Green River - Rehab Doll

Expanded deluxe edition double LP

"Proto-grunge at its best, its mud-dipped tracks breaking down and building themselves back up in real time. Frontman Mark Arm (later of Mudhoney) sounds like he gargled with lye before cutting tracks like the boogie-gone-bad 'Together We'll Never,' while the band's rip-roaring cover of David Bowie's 'Queen Bitch' (originally only available on the album's cassette release) hints at the wry humor that would animate much of the Seattle scene's best moments." — Rolling Stone

The story of Seattle's rise to global rock supremacy in the late '80s and early '90s begins with Green River. Made up of Jeff Ament (bass), Mark Arm (guitar/vocals), Bruce Fairweather (guitar), Stone Gossard (guitar), and Alex Shumway (drums), the quintet put out three 12"s and a 7" single during its brief existence. But Green River's influence on Seattle's music scene spread far and wide-thanks to the members' dispersion into bands including Pearl Jam, Mudhoney, and Love Battery, as well as the punk-glam-sludge-rock songs they left behind.

Green River's sound straddled a lot of different genres-blues, punk, boozy straight-ahead rock. The mini-LP Dry As A Bone, which came out in 1987, and the LP Rehab Doll, which came out in 1988, were released as a single CD with a few bonus cuts, including their sneering cover of David Bowie's "Queen Bitch" and their marauding version of Dead Boys' "Ain't Nothin' to Do," in 1990-but they've been unavailable on vinyl for years. Now, these slices of Seattle music history are not only back in print, they're accompanied by items from the from the vaults that had been forgotten about for decades.

Rehab Doll was released around the time the band split up in 1988. The album, recorded largely at Seattle's Steve Lawson Studios, bridges the gap between the taut, punky energy of Dry As a Bone and the bigger drums and thicker riffs that were coming to dominate rock in the late '80s.

This new edition of Rehab Doll includes a remixed version of the album and eight songs recorded to 8-track at Endino's Reciprocal Recording, which features a more accurate depiction of how the band sounded when they played live. ("We generally didn't have a gated snare sound," notes Arm.) "When I listen to these mixes, I think, ‘This is how we actually sounded-this is the kind of energy we had,'" says Shumway. "It's much more raw, and it's much more real."