“All he wants to do,” True wrote of Turner, the thoughtful anthropology major, “is ‘rock out’ and have a good time.”
June ’89 saw a big breakthrough for Sub Pop and the Seattle scene in general. “Lamefest,” with Mudhoney, TAD, and Nirvana, was the first time a local show had sold out Seattle’s landmark 1,400-seat Moore Theatre. The Moore was a local institution, and the feat was almost beyond comprehension by anyone around town. “Throughout the history of Seattle music, local music was never taken seriously,” says Pavitt. “After that show, local music was taken seriously.”
The manager of the Moore was so dubious about the turnout that he failed to hire enough security to contain the overwhelming crowd that showed up. “Kids were just going insane,” Pavitt recalls. Mark Arm kicked one overzealous bouncer, sending him sprawling into a maelstrom of moshers. Afterward, Arm almost got mauled by the security team, and for a long time Sub Pop bands were banned from the venue.
But the point had been made. “You knew that the music was real when you weren’t playing in front of ten of your drunk, ecstasy-imbibed friends but playing in front of fourteen hundred kids who were just going absolutely nuts,” Pavitt says. “And we were thinking we were right—‘These guys are great.’ ”
Success was not something that a lot of people in the underground were comfortable with. In the late Eighties, twenty-something people had little hope of participating in the Baby Boomer yuppie celebration. Baby Boomers had barricaded them from corporate culture and its attendant rewards. Besides, indie bands weren’t supposed to be successful, and if they were, they were surely doing something wrong. Like the Replacements before them, Mudhoney seemed embarrassed by their success, sabotaging themselves with drinking, stage tomfoolery, and obtuse interviews even as they went through the motions of pursuing their career. By the summer of ’89, Sub Pop was selling T-shirts with the Sub Pop logo on the back and on the front, in big bold letters, the word “Loser.” “The loser,” as TAD guitarist Kurt Danielson explained to the Rocket, “is the existential hero of the Nineties.”
It was more than a word on a T-shirt: Poneman’s business card read “Corporate Lackey” and Pavitt’s “Corporate Magnate.” “Why bother to say, ‘Die Yuppie Scum,’ ” says Pavitt, “when you can parody all the corporate mania that’s been going on all these years?” Sub Pop’s jokey big-business posture simultaneously mocked and embraced that culture, self-promotion disguised as self-deprecation. “This way you could kind of have your cake and eat it, too,” says Pavitt. “You could promote yourself as brashly and as loudly as possible, but you’re poking fun at yourself so people couldn’t really give you shit.”
Mudhoney recorded a self-titled debut album with Jack Endino in July ’89—it came out only three months later, with the first three thousand copies packaged in a gatefold sleeve and poster specially for what a Sub Pop press release affectionately called “collector scum.”
It was a good record, but the band was treading water, trapped in the classic predicament of making a crucial follow-up record while vigorously promoting the previous release. One of the album’s best songs was “You Got It (Keep It Out of My Face),” but a different, superior version had already been released as a single months before. Even Arm admits the album was “just kind of more of the same but not quite as good.” Despite some powerful moments and improved musicianship, it could not beat the six-song EP for getting to the point.
By this time Mudhoney was the height of cool in the United Kingdom. English band-of-the-moment Transvision Vamp was so eager for some hipness points that they ever so casually threw copies of Superfuzz Bigmuff, Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited, and a book on the Velvet Underground into the cover photo of their new album. The hip thing to do was to grow your hair long like the guys in Mudhoney.
But the whole band took a dim view of the trendy English music scene, so they found it ironic—even a little confusing—that they had become its darlings. Arm notes that the Replacements briefly considered calling their Hootenanny album “England, Schmengland.” “Which was the general feeling amongst most American underground people of the day—it’s all hype, what a load of crap,” says Arm. “And next thing you know, we’re the load of crap. It was kind of goofy.”
The buzz on Seattle and Sub Pop was starting to break through to the American mainstream media, too. Chicago Sun-Times writer Michael Corcoran did a long piece on the scene, noting Seattle and its “distorted marriage of heavy metal and punk called ‘grunge.’ ” “Influential music magazines from Europe and the United States have called ‘The Seattle Sound’ the best thing to happen to new music since the advent of New York’s CBGB’s,” Corcoran wrote.
