Our Band Could Be Your Life

by Michael Azerrad

  But at the same time, the band was divided on the prospect of slipping into what Lunsford calls “more of a classic business and a rock show dynamic.” “It wasn’t my goal to be doing that,” he says. “I don’t think it was Heather’s either.” And they weren’t kids anymore—they were pushing thirty; even more important, Lunsford had become a proud papa in 1990. “I had to say, ‘What are my primary commitments?’ ” he says. “Being in a seriously touring rock & roll band is difficult to do as a parent.”

  Even after the Northwest explosion, Kurt Cobain’s outspoken advocacy of the band, and the frequent press attention paid to his K tattoo, Beat Happening’s approach ensured that they were never touted as the Next Big Thing From The Northwest: On September 20, 1992, the new Seattle platinum factory Pearl Jam played a free concert in Seattle’s Magnuson Park for thirty thousand jam-shorted, backward-baseball-hatted, stage-diving alternative rock fans. That same day, way on the other side of town, Beat Happening played a show at the Fantagraphics warehouse, with no stage, for 150 people and countless boxes of comic books.

  They played their last show on Halloween of ’92 in Lawrence, Kansas, at the end of a fall U.S. tour. A couple of weeks earlier, they had sold out Maxwell’s. The audience was mostly true-blue fans, with few of the arrivistes who had recently flocked to so many other Northwest bands—the grunge gold rush had bypassed Beat Happening, which was more than fine with them. “There was a looming anxiety about that possibility in us as a band,” Lunsford says. “That would have been a big departure from what our initial goals were, unstated as they were. So here we are, playing Maxwell’s to a packed house, and we’re loving it and everyone’s loving it. So I guess we won.”

  EPILOGUE

  It was bound to happen. The records out of the indie subculture were now selling in sufficient numbers to merit more than just token acknowledgment by the music industry; the underground had grown into a sophisticated, well-organized network that reached into virtually every pocket of America. And the baby boomer regime that had long dominated the music industry could no longer afford to ignore the new music consumer demographic welling up behind it.

  Something like this had happened before. Hippies were once a bona fide counterculture, too, but then somebody figured out how to mass-market the phenomenon, and before you could say “Jefferson Airplane” a sanitized version of hippie rock was all over the airwaves and peace signs were used to sell everything from jewelry to beach towels.

  But this time the process took a lot longer. In the mid-Seventies the Ramones, the Sex Pistols, and their peers had also made a creditable effort to foment an alternative youth culture. Although a denatured punk style did make it to the malls and to MTV, it never stood a chance of dominating popular culture the way the hippies did. That’s because the arithmetic was against them: the plain and simple fact was there were far more hippies in the Sixties than there were punks in the Seventies and Eighties. “That’s the reason this revolution took so long to complete a cycle that should have been done in three years,” says Mission of Burma’s Roger Miller. “And it’s still not done. It’s just this slobbering mess.”

  If baby boomer cultural dominance was like a dam holding back the generation after it, that dam finally burst the day of Nevermind’s release in September of 1991. At the time, Fugazi was on tour in Australia promoting Steady Diet of Nothing. “It was like our record could have been a hobo pissing in the forest for the amount of impact it had,” says Guy Picciotto. “Nevermind was so huge, and people were so fucking blown away. We were just like, ‘What the fuck is going on here?’ It was so crazy. On one hand, the shows were bigger, but on the other hand, it felt like we were playing ukuleles all of a sudden because of the disparity of the impact of what they did.”

  With only minimal promotion to begin with, Nevermind hit number one, blanketed MTV with several videos, and went on to sell more than ten million copies. The funny thing was the album was a fairly complete compendium of the music the industry had been largely ignoring for the previous ten years, synthesizing underground bands like Black Flag, Hüsker Dü, Dinosaur Jr, the Pixies, Scratch Acid, the Melvins, and others. But it made that sound palatable to the mainstream with strong melodies and slick production. “That record changed everything,” says Corey Rusk. “That record started the avalanche of the mainstream of America at least superficially becoming interested in independent music. I don’t think anything will ever be the same after that record came out. I’m not saying for better or for worse, but it’s undeniable that that was the record that extended what so many people had felt and been a part of, and extended it to people who had never thought those thoughts before, or thought to be a part of something like that before.”

