Sonic Youth had a powerful effect on Mudhoney in other ways as well, as Mudhoney became only the latest in a series of connections the New York band had built up over the course of the decade. But the Replacements also figured in the story of Mudhoney and Sub Pop. Not only had the Replacements opened up the floodgates of Seventies arena rock, but Sub Pop bands, especially Mudhoney, took the Replacements’ beer-sodden self-deprecation and irony and ran with it. Irony also enabled Sub Pop and its bands to quest for ever-higher levels of exposure and income and still be able to laugh it off as a joke about questing for ever-higher levels of exposure and income.
Another strand of Mudhoney’s sound came out of the entire aesthetic spawned by the seminal Nuggets, a 1972 compilation of proto-punk Sixties garage bands, not to mention the Northwest’s rich tradition of garage rock. Garage, like punk, was a young white male genre, aggressive and full of orthodoxy. Many of the first fanzines to write about punk rock had originally focused on garage rock (others had featured science fiction, which appealed to a roughly similar type of person, but that’s another story). Half of Mudhoney were record collectors, which might account for the band’s alternating currents of self-consciousness and abandon. In that sense, and several others, Mudhoney was a metaphor for Sub Pop itself.
Sub Pop was more calculated than any previous American underground indie. Pavitt and his partner Jonathan Poneman had closely studied the history of independent labels, particularly those of the preceding ten years, and learned from their successes and mistakes, and put everything they had gleaned into promoting their local scene. No more was indie rock a matter of making it up as you went along—the road map was now pretty clear. Marketingwise, Sub Pop was the culmination of a decade of blood, sweat, and tears. But as such, it was also the beginning of the end.
Bruce Pavitt grew up in the comfortable Chicago suburb of Park Forest, Illinois, and attended a progressive high school, then in 1977 moved on to Illinois’s Blackburn College, a place he once described as “a Socialist Utopia.” In between classes at Blackburn, Pavitt would visit Chicago’s Wax Trax Records store and pick up the latest punk singles and zines. One zine in particular made a strong impact—Cle from Cleveland, a city best known for being the butt of jokes. “That made me realize,” Pavitt said, “that an underground cultural renaissance could happen in any part of the country.”
For junior year Pavitt transferred to the progressive Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, in 1979 and started working at the college’s radio station KAOS and at Op, KAOS’s newsletter. At KAOS he met fellow punk fan Calvin Johnson, who soon began contributing to a fanzine Pavitt was doing for college credit called Subterranean Pop, which focused exclusively on American independent label rock music.
Pavitt’s goal was to build a national network of like-minded people to fend off what he called “the corporate manipulation of our culture” by the media centers of New York and Los Angeles. As Pavitt wrote in another manifesto, “A decentralized cultural network is obviously cool. Way cool.”
Subterranean Pop was one of the first zines to view the independent scene as a nationwide phenomenon. Through KAOS and Op’s unparalleled record collections, Pavitt had access to piles of American independent releases and reviewed them by region, which tended to highlight localized musical trends—trendy new wave bands in Boston, acid-damaged party bands in Texas, art student noise outfits in New York, and so on. In Subterranean Pop #2 Pavitt declared a philosophy that he would take to dizzying heights later in the decade. “EXPLOSIVE artistic hanky-panky is everywhere,” he wrote. “Sometimes it just needs a little support.”
Pavitt particularly favored bands from the Midwest and Northwest because the hip East Coast music magazines largely ignored them. “They seemed to think that no American band that didn’t live in New York could possibly stand on its own,” said Calvin Johnson. “They had an Anglophile attitude and looked down their noses at California and the rest of America.”
The music Pavitt championed was hard to find, so after four issues he shortened the name to Sub Pop and began alternating printed issues with sixty-minute compilations of music from around the U.S., encouraging the consumer to buy an inexpensive cassette of American bands rather than “spending big bucks on the latest hype from England.” Nineteen eighty-two’s Sub Pop #5 featured twenty-two bands, including Pell Mell (Portland, Oregon), Oil Tasters (Milwaukee), the Nurses (D.C.), Sport of Kings (Chicago), the Embarrassment (Wichita, Kansas), the Beakers (Seattle), and Pavitt himself.
