Everybody Loves Our Town

by Mark Yarm

  ALICE WHEELER In Olympia, the cool thing was to sit around and talk about ideas and the meaning of life. Less so in Seattle, where people were like, “I wanna be cool.” Kurt lived in Olympia—that was the place he moved after he left Aberdeen—and that’s why Nirvana was so political. He lived with his girlfriend, Tracy Marander, in Olympia, and then got his own apartment there without Tracy. And he was really good friends with Kathleen Hanna, the woman who started Riot Grrrl.

  BLAG DAHLIA (singer for San Francisco’s Dwarves) The grunge scene eventually came to have a P.C. cast to it, and I think a lot of that has to do with that Olympia influence, which kind of turned into that Riot Grrrl thing, a movement that had almost no music attached to it but had a lot of instructions for how you’re supposed to live your life. Whereas the not-famous Kurt Cobain might’ve chuckled at the Dwarves album cover with naked girls covered in blood, the famous Kurt Cobain felt he had to make a stand against those kind of things.

  BRUCE PAVITT I moved to Seattle in 1983, and for five years wrote a monthly column called Sub Pop that was in The Rocket. Like Duff, I’d made a break for the big city. A lot of my philosophy was you should be able to make a scene happen where you are, so for me to actually leave Olympia for the big city of Seattle was seen as a hypocritical gesture by Calvin and other such luminaries from the region. But it wasn’t like I was moving to New York or L.A.

  MAIRE MASCO Bruce Pavitt, we were involved for a while romantically. When I met him, he was a stoner from Evergreen. He had just moved up from Olympia, and I think I met him at the Metropolis. He definitely had a great ear. He was very creative, he knew a lot of people, though not really in Seattle. There’s the old story of how he started Sub Pop with my Rolodex. I certainly gave him a lot of contacts. And then he got back together with his old girlfriend from Evergreen and dumped me! (Laughs.)

  JONATHAN PONEMAN (Sub Pop Records cofounder) I’d met Bruce informally at Bombshelter, a record store he had owned, but he wouldn’t remember it because I was kind of “anonymous guy” then. Bruce gave one of my bands, the Treeclimbers, a tip of the hat in his Sub Pop column in The Rocket. But the first time I’d had an extended conversation with him was when Sub Pop 100 came out and he went on Audioasis, the program I hosted on KCMU, which was a publicly funded college-based radio station.

  BRUCE PAVITT In ’86, I decided to try and do a vinyl version of what I’d done with the cassettes. And by that time we had more of a name. Sub Pop 100 had Sonic Youth from New York and the Wipers from Portland and the U-Men from Seattle. And that sold like 5,000 copies, which at the time was like having a gold record in the indie scene. I used the money to go to Amsterdam and party for two weeks.

  After Sub Pop 100, I put out the Green River Dry as a Bone EP, and at that time, around ’87, I became convinced, as did Jonathan, that there was kind of a unique sound happening in Seattle, and although I’d spent a lot of my time networking regional scenes, I got to a point where I wanted to focus my attention on Seattle and help the scene out, and Jon was doing the same thing with his show. We were both philosophically in the same place: We wanted to help Seattle blow up.

  CHRIS CORNELL I had never really thought of Seattle, or even necessarily my own band, as being something that could become a worldwide phenomenon. I remember running into Bruce outside a show at the Moore around 1988, and I made some comment to him about how there just suddenly seemed to be so much talent in Seattle and that Sub Pop seemed to be putting out all these amazing records.

  And he just put his arm around me and he had this funny look of confidence in his eyes, and he said, “Seattle’s gonna take over the world!” It was a little bit tongue-in-cheek, but it wasn’t really—it was like he was serious about it. And that was the first time that I actually believed it and felt like someone did have a vision.

  JONATHAN PONEMAN There are few times where you can say, “This is an event that literally changed the course of my life.” But the first time I saw Soundgarden, in 1985, really was one of those times.

  I saw them at the suggestion of Ben McMillan, who had a radio show right before mine. He knew that I had started booking these nights at the Rainbow, and he suggested that I put his band Skin Yard and this other band, Soundgarden, on the bill.

