Everybody Loves Our Town

by Mark Yarm

  MARK PICKEREL I moved to Seattle a few months after Lanegan did and started working for Sub Pop early on. My impressions of Bruce and Jonathan were pretty popular in the office. Bruce would come in with some outrageous story about a band expecting this or their attorney expecting that. Every time he got excited, he would pace back and forth in the room, kinda like a caged elephant. He had his hands on his forehead and his eyes were bulging out and he would hold his breath so his cheeks would do this Dizzy Gillespie thing. And then Jonathan would go into this very focused, eloquent speech that would calm Bruce down and assure him that the problem at hand was an outrage, but with proper strategy they could turn the whole thing around. This exchange would happen two or three times a week.

  GILLIAN G. GAAR Bruce had these dark, intense eyes and looked very striking because he shaved his head. For a while he had that huge beard—he had the Fidel Castro look. He had an intensity about him that I think made people feel he was more intimidating than he was, whereas Jon seemed more approachable and laid-back.

  JONATHAN PONEMAN When I worked at Yesco, which was sold to Muzak, and Bruce worked at Muzak about a year and a half later, we both were sickened by what we thought was a Bonfire of the Vanities–type yuppie culture. At the time, you had the managerial class working upstairs and you had the workers in what was called the dupe room, the duplication room. So we parodied the corporate culture through grotesque overstatement. Instead of making Sub Pop 200 a cheap vinyl record, let’s make it an overstated, bloated box set!

  BRUCE PAVITT Part of our shtick was that we were this huge player on the West Coast, and a lot of people bought into that. In the Sub Pop 200 compilation there was a picture of the building, and it said SUB POP WORLD HEADQUARTERS. And so people looked at the picture and were like, “Wow, they’ve got this 11-floor office building!” When in actuality we had maybe 50 square feet.

  In the Sub Pop 200 booklet, my title was listed as supervisory chairman of executive management, and Jon’s was executive chairman of supervisory management. We felt there was at that time a lack of humor and a forced modesty in the punk/indie scene, and we were really going against the grain. We were ironically undermining corporate culture.

  CHARLES PETERSON When we got paid, we would literally run down to the bank that very minute. If you were last in line, your check might bounce.

  CHRIS HANSZEK Jack did a lot of the early records for Sub Pop at Reciprocal, but ultimately when the recordings got done, I was in charge of making sure they got paid for. So I ended up being the guy on the phone with Jonathan Poneman every couple of months, going, “Where the hell’s my fucking money?”

  JONATHAN PONEMAN We had ever-changing mottos, like “Going Out of Business Since 1988.” And the mottos keep coming. Later, we did the loser shirts, which was an idea that was cribbed from Bob Whittaker, who quipped, “Why don’t you just make a bunch of shirts that say loser on them?” They became very popular. I remember getting lectured by a band member’s parent or something who got angry at me, saying, “That’s not very good for the self-esteem of the wearers of the shirt.” It’s like, “I don’t give a shit.” (Laughs.)

  KURT DANIELSON At the same time, I had this idea for a song called “Loser.” As I once said, it seemed to me like the existential heroes of the ’90s were the losers. TAD needed an extra song in the studio working on Salt Lick with Steve Albini, so I wrote it really quickly and I thought, This’ll be excellent because there’s already gonna be T-shirts that say loser on them, they’ll be promoting the song, it’ll be just magical.

  THURSTON MOORE (singer/guitarist for New York’s Sonic Youth; Kim Gordon’s husband) Sub Pop turned the tables a little bit: We’re geeks, we’re record collectors, we’re losers, we’re pathetic. People like Mark Arm and Kurt Cobain and Tad, these guys embodied this in such a great way. They were not your typical good-looking punk-rock stars. They were kinda skinny, nose-picking nerds. Except for Tad, who was a fat, burger-burping geek. They were also lovable, and you sort of wanted to be part of that gang.

  BLAG DAHLIA I would never wear a shirt that said LOSER. I felt like, Hey, I’m reasonably good-looking and cool, why would I label myself a loser? I never really identified with that side of rock and roll—“Oh, I’m such a loser” or “I’m so put upon by the jocks.” That’s sort of the essence of grunge, and part of why I never really identified with that very much. I was like a little Charles Manson in high school; I had girls following me around, I dealt drugs, and I didn’t feel like a big loser.

