Everybody Loves Our Town

by Mark Yarm

  PETER KLETT By Lucy, I’d be high on coke and all jittery and just wanting to get my tracks done so I could go. I was definitely guilty of calling in sick because I’m fucking hungover and not showing up to the studio, things like that. But sometimes we didn’t deserve to be ridiculed and yelled at. Kevin tends to think he was Mr. Perfect all the time.

  SCOTT MERCADO The thing is that Kevin won’t sing until he feels that everything is right, and if your singer won’t sing until everything is right, what are you gonna do? He’s very, very, very anal about the drums. I think that’s why Candlebox goes through so many drummers. I just felt like, Okay, I’ll do it this way, just for the sake of getting it done.

  KEVIN MARTIN I think they’d be foolish not to complain about me. The problem was, they don’t see me as the bandleader. In the studio, I would be like, “We have a record we’re trying to make here. Where the fuck are you guys?” They probably would call me a control freak, but the bottom line is if we decide to get started on something as a band, then that means if you’re not showing up you’re gonna get your fucking ass handed to you.

  BARDI MARTIN I remember being there every day. In my mind, it wasn’t about people showing up or not showing up, it wasn’t about drugs, it was about not taking the time and the space to write the album that we probably could have written.

  KEVIN MARTIN Courtney used to talk shit about us all the time. We saw her on MTV, talking about “stupid bands like Candlebox who ride the coattails of my husband.” That started in ’93, and after Kurt committed suicide, it was even worse.

  COURTNEY LOVE Nobody cared for Candlebox. It seemed fake.

  Guy Oseary signed two bands that made money out of the 48 bands that he signed to Maverick. The other was Alanis Morissette, and Alanis was the thing that really, really, really infuriated me. I was still filming Larry Flynt at the time that Alanis was selling fucking truckloads, and I forbade Woody Harrelson from mentioning Alanis to me. Candlebox was just sort of gay, but Alanis was a safe version of what I had been doing, and it really, really, really infuriated me.

  Maverick tried to sign me. I walked into Maverick, and I felt like, Why are these people looking at me like I’m the Vegas dead Marilyn version of Madonna? I play rock music. This is a ghettoized bunch of shit. It was a joke meeting. I took it because it seemed funny and because Guy Oseary seemed very passionate.

  I don’t want Madonna being my patron. It’s retarded. Do you know anything about the relationship between me and Madonna? No. What do you know about my relationship with Madonna beyond me throwing a MAC [compact] at Kurt Loder’s head?

  PETER KLETT She just hated us for the same reason all the other assholes did. They could not handle the fact that we were successful. Fucking Courtney Love didn’t deserve squat, man! The reason she ever became anything was because of her husband. Period. End of story.

  COURTNEY LOVE It’s not like the film industry, where everyone has to say they love each other when they hate each other. So I might say, “Oh, God, George was wonderful to work with, and Renée is the best actress in the history of the world, and Richard is a fantastic director.” But music is an industry where slagging each other becomes sort of a sport, particularly in the British press.

  KEVIN MARTIN We did a magazine cover for The Rocket in ’95 and all dressed up like Courtney—in slips and blond wigs and tiaras and makeup—and the headline was CANDLEBOX: THE BOYS WITH THE MOST CAKE. It was a stab at her. But I had a lot of respect for her and I loved her records, and I still do. Charles Cross wrote the article, which helped to explain a lot of our history and where we came from, but it was a little bit too late for people in the Seattle scene to respect or understand it.

  CHARLES R. CROSS We do this funny story with Candlebox, and I didn’t know that Courtney Love was going to be pissed off enough about it that she was going to threaten to come blow my toilet up. I was in Portland at a hotel; no one knew where I was, and then the phone rang and it’s fucking Courtney Love, and I’m like, “How did you find me?” I still never figured that out. She said, “I’m gonna come blow up your toilet!”

  KEVIN MARTIN About two months later, we were on tour in Chicago and Courtney called a friend of mine that she knew from Chicago. He handed me his phone, and she just went off on me for two hours. She was losing her fuckin’ mind. I think she was pretty well loaded. “How dare you? You guys are posers and fucking bullshit!”