  The infrastructure that the underground community had been building for ten years was now in place. The progressive-leaning Spin magazine was well established, and even Rolling Stone was paying more attention to the music. Indie distributors were finding their way into the chain stores. And everybody wanted a piece of the action. “I saw a lot of friends and acquaintances turn their bands which were previously something that they did out of passion into a shot at a small business,” Steve Albini told the venerable zine Punk Planet. “In the course of doing it, they ended up hating their bands in a way that I used to hate my job, because it became something they had to do: it was an obligation.”

  For a time the underground community lost all sense of scale. Indie’s commercial hopelessness had been the very thing that united the scene and kept it from being the shallow, mercenary snake pit the majors had long been. Because it was such a small world, cooperation and straight shooting had been imperative. But much of that was demolished now that the sky, not the basement, was the limit.

  Every facet of the underground was affected. The success of R.E.M. and U2 had already proven that college radio was a viable stepping-stone to larger commercial success, but the alternative explosion sucked college radio far deeper into the belly of the mainstream music industry. Labels plowed even more money into college radio promotion, and the collegiate airwaves accordingly became more formatted, competitive, and compromised.

  The music industry viewed indie rock as little more than a marketing path. Bands and labels painstakingly developed grassroots national followings and then, once all the hard work had been done, a major could snatch them up and cash in. The more established labels soon skimmed off the cream of the indie crop, but a slew of well-heeled start-up labels—including Charisma, SBK, Giant, DGC, Imago, Hollywood, and Def American—also needed bands to fill out their rosters. So they raided whatever was left, plucking up many bands who had released only a 45 or two—as long as they sounded at least a little bit like Nirvana—and handing them gigantic advances that they could never possibly hope to earn out. Failure was almost inevitable.

  (One way to break these bands while maintaining their “indie cred” was to release their music on “fake indie” labels, outfits that posed as freestanding operations but were in fact wholly owned subsidiaries of major labels. The problem was that anyone who cared about such things knew which were the fake indies, and everyone else couldn’t care less whether a band was on an indie or not. The tactic disappeared quickly.)

  As majors raided more and more indie bands, the trust and close personal connections between indie labels and their bands waned. Indies put less and less emotional capital into their bands, realizing that some major label would probably reap the benefits of their hard work (of course, the indie labels retained the bands’ back catalog, paying off handsomely for some). Some bands were even signed by indies for purely speculative reasons, on the hunch that a major would soon buy out the band’s contract for a hefty sum.

  Very suddenly and very improbably, this music that had been so thoroughly ignored by the mainstream music business for more than ten years had become big business. “Ian once said this thing, and I think it’s really true: The conversations changed after ’91,” says Guy Picciotto. “Before, people talked about idea
s and music. And then after that, people talked about money and deals.”

  One upside was that a few independent labels did quite well in the wake of the alternative rock explosion. In particular, Gerard Cosloy got the success he so richly deserved. Matador Records, the label he began running with founder Chris Lombardi, became an indie powerhouse (although it eventually struck a succession of major label affiliations in the Nineties). Matador bands like Pavement, Yo La Tengo, Liz Phair, Superchunk, Guided by Voices, Cat Power, and the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion dominated the underground landscape for most of the decade.

  Chapel Hill’s Merge Records, the label run by Mac McCaughan and Laura Ballance of Superchunk, one of the foremost indie bands of the early Nineties, also became a major force, thanks to bands like Magnetic Fields, Neutral Milk Hotel, Polvo, and Versus. Berkeley’s Lookout Records prospered as well; Green Day, one of their leading bands, brought the sounds of early English punk rock to the masses twenty-five years after the fact. L.A.’s Epitaph Records had several staggering successes, including Offspring, NOFX, Bad Religion, and Rancid, all of whom went gold or platinum. Excellent regional labels like Drag City, Simple Machines, and Teen Beat all blossomed in the Nineties.

