by Everett True
“We found a drummer and began playing constantly in that little house,” Krist wrote in Of Grunge And Government. “We had the most intense jams. We’d orbit inner and outer space. It was so serious, if we felt we sucked at rehearsal we were disappointed and we’d sit around bummed out after.”
Chad never officially joined. “They kept asking me to go over and jam with them,” he says. “They never actually said I was in. Our first show was either at The Vogue [ July 3] or at the Central Tavern [ July 23, opening for Leaving Trains8 and Blood Circus]. There weren’t very many people at either place.”
Before Chad joined, there were a couple of shows in early May: one at The Vogue, and a friend’s 18th birthday party at Evergreen on the 14th, where Kurt played a cover of Scratch Acid’s ‘The Greatest Gift’. There was also a gig at The Central Tavern in Seattle on June 5, booked by Poneman again. “That show was with Doll Squad and Zoomorphics,” recalls Jack Endino. “They were terrible bands, with no draw at all.” Once more, it was a KCMU benefit: just before the gig, Poneman asked Nirvana to go on first, rather than in the middle, so he and Bruce could get an early night. Maybe half-a-dozen people showed up, but no one was impressed, apart from the Sub Pop pair. In fact, none of Nirvana’s early Seattle shows were particularly auspicious. Feedback and bad sound all but obliterated Kurt’s vocals: the trio were disheartened by the lack of an audience.
What were the early shows like?
“There was nobody there.”
Was there destruction going on?
“Not really. We started raging and destroying our gear a lot, but we didn’t do that right off the bat. That was probably about the third show. It started pretty quickly. I didn’t do it on purpose or anything. I just joined in with what was already going on. But it is fun. It wasn’t like we said, ‘OK Krist, you jump really high and throw your bass in the air and have it knock you out, and Kurt, you get down on the floor and do the worm.’ It was that we were so sick and tired of the big rock – all the arena rock and special effects and all that that entailed wasn’t what we were about.”
Were you ever drunk when you were playing?
“Never! Krist was. Everybody knew that. I could never drink while playing a show. I would drink afterwards, but I rarely got drunk.”
On June 11, Nirvana returned to Reciprocal, with the express intention of recording a single for Sub Pop. The session began with ‘Blandest’, and continued with first takes of ‘Love Buzz’ and ‘Big Cheese’, early versions of ‘Mr Moustache’ and ‘Blew’, plus an instrumental version of ‘Sifting’ that used a wah-wah pedal. It was harder going than the demo session, probably because they knew it was for a finished product, but also because Chad didn’t hit the drums quite as hard as Kurt liked.
In fact, Nirvana were attempting to change their sound substantially as they struggled to form their own identity separate to that of their favourite bands; incorporating the rock machismo of Black Flag and Led Zeppelin, and the more subtle approach of pop bands such as R.E.M. and The Beatles.
The trio returned twice to finish off the sessions, on June 30 and July 16. Songs were recorded over previous takes so they didn’t have to fork out the extra 50 bucks needed for another reel. Take two of ‘Love Buzz’ was the single, with a 10-second sound collage intro lifted from Kurt’s ‘Montage Of Heck’ tape of audio samples. Kurt wanted the song to start with 45 seconds of his sampling but was talked out of it.
“I’m not sure Kurt was entirely happy with doing a cover for the A-side but he thought it’s a single, what the hell,” says Jack Endino. “And they were going to put ‘Blandest’ on the B-side . . . the song is called ‘Blandest’ for a reason [laughs]. The band wasn’t that enthusiastic about it and Chad didn’t know how to play it. They’d only shown it to him the day before. Afterwards, they did ‘Big Cheese’ and some other songs and I thought, whoa, these are way livelier. They were easily convinced to put ‘Big Cheese’ on the B-side: you need to have something that people will notice as your first original recorded song, rather than a drone-y, mid-tempo thing. They were going to redo ‘Blandest’ later but never got around to it.”
Was there anything to be read into the actual choice of cover?
“No,” the producer replies. “It was the only cover in their set at the time9 and Jonathan liked it. It was his idea. Using a cover for the first single can be to the detriment of the band – often it means the end of their career. They were smart not to continue with that.”