  Everything that came out of her mouth went back to Kurt and how we were riding his coattails. I even made a point to her about that: “You know, you keep using your husband’s name. This isn’t about your husband. We don’t sound anything like Nirvana. You need to understand that article is, more than anything, an homage to you and your credibility as an artist in the scene. And you just need to quit being such a pain in the ass and talking shit about us.” In a way we were making fun of her, but she should’ve found it somewhat flattering that somebody would go that far to parody her.

  I don’t really remember ending the conversation, just looking at the phone and going, “She’s not there.” I think she passed out.

  JONATHAN PLUM On that second record, the record stores had already ordered a million copies. So it was certified platinum before we even made the record. When it got released, it did ship a million. But what none of us knew at the time was that record stores can actually ship back records. So it shipped a million and went certified platinum, but then they just started getting shipped back.

  KELLY GRAY When that record came out, the whole music scene had changed again. It definitely had cycled on to its new thing. It was Green Day then.

  JEFF GILBERT Among the metal guys, there was a term that we all used to bandy around. If your band was on the way out, we’d say, “Oh, man, you’re Candleboxin’.” That meant you were circling the drain, so to speak. This was when their second album came out. The second album kind of sounded like the first one, and the first one was pretty cool, but … they never really connected with everybody.

  PETER KLETT Lucy flopped. Plain and simple.

  BRUCE PAVITT Post-Nirvana, everyone thought the indie underground was blowing up. It was on the cover of Time magazine; Courtney Love is being taken out by major labels and discovering crème brûlées; everybody thought they could sell a million records. There was a total feeding frenzy. Major labels were approaching all the bands we were working with.

  I remember specifically there was a situation—this might be a year after Nevermind came out—when our A&R head Joyce Linehan said, “There’s this group the Grifters who have typically sold 5,000 records and would like a $5,000 advance,” and I’m thinking, That sounds about right. By the time we were done negotiating, we had given them a $150,000 advance. And they wound up selling 5,000 records.

  MEGAN JASPER The only time I remember Bruce and Jon really becoming furious with each other was in 1990, when Dinosaur Jr. were shopping around for a label. Both Bruce and Jon were huge fans, and Jonathan said, “Let’s offer them a big deal. Not more than the majors, but more than we typically do.” But there was no money. That’s what flipped Bruce out. He saw that as a step towards that becoming normal, and he said, “No, we can’t do that—we don’t have that money! Is this what the company wants to be?!”

  And Jonathan was saying, “Yes, this is what the company should be like! We have to work with the times. This is a relevant band making great art—let’s fucking be a part of it!” Bruce walked away, doing his famous mannerism we’d always imitate, where he’d put his hand on his forehead and put his head back and his eyes would get huge.

  They were yelling at each other. And that was that moment that it was clear to me that these guys had different visions and different paths they were on.

  BRUCE PAVITT After the suicide, we sold half a million copies of Bleach. It was a weird feeling that because of the suicide you’re able to pay your bills. As the money was coming in, the label was growing. And as the label grew, it became more departmentalized. I felt that Sub Pop was becoming more cor
porate. We had brought in a marketing person from a major label. I remember she came in one day and said, “There will be no more brainstorming,” and I felt less empowered to be creative.

  I personally felt if we continued to spend at the rate we were that we would once again be in a situation where we would be desperately low on funds, and I initiated the idea of working with Warner Bros. I thought, Why not just go for it, as opposed to creating a corporate culture, spending all your money, and going out of business? Jonathan was kind of apprehensive about it, but we got on the same page. Dana Giacchetto was our money manager; Sub Pop was his first really big account. He was a very persuasive and charming guy.

  Around November ’94, we actually talked to Microsoft about doing a joint venture. That was an unusual approach. Dana’s idea was Microsoft is in Seattle, they have tons of money, they are in media, and if we went to other labels and said, “We’re negotiating with Microsoft,” that would move things along. It was a very smart move. Microsoft said, “Sub Pop, you’re cool, but we’re not interested in working with record labels,” and that was it. However, to the people at Warner, we were talking to Bill Gates, the richest guy in the world, and maybe they should offer more money—which they did.

