by Mark Yarm
He was quiet and not very confrontational and very reclusive, so you’d hear things through the grapevine and interviews, but one thing I knew he was upset about was that we were not buying a lot of advertising for Nirvana in particular. We tended to run group advertisements, and we were really pushing Sub Pop more as a label. It was a more cost-effective way of advertising, and I felt that he was truly missing the big picture, because we were so effective at garnering press. Literally a year and a half after he was sleeping under bridges, he was on the front cover of Melody Maker in England. I’d say that’s pretty effective label promotion.
DANNY GOLDBERG (Gold Mountain Entertainment founder/president; Nirvana/Hole manager; Atlantic Records president; Warner Bros. Records chairman/CEO; Rosemary Carroll’s husband) The first meeting I had with Nirvana, Krist did most of the talking. Kurt didn’t do much talking, and Dave Grohl did no talking. I asked at one point if they wanted to stay on Sub Pop. Kurt, who had been quiet up until then, just said, “No, definitely not!” He wanted to be big. They committed to us after the first meeting.
DAN PETERS They go down to L.A. and come back, and Kurt calls me up, and I go, “Hey, what’s up with the U.K. tour?” He goes, “Yeah, that’s why I’m calling. Well, we got another drummer. That guy Dave, from Scream.”
“Ah, all right,” I go. “That’s cool.” I was kind of taken aback, but really relieved, because, like I said, Mudhoney had this unique bond, and I felt nothing like that playing with Nirvana. But in hindsight, I’m like, Aww, Jesus.
MATT LUKIN Crover kind of spoiled Nirvana. Dan’s more tippy-tap—we always used to make fun of Dan and call him Tippy Tap—while Dale’s more thunk-thunk-thunk. Grohl’s more of a beater, like Dale.
DAN PETERS What I was bummed about was that all they had to do was just be honest—don’t be pussies. Communication on those guys’ part was not all that happening. I found out that Dave had been up there in Tacoma practicing with those guys for a while. He was probably more prepared to do that show I played than I was.
SLIM MOON Scream’s show at Gorilla Gardens in 1984 or 1985 was one of the best shows I ever saw. Years later, I convinced Kurt to go up to Tacoma to go see Scream. I was tapping my foot because I was so anxious to get to Tacoma and see this awesome band Scream. I was talking them up, and when we got there, they were this really bad Van Halen. It was not at all the same band I had seen. They were just awful.
Kurt went on this crazy tirade all the way home about how much he hated Telecasters. Scream’s choice of guitar became symbolic of everything he hated about them. We didn’t even talk about the drummer. So it was funny that we lambasted Scream and just talked about how much we hated them, and a year later or something, Scream’s drummer was his new drummer.
BUZZ OSBORNE I was friends with Dave Grohl when he was in Scream. Dave has a really good sense of humor. Really severe black humor. Actually, he had some pretty great stories about Scream’s black bass player. I think that those stories would have been good regardless of what color he was.
Dave called me when I lived in San Francisco. The Nirvana guys were in town, so we went and saw Scream play. It’s been written that I took them there to see Dave Grohl play, but that’s not true. I was going to go anyway.
CRAIG MONTGOMERY We had Dale play drums on a tour, the tour with Sonic Youth. And the Melvins let us stay at their house in San Francisco for a couple days before the tour started. We went and saw Scream at the I-Beam. Kurt saw Dave play and he said, “That’s the kind of drummer we need.”
BUZZ OSBORNE A couple of weeks later, I got a call from Dave, and he was in L.A., stranded. The bassist of Scream had sold all their gear. And I said, “Well, you know, Nirvana’s looking for a drummer.” And I didn’t know at that time that they’d already hired Danny Peters. And Dave said, “Really?,” because he was looking for anything he could do. And so I called the Nirvana guys and said, “Remember that drummer that you saw play for Scream? Well, he’s looking for something to do. Call him up.”
SLIM MOON Me and Dylan Carlson moved to Seattle in ’90, and we moved in with these two guys from Ellensburg—Nate Hill, who was in a band called King Krab, and Lanegan, from Screaming Trees. While I was living with Lanegan, he was recording his first solo album. I think Dylan and Kurt were using drugs together at that point, though Dylan wasn’t deep into drugs yet. But I started to feel unsafe around Dylan, because he was so into guns.
