Our Band Could Be Your Life

by Michael Azerrad

  “The next thing I knew, we were onstage in front of hundreds of Dutch people politely waiting for us to finish so they could see Sonic Youth,” said Arm. “Well, I was having none of that. These motherfuckers were gonna rock if I had to beat up everyone in the place. I jumped into the crowd, threw a few drunken, waterlogged punches, and got back onstage. No response, except maybe confusion, so I cursed ’em and stormed off the stage, expecting my boys to follow. They didn’t. They were as baffled as the audience. So I’m backstage and they’re playing the rest of ‘You Got It…’ then they go into ‘Need.’ I’m thinking, ‘Great, they’re going to play the rest of the set without me. I could stay here like an ass or I could go out there like an ass and continue on like nothing happened.’ After they played another song I sheepishly went out and joined the band…. Nijmegen never invited us back.”

  But by the time they returned to England in May for a final handful of dates, Sub Pop mania was in full bloom and things got amped up even further thanks to a Peel Session that was broadcast all over the United Kingdom. A reported 150 journalists were on hand to witness the sold-out 1,000-seat show at a university in London; two notes in, Arm and Turner dived into the audience with their guitars on. A couple of songs later, Arm jokingly invited the audience onto the stage and a huge throng of kids accepted, promptly collapsing the stage. No one was hurt, but Arm and Turner were left stranded out in the crowd while bouncers cleared the stage. In the melee the stage monitors disappeared. Techs tried to fix the PA but were too busy keeping the speakers from falling over onto the crowd. Naturally, Arm invited everyone to climb on top of the speakers, and many did, then he dived off into the crowd. Arm then asked people to throw money onto the stage, but few accepted that particular invitation.

  The next day the London papers reported that a riot had taken place. Mudhoney’s U.K. fame was assured.

  Bruce Pavitt and Jonathan Poneman understood that virtually every significant movement in rock music had a regional basis, from Memphis to Liverpool to San Francisco to Minneapolis to Manchester, England. They’d studied the successes of early indies like Sun, Stax, and Motown as well as contemporaries like SST and Touch & Go, and deduced that what helped make them successful was having a consistent sound and look. Pavitt and Poneman then transferred these features to Sub Pop.

  The idea was to develop the kind of brand loyalty that SST had enjoyed in its heyday—the confidence that if you bought anything with the Sub Pop logo on it, it was not only going to be good, but good in about the same way everything else on the label was. One thing Sub Pop did was to take out ads that promoted a label identity over the identity of any one band, the basic message being that if it was on Sub Pop, it rocked.

  Key to this was Jack Endino, who would record seventy-five singles, EPs, and albums for Sub Pop between 1987 and 1989 and served much the same role as Spot had with SST and Steve Albini and Butch Vig had with Touch & Go. Endino had a talent, as Bruce Pavitt once put it, for “making the guitars bleed,” and could do so on an exceedingly modest budget—he could record an entire album for about $1,000. In order to crank out recordings at the pace Sub Pop required, Endino soon developed some standard setups. This also meant the records had similar sounds, but that’s exactly what Pavitt and Poneman wanted—a “Seattle sound,” just like there’d been a “Memphis sound” and a “Liverpool sound.”

  But to locals, there wasn’t a “Seattle sound”—Mudhoney’s garagefuzz didn’t really sound much like Soundgarden’s gnarled neo-Zeppelinisms; TAD’s aggro steamroller rock didn’t sound much like the thrashy Swallow. But to the objective observer, there were some distinct similarities. “The sound that I hear from bands that are walking in my door comes from fuzzy guitars, bashing drums, screaming vocals, no keyboards, and a general loud intent,” Endino said. Said Kim Thayil, “It’s kind of this sloppy, smeary, staggering, drunken music.”