  Ultimately, all the symbols of grunge came to be these cute, young, skinny guys. They didn’t really seem like losers to me, although I guess if they did enough dope it made them losers.

  BUZZ OSBORNE Cobain had the wounded-junkie look that for some reason women watching MTV think is really cool. I’ve said this before: If Kurt Cobain looked like Fat Albert—same songs, everything—it wouldn’t have worked. Same with Soundgarden. If Chris Cornell looked like Fat Albert, a 500-pound black guy, nobody would have given a shit.

  TRACY SIMMONS Being on Sub Pop would help sometimes. They were getting notoriety, and they definitely had collectors in some towns. And in some places it didn’t help us much at all. Here comes a bunch of long-haired guys from Seattle wearing lime-green Doc Martens and motorcycle jackets, and you get up onstage in front of a bunch of farmers from Omaha, Nebraska, and they’re like, “What in the hell is this?” And they start chanting, “Play ‘Freebird’!”

  BLAG DAHLIA I’ve said that being on Sub Pop was like starving to death in a really cool suit. It was fun to be able to say that you were on Sub Pop, and it was nice to show up in Boise, Idaho, and have a little Sub Pop logo in the newspaper next to your name—that was your nice suit—but you just weren’t making any money from the label.

  GRANT ALDEN Sub Pop was in your face: WE’RE RIPPING YOU OFF BIG TIME!—that’s what their ad said. This is a record label that managed to finance itself on that Singles Club.

  MARK ARM One of the label’s biggest tricks was selling itself so that people would want to get anything on Sub Pop, whether it was good or not, because of the packaging and the label identity. They came up with the Singles Club, getting people to pay [$35 a year] up front without knowing what they were getting. That helped them stay afloat.

  THURSTON MOORE The Singles Club was completely brilliant. These guys had a real sense of design, which appealed to the record geek. The singles became almost like trading cards.

  ART CHANTRY I have no idea who actually physically designed the black bar with the band’s name and the Sub Pop logo at the top of the singles—probably Lisa Orth or Linda Owens. Bruce liked to change things up periodically, but I talked him into continuing to use the black bar when he wanted to dump it: “This is your identity here. Make sure people know it has that Good Housekeeping Seal of approval.”

  JACK ENDINO There was a little bit of weirdness with Sub Pop, because Skin Yard was not a band that they felt was appropriate for the label, and it wasn’t hard to see why—we were a little too metal. But strangely enough, our bass player, Daniel, wound up working for them for a couple years. It used to drive Daniel nuts that he couldn’t get his own band onto the label, but I stayed the hell out of this because I was still recording all the records for Sub Pop.

  DANIEL HOUSE When I first started working there, it was Bruce, Jon, and me. Charles Peterson had been there earlier and a couple people would come and go. Bruce seemed to have almost contempt for Skin Yard. He hated Ben’s singing. Too melodramatic. He felt like there were elements of our music, the prog-rock elements, that were anti-everything that his label was trying to establish. Jon liked our band. And he actually tried to push Bruce to put us out, but Bruce wouldn’t budge. They eventually put out a Skin Yard seven-inch to just shut everybody up, or at least that’s how I saw it.

  JASON FINN Daniel asked me to join Skin Yard at a gig I was playing with a band called Paisley Sin. Matt had quit to join Soundgarden; Steve Wied had played a couple shows with Skin Yard, and Gre
g Gilmore had maybe played one.

  We did our first-ever West Coast tour together, traveling in Jack’s truck. Jack and Daniel would sit in the front, and Ben and I sat in the back with all the gear, and then we put a mattress down. This is with the cab on. And we would just kind of scrunch into the other side there, and Ben and I were doing a lot of crystal and smoking. Jack was pretty much a teetotaler, but I don’t remember him ever saying, “Hey, guys, get your shit together.” I have to assume he was irritated by our antics more than once, but Jack is a born record producer, and more than anything in the ears, it takes a boundless patience.