There was this one scary time when Krist Novoselic came to our house. The front door was locked, which was unusual, and it was late at night, and he needed a place to crash because he was wasted. So he crawled up onto the roof in the back and was trying to open the upstairs back window. He finally widgets the window open, looks up, and he’s staring at a double-barreled shotgun right in his face.
It turned out that Dylan had not heard him knocking on the front door, and had woken up to hear somebody trying to break in, so he had gotten the gun from under his bed. Dylan, despite all his bravado about how quick he’d be to shoot an intruder, waited long enough to figure out who it was. The world very narrowly escaped Dylan blowing Krist’s brains out, years before Nirvana got famous.
It scared the crap out of me, but Krist and Dylan just thought it was hilarious. It was just another good story. It was one of the events that led to me quitting Earth and moving back to Olympia.
DAVE GROHL (Nirvana drummer; drummer for Washington, D.C., area’s Scream; Foo Fighters singer/guitarist) The first phone call that I had with Kurt was really funny, ’cause we had played Olympia, Washington, where he lived, maybe like four weeks beforehand.…
SLIM MOON The next time Scream went on tour, they had a show in Olympia, but I didn’t go because I had already planned a party and plus, they had sucked before. But after the show, somebody told them, “There’s a party going on,” so they showed up in my apartment and walked in while Tobi Vail—who Kurt was with at some point after Tracy—was playing solo on electric guitar.
DAVE GROHL This girl sits down and she plays the most saddest, depressing fuckin’ [song]. And there’s all these people who look like they’re fuckin’ Scooby Doo, with the glasses, and they’re just sad, and hot chocolate party shit and all of that crap. And we’re there with our beers like, “What the fuck is going on? This place is screwed, man. This is horrible.”
So the first phone call I had with Kurt … I’m like, “Man, afterwards we fuckin’ went to this party at someone’s apartment, and it was kinda fucked, man, ’cause we showed up and we had all our beer and shit. And then this fuckin’ girl starts playing this shitty fuckin’ depressing fuckin’ bullshit.”
He’s like, “Yeah, that’s my girlfriend.” (Laughs.) I’m like, “Ohhh … Whoops. Whoopsie daisy.”
COURTNEY LOVE Dave performed a really great service for Kurt. He made him make hot dogs and get over chicks that were pounding on pots and pans singing about their vaginas. “We’re goin’ to a strip club, motherfucker!” That’s good. I don’t know if that’s in the history books. They didn’t have a lot of money for strip clubs, but Dave was very much a heterosexual red-blooded young man who did not understand why Kurt was mooning over some pudgy girl.
DANNY GOLDBERG I think there were six labels that were interested in Nirvana, and my partner, John Silva, was excited about meeting the labels. But I thought it was pretty obvious that Geffen would be the best place. They had staffed up in the alternative world in a way that the other labels hadn’t. They had Ray Farrell, who had come out of SST and who really knew the retail scene, and Mark Kates, who was very much on the cutting edge of dealing with this burgeoning alternative-radio format. And Geffen had a huge advantage because we had just been through this experience with Sonic Youth, who had a lot of the same concerns that Nirvana had about protecting their image, and Geffen had not screwed up. So it was kind of theirs to lose, and they didn’t lose it.
NICK TERZO My biggest problem trying to sign Nirvana to Columbia was I didn’t have Sonic Youth. Kurt cared about Sonic Youth and being w
here Sonic Youth was. I remember getting the call at Christmas that they had signed to somebody else. That was not a good Christmas gift.
DAN PETERS After I played with Nirvana, Jonathan told me that Mark Pickerel was quitting the Screaming Trees. And I was like, “Well, hell, I got some time. I love the Screaming Trees.”
MARK PICKEREL The band dynamics had just become so complicated. My then-girlfriend Jana, who was in Dickless, was equally complicated and demanding of my time and energy, and she wasn’t happy about all the touring. I wasn’t happy about all the touring. I was having a harder time finding my place in the band because it was already hard enough as a drummer to exert much creativity in the group. And when we got signed to Sony, I found that it wasn’t just band members that I was having debates with anymore, it was management, it was people at Sony.