  RICH JENSEN I know there was a period in 1990 where Sub Pop was taking meetings with various executives at major labels to talk about partnership deals and asset sales, but that quieted down during the collapsed period and it didn’t really get going again until about ’93, and eventually the deal was consummated with Warner Music in ’95. It was a pretty remarkable, historic deal that basically provided a lot of money without too many strings attached. It was $20 million for a minority stake, noncontrolling interest of 49 percent. I think the deal ended up being four times what we expected—we had been thinking $5 million.

  BRUCE PAVITT After Dana engineered this deal, everyone wanted to work with him. He went on to manage Leonardo DiCaprio’s money. Later, it became known that he never did go to business school and didn’t have a business degree, and he wound up going to jail for a couple of years for embezzlement.

  MEGAN JASPER Post-grunge, Sub Pop’s roster was all over the map: there was Plexi, who were glam; Mike Ireland; the Blue Rags, who were blues; Damien Jurado; the Supersuckers; Combustible Edison; Velocity Girl. I heard a lot of people asking, “What’s going on?” There was confusion about what kind of label it was; it was in the process of evolving into something else.

  LOU BARLOW (singer/guitarist for Westfield, Massachusetts’s Sebadoh; bassist for Amherst, Massachusetts’s Dinosaur Jr.) With Sebadoh’s third Sub Pop record, Harmacy, things just went wrong. They’d hired people from big labels to do radio promotion and get placement for us on shows like Friends. They were trying to get our wannabe–hit single “Willing to Wait” to play when Ross and Rachel were splitting up or something.

  The only reason I wasn’t comfortable with it was because I knew that we as a band were flawed in a way that would prevent us from reaching that kind of level. The drummer that we had was just a friend of ours who could barely play, and drums are the texture that really determine whether it’s gonna reach the next level. We’d even hired a producer who, during the course of Harmacy, was begging me, “Fire your drummer! You’ve got to do this!” And I was like, “We’re sticking with Bob. He’s a friend.”

  Sub Pop was becoming corporate, and trying to play the game on that level. There just weren’t any returns on it. They lost a lot of money on us, and I think they lost even more on the Supersuckers.

  NILS BERNSTEIN There was the major-label idea that we need a few huge bands to float all the small bands. So they have this huge radio department, with locations all over the country, which kept growing, as if, if we just make ourselves big enough, we will somehow compel a hit to occur. And that’s where I think it got a little irresponsible. A lot of money was spent to no avail. Bruce’s leaving was a really gradual process over many years. He was more and more gone from the office, and then he was entirely gone, and then he became officially gone.

  ART CHANTRY There’s only about 10 people who got rich in the Seattle scene, like millionaire-level. And this includes people who ran record labels. Bruce Pavitt, bless his heart. I’ve said a lot of harsh things about Bruce, but I think of them as funny things, in a very black sort of way. But when it came to helping the community, he is one of the only guys who didn’t take the money and run. He actually helped his friends. Say, if somebody wanted to start a restaurant, he would finance it. He would loan people money to go back to school. There’s a lot of guys that would not have survived if he hadn’t come back and helped them. And I gotta say, there’s a spot in heaven waiting for him for that.

  BRUCE PAVITT My relationship with Jon was becoming more distant. I had married, I had a kid, so I was less available for travel and for interaction; we used to do a lot of brainstorming and theorizing about stuff when we traveled. Jon and I are different people, but we had a good chemistry with regards to envisioning and creating things together. I couldn’t relate to the corporate culture, so I officially resigned in April 1996. In December, some employees came to me and said, “Bruce, we really miss you, and the company is becoming unbearable.” This was the beginning of “the coup.”

  JONATHAN PONEMAN What I had heard was that Bruce was meeting with some employees at Linda’s Tavern, which Bruce and I co-own. The fact of the matter was Sub Pop was not a very nice place to work at that point. Bruce had the good sense of having checked out years ago. I had the impulse to move the label forward. In retrospect, I was very depressed, very tired. I had gotten involved in certain spiritual pursuits; I was trying to distract myself from the growing mess that was Sub Pop.