  Pavitt and Poneman were very keen on identifying the label and its bands with Seattle. “It’s a regional chauvinism that you find in sports,” Pavitt explains. “People relate to that. They get pumped up by that.” And Seattle was then fairly obscure, so they had an open field as far as defining its image. Sub Pop would further the “decentralized cultural network” Pavitt had been championing since the earliest days of Subterranean Pop. Take Sub Pop’s motto “World Domination,” for instance. “When we say ‘World Domination,’ ” Pavitt explained, “we’re saying, ‘Fuck you, we’re from Seattle, and we don’t care if the media machines are in L.A., we’re going to create our own.’ ”

  And Pavitt and Poneman had done their homework on the independent label rock business. “We’re using a precedent set by Tamla-Motown and Stax, where you have the scene that is being born in a particular region and then you just have a machine that you use to refine and perfect your product,” Poneman said. “You create a sensation, like Great Britain in 1962 through 1965. All of a sudden there are all these bands coming out of this part of the world, there’s good press, it’s romantic. Everybody likes the idea that there’s this burgeoning, happening scene somewhere in the world. If you’re a teenage kid living in Dullsville, U.S.A., maybe someday you can go to Seattle and join a rock band and maybe play the Central.”

  What further united the Sub Pop bands in people’s minds were the visuals—the bold lettering and monochrome photos on the record covers combined for a very definite, evocative sensation of gritty, sweaty machismo. And the musicians themselves had a look to match—no matter what kind of music they played, everybody seemed to wear flannel shirts, torn jeans, and long hair.

  Shaggy SST bands like Black Flag and the Meat Puppets, says Turner, were the main inspiration for long hair in Seattle. “They started growing their hair, and so did Seattle—that’s an easy answer,” says Turner, “and the fact that a lot of people secretly were heshers anyway and just cut their hair once to be punk but secretly liked the metal long hair to begin with.”

  Mudhoney favored shoulder-length hair, horizontally striped velour T-shirts, Mardi Gras beads, blue guitars, and trucker’s wallets chained to their belt loops (useful for holding on to your cash while you got passed around the mosh pit). The beads and striped T-shirts never really caught on, but everything else became de rigueur alt-rock attire within the year, especially the hair—long, greasy, sweaty… grungy. (Still, there was one grunge fashion statement that Mudhoney never went in for. “There was a look where people would wear shorts and long underwear and Doc Martens,” says Arm. “I could never figure that one out. I was like, ‘Hey, your underwear is showing!’ ”)

  At the beginning of the decade, embracing arena rock was antithetical to the underground scene. But now it was the next logical step after the undeniable classic rock elements of bands like the Replacements (the Faces), the Butthole Surfers (Grand Funk Railroad), and Dinosaur Jr (Neil Young). Pavitt and Poneman had seen this phenomenon developing and succeeding, and knew that the Seattle bands were in a position to capitalize on it.

  The Seattle bands’ long hair was just one manifestation of their disdain for both the strictness of hardcore and the pointy-headed pretensions of East Coast art-rock. So was their heretical embrace of decadent metal and proletarian hard rock. And what was more punk than to throw this shameful musical lineage right in people’s faces. “Ultra HEAVY Zep rip-off,” crowed a Pavitt-penned Sub Pop mail order catalog about the Screaming Life EP. “The very thought that you could put out a band that even remotely resembled Led Zeppelin was just hideous,” Pavitt recalls. “People stopped talking to me. So I thought, ‘People in the underground are offended, and people aboveground are offended, too. This is great!’ ”

  One day in early ’88, Jack Endino got a call from some Aberdeen band who wanted to record. They were friends with the Melvins, so Endino told them to come right up. A really tall guy and a small blond guy with piercing blue eyes arrived with Melvins drummer Dale Crover and the trio recorded ten songs in an afternoon. Endino thought the stuff was so good that he asked if he could make some cassett
es for some people he knew. He called up Poneman and raved, “Dale Crover from the Melvins came in with this guy from out in Aberdeen, and the guy looks like he could be pumping gas or be some sort of grease monkey, but, man, he opens his mouth and Jesus fucking Christ I can’t even believe it. I don’t know what to make of this music—I don’t know whether it’s good or bad—but you have to hear it.”

  Poneman flipped over the music and brought it to the Yesco crew for an appraisal. No one liked it very much—“too rock” was the general opinion; besides, Nirvana (what a corny name!) were from out of town. And Pavitt just couldn’t see an angle. TAD’s Tad Doyle was a 300-pound professional butcher from Idaho; Soundgarden had a hunky lead singer and fused Led Zeppelin and the Butthole Surfers; Mudhoney was a local supergroup. But Poneman was crazy about Nirvana, so Pavitt began to cast about for a hook for selling the band. He found it in the band’s semi-rural blue-collar background. “It really started to fit in with this TAD thing,” Pavitt says, “the whole real genuine working class—I hate to use the phrase ‘white trash’—something not contrived that had a more grass-roots or populist feel.” And that was the key to promoting the band in the U.K.—“If you want to sell records in England, you want to sell them something American, you don’t want to sell them something that sounds British,” Pavitt says. “And these guys seemed very authentic and that’s what appealed to me about the group.”

