Grunge Is Dead

by Greg Prato

  JACK ENDINO: They borrowed a bunch of money from various gullible people and somehow set the wheels in motion to start an indie label. I was already working in this eight-track studio from the middle of ’86, and I had been working with Soundgarden almost from the moment the studio opened its doors. So some of the recordings we had been making anyway, wound up on the first Sub Pop record — Soundgarden’s “Nothing to Say”/“Hunted Down.” And that became the Screaming Life EP, those two songs plus four others. Sub Pop had a strange rationale when they started — “Let’s just do eps at first. They’re cheaper to record and you can put a lower list price on them, which means more people will take a chance on buying them.” The other side of the equation is you make less money on it [laughs]. So Sub Pop did a lot of seven-inches and eps in their first few years.

  STEVE MANNING: When Sub Pop started, it was in the Terminal Sales Building on First and Virginia. There were lots of rental spaces available at that time in the city.

  JEFF GILBERT: Their warehouse was all the way in the basement, so there’s constant elevators and stairs. You’d take the elevator, it would stop at the tenth floor, and you’d have to get out and walk up another flight and a half of stairs to get to their offices. They were in “the Greg Brady room” [laughs]. The Sub Pop Singles Club was a brilliant marketing stroke on Sub Pop’s behalf. Fucking genius man. Even the metal guys would go out and get the singles, just because they thought it was cool — metal is all about collecting [laughs]. I remember telling some of the metal guys around town, “You should look at what they’re doing, co-opt it, and ‘metal it up’ for your side.”

  JONATHAN PONEMAN: The Singles Club really was a natural evolution. We were making far more commitments than we could afford. What started happening was there was a handful of record stores that were buying most of our singles. We were trying to open accounts and people would get mad at us, because they would try to buy records from us and we would already sell them out before we even placed an order with some of these accounts. The one way people could ensure that they would get a single and we would have cash flow was to have people pay up front. I don’t remember who actually came up with the name “Sub Pop Singles Club” — Bruce came up with original text for the advertisement. I remember after work, we would go to this place, the Virginia Inn — across the street from our old office. Bruce and I would have a couple of beers and talk about this kind of stuff.

  BLAG DAHLIA: Chris Cornell sang like the guy in Zeppelin — so did everybody in Los Angeles. Kurt Cobain frowned a lot, and acted sad like the Replacements, and a lot of the Midwestern Touch and Go bands. All of this stuff is more derivative than it’s generally portrayed. Sub Pop essentially completely copied the artwork of Touch and Go, and that “grunge style” started with bands like Butthole Surfers and Scratch Acid. They were good at promoting their scene as something unique. If you look at Sub Pop, what they did with their Singles Club — they signed the one good band in every town. There was no Chicago scene, but you could get one thing out of Urge Overkill. There was no San Francisco scene, but you get one thing out of the Dwarves. L.A. had L7 and Ohio had the Afghan Whigs. Basically, “Grab the one band that’s touring and hanging out, and make it into something.”

  KIM THAYIL: The Green River single with “Ain’t Nothing To Do” on it — the Dead Boys’ song — came out on green vinyl/green sleeve. Then the Soundgarden “Hunted Down”/“Nothing to Say” single came out on blue vinyl/blue sleeve. To complete the set, you had Blood Circus on red vinyl/red sleeve, and I think it was Swallow with yellow vinyl/yellow sleeve. And Tad did a clear vinyl/clear sleeve thing. The Green River one is part of that set, but the money spent came out of Green River’s pocket, so they put it on Tasque Force Records — the Green River killer had yet to be found, so Green River’s fan club was called Tasque Force — a French spelling. But the distribution and promotion was pretty much Sub Pop. Then our single came out alongside Green River’s Dry as a Bone EP — that must have been “eleven.” In some cases, they’d stick a copy of the Soundgarden “Hunted Down” single in with [Dry as a Bone] — “Here’s what we want you to play, and by the way, we got this coming up.” That was “twelve A,” and “twelve B” was Screaming Life. So we were the twelfth Sub Pop magazine [laughs].