  But not every indie label got to bask in the warm sun of Nevermind’s success. After Gerard Cosloy left Homestead, the label languished for years before briefly becoming a hotbed of free jazz, then disappearing. Once the Replacements and Soul Asylum left Twin/Tone, the label lapsed into obscurity, subsisting on its venerable back catalog. Despite a massive influx of cash from sales of Nirvana’s pre-major label album Bleach, a huge increase in other back catalog sales, and some very good new releases, Sub Pop was not able to capitalize on its initial success, mostly due to dissent between its principals and an inability to shake its grunge associations.

  But the SST story is by far the most pathetic. In the late Eighties the label began issuing far more records than even a major could profitably promote, and the quality of the music plummeted, destroying the label’s hard-won cachet. By 1989 Sub Pop had plainly stolen SST’s fire.

  Even worse, SST stood accused of not paying proper royalties to some of its most important bands, and eventually the likes of the Meat Puppets and Sonic Youth successfully sued to get their masters back. Another black eye came with Negativland’s infamous “U2” record, which sampled the Irish rock superstars of the same name and dared to put the letter “U” and the numeral “2” on the cover along with an illustration of the well-known U.S. spy plane of the same name. Thanks to an ugly exchange of lawsuits between Negativland, SST, and U2’s label, SST’s reputation was irreparably tarnished, and by 1990 the label was completely off anyone’s radar.

  Labels with a strong commitment to integrity, taste, and community continued to thrive in the post-Nevermind era. Dischord flourished throughout the Nineties, thanks mostly to the still highly active Fugazi but also to fine bands like Jawbox, Lungfish, Make-Up, Shudder to Think, Slant 6, and the Warmers. The ever-righteous Touch & Go went on to even greater success with beloved bands like the Jesus Lizard, Girls Against Boys, Tar, Didjits, Urge Overkill, and Steve Albini’s new band, Shellac. Thanks partly to the fervent testimonials of Kurt Cobain and partly to a whole bunch of kids who were repulsed by the macho breast-beating of the grunge scene, K Records expanded its cult following even as its newly founded Olympia neighbor Kill Rock Stars Records carved its own niche with critically lauded post–riot grrrl punks Sleater-Kinney.

  But just as the music struggled to absorb a huge influx of new fans, it also struggled to accommodate a huge influx of labels. There were now so many indie labels and bands that the original tight-knit community had become severely diluted. It seemed that the DIY ethos that gave birth to the indie rock movement was threatening to become its undoing. Now everyone was doing it themselves—and a lot of it was mediocre. And like an oversize herd of deer, there was simply too much of it for all to thrive.

  Taking music away from corporate labels and putting it in the hands of local practitioners demystified the process of making and selling records. One of the dividends of that was helping people feel OK about not fitting into mainstream culture. So it makes sense that freaks and outcasts were the first to be drawn to this concept. But gradually the idea radiated into the more conventionally minded precincts of society: people who perhaps didn’t need that affirmation as badly, people who didn’t understand the implications of the do-it-yourself credo, and sometimes even the very people who had made the others feel bad in the first place. They had no knowledge of the history and basis of the whole movement, nor did they care to find out. There was a lot of resentment.

  “People were not as nice and polite,” says Steve Fallon, who owned the legendary Hoboken club Maxwell’s throughout the Eighties. “The bands still had reverence, but the audience didn’t have any kind of reverence for anybody or anything. They wanted a part of that music and only that music, and anything that was around it could be shit on and destroyed. Those people were handed this music and they were very fortunate, but they didn’t have any respect for what had come before. It was not a really fun-loving crowd, I have to say.”

  The scene, once a refuge for original thinkers, was now being overrun by jocks and cheerleaders in underground drag. “If I was walking around somewhere, on the street, it was instant tribal identification,” says Ian MacKaye. “I’d see people and immediately be attracted to them—some woman with a shaved head or just something about them, it was just instant identification. And it was really a very important aspect of my community and the larger community that I felt a part of. And a few years ago, when punk rock spread everywhere, it became really hard for me. Suddenly it was like some weird horror movie. I kept seeing people who I’d identify with instantly and then I realized, wait a minute, they’re just normal people. It’s like some old World War II movie where you’re in a whole town of regular Americans but they’re actually all Nazi spies. That’s what it felt like. Kind of freaked me out a little bit.”