Pavitt was smart—he made sure to include regionally popular bands; that way he’d be guaranteed some sales in their hometowns. The gambit worked—Pavitt sold a remarkable two thousand copies of Sub Pop #5. “I paid my rent for, like, a year and a half with that tape,” Pavitt says. He also got brilliant underground illustrator Charles Burns to do the cover art, shrewdly surmising that magazines would be happy to reproduce Burns’s striking black-and-white artwork. Says Pavitt, “I was always looking at the big picture as far as promotion and marketing and stuff like that.”
Seattle’s punk scene had been mobilized by a March ’77 Ramones show in the ballroom of the tony Olympic Hotel; the place endured a trashing and the hotel never hosted a rock show again, but punk bands soon started popping up all over town. A few years later Black Flag started playing places like the Mountaineer’s Club and the Eagle’s Nest, and hardcore raged through the city for several years, spurred by visits from bands such as the Dead Kennedys, D.O.A., and the Subhumans, as well as the usual SST acts.
But punk rock wasn’t the only kind of music with a foothold in Seattle—early Northwest garage rockers like the Sonics, the Wailers, and the Kingsmen had never gone out of style there. Commercial metal was also popular—one of AC/DC’s first U.S. strongholds, Seattle was home to Heart and later Queensrÿche. But most bands who wanted to make it left town at the earliest opportunity, usually winding up in Los Angeles and failing miserably. This sense of futility gradually gave way to a sense of freedom, though—Seattle bands could do whatever they wanted, since no one was looking. Sure, there were lots of bands who just wanted to be Joy Division, others who were fifth-rate Minor Threat imitators, but there were others who just didn’t give a hoot.
And there was plenty of local support: KJET-AM played plenty of area bands from the mid-Eighties up until 1988; they’d even play cassettes. Dawn Anderson’s newsprint zine Backlash offered cogent and comprehensive coverage, as did the respected local giveaway paper the Rocket. Several key punk stores were happy to take 45s on consignment. It was a nice little setup.
Pavitt moved to Seattle in early 1983. He was so broke he had to sell his blood twice a week; his diet consisted mainly of a case of sardines a friend had lifted from her father’s fishing boat. After squeezing out one last Sub Pop tape (#9), he quickly established himself as a player in the emerging Seattle underground scene—by April he was writing a monthly column called “Sub Pop U.S.A.,” for the Rocket as well as DJing at the University of Washington station KCMU. By 1984 he was working at an indie record store called Bomb Shelter Records and oversaw the store’s release of an EP by local visionaries the U-Men that quickly sold out its 1,000-copy run.
He was also DJing at the all-ages punk club the Metropolis, where he made friends with a bunch of musicians around town who would always ask him to play Minor Threat. Sometimes he’d hang out with one of them, acid-tongued University of Washington English major Mark McLaughlin, and listen to records.
McLaughlin had also befriended future Soundgarden guitarist Kim Thayil, who coincidentally had been close to Pavitt’s family in high school. McLaughlin and Thayil first met at an early Eighties T.S.O.L. show, when Thayil strode up to him and said, “Hey, you’re in my philosophy class.”
“Dude,” McLaughlin replied incredulously, “you’re at a punk rock show and you have a mustache?”
McLaughlin, an Eagle Scout raised in a strict household, began life as a real straight arrow. “I think I was really drawn to rock & roll bec
ause it was so forbidden to me,” he recalled. Still, he managed to form a band of school chums called Mr. Epp and the Calculations, who put up posters for fictitious shows before they had even learned how to play instruments. McLaughlin took the punk name Mark Arm, chosen basically as an absurdist joke about insulting people by calling them a body part. In 1982 the band released a seven-inch EP called Of Course I’m Happy, Why? (on the local Pravda Records) and got reviewed in Maximumrocknroll, who described the disk as “weirdly structured guitar raunch crammed with cynicism.”