I’m only just starting to admit that now, that I left the band partly because of a relationship. Although the band may have suspected it, at the time I told them that it was for other reasons.
DAN PETERS Then I got a call: “Hey, I hear you might be interested in playing with us.” And I was like, “Yeah.” And he just kind of laughs, and I’m like, “Well, who the fuck is this? Are you fuckin’ with me?” I had to ask him a couple of times. And eventually he’s like, “It’s Lanegan.” Mark’s a funny guy. He was probably flippin’ me shit.
GARY LEE CONNER Then we had the tour with Dan Peters, which started off with the big wreck. We had two vans instead of one, so it was slightly more luxurious. Mark and our two road guys were in the equipment van because Mark wanted to be by himself. We did one or two shows, we’re driving through Wyoming, and it was early spring, but there was black ice on the road. We were ahead of him, and the van flipped over a bunch of times, all the way from one side of the freeway, through the median, to the other side.
We thought they were gone, all dead. Considering how bad it looked, it was a miracle no one got seriously injured. The van was history, but everyone came out fairly unscathed. Mark did not get injured, but he sure was traumatized, apparently.
I think the band kept him sober, because he had something to keep him going, as a distraction or whatever. On the surface, it looked like the crash changed that. We got to Chicago a couple of days later, and apparently Mark started drinking, and that lasted for I don’t know how many years.
DAN PETERS But by the time we hit Chicago, Lanegan started drinking again. I went to the store with Van and Mark, and Mark walks over to the beer cooler and pulls out three Foster’s oilcan beers. I kind of laughed, and he was like, “What?” And I’m like, “What are you doing?”
He goes, “I’m going to drink these.” I’m like, “Really? Well, I’ll get some, as well.” We went back to the hotel and drank some Foster’s.
GARRETT SHAVLIK The Fluid were playing in Chicago at Lounge Ax, and I went to see the Trees, who were playing a matinee show at the Cubby Bear. Mark got notorious for this shit—he’d get onstage and sing like two songs and throw the mic down and walk off.
GARY LEE CONNER Das Damen was opening for us. We played one or two songs, and Mark, I don’t know if he just freaked out, but he said his voice went out. He left the stage, and we ended up playing the rest of the show jamming with the guys from Das Damen. So that was the beginning of a little bit of nastiness.
GARRETT SHAVLIK I followed Lanegan and said, “What the fuck is wrong with you, man? These guys are bleeding without you.”
“My throat’s fucked up, Tidbit.” He’d call me Tidbit. I don’t know why.
“Your throat is not fucked up.”
“Give me some of that Bushmills. Pour me some of that stuff.”
“Fuck you, you’re not fuckin’ Morrison, dude. Come up here and look at what’s going on.”
He’s like, “They got it.” They’re doing horrible covers, just trying to make the fuckin’ set so they can get paid.
“You’re a fuckin’ asshole for fuckin’ leaving them high and dry.”
He loved the fact that I’d call him on that shit. We got to be good friends that way.
DAN PETERS The tour got canceled in Florida. Mark decided the tour was done. He caught a flight home, and we all drove from Pensacola, Florida, back to Seattle.
VAN CONNER We used to do that all the time. We’d have such intense tours; it would be like a month, and then we’d have a week left and Mark would be like, “Let’s just fuckin’ go home.” After burning the candle at both ends for a month, I would not argue.
DAN PETERS Mudhoney had recorded Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge while Steve was going to school, so that record’s getting ready to come out. Meanwhile, the Screaming Trees are getting ready to go into the studio to record, so I demoed some stuff with them. Then I realized that I was going to have to make a decision.
I’m like, “Steve, what’s the deal? Do you want to tour, or are you going to school?” And he’s like, “I think we should tour.” To me, that was all I needed. As much as I was having a gas with the Screaming Trees, Mudhoney was my band. There was nothing like a Mudhoney show at that point.
DANIEL HOUSE I left Skin Yard in early ’91. The primary reason was that my son was born in 1989, in March. And I actually left to go on tour when he was two weeks old, and when I came back he was two months old. So I was miserable, but I did it because it was something that I understood was necessary to develop awareness and a fanbase for the band. But I wanted to be a responsible and present parent, so I couldn’t justify that in my own mind.
