by Mark Yarm
MARK ARM Every once in a while, I’d go, “Bruce, I really need some money.” And he would cut me a check. Sometimes he’d go, “I really shouldn’t do this,” because by this point I was doing a lot of drugs.
STEVE TURNER I’d been told about Mark dabbling with heroin here and there right after I quit Green River. My attitude was always, and still remains: He’s a big boy, everybody is. It’s not my place to tell someone not to do something like that. That wasn’t anywhere in my scene, and I was not comfortable around people doin’ that stuff, and he knew that. So we weren’t hanging out like we had a few years before. I think for him it’s something he had to go through because so many of his heroes, like Iggy, went through it.
MATT LUKIN I wasn’t aware of it until Mark was knee-deep in it. I remember him scolding me one time because I was spouting off to my friends about him OD’ing. And I go, “But dude, really, are you okay? I don’t want you to be strung out and fuckin’ OD’ing and dying. Let’s deal with it.” But at the same time, I really didn’t want to deal with some junkie dragging me down.
STEVE TURNER Mark wouldn’t do drugs on tour, generally. We would start tours, and he’d be a wreck. I remember a few tours where we stored him like a sack of potatoes in the back of the van. Kinda throw him up on the loft and drive to Minneapolis. And by the time we get there, he’s in better shape.
BRUCE PAVITT Mark says, “You used to give me money for drugs,” and the reality is, Mark would come in and say, “I need money for rent.” So if you have a musician who might get kicked out of his apartment, what are you gonna do? What he does with that money is his choice.
This used to happen a lot: A band would come in and say, “Hey, we want some money,” and Jon would say, “Sure, you can have your money. Come in tomorrow.” Oftentimes, we simply would not have the money.
When Steve Turner of Mudhoney came in saying, “Jon said I could get my check for $5,000 today,” I started laughing, kind of a nervous laughter, because we had maybe $20 in the bank. I think Steve just felt like he was being jacked around and that I was disrespecting him by laughing in his face and telling him I didn’t have the money, when in actuality I was barely able to hold it together. Based on that conversation, Steve said, “Well, fuck you, we’re going to a major label.” I remember breaking down and crying in front of him.
STEVE TURNER Bruce is a very emotional guy; he wears it all on his sleeve. I wanted to get out of there before we weren’t friends anymore. We were afraid they were for-real gonna go out of business, owing us a lot of money. It was like a bad breakup, a vote of no-confidence from us. The way I remember it is that we decided we would look around for another label after Sub Pop released Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge. But I didn’t have any desire to go to a major label at the time. None of us really did.
MARK ARM Sub Pop flew the Afghan Whigs out and put them up in a hotel room and had them record at I think Bear Creek Studio, which is a really expensive studio, and we weren’t getting paid? At one point, instead of payment they offered us stock in the company. We were like, “What?!” We didn’t know anything about stocks, but it just seemed like it would’ve been empty paper.
BRUCE PAVITT Mudhoney were our biggest band and they decided to walk because we couldn’t pay them, and not only couldn’t we pay them, we were lying to them about paying them! That’s just really fucked up. What can I say?
CHARLES R. CROSS Seattle was a small enough world where The Rocket did typesetting for Sub Pop, we ran advertisements for them, so we knew they owed us money and we knew the record-pressing plant and Jack Endino and everyone else, and we knew they owed them money, so it wasn’t exactly like a Wall Street Journal investigative report to figure out that they owed $20,000, $30,000 around town and that they had very little revenue. We basically wrote this piece saying there’s some questions on whether they’ll be able to continue. They were quite angry and they felt that our piece affected their ability to get credit.
GRANT ALDEN The inception of the “Sub Plop?” cover story I wrote was that they were not paying their bills and there were all sorts of rumors they were gonna collapse. I knew that they were in trouble. I also knew that if they were allowed to hold on for six months, they were gonna be fine. Because there was the Nirvana record coming out on a major label, which I knew would be enough to get them out of the kind of hole they’d dug—though I had no idea the extent to how well it would do. Also, they had a Mudhoney record coming out, and I knew roughly what numbers that was likely to sell, and that again would be enough.