  Still, it was a whole year before Sub Pop got around to releasing Nirvana’s “Love Buzz”/”Big Cheese” single in a limited edition of a thousand copies in November ’88. (Sub Pop mail order department worker Hannah Parker painstakingly hand-numbered every copy. Perhaps because of such dedication, Pavitt soon asked her to marry him. She accepted.) It was the inaugural entry in the Sub Pop Singles Club, a venture that helped rescue the label from one of its many flirtations with financial oblivion.

  Sub Pop had started to get letters complaining that their limited-edition singles (a) were hard to find and (b) sold out too quickly. “We put the two conditions together,” says Poneman, “and realized we had a great marketing tool.” The Sub Pop Singles Club was born. For $35 a year, subscribers got a single a month—a pretty good deal, but the brilliant part was that Singles Club subscribers paid before they got their records, which gave the label a significant financial boost. “On a limited budget, if you have the desire to sell a lot of records,” Pavitt says, “you have to figure out ways to scam and manipulate the public.” With typical Sub Pop irony, the teaser line was “We’re ripping you off big time.”

  Sure enough, collectors pounced on the singles. Sub Pop took the seven-inch single, a format the major labels had abandoned because it was more trouble than it was worth, and turned it into a modest cash cow. At its peak in 1990, when the annual fee hit $40, the Singles Club topped two thousand subscribers. A host of other indie labels followed their lead, and the seven-inch single enjoyed a renaissance for several years, with every Tom, Dick, and Mary indie label pressing up “collectible” 45s on colored vinyl like they were going out of style (which, of course, they were).

  And while Sub Pop was issuing 45s in the U.S., their German licensee Glitterhouse was putting out twelve-inch editions of the same releases, usually with different packaging. Many Glitterhouse releases got imported to the U.S., effectively doubling the exposure for the records, an excellent tool for creating what Pavitt calls “a celebrity culture” out of Sub Pop. Also, Pavitt was a big believer in having plenty of publicity photos taken of each band, which meant that Sub Pop raised its profile simply by having more photos in magazines than its competitors.

  Both extremely well spoken, Poneman and Pavitt did copious amounts of interviews, more than any artist on the label. Most label owners avoided such things, but the way Pavitt looked at it, it was free advertising—“What label in their right mind wouldn’t take the opportunity to hype its product?” he says. “You can spend $500 on a full-page ad or you can spend ten minutes on the phone.” American zines and the British music press were more than happy to run the interviews—Pavitt and Poneman made great copy.

  Pavitt and Poneman soon realized that the press, particularly the typically young fanzine writers, would eagerly swallow whatever hype they tossed out. They were free to establish a mythos about the label based on exaggeration. “It’s a very luxurious, opulent, prestigious office,” Pavitt boasted of Sub Pop headquarters to one fanzine. But in truth it was just a couple of rooms in a nondescript old office building on the edge of one of Seattle’s seedier neighborhoods. The elevator didn’t even go all the way to their floor. “Our technology was a phone, a pencil and pad of paper,” Pavitt reveals. “For our first year, our records were warehoused in the bathroom, so you’d have to step over Superfuzz Bigmuff to take a piss.”

  In December ’88 came another successful piece of hype: Sub Pop 200, a triple-album, twenty-band label compilation complete with sixteen-page booklet. The cover art, by Charles Burns, depicts a demonic guitarist with, presciently enough, a monkey on his back. In an inside photo, Pavitt and Poneman are dressed in suits and gave themselves titles like “Executive Chairman of Supervisory Management.” Sub Pop was going to be important, if only because Pavitt and Poneman were going to make it so.