  This was all going down in a period of my life that was very difficult, because my father was dying, and the very week of the coup, my father died. Also, we had ongoing tenuous relationships with Warner and we were borrowing money and we had all these satellite offices that just weren’t managed in a very practical manner. So the company was exceedingly bloated. It was all the bad things about a major label, with the inefficiency of an indie.

  LOU BARLOW During that period, I got into Seattle to play a show, and I was in this coffee shop on First Avenue, and they were laying out the new stack of either The Stranger or the Seattle Weekly, and there’s a big picture of Bruce and Jon on the cover, with the headline WHAT HAPPENED? or THE BIG SPLIT. The story detailed the collapse of their relationship, and one of the first things it blames is how poorly the Sebadoh record sold after how much money they spent on it. We only sold 90,000 copies of Harmacy, which would have been great had we not spent $120,000 on a video for “Willing to Wait” and had the song remixed by some big-league cheeseball mixer.

  BRUCE PAVITT Jon had set up a meeting with Warner to get a bunch of money. My point was, “Before we borrow more, let’s think about restructuring and reconsidering how money is spent.” I still owned 25 percent of the company and told him I was going to go to Warner and tell them to stop funding the label. Jon was extremely pissed off. He then fired the four people I wanted put in positions of more responsibility. I felt that Nils Bernstein, who’s now the publicist at Matador, was the one person who could get along with everybody, the one person who had a very sane perspective on what an indie label should do and how money should be spent. I felt very strongly if Nils was in there as a president or general manager, the label would be in a much stronger position. I didn’t think Rich Jensen was doing that. He was a friend of mine, but I think he was losing perspective.

  RICH JENSEN Bruce was at home and launched a surprise attack. I was totally sympathetic to the idea of hacking back at that bloat. They put three quarters of a million dollars behind the Supersuckers, and I thought that was absurd. Similar number for this glam band from L.A., Plexi, that was gone after a year. That was nuts. At the time I was very disappointed in Bruce. I wish that we could’ve had a friendly conversation before he put people in the position of being fired.

  NILS BERNSTEIN I was one
of the four fired. Around that time, we had written, but not yet sent, a letter to Warner about changes we wanted. I understand why Jonathan did it—we were undermining him.

  JONATHAN PONEMAN I may have overreacted, but these people were meddling in my affairs. If this letter would have been sent off, I would have been profoundly humiliated at best.

  BRUCE PAVITT When the people were fired, they had to sign gag orders in order to get compensation. So they couldn’t even talk to the press. That was not very punk rock, in my opinion. After that, I didn’t really communicate with Jon, except through attorneys, for seven years.

  ANNA WOOLVERTON (Sub Pop Records receptionist) It really felt like a divorce. Everybody was so suspicious of everybody else. There was a lot of crying. I remember during the coup, I just sat at my desk and cried, because I was so bummed out that it had to be like that.

  JONATHAN PONEMAN The coup was a wake-up call. I owe everyone in that situation a debt of gratitude, because it set us on a course of restructuring that a lot of record companies are doing now—shrinking and becoming more efficient. I think we’re so successful right now by staying within our budgets, minding our overhead, signing bands that mean something to people, not being overly ambitious, being respectful of the artist.

  DANIEL HOUSE C/Z was courted for a really long time by Relativity Entertainment Distribution, RED, part of Sony. We had a really good distribution setup through a number of nonexclusive arrangements. And we sold directly to retail, as well, and we were a profitable company. We weren’t making money hand-over-fist, but we were not laden with debt. RED, in some sort of desperate need for indie cred, kept chasing us and chasing us and said, “We can get your records in places that you’re not being represented,” meaning the chains, big-box stores. Our concern was that our foundation, the mom-and-pop indie stores, didn’t get compromised. And they assured us, “No, no, no, that won’t happen.” So we finally did a deal with them in 1993, and they fucked us sideways and frontways and backwards.