  After like 10 months, my girlfriend, who I was sure I was going to be with forever, moved to Europe. She was calling the shots, so I moved to Europe. And by the time I got back, Skin Yard had definitely moved on; they had Scott McCullum drumming for them by then.

  Skin Yard was more of the working band. We didn’t have a Stonesy swagger—it was more of a Yes kind of swagger. Which is not really what rock and roll is about. The U-Men were definitely the übercool band. Back then, if Tom from the U-Men said hi to me, which he did a couple of times, that made my week.

  CHARLIE RYAN Jonathan and Bruce begged the U-Men to record for them and be on their label. John and I drank in this bar called the Virginia Inn, which was right across the street from the Sub Pop headquarters. We’d run into Jonathan and Bruce quite often. They’d say, “You guys gotta get on our label! Would ya?” And we’d say, “No, I don’t think so.” Because they wanted it so bad, it was just more fun saying no to them.

  SUSAN SILVER Larry Reid got a job as the director of COCA [Center on Contemporary Art] and needed to let the U-Men go. So I inherited them for a year or so. The difficulty was not having that much experience. How do I get them shows? I remember booking them a tour across the U.S. from my bedroom, using a phonebook, 411, and fanzines.

  CHARLIE RYAN Susan tried. We weren’t very interested. Susan would offer us a show, and I’d go, “Oh, I’m not playing with them. I have no respect for them.” We were rather shortsighted.

  TOM PRICE We’d wanted to kick Jim out for a while. I liked Jim personally, and I thought he was a great bass player, but the problem for me was I always got stuck having to mediate between him on the one hand and John and Charlie on the other hand. We made Susan fire Jim, because all of us were too cowardly to do it ourselves.

  SUSAN SILVER That sucked. It was horrible. It was very sad to see, because Jim was the workhorse. He was the one who went and got ’em money; he was the one whose parents funded everything. One time, the bus broke down in the middle of the night coming home from Bellingham. We were there on the side of the highway until Jim’s parents came to bail the band out, like they did every single time.

  JIM TILLMAN Nobody said one word to me. That’s Seattle—it’s very passive-aggressive. I first found out that something was amiss when I saw a poster advertising a show for Scratch Acid and the U-Men at the Central Tavern. I’m like, Oh, I didn’t know about that. I called Susan Silver and asked her what the hell was going on. She said, “They didn’t talk to you?”

  “No, what do you mean? What’s going on?”

  And she said, “They’re having Tom Hazelmyer play bass for that show.” She was sympathetic, though she was a little surprised that they hadn’t said anything. I asked her what was going on and she said, “I know they’re having a band meeting tonight at Charlie’s apartment.” Susan told me that they were scared of me.

  I went over to Charlie’s apartment that night, and I wanted to totally surprise them, so I basically broke into the building by climbing up the fire escape. I went up to his door and knocked on it. Charlie answered, and I think he was pretty drunk at the time. He said, “Oh, is this the blond we’re supposed to fuck?”

  And I said, “Well, evidently you already are.” And I walked into the room, and John and Larry Reid were there, and Susan was there, as well, I think. Tom was out getting beer. I said, “What the hell is going on?”

  Charlie said, “Well, uh, uh, uh … What are you talking about?”

  And I said, “Fine. Fuck you, I quit.”

  LARRY REID I just remember it being really tense. I was there to support the band. I don’t remember too much about the specifics, except Jim protesting. I was against firing him, because I thought there was a pretty good musical chemistry. But the decision was personality-driven. Jim was the most genteel member of the band. These other guys at the time were almost like Ave rats, not real far removed from street-urchin punks.

  JAMES BURDYSHAW Jim Tillman was out of the band, so the U-Men all of a sudden had some free time. David Duet had gone out on that last tour with them, and he did a good job of getting Charlie interested in doing a kind of Stones garage rock-and-roll band. And Tom agreed to play bass. They needed somebody to play guitar, and David got his friend, this guy named Mike Hutchins, who went by John Michael Amerika and was like 12 years older than him.