  Soundgarden had this intensity—the best bands to me just are, you know? I don’t mean to sound metaphysical or anything like that. I thought, I would love to be in a band like this, but I just never will be. I continued to play in bands for a couple years after seeing Soundgarden, but in seeing them I thought, The die is cast. This is a band that’s gonna take over the world. Because even at that show, where there were maybe 40 people, you could tell there was a chemistry and a sense of inevitability.

  DANIEL HOUSE Kim Thayil and I would just drink and drink and get fucked up together and spew for hours about everything and anything, philosophy and ideas. Before Soundgarden signed to A&M later on, invariably we would bandy about who was the bigger band, Skin Yard or Soundgarden: “Well, you know, we’ve played more shows.” “Yeah, well, we’ve been together longer.”

  But in the end, the reality was that we always opened for them; they never opened for us. And history pretty much tells the whole story. The fact is, they had Chris. We didn’t have Chris.

  JEFF GILBERT Back in the day, I would say Chris was more shy than anything, ’cause when they would play, Chris would sing with his back to the audience, or off to the side, for a good portion of the show. It took a while for him to get his confidence level up. But when he started to get into it, it was like that picture of him on the back of Screaming Life, where he’s on the club floor. That’s where you saw Chris mostly: either he was on his back or on the floor.

  JAMES BURDYSHAW I remember one Soundgarden show where this girl was so enthralled with Chris that she was dancing like crazy and rubbin’ her rear end against me, all while staring at him. Did she know who she was rubbing up against? Probably not. I might as well have been a pole to her.

  MARK ARM This might be coming from a place of jealousy, but the shirtlessness seemed contrived. Chris would wear tear-away shirts—clearly someone had done some damage to the seams before he would go onstage, because he would grab the shirt right in the middle and then pull it straight off him. I think I might have respected it more if he just came out onstage without a shirt at all.

  HIRO YAMAMOTO It bugged me a lot. “Do you have to take off the shirt? Do you have to break a mic stand every show?” It was one of those things that kind of made me quit eventually, to tell you the truth. “Could you not take off your shirt tonight?” He wouldn’t even answer. Or he’d walk out of the room. That became this real tense thing.

  SUSAN SILVER The shirtlessness? I never even thought about it. Honest to God, it’s just what he does. Love is blind, I suppose.

  The female attention never ruffled me. I felt we had such security in our relationship then that it never occurred to me. I remember a show in Philadelphia in the early ’90s, some girl got on her boyfriend’s shoulders and was screaming, “Chris, I wanna fuck you!” or some other equally poetic phrase. Come on. You’re embarrassing our entire sisterhood here.

  So when the show was over, I found her and was like, “Excuse me, can I talk to you for a second? I have a message for you from Chris.”

  Her eyes light up. “Really? What?”

  “He heard you in the audience, and he was wondering if you would stop embarrassing yourself that way.”

  KIM THAYIL Competition with Skin Yard? There was only one person really participating in that, and it was Daniel House. It’s the strangest thing. We thought they were our buddies, and they’d run ads for Skin Yard like, FAR LESS DOOM AND GLOOM THAN SOUNDGARDEN.

  Ever see those old Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck cartoons? Bugs Bunny never really advanced the competition. It was Daffy who was advancing it. He was the one who was more competitive, bitter, jealous. We never had to compete with Skin Yard—we always drew far more than they did, were far more successful, both critically and commerci
ally.

  They were our friends. I was very close with Jack. Matt Cameron ended up quitting their band to join us when he found out that we were looking for a drummer.

  SCOTT SUNDQUIST When it became time to have to tour, it was hard for me, with my son, who was seven. My wife and I had an on-again, off-again relationship, so single parenting was sometimes a part of it. I was older than them and was unsure about money. In the end, I stepped aside so that those guys could tour. It was very emotional for all of us. We were really close, and to this day still are. I think of them as younger brothers.

  SCOTT MCCULLUM I was in the band 64 Spiders when Chris asked me to try out for Soundgarden. I actually got the gig. Everybody was excited. I remember sitting on the front porch and Chris sat down next to me and went, “Hey dude, you’re in the band! We got a show in two weeks, so you gotta start fittin’ in our practice schedule!”

