Touch Me I'm Sick - Legacy

Legacy

Following the success of the "Touch Me I'm Sick" single in the Seattle area, Sub Pop positioned Mudhoney as the flagship band of their roster and undertook heavy promotion for the group. The band's early material received airplay on college radio and influenced many local musicians, including Kurt Cobain of Nirvana. In a few years, many Seattle grunge bands signed to major labels and broke into the mainstream, achieving mass popularity. Although Mudhoney never attained this level of mainstream acceptance, according to Allmusic's Mark Deming, the band's "indie-scene success laid the groundwork for the movement that would (briefly) make Seattle, WA, the new capital of the rock & roll universe".

Since its release, "Touch Me I'm Sick" has been accorded classic status within the grunge genre. Writing for Allmusic, Steve Huey described the song as "the ultimate grunge anthem", and wrote that it "was a crucial and vastly influential touchstone in the evolution of the grunge movement, virtually defining the term". For its North-Western rock exhibit, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame requested the song's original lyrics sheet. Since it did not exist—Arm briefly considered making a fake one by writing down the lyrics, crumpling the sheet, and then burning the edges—the band instead donated Turner's old Big Muff pedals.

"Touch Me I'm Sick" remains Mudhoney's most popular song. Joe Ehrbar called it "the song most of us would come to know by". Arm considers the track to be Mudhoney's highwater mark,

There's something special about that first single, we were never quite able to recapture that sound. I don't know if it was the guitars or the recording. It was just a really gnarly, gnarly guitar sound. We've gotten some since, but they've been a different kind. I think it had more to do with the actual electromagnetic chemistry of what was going through our amps that day. It was just a cool, fried-out sound.

The song was referenced in the 1992 film Singles, which is set against the backdrop of the Seattle grunge scene. The fictional band in the film, Citizen Dick, perform a song called "Touch Me I'm Dick"—a wordplay on Mudhoney's song. In 2003, Charles Peterson published a book of photography titled Touch Me I'm Sick. It features black-and-white photographs of bands (including Mudhoney) and concerts, and focuses on the alternative music scene of the 1980s and 1990s.