  Not everyone was upset about the way Nirvana had crashed the mainstream gates. “It felt great,” says J Mascis. “It was so validating. It was just cool that some music I actually liked was on the radio. People were getting it. It was a big breakthrough. It just felt like your buddy has succeeded. Suddenly the country somehow gets it a little bit. Just that something that didn’t suck was on the radio was amazing.”

  But the music, particularly grunge, had lost touch with what the underground had tried to do at the beginning of the decade. “Most of those bands, I couldn’t feel anything for,” says Mission of Burma’s Peter Prescott. “I heard in it the kind of stuff that I had always wanted to get away from. Not that I hate Kiss and AC/DC and Led Zeppelin, because I think they were sort of hovering in the background of a lot of that stuff, but that’s what I played in my basement in high school…. So to see punk rock mutate into this different version of that was not a grand thing to me. I felt out of that.”

  Ironically, in the early Nineties the stylistic palette of American indie rock had become quite limited. Indie largely discarded all sorts of ideas that the original punks had introduced—early AM pop (Ramones), transcendental guitarism (Television), funk and world music (Talking Heads), agitprop (the Clash), mystical poetry (Patti Smith), media manipulation (Sex Pistols), performance art (Pere Ubu). What remained was solipsistic and clichéd, a phenomenon so presciently forecast by Sebadoh’s Lou Barlow in the definitive loving/scathing send-up “Gimme Indie Rock” in 1991. Punk had winnowed its heritage down to one single inbred white gene, working hairsplitting variations on a simple theme.

  The alternative phenomenon deluged the media landscape, from fashion runways to a 1993 car ad in which a grungy young man crowed, “This car is like punk rock!” The indie community of the Eighties had developed largely outside the withering media spotlight, where it could hatch and thrive unmolested. That situation simply didn’t exist anymore. For a while, there effectively was no underground. “I thought that was the en
d of what you might call punk rock,” says Peter Prescott, “because punk rock is unique and individual and is not for everybody. So almost by definition it can’t be popular.”

  Which underground music appealed to the mainstream and which didn’t seemed to be determined along class lines, with the more proletarian sounds of the Seattle grunge scene (Nirvana, Alice in Chains, Soundgarden) conquering the masses. Since nothing with that blue-collar sound could be underground anymore, indie rock became increasingly the preserve of the more privileged strata of American youth, who favored cerebral, ironic musicians like Liz Phair, Pavement, and Palace Brothers. Perhaps to make up for the seeming elitism, such musicians placed even less of a premium on musical technique than ever. But maybe that was just a flip of the bird to the traditionally working-class emphasis on artisanal values like chops, speed, and power.

  Punk confrontation was largely gone from the indie world; in its place was a suffocating insularity, whether it was Cat Power’s depressive mutterings or Pavement’s indie rock about indie rock, however beautiful or evocative they might have been. Sticking your neck out too far was verboten. There was a distinct sense of tactical retreat, of lying low until the storm passed. Many musicians sought refuge in irony, where nothing was revealed and all could be denied.

  By the mid-Nineties, the indie community began to cast about for new sounds. Some defected to techno and the rave scene, while others explored spoken word and poetry slams. Some musicians delved into the past; classic artists as disparate as Johnny Cash, Leonard Cohen, and the Beach Boys became very hip. The trend eventually bubbled back into indie as “record-collector rock,” an extended game of spot-the-influence. Sure enough, the music started to diversify, but instead of a thriving, united counterculture, the indie scene was now just a small segment of the music market catering to ever more minute and rarely overlapping subgenres: Twee pop, math rock, neo-country, riot grrrl, mod, four-track auteurs, emo-core, lounge, garage, love rock, even music made by mentally ill people.