Arm was already tapping into the national indie scene: he and bandmate Jeff Smith copublished a fanzine called The Attack, whose readers included members of Sonic Youth and the Butthole Surfers; Mr. Epp appeared on a New Alliance compilation called Mighty Feeble with a quick hardcore outburst called “Jaded”; their “Mohawk Man” had even gotten some airplay on Rodney Bingenheimer’s show on L.A.’s KROQ. But Mr. Epp remained quite obscure and broke up in early ’84.
Arm and a lanky, bespectacled guitarist named Steve Turner first met at the same 1982 T.S.O.L. show where Arm had bumped into the fecklessly mustachioed Kim Thayil. They’d been introduced by a mutual friend who had assumed that Arm and Turner were both straight edge and therefore should meet each other. But it was instantly apparent that neither Arm nor Turner was straight edge, and as soon as they laid eyes on each other, they both burst out laughing. “And we’ve been trapped together ever since,” says Turner with a wry chuckle. “I think there’s one six-month period where we weren’t in at least one band together in the last sixteen years.”
Turner’s dad worked in international trade for the city of Seattle, his mother worked for Boeing, and he grew up in the affluent Seattle suburb Mercer Island. Like Arm, he didn’t really have much to do with rock music until his teens, when he found punk rock and the early Northwest garage rockers, as well as L.A. garage legends the Seeds, and ravenously began making up for lost time. By 1980 Turner was a certified state punk; that epochal summer he saw Devo on one night and Black Flag the next. At the public Northwestern School for the Arts, he and his friend Stone Gossard played in the short-lived Ducky Boys. Soon after meeting Arm, Turner joined Mr. Epp—as well as Arm’s other band the Limp Richerds—in the last six months of its existence.
After Mr. Epp broke up, Turner and Arm decided to soldier on together and began eyeing potential candidates for their next band. They settled on bassist Jeff Ament because he jumped around a lot and played through a distortion pedal. But Ament had detested Mr. Epp, so Turner went so far as to get a job at the same restaurant where Ament worked just to befriend him. The scam worked. Turner brought in his old bandmate Stone Gossard, and Turner and Arm’s friend Alex Vincent got the drum seat. Arm put down the guitar and assumed frontman duties, basically because all his equipment was broken.
The band was called Green River, after the Green River Killer, a serial murderer responsible for the deaths of nearly fifty women around the Northwest in the early Eighties. (It probably didn’t hurt that “Green River” was also the title of a Creedence Clearwater Revival hit either.) By then Turner had discovered the sludgy Sixties powerfuzz of Blue Cheer as well as the first Stooges album. Arm had begun working his way from Northwest garage rock and the Stooges right up through Alice Cooper, Black Sabbath, and Aerosmith, bands he’d disavowed when he first discovered punk rock. Their new band plied a mixture of punk, proto-punk, and classic scarf-on-the-mike-stand rock & roll.
Ament was a longhaired jock from Montana who wore flannel shirts, although he underwent a surprising metamorphosis for Green River’s first gig, a house party. “He shows up with kind of a rock outfit on and white makeup on his face,” recalls Turner. “I was like, ‘Ohhhhh nooooo….’ ” From then on, Turner says, it was makeup every night for Arm, Gossard, Ament, and Vincent. Turner quickly became disenchanted with the band’s increasingly glammy style and left that August, but not before playing on the six-song Come on Down EP, a strange collision of mid-Eighties metal and the Stooges’ Funhouse LP, released on Homestead in 1985.
Turner continued to play with Arm in a goofy side band called the Thrown Ups, who wore wacky costumes and improvised all their songs onstage, making music that the band once said “sounds like vomit looks.” The idea, says Turner, “was to see how stupid we could act and have people still watch us.” They actually recorded three EPs and an album for a small local indie called Amphetamine Reptile, their finest moment being a song entitled “Eat My Dump.” The band’s singer, an unhinged Australian graphic artist named Ed Fotheringham, later claimed the band was actually a conceptual statement about DIY—if the Thrown Ups could put out a record, anybody could.
Green River replaced Turner with Bruce Fairweather, took whatever jobs they could find, and saved their money so they could tour. They pulled out of town that summer in Gossard’s parents’ station wagon, U-Haul trailer in tow. Unfortunately, Come on Down didn’t come out until they reached New York, where they headlined CBGB to about six people; when they opened for ghoul-punks Samhain in Detroit, Arm and Ament almost got mauled by the crowd when Ament appeared onstage sporting big, poofy hair and a skimpy pink tank top that said “San Francisco.”
