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 PUDDLE OF MUDD bassist DOUG ARDITO talks candidly to TOM HERSEY about the band’s struggles with success and how the band redeemed themselves by making a rock & roll record in a rap world.
Chances are if you were in high school in the early 2000s the name Puddle of Mudd has been branded on to your psyche. When baggy cargo pants were cool and kids were wearing flex-fit caps backwards the Kansas four-piece were in the process of selling over five million copies of their debut album Come Clean. The angst-filled crooning of singer Wes Scantlin seemed to speak to the teenagers of the new millennium, as songs like She Hates Me became the soundtrack to doomed high school relationships the world over.
Puddle of Mudd were living the rock & roll dream at this stage. They had gone from being an unknown band to global sensations seemingly overnight after Fred Durst (that wanker from Limp Bizkit) was handed a copy of their demo. However, the band soon discovered that after every dream comes the harsh realities of the real world. Puddle of Mudd’s second major label album Life On Display was written off as a flop, despite selling over 700,000 copies.
“Come Clean sold five and a half million records worldwide. None of us expected anything like that, because we were just doing our thing and then BLAM it came out and sold one hundred thousand copies in the first week, then we were just living in this surreal dream for the next 18 months of our lives. Then we got off tour and I remember a week later hearing a truck loaded with recording equipment back up to my house. The label was making us start work on the second record. I remembering thinking ‘what!?’ We utilised and drew experiences from our whole life to make Come Clean and then it was expected that we could do the same thing with a week.”
After Life Of Display, Puddle of Mudd disappeared from the international rock scene. A process Doug described as incredibly daunting. “We were kind of in limbo. We hadn’t had a record out in three years so we were just constantly writing to try and come up with the best possible songs.”
To help them actualise their goal, Geffen Records made Puddle of Mudd work with a slew of different producers when creating their 2007 LP Famous. “Instead of having long-time producer John Kurzweg do the whole record we worked with Bill Stevenson from Black Flag and several other cats. It was more like a hip-hop record, where you’ve got the Neptunes producing one track and Timbaland doing the next, instead of recording in the typical rock way. It was actually kind of cool because they were all proving how awesome they were … trying to out do all the other producers and in the process they made us a darn good record.”
And what does Doug think of the making rock records to the hip hop motif?
“We’re going to see it happen a lot more often … it increases the scale of collaboration. It’s like taking your greens and mixing them with the reds and making a pretty picture. It makes the recording process much more creative.”
PUDDLE OF MUDD play the Wednesday with Drowning Pool and Lump. Famous is out now through Geffen Records.
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