  MARK IVERSON: It was exciting — I wanted to buy everything they put out. I basically did buy everything they put out for a year or two. I remember the first time I saw the “Loser” T-shirt, and I just thought, “That is the funniest thing I’ve ever seen in my life — I’ve got to get that.” They did a good job of creating anticipation, desire, and demand.

  JEFF GILBERT: The coolest club you could never get into. Those guys were almost too smart for their own good — they ignored all the rules. They would promote the negative stuff, like “Loser.” If you were dysfunctional, disaffected, or didn’t have a crowd to call your own, that was your crowd.

  ART CHANTRY: The thing you’ve got to remember about Bruce is that guy was stoned all the time. He was one of the earliest guys you ran into who was really into MDMA. His eyes were like fucking sparklers — I swear to God, they had sparks flying out of them. So he was like this marketing genius, but what he was, was like, stoned. He kept jumping ship with graphic designers. He was always a sampler — a kid in the candy store constantly. Whoever he was working with, you could talk him into anything. I quickly learned with Bruce is the way you worked with him, is you made it his idea. I tried to talk him into not putting the title of the band on the cover, and just have the logo to promote the label, and how important it is to promote the label. And he’d look at me like I was crazy. And then the next time I saw him, I’d say, “Remember when you had that idea?” And he’d go, “Yeah, that was good, wasn’t it?” And then it would happen. After a while, I could get anything done [laughs].

  STEVE MANNING: Over the years, as Sub Pop grew, they expanded to three floors in the building. Probably grew to twenty full-time staff. It had great views, [but] it wasn’t very conducive to an office space — it was really hodgepodge. The conference room was huge — it was really unnecessary — and everybody’s offices were cramped and closetlike. You’d have to walk through a little maze to get to each desk. Nobody seemed to know what they were doing — shit stacked everywhere. People signed graffiti on the wall, there was garbage sitting around. They were completely learning on the fly — and really struggling to keep the doors open.

  BRUCE PAVITT: I have memories of the phone company calling us up and telling us they were going to disconnect our phone line because we couldn’t pay our bills.

  DANIEL HOUSE: I was driving home, and who do I see at a bus stop — Jonathan Poneman. I pulled over and said, “Hey, let me give you a ride.” We got to talking, “Do you know anybody that’s looking for work? We need somebody to spearhead our sales efforts and distributions stuff.” And I said, “I do — me.” So the following week I started working at Sub Pop — it was Bruce, Jon, and me. Bruce and Jon were probably two of the most disorganized and flakey people I’ve ever known. Bruce and Jon also have some of the most remarkable luck of anybody I’ve known. They were terrible about paying bills, hitting deadlines. They were losing things — masters, artwork. I was basically building their direct-to-retail account base, which by the time I left was, like, 400 stores nationwide that we sold direct to, on a cod-only basis. Eventually, I was billing out approximately $30,000 a month. Frankly — not to take too much credit — had it not been for that money made during that time, I’m pretty sure that Sub Pop would not have been able to weather their debts. They would have had to foreclose and declare bankruptcy, because they were hemorrhaging money like crazy.

  GRANT ALDEN: Total disorganization. Luck? You make your own luck. Those guys gambled every time — without fear. Every time they had a chance to walk away with an extra $10,000, they blew $20,000 doing something else.

  JEFF GILBERT: They owed everybody in town money. Everybody around town ended up working for them, and ended up getting stiffed by them. Th
eir famous saying — “What part of ‘We have no money’ don’t you understand?”

  BLAG DAHLIA: I used to describe it as “Starving to death in a really cool suit.” It was the kind of place where they would rather give a fat girl from the bar a job and a paycheck than give any money to the bands on the label. That’s why no bands stayed for any length of time — but there were always new and tremendously useless Seattle townies working there. Bruce had good taste in music and could grasp an interesting concept. He was just so high and confused that often only the bands Jon liked got any help selling records — because he showed up at the office once in a while and occasionally did something.

  JEFF AMENT: It was impossible [to get paid]. When Green River broke up, the hardest thing was we played on Saturday night, drove home all day Sunday, and then I went to work on Monday. And on that Monday morning, Jonathan Poneman came down and said, “We just got a bunch of money — we’re going to buy a van, so you guys can tour on this next record.” I thought, “Wow, just when we decided we’re not going to do the band anymore, somebody is actually offering to do something for us.”

