Mudhoney: Sweethearts of Grunge Guitar : Rock: Gritty Seattle garage band carries a reputation as the Next Big Thing. They open for Sonic Youth on Saturday at UCI’s Crawford Hall.

During the last two years, Mudhoney has catapulted from an unremarkable, undisciplined garage rock band to kings of Seattle’s Great Guitar Movement and heroes of alternative-rock scenes overseas.

Named after a Russ Meyer sexploitation flick, Mudhoney is a bona fide headliner.

Nevertheless, when critical favorite Sonic Youth called looking for a band to join it for shows Saturday at UC Irvine and Sunday in Tijuana, the Seattle quartet, though road-weary from two years of nearly nonstop touring, eagerly agreed.

“They’re an amazing band,”Mudhoney lead vocalist and guitarist Mark Arm said of Sonic Youth during a telephone interview this week from his Seattle home.

As Arm explains, he and Mudhoney guitarist Steve Turner discovered Sonic Youth by stumbling upon its “Confusion Is Sex” single. “And we’ve followed them ever since.”

Along the way, theiradmiration for the band has developed into a working alliance--which Arm credits almost expressly for Mudhoney’s recent notoriety.

The symbiotic, bicoastal connection between the two bands dates to pre-Mudhoney days.

Upon a visit to Seattle some years back, Sonic Youth was impressed by a local band called Green River, which Arm and Turner had formed. After that, every time the New Yorkers performed in the Seattle area, Green River was their opening act.

Green River eventually parted into Mudhoney and Mother Love Bone, but Sonic Youth members remained enamored of Arm and Turner’s work in their new grunge-guitar outfit. “And they really kind of took us under their wing,” Arm said.

Sonic Youth took Mudhoney on the road, first on a West Coast tour in late 1988, and the next year over to England--where the capricious, finicky music press and fans adopted the Seattleites with the long hair and very loud guitars as the Next Big Thing.

But while Sonic Youth assisted in Mudhoney’s rise from the underground, the band earned its lofty stature in its hometown largely by its own doing, carving out a distinctive, charged-up guitar sound that has spawned a host of imitators.

Although Mudhoney’s name comes from a movie that the band members claim not to have seen, it doubles as a fair description of their music--a thick, messy puddle of noise enveloping irresistibly delicious melodies.

Like its New York heroes, Mudhoney is concerned more with the music’s texture than its message.

As Arm, the band’s lyricist, sees it, “It takes a pretty egotistical and arrogant person to tell people the right way to live (through lyrics). That’s not my place. I don’t have things figured out for myself yet, let alone anyone else.”

But, in his typically soft-spoken, self-deprecating manner, Arm insists the band isn’t doing anything unique, just lifting elements from favorite bands, ranging from Blue Cheer and the MC5, to Neil Young & Crazy Horse, to the Adolescents and the Germs.

“We’re not experimenting in new sounds,” he said. “We’re just interested in getting a cool guitar sound, a decent drum sound. It’s not real high-tech.”

But it is that uncompromising devotion to garage rock that has propelled Mudhoney to godhead for many of its fans, particularly through some legendary live shows.

Many of the band’s shows are said to have been spectacles, in which Arm reportedly encouraged fans to climb onto speaker stacks while launching himself, guitar in hand, into the crowd or otherwise inciting near-riots.

As loud and wild as the band’s shows are, they are equally unpredictable. As Arm puts it, “Sometimes we drink too much or get a little careless.”

That inconsistency, though, like that of the early Replacements, only fuels the mystique and cult following surrounding the band.

As for Mudhoney’s ascent to hero status among many of its Seattle devotees, Arm said the inevitable backlash against the band and its hometown record label, Sub Pop, has set in.

At the same time, he downplays accounts of the so-called “Seattle scene,” which many rock journalists have discovered and so labeled during the past two years.

“In a way, that whole thing has been a total fabrication,” Arm said, “because it’s been here all the time. There have been good bands in Seattle for as long as I can remember. . . . But it’s like people don’t realize it until they read it in Spin.”

No matter how many column inches are devoted to the band or how many records it sells, Arm says he remains ardently opposed to the idea of Mudhoney jumping to a major record label.

“I just don’t see how a major label could really help us,” he said. “They wouldn’t really understand us. Big labels have taken some good bands and made them do some strange things. Like, what happened to the Replacements? I don’t think it was up to them to record those slick records.”

One of the few bands to weather major-label pressures, Arm says, is Sonic Youth. “But,” he explains, “they’d been around so long that they were able to get things completely on their own terms.”

If Mudhoney were presented with a similar opportunity, he said the band might consider it, “if we had a lawyer I knew and trusted.”

Following the opening slots for Sonic Youth in the days ahead, Mudhoney will embark on its own monthlong tour of New Zealand and Australia.

Upon returning to the States, the band plans to record a new LP early next year, which will include two new songs it has been performing at recent shows, Arm said.

The new Mudhoney material may dare to stray beyond their staples of sonic guitars and booming drums, Arm says.

Although one is never entirely sure whether the deadpan Arm is serious, he claims that drummer Dan Peters plays the brushes on a new song to a “sort of a ’50 Ways to Leave Your Lover’ beat.”

And, he says, Turner recently purchased--of all things--a banjo. “We haven’t managed to work it in yet. Steve’s still figuring out how to play it. But he’s really working on it.”

Sonic Youth, Mudhoney and Gumball play at 8:30 p.m. Saturday in Crawford Hall at UC Irvine, Campus Drive and Bridge Street, Irvine. Tickets: $15.50. Information: (714) 856-5000.