  So two days pass, and I don’t hear from anybody, right? And somehow I found out that Matt Cameron had tried out for Soundgarden. He was the preeminent drummer in Seattle at that time, and, of course, they’re like, “Shit!” So Chris reluctantly called me up and told me that they decided to go with Matt. It totally sucked. I loved Soundgarden.

  MATT CAMERON I was in Skin Yard for about a year and a half. I quit because I was ready for something new. I told the Skin Yard guys I wanted to pursue jazz, which wasn’t totally untrue. But it turned out that I was just searching for that right rock band to play in. It was a coincidence that, once word got out that I was out of Skin Yard, I called Kim or Kim called me, and they were at a crossroads with Scott Sundquist. My first practice with Soundgarden, in Chris’s living room up in Capitol Hill, it was pretty instantaneous. I remember after I played like one song, Chris said, “Hey, man, you’re playing it perfect.”

  JONATHAN PONEMAN I wanted to do a record with Soundgarden. But the thing is, I didn’t really know anything about record-making. I had like $15,000—savings bonds from when I was a little kid—which at the time was a lot of money.

  Soundgarden had a meeting with Bruce at the Oxford Tavern that I had walked in on towards the end of. I saw them meeting with Bruce, and I was freaking out—I thought, Here is Bruce Pavitt muscling in on my turf.

  BRUCE PAVITT I had known Kim since he was probably 11. He used to hang out at my house quite a bit in Park Forest. We went to the same alternative high school together. He was a longtime friend of the family. Soundgarden were probably at the time a little too metal for my taste, but I still thought they were pretty interesting and I think they ultimately became a great band.

  KIM THAYIL Bruce had an established brand, with a cool little logo, and contacts throughout the country within the indie network. But Bruce is in debt to his dad at this point. Jonathan did have money, and was ready to put out the record then.

  JONATHAN PONEMAN Kim Thayil said, “Look, we wanna work with both of you. I’ve known Bruce since I was a kid back in Park Forest, Illinois. Have you guys ever considered doing something together?” And for some reason I hadn’t ever thought of approaching Bruce. But then it just made all the sense in the world.

  KIM THAYIL I called Jon a couple of times and said, “You need to talk to Bruce,” and he said, “I don’t need Bruce.” I called Bruce and said, “You need to talk to Jon.” “I don’t really need Jon.” It was something that I pushed very aggressively, because there wouldn’t have been a Soundgarden record otherwise. Eventually they called each other.

  JONATHAN PONEMAN So I was just gonna be an investor in the Soundgarden record. We did a limited-edition single, which was “Hunted Down” backed with “Nothing to Say,” and then the Screaming Life EP. And while working on that project, we both kinda had the same idea at the same time, which is: Let’s make Sub Pop an ongoing concern and let’s document the happening scene that’s going on in Seattle.

  GRANT ALDEN You can reduce this to a handful of people who made Seattle happen. Bruce and Jon are clearly on that list. Susan Silver is on that list. Art Chantry is on that list. And without Charles Peterson’s camera and his visuals, I don’t think it would have happened. I don’t think it would have been a cohesive, coherent movement in the way that it was perceived by the outside world.

  BRUCE PAVITT The moment that I began envisioning a record label that focused on Seattle bands was when I stepped into a house in the U District called the Room Nine House. The band Room Nine lived there. Charles Peterson lived there, too, and he had printed up photos that he had done of local bands that were literally life-size. Instantly, I was like, Oh, my God, these photos so perfectly capture the energy of the shows.

  RON RUDZITIS (a.k.a. Ron Nine; Room Nine/Love Battery singer/guitarist) We lived behind the Rainbow Tavern, which was pretty convenient. My girlfriend at the time knew Charles Peterson, so that’s how I met him. He became my roommate, and all of the sudden, Charles’s friends started coming to hang out. Mark Arm was Charles’s best friend, so Mark was over there all the time. People like Ed Fotheringham, who did everybody’s album covers and was the lead singer for the Thrown Ups. Right around the time Charles moved in, we got to be known as quite the party house.