What I did was slightly unethical, and I’m still troubled by it. I wrote that story as fairly as I could, but with the intent to diffuse the bomb. I said they had problems, but here’s how they’re gonna fix it. It said, “Don’t worry.” It was “Sub Plop” with a question mark. It was not, “They’re about to crash.”
Bruce and Jon cooperated with that story, and they were honest. I felt at the time if we had allowed the rumors to fester, if we had not addressed it head-on, that Sub Pop would’ve collapsed and that would’ve been the end. I don’t think that’s really what my job as a journalist is. But I felt the article was as close to what was true as I could get, and I felt it was necessary.
JONATHAN PONEMAN We ended up putting out Mudhoney’s Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge late that summer. That sold 100,000 copies and got us back on our feet.
JENNIE BODDY Right before the electricity was about to get turned off, it was always a Mudhoney release that would save us. They kept the lights on, Mudhoney did.
GARRETT SHAVLIK There were times near the end of the Fluid’s being on Sub Pop where we’d do interviews, and some jackass is saying, “Hey, must be killer to be on the ol’ Sub Pop! ‘World Domination’!” I’m like, “Dude, I work for Mr. Mark Arm. Have you seen the sales on Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge? He’s basically paying my fuckin’ bills.”
MARK ARM We agonized over our decision greatly. If we had known that there was even a slight chance that Sub Pop would’ve been financially flush in a year, we wouldn’t have felt the need to look elsewhere.
JOSH SINDER (the Accüsed/TAD/Gruntruck drummer) I wanted the Accüsed to get management and push it further. So I quit, made a demo tape, and took it to Susan Silver. And then TAD was looking for a drummer—Rey Washam was right before me, and I don’t know why they got rid of him or why he quit—and they called Susan asking if she knew anybody, and she said, “I’ve got this demo tape from this guy in the Accüsed.” So I tried out, and Tad called me and said, “Do you want to play drums for us?”
We did a lot of practices, and we smoked a lot of pot. Literally, we wouldn’t practice unless we could smoke pot. We would get in Tad’s little car—he had this Datsun B210—and we would drive around West Seattle trying to find the different people who were selling weed. And if we couldn’t find pot, we would just go, “Well, I guess there’s no practice today.”
I did their last record on Sub Pop, the “Salem/Leper/Welt” EP. Everybody was waiting in line to get their major-record-label deal, and we were like the last ones to get a major deal.
KURT DANIELSON All we could see from our vantage point at that time was continued strife and financial instability at Sub Pop, and we thought that if we went to a bigger label, we would not have that problem. We also assumed that going to a major label, we would be understood and marketed correctly, and on top of that, have financial stability. In fact, when we moved to a major label we were not understood, we were not properly marketed, and we were lost in the shuffle.
ROBERT ROTH Mark Pickerel and I set up a meeting with Sub Pop and went there with four-track demos of some Truly songs. Nirvana had just left Sub Pop that day, and Jonathan was fuming about Nirvana, just fuming. It was great timing for us, because how much more of a receptive audience can you have than a label guy who just lost his best band? He really gave our songs a good listen and said, “Yeah, I love it. Let’s do an EP.” So we were off and running.
JONATHAN PONEMAN When all the bands left it wa
s hurtful. Back at the beginning, I remember having a very poignant conversation with Susan Silver, the manager of Soundgarden. She was saying basically, “Sorry, guys, we’ve gotta go on without you.” The die was cast early on with Soundgarden; we all understood what was going on. But still, having the conversation somehow made it even more hurtful. The thing that I always took as the subtext of that conversation is, “We’re leaving and moving on, and good luck in your future endeavors—if there are any future endeavors.”
CHRIS FRIEL I was 17 when Shadow moved to L.A. My parents have always been just incredibly supportive. They were into it 100 percent. Mike’s parents were not into it at all. They were right, my parents were probably the ones that were sort of crazy.