  ART CHANTRY: They did everything exactly wrong — it was astonishing how stupid their moves were. I remember [the poet] Jesse Bernstein coming to their office and threatening them. Jesse was a scary dude, because the guy had been there. He walked in the office, and wanted his money for that recording they put on [1988’s] Sub Pop 200. Some people said there was a gun, some people said a knife — probably not, because he didn’t do that. He walked into their closet office, grabbed them, took them down to the bank, made them withdraw every penny they had in their account, and give it to him — it was a hundred bucks or some pathetic amount. And that’s the only way he got paid. I mean, Girl Trouble immediately pulled their fucking record from Sub Pop — they were the first ones to walk.

  GARRETT SHAVLIK: As time progressed, things started getting a little more tight, and Jon and Bruce started getting a rift between them. Jon was “the yes man” and Bruce was “the realist.”

  CONRAD UNO: Early on, they bought studio time and eventually product from me. Over the course of their first five/six years, they always owed me money — it got to be a slight source of tension. I’m not sure it ever got paid either. Can you speak to Jonathan? I’m sure you have his number…

  JIM BLANCHARD: They paid me $150 for a piece of artwork. Although I never got my original art back.

  SCOTT VANDERPOOL: I remember buying Sub Pop’s first stereo system — it was a ghetto blaster they put on my credit card, because I had one. And a hand truck, to move boxes of records around. It would be like, “Jon, Bruce — can we get paid?” “Oh, I’ll write you a check — but don’t cash it for a week or so.” I quit working there, because I thought they were going to fail at any minute.

  JONATHAN PONEMAN: We started off the business with about $19,000 — what we were able to accumulate between money that Bruce and I borrowed from people. We spent that money within one month. We were in a situation where we were calling up record stores and trying to say, “Hey, if you buy from us direct, we’ll give you a discount, but you need to pay cod.” At the time, there wasn’t anybody else doing that. The most critical connection [Bruce] was able to establish at the time — the Sonic Youth/Mudhoney single — was something he and Mark orchestrated. And then the Nirvana single, because we knew there would be … not a huge amount of fanfare, but a certain amount.

  I remember Bruce and I would pray to ups — “Oh please!” Because the checks would come in clumps. There would be days where there would be no checks, and then suddenly, there’s $400 worth of checks. We could pay rent and give ourselves a paycheck. That happened for like a year, year and a half. But we were on the ropes, because we were always being ambitious. Two times in particular that I can remember we cleared out our bank accounts to buy vans for our bands. One was the $600 we gave to Mudhoney to buy their first van. We bought this monstrosity — I can’t remember if we bought it for the Fluid, or L7 and Cat Butt — but they both ended up using this van, and Sub Pop paid thousands of dollars.

  And the third time, we had like $3,000 in the bank, and Tad was about to go out on tour with Primus. This was seen as being a big deal, so they strong-armed us at the time, because this was between when we had regular business affairs and contracts, and the handshake deal. So the implied threat from Tad was, “If you guys don’t get us a van, then when we become big pop stars after this Primus tour, we’re going to split.” Which all seems kind of amusing now. We all lived in a perpetual state of paranoia.

  ROD MOODY: Sub Pop began hosting “Sub Pop Sundays” at the Vogue. This series began to solidify the whole scene that they were developing. Everybody knew and supported each other, we all recorded at the same place, with the same engineer, and we all went to and played the same three or four clubs. We all toured in the same “Sub Pop van,” the first of which Swallow blew up in Texas. Probably slept with a lot of the same girls too.

  KURT BLOCH: I remember one time, seeing [ Jonathan] at a show, and he was like, “Hey, I don’t have any money, can you buy me a coffee? Come in tomorrow and I’ll give you a single that will just blow your mind.” Went down there, and it was the “Love Buzz” single.