And then came the deluge. It had been a very isolated scene until A&R people started flying up to check out Soundgarden. Everybody was excited about the prospect of their friends Soundgarden cracking the big time, but there was also worry that their little scene was being co-opted. Soundgarden’s SST album Ultramega OK came out at the end of 1988; they signed to A&M within a year, and by the spring of ’90 Seattle was crawling with major label A&R execs angling for bands like the Posies and Screaming Trees. Seattle was everyone’s darling from the underground to the overground.
Well, almost everybody’s. “You go see Mudhoney or one of those bands and it’s silly how great they think they are,” said Steve Albini in a Maximumrocknroll interview. “It’s almost offensive to me. And the thing is, when Mudhoney started out they were a real cool, real fucked up band. Their first single, I think, is really great. And now it’s sort of like a hard rock version of the Beatles.”
Albini wasn’t the only naysayer. Mudhoney toured Australia twice in 1990, playing everything from pubs to theaters. That year’s Rockpool poll of American college radio programmers named Mudhoney their favorite band. But once the band hit the U.K., it was a different story. The British music press is nothing if not fickle, and many writers, including Everett True, had turned against them, partly because of Sub Pop’s overblown hype barrage, partly because the band had gotten too big for their liking, and partly because of the band’s new look, which got mentioned in virtually every live review of the tour: “We had cut our hair,” Turner explains. “That made them reassess us a little bit.”
And the U.K. press was upset that a couple of the guys in Mudhoney were not exactly the backwoods savants they had been making them out to be. “That was the thing—they found out that Mark and Steve had gone to college,” says Bob Whittaker. “They weren’t the working-class freak show that everybody thought they were.”
“This one guy, the only damning evidence he could call us was ‘harmless history students’—I was like, ‘Well, that’s pretty much me in a nutshell,’ ” says Turner with a shrug. “I mean, yeah, we aren’t white trash mountain men. We told them that from the beginning, but they never printed it—they’d just print their imaginations of what we said.”
“Mudhoney are not the pig-fucking sulphate-rotten greasy biker Viking stormtroopers with one foot in the grave and the other in a nun’s entrails that their music suggests,” wrote NME’s Steven Wells. “If Mudhoney had been sent to Vietnam they would have all been Radar from M*A*S*H. Mudhoney are geeky motherlovers, all matchstick arms and legs and horn-rimmed glasses and small bottoms and boyish fun. They are far too intelligent as individuals to believe in the rock ’n’ roll woah, they seem to be making a career out of one huge, elongated piss-take (albeit a piss-take that kicks some serious three guitar all-out attack bottom). No journalist has ever penetrated their facetious facade, none has ever managed to slice them down to the bone.”
By the summer of ’90, speculation that Mudhoney was splitting up was filtering through the press. Reports of the band’s demise were, however, greatly exaggerated. Turner was burned out from constant touring and wanted to take a break by returning to college.
The break also meant that the band could recharge its creative energies. The others were content to hang fire for a while, but the more enterprising
Peters toured with Screaming Trees and, for an eye blink, was a member of Nirvana, playing one landmark show and recording one landmark song (“Sliver”) with the band before they jettisoned him in favor of Dave Grohl. In reaction to President Bush’s Gulf War, Arm released a solo single, a cover of Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War.”
By 1990 Sub Pop was so hip that it was attracting one-off singles by what were or would soon become some of the biggest names in what was now being called “alternative rock”: Dinosaur Jr, Rapeman, Fugazi, Rollins Band, Hole, Smashing Pumpkins, and Soundgarden. Sub Pop itself was landing features in places like the Los Angeles Times and on National Public Radio.