  LILLY MILIC (Top Hat Records store owner; Garrett Shavlik’s wife) The parties were always the same group of people, the same soundtrack. Scratch Acid, Butthole Surfers, the Kinks, Bad Brains—and you would hear that for a whole year. Same party, different place. One thing we would always laugh about is everybody at these parties would immediately stash their beer somewhere—you would have hiding places at each house. When the junkie scene started taking over in Seattle by ’88, ’89, I noticed people weren’t trying to steal my beer as often ’cause they were nodding out.

  RON RUDZITIS When Charles first moved in, he goes, “Hey, I want to throw a party!” It turned into one of those out-of-hand things where our next-door neighbor had a water hose and was spraying all the people on the front lawn. I was worried about the house getting burned down—people were blowing up eggs in the microwave. We had instruments set up, and a bunch of bands got up and played. It’s pretty hazy, but I think the Melvins might’ve done a couple of songs. Maybe Green River.

  CHARLES PETERSON At the time, none of the indie labels were really using photography; it was more about illustration. So Bruce was like, “Let’s use photography,” because you can use photography to make something look larger-than-life. It was a small scene—at any given show, there were maybe 50 to 150 people, max—but by using a wide-angle lens and just getting right in the face of the performer and maybe including a slice of the audience or the performer interacting with the audience, it looked like, Oh, my God, this is so exciting!

  BRUCE PAVITT Both Charles and Jack Endino captured the energy of the bands. And they were perfect complements for one another. Jack became, in effect, Sub Pop’s house producer.

  CHRIS HANZSEK I didn’t have the time for C/Z, or the money for it, because I was now a studio owner. I rekindled Reciprocal in early ’86 with Jack Endino, in Ballard. It was in a classic wooden building in the shape of a triangle that had previously been a studio called, imaginatively enough, Triangle Recording. A month or two into our partnership, Jack decided that he wanted to pursue being a producer, and asked me if I wouldn’t mind being the studio owner, so I bought out his contribution.

  Plus, I was feeling a little bit bitter still about everybody heaping on me with the Deep Six thing, so believe it or not, I had a little bit of a distaste for running the label. At one point, Bruce and Jon actually called me up and invited me down to their office. Bruce was sitting on the floor, laying out some artwork for the Green River record, and Jonathan said, “Sit down, we want to talk to you.” They said, “Are you still going to release records on C/Z?” And I said, “No, I’ve decided not to go forward with it.”

  They just kind of looked at each other and smiled and went, “Okay. That’s good.” They wanted to make sure I wasn’t still competing with them.

  DANIEL HOUSE Chris and Tina had done Deep Six, and they had done the first Mel
vins single, which was a six-song seven-inch. He’d told me that he had no interest in doing this anymore. He had a futon bed underneath which was all his unsold inventory. And so I offered to basically take over the ownership of the label and buy his inventory from him.

  Skin Yard had recorded enough material for a full album and no record labels were biting. So taking over C/Z was basically me just going, Well, how hard can it be to put out a record? I can do this. So I took over C/Z in ’87 and my first release was CZ003, the first Skin Yard record. I was pretty connected with all the bands in town, so I started putting out records by my friends’ bands, like Coffin Break and My Eye.

  JACK ENDINO At first, Daniel and I were going to do C/Z together. CZ003 was the first Skin Yard record. CZ006 was a compilation record called Secretions that someone else put together, but I ended up being the guy who got it dumped in his lap. And that was the last thing I did for C/Z in an organizational sense. From then on, it was just Daniel’s. He was actually working for Sub Pop then, but pretty soon, he started getting more and more serious about C/Z.

  STEVE MACK My college roommate at the University of Washington and I were looking for another place to live. And in the student union building there was this ad posted on a piece of paper, with all these things cut out of different magazines and collaged together. Scrawled in black Magic Marker, it said: DOGS FUCK THE POPE, NO FAULT OF MINE—that’s a Hunter S. Thompson quote. CHANCE KILLS US ALL, EVENTUALLY, WITH NO CHOICE. We thought, This is the guy for us.

  So we called the guy, Todd Chandler, and went over to look at his place. He had the Misfits cranked at full volume, and we thought, Okay, this is going to work. We lived in that house for three months before we had to move out, at which point we all moved to a much larger house. That’s when Leighton and a number of other people moved in with us.