During that same time, C/Z had begun seeing a fair bit of success on its own, even though it was a side hobby. Sub Pop believed, very incorrectly, that I was using Sub Pop time to do Skin Yard business or C/Z business, and nothing could’ve been further from the truth. I had far too much pride about the quality of my work to ever mix the two. When they actually let me go, it was pretty hurtful and I was pretty angry. I worked so hard; I was earning them $30,000 a month at that point, personally. And it was that piece of the business that was pretty much keeping Sub Pop afloat at that point. I’m convinced to this day that they decided to get rid of me because they got somebody to do my job for cheaper.
Suddenly, two of the things I identified myself as being—the bass player/songwriter in Skin Yard and the sales/distribution guy at Sub Pop—were not there, and the only thing I really had left was C/Z. So either I had to get a real job or make a go at C/Z, so it seemed like a no-brainer. In retrospect, I have to thank Sub Pop for the opportunity to take a leap forward and take a chance on the label, which would basically carry me through the next many years.
PETER LITWIN (Coffin Break guitarist/singer) Coffin Break started in ’87. Originally, Sub Pop was going to put out our first seven-inch, and then they backed out at the last minute because they didn’t feel like we fit their label totally. We were a little more punk rock; we weren’t quite as grungy. We went with C/Z, where it wasn’t one type of sound. Daniel signed people he liked, and that could be grungy or more punk or metal or whatever—where Sub Pop had a pretty clear garage/grunge sound.
We did end up putting out a seven-inch on Sub Pop years later, but there was some jealousy. Like all their bands were doing amazing and we weren’t getting as much notoriety. So I wrote this song “Pop Fanatic.” One of the lines is about how I felt Sub Pop was on the way out: “People don’t care ’cause you’re on the descent/Don’t think you’ll go far ’cause your energy’s spent.”
STEPHANIE DORGAN (the Crocodile club owner; Peter Buck’s ex-wife) The Crocodile opened April 30, 1991. Jonathan Poneman and Bruce Pavitt would come to the club’s restaurant for lunch all the time because Sub Pop’s offices were pretty close, and I remember at the beginning they’d trade CDs for lunch sometimes. They were on the verge of being broke.
RICH JENSEN (Sub Pop Records general manager; musician) The first job I had at Sub Pop, in ’91, was to go into the previous bookkeeper’s office, which was completely strewn with paper, and determine what was a bill. And I put them in a big stack, organized them, and
then typed everything into a spreadsheet, which those guys had apparently never heard of. That was my great talent: I knew what a spreadsheet was.
I printed it out on an old-fashioned, dot-matrix printer, and it was a six-foot-long list that I hung up on the window in Bruce’s office. At the bottom it said we owed $250,000. We had $5,000 in the bank. That was probably May. Megan was let go that summer. Most of the staff was. We were reduced to a core group of like five people.
SALTPETER The original Sub Pop office was pretty much a free-for-all. I remember looking in this closet once there and finding the master tapes to stuff, including our album Blood Guts & Pussy. If I’d had the foresight, I would have just stuck ’em in my underwear and walked out. At the time you could pretty much do whatever you wanted. I remember finding a can of spray paint and thinking, This makes sense. I spray-painted on the office floor YOU OWE DWARVES $.
KIM WARNICK (Fastbacks singer/bassist; Sub Pop Records receptionist) And that stayed there forever. I thought it was fuckin’ hilarious.
JONATHAN PONEMAN We were lying to bands, but we were lying to ourselves, as well, by being overly optimistic about when money would come in.
Bands would see records being sold and they’d go, “Where are my royalties?” Never mind the fact that we had bought them a van, we’d flown them to Europe, advanced them rent. We didn’t have even rudimentary bookkeeping knowledge. What we did was definitely fiscally irresponsible. But it’s not like we were being criminals.
THURSTON MOORE When I first saw Nirvana play at Maxwell’s in Hoboken, Sub Pop had helped them out with a van. They had this van, but they had no money. And I remember them just completely destroying all their amps and equipment onstage, and I was like, “How are you gonna finish your tour?” Bruce was figuring out how to get their shit fixed every night.