  CHARLIE RYAN Tom and I accepted our friend David Duet’s invitation to be rhythm section in his band Cat Butt until he got something more permanent. One of the guitar players was John Michael Amerika. He was a real fringe guy. As fringe as we were, I still felt like I had a foot based in reality at all times. I could always go to the old man if I ever needed to get bailed out. I could always get back into working in a restaurant. But man, a lot of the guys that you met would never be going back and entering normal society.

  DAVID DUET My girlfriend and I used to do this thing where we’d braid our hair and then rub black dye in it, and then rebraid it and rub bleach in it, and rebraid it and rub different colors in it, and then cut the braids off. We called them calico cat–butt hairdos, ’cause it looked like a calico cat’s butt. That’s where the initial spark for the band name came from. But in radio interviews, I always told a half-true story about my great-grandparents, who at one time were wealthy and had a maid named Sally. She was an old black woman with two fake legs who had a lot of cats and grew her own vegetables and sustained herself very modestly. Somehow in my mind what transpired was that she would shave a thin layer of meat off each cat’s ass—allowing the other cats time to heal—and then cook it like bacon.

  JAMES BURDYSHAW I was playing in 64 Spiders, and Tom was workin’ at Fallout Records, and when I saw him there, he nonchalantly brought up Cat Butt. He’s like, “Hey, we’re lookin’ for another guitar player. Are you interested?” I was like, “Yeah!” The notoriety of having two guys from the U-Men, plus David’s charisma, meant all of our shows were crowded, and girls were comin’ up to me like they’d never come up to me before.

  TOM PRICE Cat Butt was the kind of band that something always went wrong. David would either break a bone, or an amp would blow up. Almost every show I did with them, and every show I saw them do afterwards, there would be at least one member of the band that was totally out of it and didn’t even seem to know which song the rest of the band was playing. That was a good part of their charm.

  JAMES BURDYSHAW Tom and Charlie did seven shows with us. The last show we played with them before they finally left to concentrate on the U-Men again, Michael’s leg was in a cast, and he made up this story about falling down the stairs at his apartment trying to catch the cat or some nonsense. The truth of the matter is, he broke his foot jumping out of a second-story window of a pharmacy he was rippin’ off. He was a total drugstore cowboy, before that movie ever came out.

  DAVID DUET We’re waiting to play a skateboard contest, and eventually John Michael shows up, and he’s wearing his Zorro hat and his leather overcoat and he’s got a brand-new cast on each leg. He played the show sitting in a chair. We were kind of wasted and I was in a long blond wig and black leather miniskirt and fishnet hose. On the first song, I split my knuckle open on my tambourine and blood squirts all over these little kids in the front row. (Laughs.) It was a Sunday afternoon and there were a lot of parents there that were just appalled at what they saw, ’cause we were the biggest freak show on earth.

  JAMES BURDYSHA
W Cat Butt played the Vogue and most of the band took LSD a half-hour before we played. The opening band was this supergroup that Mark Arm, Ron Rudzitis, Tad, and Chris Pugh were in called the Wasted Landlords, as a joke on Lords of the Wasteland.

  RON RUDZITIS I was playing bass, and Tad had an inflatable doll, which he bought for the show. The doll was wrapped around his waist, and he pulled out a can of whipped cream and shot it out—like come, basically. I think he emptied the whole damn can. I felt really bad for Cat Butt, ’cause the stage was covered in whipped cream after we were done.

  JAMES BURDYSHAW I was so high that I just saw a big swirl on stage. Dean Gunderson, my friend who we got in the band, was wearing a toga, walkin’ around barefoot. We would just giggle and giggle and giggle until it would become like this comedy routine. Onstage, Dean steps on some broken glass with bare feet and he’s bleeding and he comes over to me in the middle of a song and stops playing and says, “Hey, James, my foot’s bloody, ha ha ha ha.”

  DEAN GUNDERSON (Cat Butt bassist) I remember looking down and there was a broken pint glass there and a big pool of blood. I remember everybody looking at each other confused and forgetting what song we’re on, and the distance between my frets and the strings looked like it was a quarter-mile long. The next day, we were just like, “Oh, God, what the fuck did we just do?” But a lot of people say it was the favorite show they ever saw.