  TRACY MARANDER: I remember when Sub Pop called to tell them that they wanted Nirvana on their label, Kurt was so excited. At the beginning, he thought that they were really cool. He was like, “There’s this independent record company, they’re from Seattle — they’re not from somewhere else.” Touch and Go at that time was his favorite label. He sent tapes to them, but they never contacted him back. It was just validating the fact that he was actually starting to get his music somewhere. [Later on,] I think he felt like they were ripping him off, and they were not willing to pay the money that they deserved or other bands deserved. The thing is, at the beginning, they couldn’t afford to.

  DYLAN CARLSON: All of a sudden, there’s starting to be a lot of British journalists at shows. Articles on Seattle in British music papers.

  JOHN LEIGHTON BEEZER: The infamous story of Everett True. [True] ends up writing for NME — but not their marquee/flagship author. He’s, like, a dude that managed to write a few articles for them. So the Sub Pop single comes in, a promo package, and it says, “If you’d like to come out to Seattle and see what is happening here…” Everyone’s like, “Eh, where’s Seattle again?” And he’s like, “I’ll go!” They’re like, “Do you realize that there’s no budget for a hotel? They’re just going to fly you there and you’re going to sleep on people’s couches.” So he comes out, and I think in the movie Hype, Bruce Pavitt says, “Everett basically came out and invented the myth.”

  So what he did is he found kindred souls — drank with all these crazy people and slept on floors. Went back and wrote what turned out to be a cover article in NME, that said, “Holy shit, amazing things are happening in Seattle!” And the British public bought it [laughs]. So Mudhoney immediately went to Europe to tour. That was chaotic — it was mayhem and insanity. I wish I could have seen some of that, because that was probably some of the purest, best example of what it was all about.

  BRUCE PAVITT: I felt that the British audience was really hungry for music that was decidedly more American, more physical, and more rocking than what was going on in England. The timing was really good.

  DANIEL HOUSE: C/Z was a label that was started before Sub Pop started. What really inspired [Bruce Pavitt] — by his own words — to launch the label was the release of the Deep Six compilation. Never grew as big as Sub Pop, but at one point, C/Z did have thirteen people working for it — it was a full label, and definitely “the number two label” in Seattle for many years. Even though I didn’t put out the Deep Six record personally, it was the record that was the launching point for Soundgarden, the Melvins, Green River. Certainly, there are bands that may have never ever broke, or left a mark, had it not been for C/Z. We had the Gits, 7 Year Bitch. C/Z was around for fifteen to twenty years.

  CHRIS HANZSEK: I
borrowed and scraped together enough money and gear, and started a studio called Reciprocal Recording — right at the beginning of 1984. And ran the studio for a year. I had my day job, and then I’d work until two in the morning in the studio. Met all kinds of great bands. The idea occurred to me, “There’s bands — the city is still forming its identity.” I had a partner at the time, my girlfriend, Tina Casale, and we lasted a year in our first studio building, before the old Swedish landlord decided to kick us out at the end of our lease year. Then I had a year off, where I put the studio in my basement, and started C/Z Records. Talking to some of the musicians that I had been working with, the idea sprang up that there should be a compilation record to expose all of the talent in Seattle.

  During the making of [Deep Six], there was a little bit of friction — the bands took the “democratic thing” really seriously. And Tina started to rub people the wrong way — she was an abrasive person early on. I think I had the ability to be the deal maker, but she had the ability to be the deal buster. She ended up pissing some people off — including me — and then we ended up splitting up in the middle of the record. I lost my day job too, because they went Chapter 11 — I was totally out of money. When the record came out, people were pissed at me, because I wasn’t promoting it very much. I think I was branded a guy who talked a lot and didn’t put his money where his mouth was. I got out of the record business pretty quick. I did another record with the Melvins, their first [1986’s Six Songs], and I developed a bit of a distaste for dealing with the distributors and all the high expectations coming from artists. I more or less gave the label away after a year and a half — I gave it to a fellow who promised to be good and run it with all his best interests and my best interests put forward.

  DANIEL HOUSE: I went to Chris, who probably still had over half of his thousand record pressing sitting under his bed, and subsequent release, which was the Melvins record. I offered to take the whole thing off of his hands, take over the label, buy his inventory. He was more than happy to say, “Here, fine.”