On their first trip to Seattle, Sonic Youth played an in-store at the record shop where Pavitt worked, Fallout Records. They hit it off and on their next visit, in January ’85, they took Pavitt’s suggestion that Green River open for them. Recognizing a fellow hipster Iggy fan and obsessive record collector, Moore particularly hit it off with Arm. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Sonic Youth liked Green River so much that they requested them as opening band every time they played Seattle. After one July ’86 show, Thurston Moore wrote in his tour diary, “Local band Green River split the night with volumatic Ig-pow glamkore. ‘Twas hot. Sorta like very ultra.”
Later that year Green River opened for Public Image, Ltd., at Seattle’s landmark Paramount Theatre and finally gave John Lydon some payback for the hard time he’d given bands like the Minutemen, Mission of Burma, Minor Threat, and who knows how many others. At the end of their set, Arm told the crowd, “If you want to see what happens to somebody who’s completely sold out, just wait.” Green River had already trashed PiL’s dressing room and were kicked out of the building right after their set. Lydon further retaliated by writing the withering PiL classic “Seattle” after the show.
Even if the Seattle underground scene was small, it was also quite a motley crew. “There were guys in ski jackets with long hair and mustaches and then there were freaky punk rockers with spikes,” says Seattle scenester Bob Whittaker. “And that was really cool. No one would bat an eye at some freak that didn’t fit the look.”
“It was real small and it was a lot of fun,” agrees Steve Turner. “Hard rock and metal was never that much of an enemy of punk like it was for a lot of other scenes. Here, it was like, ‘There’s only twenty people here, you can’t really find a group to hate.’ ”
Metal and punk had started mixing in Seattle around 1984, much of the credit going to the U-Men. When the U-Men landed a deal on Homestead, a lot of lightbulbs went on over a lot of heads around town. Locals got a further inkling that there was a possibility of wider success when the 1985 Young Fresh Fellows album Topsy Turvy, on the fledgling local label PopLlama, got a glowing review in Rolling Stone. The Fellows began touring the U.S., as did the U-Men, and gradually an invisible barrier around Seattle began to crumble.
But as things in the wider world started looking promising, back home Seattle’s infamous Teen Dance Ordinance was passed, making it extremely difficult to stage all-ages shows by, among other things, raising insurance rates to astronomical heights and requiring excessive amounts of security. The move crippled the Seattle music scene until the first wave of punks hit twenty-one and began playing and/or patronizing a small handful of taverns around the city.
The music scene didn’t totally die: local bands like Soundgarden, Skin Yard, Green River, and Malfunkshun were all playing Seattle, and the
Melvins were regularly coming up from the humble fishing and logging town of Aberdeen. But there were not many places to play and no record labels to speak of, and most bands didn’t even think of trying to play other cities. So they stayed in town, developing material, chops, and stagecraft.
As hardcore further mutated into speed metal, others, especially Seattlites, preferred to wallow in the deepest sludge possible after Black Flag’s My War tour hit town. “A lot of other people around the country hated the fact that Black Flag slowed down to their ‘creepy-crawl’ thing,” Steve Turner says, “but up here, it was really great—we were like, ‘Yay!’ They were weird and fucked-up sounding.” The new Seattle sound was officially christened on April 1, 1986, when the Deep Six compilation was released on the small Seattle label C/Z. The six bands—Green River, Malfunkshun, the Melvins, Skin Yard, Soundgarden, and the U-Men—had a mostly heavy, aggressive sound that melded the slower tempos of heavy metal with the intensity of hardcore. Deep Six isn’t a particularly good record and it took three years to sell out its original 2,000-copy pressing, but if three people make a conspiracy, six bands constituted a movement, especially in a small city like Seattle. “People just said, ‘Well, what kind of music is this? This isn’t metal, it’s not punk. What is it?’ ” recalls Skin Yard’s Jack Endino. “People went, ‘Eureka! These bands all have something in common.’ ”
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