Duff came to our very first show down there, which we played before we moved. We were in L.A. for well over a year. It was kind of humbling because we had come from Seattle, where we were a pretty big band, to down there, where you’re totally starting over and also really feeling like we didn’t fit in. We just really weren’t partiers. There was drugs, girls, all this stuff that you read about in the rock books. I think we were probably a little scared.
RICK FRIEL You’d be around people who were wasted all the time. You’d be at the Cathouse and see Slash get thrown down a flight of stairs. The whole thing was so foreign to us. But I loved everything about L.A. and Hollywood. I had this burning desire to make it, and I loved seeing all these shows and driving around seeing palm trees. I thought, I’m never moving home.
We were basically living on Top Ramen and generic beer and pancake mix. I believed that it was gonna happen, but Mike and Chris were like, “We gotta move home.” I think Mike was getting frustrated with the life. He just started partying hard and getting wasted. It wasn’t our thing, so he was doing it on his own. I’d be tryin’ to write lyrics; my focus was completely on the band. We never discussed this with him, but it probably was a reaction to, What the hell’s happening to my body? ’Cause he didn’t know he had Crohn’s disease at the time—that’s when it kinda started.
CHRIS FRIEL I was working at a record store, and I remember hearing the first Soundgarden EP and thinking, There’s definitely some cool stuff going on in Seattle. People were saying things were starting to happen there, and I was thinking, Did we move at the wrong time?
RICK FRIEL I was very sad when we moved home. Once we did, that was the end of the band. Mike fell off the face of the earth, and then he came over and gave me his guitar and said, “That’s it, I quit. I’m never playing music again.”
Mike became a hardcore Republican. He got a weird haircut and started wearing Hush Puppies and corduroy and big sweaters and started raving about Barry Goldwater. We were like, “What the hell?” But that wasn’t gonna last, ’cause every time we’d get together at people’s houses, we’d have these jams and we’d always hand him the acoustic guitar ’cause we were really upset he wasn’t playing anymore. He was like, “No, I don’t wanna play. I’m done.” But we would say, “C’mon, just play one song!” And it would turn into three, four, six songs. Eventually he formed a really cool band called Love Chile. It was a Stevie Ray Vaughan/Double Trouble, Jimi Hendrix Experience–type band.
MIKE MCCREADY (Pearl Jam/Temple of the Dog/Mad Season/Shadow guitarist) I was sitting around at a party with Pete Droge, an old friend of mine. I had my guitar and I was just jamming to a Stevie Ray Vaughan record when Stone, whom I’d known for a few years, walked up and said, “Wow, you’re really good!” At the time Stone’s band, Mother Love Bone, was happening, so I was really pleased that he liked my playing. About three months later, Stone called asking if I wanted to jam. So we got together and everything clicked.
A short while after we played together, Stone called and asked whether I’d be interested in joining his new band.
JEFF AMENT I was going through a major identity crisis at that point; I’d put my heart and soul into Mother Love Bone, gave up school, and to have it be snuffed out so quickly. All summer, Stone and I would meet up, mountain bike, and just talk. We aired our grievances with one another. He told me that I needed to lighten up a bit and I told him that he needed to take it more seriously.
CHRIS FRIEL Matt Cameron did most of the playing on the demos, and I did the rest. They had Matt play the stuff that was a little bit more like Mother Love Bone and a little more complicated. And with me, they knew they would get a pretty straight, really nice feel, a lot of space. I know that they were very keen on not letting too many people know that this was like a band—I think there was some legal wrangling going on—so it was called Stone Gossard Demos.
MICHAEL GOLDSTONE I knew Jack Irons from his band What Is This. He was always around L.A., and I ran into him at a party. Stone and Jeff had sent demos specifically for me to get to him. When I ran into Jack, I handed him the CD with the instrumental tracks on it.