As early as March ’89, Pavitt had been bracing for a backlash from the English press. “It’s only a matter of time,” he told Maximumrocknroll. “That’s the way it works. The English press build you up, only to tear you down.” And yet Pavitt and Poneman seemed to be getting a bit carried away, as if they were believing their own hype. Poneman’s liner notes from Fuck Me, I’m Rich, an Australian Sub Pop compilation, declared, “I don’t play rock music, I ‘play’ rock bands! The same way others ‘play’ the horses.” Not to be outdone, Pavitt added, “Once upon a time, Seattle opened it’s [sic] legs and fucked the world. YES! Loud powerfuzz and muff shagging hair action…” Meanwhile, the label was releasing either a single or an album a week. In letting what Poneman once called Sub Pop’s “calculated arrogance” get out of hand, Pavitt and Poneman had forgotten one thing: Pride goeth before a fall.
“Will Sub Pop be able to stay on top of its scene and meet an expanding market for its product, or will it become overloaded, overextended and ineffective as so many promising independent labels have before it?” asked writer Richard T. White in a 1989 Pulse! profile of the label. Pavitt’s cocky reply: “I’ve been doing this forever. It’s like breathing. Quiz me—I know this shit.”
Unfortunately, Sub Pop was relying on what Pavitt called “intuitive accounting.” Pavitt and Poneman got too bound up in the more glorious processes of signing bands and recording, designing, and promoting their records while the business end fell by the wayside. “We were an awesome promotional machine,” admits Pavitt, “but at the expense of the nuts and bolts.”
Sub Pop had also gone into the distribution business—at one point distributing a dozen or so other labels, most of them Northwest microindies—and was not doing it very well. The label was losing vast amounts of money and couldn’t pay their clients. And in the spring of ’90, Sub Pop was hit with two coffer-draining lawsuits. One was from the Pepsi Corporation, which was upset that TAD’s “Jack Pepsi” single featured a close approximation of their logo; the other was by a couple whose mildly compromising photo was used without permission on the cover of TAD’s 8-Way Santa album.
More problems came when Pavitt and Poneman began to feel they’d hit a sales wall—and had an inkling that Nirvana’s second album would be a bigger success than they could handle—and started looking for ways of breaking through it. So they began the expensive process of negotiating a major distribution deal with CBS Records.
At the same time, major label A&R scouts were courting more and more of Sub Pop’s artists. That and the talk of an impending major label distribution deal for the label prompted its bands to ask for bigger advances; since few of them had contracts with the label, they were free to walk. So in order to keep their bands happy, Pavitt and Poneman starting handing out drastically higher advances, even though they couldn’t actually afford it. And, as Pavitt put it to the Rocket, “That’s what fucked us.”
Ironically, the CBS deal fell through in the summer of ’90, but not before Sub Pop had spent tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees.
As the Seattle phenomenon widened, bands began moving to Seattle from all over the country, dressing up in “grunge” clothes and playing “grunge” rock. “It was really bad,” says Turner. “Pretend bands were popping up here, things that weren’t coming from where we were coming from.”
Pained by the grunge overkill, the original Seattle bands were doing what they could to distance themselves from the flock of arrivistes. TAD was getting more melodic, Screaming Trees’ Mark Lanegan released a second solo album of moody balladeering, and Nirvana was writing more or less straightforward pop songs; Sub Pop itself was diversifying into power-rockabilly (the Reverend Horton Heat), spoken-word-meets-sampledelica (Steven Jesse Bernstein’s brilliant Prison, a collaboration with producer Steve Fisk), and naive pop (Beat Happening).
And Mudhoney took an appreciable change in direction on their next album, Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge (the name is a mnemonic for the notes of the musical staff). Even the cover speaks volumes: instead of a shaggy, sweaty black-and-white shot by Charles Peterson, the cover art is a colorful, cartoonish illustration of a sinking ship by the band’s old friend Ed Fotheringham—visually, quite a break from the usual Sub Pop look, but still very Seattle. And instead of Sub Pop mainstay Jack Endino, they recorded with Conrad Uno, who ran Seattle’s tiny PopLlama Records, the Young Fresh Fellows’ label.
They’d done some demos with Endino at the relatively upscale twenty-four-track Music Source, but they hadn’t turned out very well. Realizing they were repeating themselves, they figured it was time for a change. It was clear that their best work, the “Touch Me I’m Sick” single, was done on an eight-track board. Girl Trouble had just recorded a great album at Egg Studios with Conrad Uno on an eight-track board that had once been used at Stax’s studios in Memphis. So Mudhoney went to Egg and ran down eleven covers—songs by key influences like Black Flag, Devo, Elvis Costello, and others—in one day, with the idea of releasing an entire punk covers album. “But then Guns N’ Roses did one,” says Turner, “and that idea was over.”