  The tracks, by such local luminaries as Mudhoney, Nirvana, TAD, the Fastbacks, Steve Fisk, Screaming Trees, the Walkabouts, and Seattle’s underground poet laureate Steven Jesse Bernstein, could easily have fit on two LPs. “But no, we wanted to take a more lavish approach,” Pavitt says. “It was just overkill—sheer overkill and maximum hype.” It worked—to out-of-towners, the set gave the impression of a teeming, vibrant scene in Seattle, when in fact the Seattle scene appeared to be in trouble as venues closed right and left, police hassled the places that dared to soldier on, and local radio stations grew increasingly unsympathetic to Seattle bands. The album caught some ears, and some hugely influential ones at that. Wrote John Peel in the London Observer, “It is going to take something special to stop Sub Pop 200 being the set of recordings by which others are judged for some time to come.”

  National American music press was beyond the reach of all but the largest indie labels. So, mindful of what it had done for Sonic Youth, the Butthole Surfers, and Dinosaur Jr, Pavitt and Poneman set their sights on the U.K. press. To a struggling new label looking for some publicity, the English music weeklies were a very attractive prospect. “They were willing to be bought,” explains former Homestead employee Craig Marks, “and these were established music papers, not erratic zines—they were long, lavish articles written by journalists. And it was very glamorous to be accorded acclaim by ‘the English.’ They knew how to make stars.” So Sub Pop went to England. Or rather, they got England to come to them.

  In March ’89, Sub Pop flew Melody Maker writer Everett True all the way to Seattle and plied him with all the free drinks, shows, and interviews he could handle. “Insane stuff,” Pavitt says, “and that’s what made us look like this ridiculous little label trying to act like a major.” True obliged with a glowing, if slightly condescending, roundup of Sub Pop’s roster in one week’s issue and a front-page feature on Mudhoney the next. It was a huge coup. Suddenly the other two English music weeklies were calling up for interviews, then a host of American fanzines.

  Pavitt’s hunch that Sub Pop’s “white trash” aesthetic would win over the English panned out just as he’d hoped. “I really felt that the Brits and the Europeans wanted to see something that was unruly and that was more of an American archetype—something that was really primal and really drew from the roots of rock & roll, which was very American,” says Pavitt. “I think their Americanness, their unruliness and their spontaneity and their lowbrow sense of humor really won people over. They weren’t trying to be really conceptual or pretentious or anything. They just went out there and rocked.”

  The U.K. press believed that such raw rock & roll could only be made by Neanderthals, and Sub Pop obligingly played to their preconceptions. “Our bands were all lumberjack
s,” Poneman declared. “Or they painted bridges.” And if they didn’t, Sub Pop made it seem like they did—for instance, they never mentioned the fact that TAD’s Tad Doyle had a music degree from the University of Idaho and instead made him pose in the woods with a chain saw.

  To a certain degree, Mudhoney’s music played into this stereotype, but it also transcended it: the music was actually well constructed, the lyrics were razor sharp, and Mudhoney boasted ample wit and sarcasm, things to which the British press could easily relate even as they continued to celebrate their prejudices about Americans. “They were the ultimate American rock & roll band,” says Pavitt. “They were intelligent, sophisticated, and witty, but they were also very primal.” Even the makeup of the group reflected the split nature of the music (and indeed of Sub Pop itself): Arm and Turner were educated and middle to upper-middle class while Lukin had grown up in redneck Aberdeen and Peters had a trailer home childhood. Sometimes the differences in the band members’ backgrounds did show. During one early interview, Arm stated that “unless you’re omniscient, you’re going to be prejudiced of something.” Peters, in all seriousness, added, “but even Amish people are prejudiced.”

  “Not ‘Amish,’ omniscient,” Arm corrected him.

  Peters was so embarrassed that he rarely did an interview again. Arm says the class schism never caused any friction: “It was all about who you thought played well and who you wanted to be in a band with and who you got along with instead of ‘What does your daddy do?’ ” But the class-fixated English were entranced with the idea of blue-collar Americans making rough-and-ready rock music and bent over backward to fit bands into that concept. So Everett True felt compelled to state: “Mudhoney are laconic, wry, intelligent and working class. They don’t wash their clothes a great deal.” Of Lukin, he wrote, “A carpenter by trade, Matt is an All-American working class guy who drinks beer, watches sports and fixes cars”—actually, Lukin didn’t watch sports or fix cars, but why let the truth get in the way of a good stereotype?