JACK IRONS (Red Hot Chili Peppers/Eleven/later Pearl Jam drummer) I was in the Red Hot Chili Peppers in 1983. We were the original guys that started the band, and that lasted about nine months or a year. I stayed with my band What Is This, and I rejoined the Chili Peppers in ’86. We went through a pretty laborious process to get the material together for The Uplift Mofo Party Plan. We did a lot of touring, and that, along with the band’s drug use, started to wear on me. I was not ever participating in the drug use, but it’s very stressful to be around your friends when they’re doing it.
After our guitarist, Hillel Slovak, died of a heroin overdose in June of ’88, I was really struggling with my mental health. I was having a nervous breakdown, and that went on for a long time. Eventually that was diagnosed as bipolar disorder and I was hospitalized. It became a lifelong commitment to treat it and live with it.
When I met Eddie, I was on tour with Joe Strummer. It was a very significant tour for me, because prior to meeting Joe Strummer, I was not going to do music anymore. I’d been traumatized, and I just couldn’t see that life again. But Joe offered me a gig and got me out again, because I love Joe, and I love the Clash. During that tour, I met my wife-to-be, and the next night, I met Eddie.
I remember the club, the Bacchanal in San Diego. Eddie was backstage—he may have been there to help out. He knew the people at the club, and he wanted to meet Joe and he wanted to meet me, because he knew that I had been in the Chili Peppers. As I recall, all the power went out in the building, and we were just sitting there in the dark. Eddie had the lighter, so he kept the room lit.
After that, we kept in touch and started to hang out and play basketball together. Like every weekend he would drive up from San Diego to where I was living in L.A. He and my wife were probably the two main people in my life at the time, and then, of course, my band Eleven.
MARCO COLLINS (KNDD DJ) My first major radio job was at a station called 91X in San Diego. I was doing a local music show, and I was relegated to Sunday nights after 10. Eddie Vedder was in a band called Bad Radio that I used to play. We never met in San Diego, we just knew each other on the phone, because he would call my show all the time and request that I play his band. He was the guy doing all the work in the band, in terms of promoting it.
He wrote that song “Better Man” in ’88. It took a different shape when Pearl Jam recorded it. Bad Radio were a little bit more funky; they had that Chili Peppers thing going on a little.
JACK IRONS In August of 1990, Stone and Jeff were rebuilding from Mother Love Bone and they were looking for a drummer and a singer. They were familiar with my work from the Chili Peppers, and they wanted me to check out what they were doing. I met them at a hotel where they were staying in L.A., and they said, “We’d like you to come play with us.”
At the time, my wife was pregnant, I didn’t have any money, and the requirement was that I would have to move to Seattle. I had committed to touring with Redd Kross as their drummer for three months and I needed to work. With my son coming at the time, I told them that I wasn’t ready to move to Seattle and that I was going on this tour. They were like, “Well, if you kn
ow any singers …”
EDDIE VEDDER (Pearl Jam/Temple of the Dog singer; Hovercraft drummer) Jack sent me three of their songs. I had them in my head from the night before at work, and I went surfing and had this amazing day. The whole time I was out there surfing, I had this stuff going through my head—the music—and the words going at the same time. I put them down on tape and sent it off.
BENJAMIN REW I was at a bookstore/coffee shop down in Pioneer Square right after Andy died. And Kelly Curtis was having a meeting with Jeff and Stone about what they were gonna do. I overheard them talking about all their options for getting another singer. I wanted to try out for them, and then I talked to a mutual friend, and she said I looked too much like Andy, they wanted to go with a different look.
DAN BLOSSOM I was in a band called Hippie Big Buckle, and our singer disappeared. This was right after Andy died. We put ads up, and there’d be all these Andrew Wood wannabes coming to the audition. There was one person in particular, you’d try to have a conversation with him and he’d be doing Andy’s stage shtick, acting like an arena rocker from another world where the gods lived. We were just rolling our eyes, like, Get the fuck outta here!
BENJAMIN REW But I kinda threw my name into the hat for Jeff and Stone’s band anyway and got subsequently denied. I thought Tal Goettling, the singer from a band called Son of Man, would get it, because Tal was just an amazing singer, but he was also blond and blue-eyed.