But they liked the way the tracks sounded, so they recorded their second album at Egg (so named for the soundproofing egg cartons nailed to the walls), a cozy little room in the basement of Uno’s house in an unassuming corner of the suburban University District. The whole thing cost $2,000.
Uno, a droll, kindly gent who had played in various Seattle art bands in the Seventies, had never heard a Mudhoney album until he recorded them. He quickly came to a realization about Arm’s talents: “He’s terrible singer,” said Uno. “But he’s a great singer.” Uno also came to appreciate the band’s sense of spontaneity. “With Mudhoney, I would say, ‘Uh, guys, you kinda missed that one part,’ ” he said. “And they would say, ‘Aw, it’s OK.’ If they made it through the song and it had a good energy to it, that’s enough.”
Mudhoney’s self-titled album had sold thirty thousand copies in the U.S. and about fifty thousand in Europe, and the catchy Every Good Boy was sure to sell more. But Sub Pop kept delaying its release, saying there wasn’t enough money to put it out. The label was also getting behind on royalty payments. “We’d meet with them and they’d say, ‘Come down tomorrow and we’ll cut you a check,’ ” says Peters. “And we’d go down there the next day and they’d say, ‘I didn’t say that. You must have misunderstood me.’ ”
Finally Mudhoney decided to force the issue and booked a September tour to support the still unreleased new album. Pavitt and Poneman insisted they would come up with the money soon, but no one believed them. “The honesty wasn’t really there,” says Peters. “They would say things, and maybe they truly meant them, but they were, like, outlandish.”
“And then they flew out the Afghan Whigs, who they were trying to sign,” says Bob Whittaker, who was now taking on some managerial duties for the band. “And basically spending the money they’d gotten from [Glitterhouse] for the advance for our record to fly the Afghan Whigs out. They were thinking too far ahead. To our minds, they should have been concentrating on us and the record that was about to come out that was going to sell a lot.”
“Whereas before we had been in an all-for-one, one-for-all state of mind, we were [now] trying to save our asses,” says Poneman. “We didn’t do it at the expense of Mudhoney, but Mudhoney had been accustomed to a
certain kind of consistency and favoritism from us that we simply could not provide because we were simply trying to keep the organization afloat.”
By early ’91 Sub Pop was bouncing checks all over town; they couldn’t pay their employees, bands, the pressing plant, even their landlord. Any one party could have pushed them into bankruptcy by insisting on their money. Seattle Weekly ran a story on the label’s financial woes; a couple of weeks later so did the Rocket, with a cover photo of a dejected-looking Pavitt and the cover line “Sub Plop?”
In response, Pavitt and Poneman made up T-shirts that said “Sub Plop” in the Sub Pop logo style, with the legend “What part of ‘We have no money’ don’t you understand?” on the back. And then they sold them to raise money.
But privately Pavitt and Poneman were increasingly at odds over how to cope with the crisis: Poneman preferred to think things would blow over eventually, but Pavitt, upset about letting down so many people, many of whom were good friends, was taking it very hard. “I was medicating myself,” he says. “I was under incredible stress. My god, just having to deal with that kind of stuff was very hard.”
In the name of preserving his friendship with Pavitt, Arm preferred not to know how much money Sub Pop owed Mudhoney. But one day Steve Turner stopped by Pavitt’s office and mentioned that Poneman had promised they’d get $5,000 the following day. Pavitt, stressed nearly to the breaking point, just burst out in a fit of nervous laughter. After he calmed down, he explained to Turner that much as he would love to pay the band, the label was broke and the money simply would not be there the next day. Turner was mortified at Pavitt’s outburst; Arm called Pavitt the next day and said that the incident had so upset Turner that they had decided right then and there to go looking for a new label. “I always have really respected and liked Bruce,” says Turner. “And so we just thought, ‘Let’s get out of here before we just tear their heads off or something.’ ”
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