“I heard some ruckus outside… It was Kurt and Dave from Nirvana who had a note for me, saying, ‘This is not a joke, call Buzz about playing with the Melvins’”: Joe Preston on Thrones, Sunn O))) and life as the underground’s first-call bassist

Joe Preston plays a white headless bass onstage with Thrones.

The drive-by opinion on Joe Preston – if the casual music fan has heard of him – is that he’s a burly man living in a remote wooded area who once played with the Melvins. And while that’s true, it’s hard fair to someone who, despite his low-key demeanour, is one of the more thundering bassists to come out of the vaunted early-90s grunge scene.

But then again, boiling Preston down to a “grunge bassist” isn’t fair either. Sure, he played with Earth and the Melvins, the latter of which are perpetually lumped in with grunge, but the albums he recorded, Lysol, and Joe Preston, aren’t remotely grunge. Though he did appear on Night Goat, a cut that, funnily enough, did end up on the Melvins grungiest record, Houdini, which Kurt Cobain was involved with. Go figure.