Sub Pop paid for this session – legend has it that later on, with grunge in full swing and their finances in turmoil (cash flow is the biggest single cause of small business insolvency), they kept bouncing cheques on Reciprocal. “It was actually only one or two,” admits Jack, “but a reputation like that is difficult to lose.” The label’s notorious inability to grapple with financial realities didn’t inspire confidence in their artists. One time, shortly after agreeing to release a single, Bruce called up Kurt to ask if he could borrow $200.
In August, Jon and Bruce had the bright idea of combating their cash flow problems with a subscribers-only Singles Club – whereby interested fans would sign up for a one-year fixed period, paying $35, and receive a single through the mail every month. They decided that the Nirvana single would have the honour of being the first in the series, with a limited edition pressing of a thousand copies. Kurt was dismayed by the news – he wanted his band’s debut single to have a ‘proper’ release – but undaunted: after all, most bands never even get to the stage of releasing a record.
“Yeah, ‘Love Buzz’,” Chad sighs. “When we were getting my snare sound set up I had this crazy idea of hooking two snares together. I took the bottom off of one and the top off another and put them together. It was all about trying to get a beefy drum sound.”
Were you aware while you were recording those songs that you were doing something special?
“No! That would be like predicting the future. The only feeling I had when I first started getting involved with them, was that the band was going to go somewhere. Exactly how far, I wasn’t sure. It was always a matter of, ‘Is the public ready for this?’ ”
Things were starting to happen, in and around Seattle.
Soundgarden found themselves with the dubious distinction of being ‘signed’ to three labels at once: Sub Pop, SST (for the patchily astounding Ultramega OK album10) and A& M – a major label, which they ended up with. Metal band Alice In Chains11 would follow soon after, but it was Chris Cornell’s mob that was the big news in town in ’88. SST had long ago picked up on Screaming Trees, issuing three albums – including 1989’s claustrophobic, Endino-produced Buzz Factory – plus an EP of outtakes, Other Worlds, before the Trees briefly joined Sub Pop to release the awesome double seven-inch ‘Change Has Come’, and left to sign to a major, Epic. New York’s Homestead records12 was getting in on the act, putting out a joint Screaming Trees/Beat Happening 12-inch13 (Calvin promoted the Trees’ earliest out-of-Ellensburg shows).
“By the summer of ’88, something had changed significantly in town,” says Mudhoney guitarist Steve Turner. “After the first couple of shows, if a group of us were playing someplace, suddenly it’d be packed. We did the downstairs from the Comet Tavern – us and The Walkabouts and maybe Blood Circus – and it was packed out. It changed really fast. We’d never had people coming to see our bands before! We figured it was some weird anomaly so we were milking it for all the fun we could get out of it: a lot of beer and craziness. We played The Vogue so many times within a nine-month period that all the gigs blurred into one.”
Towards the end of 1988, Mudhoney released Superfuzz Bigmuff and went on their first US tour. Shows were frantic, insane: a mass of sweaty bodies and long hair flailing; Mark Arm sardonically inviting kids up on stage and hurling himself straight into the fray, Matt Lukin as likely to swig from a beer bottle as pummel his bass. People from the outside – Sonic Youth, Tom Hazelmyer from hardcore Midwest band Halo Of Flies, and influential British DJ John Pee
l – began to take an interest.
Sonic Youth released a split 12-inch single with Mudhoney on UK label Blast First, each band covering one another’s songs (‘Halloween’ and ‘Touch Me I’m Sick’): the two bands toured the UK together the following year for Britain’s first taste of live grunge. I introduced Mudhoney on the opening night, at Newcastle’s Riverside, dressed in a Mod suit. The idea was that I would scream a few words then leap into the throng – the crowd was so packed I balked at the challenge and ran backstage, only to be confronted by Sonic Youth bassist Kim Gordon. “Where do you think you’re going?” she barked. So I leapt off the stage seven times, only to be thrown back on stage each time.
I made the record UK Single Of The Week in Melody Maker, writing, “Instinctive, primal rock as it should be. Sub Pop’s coming at ya, and you better watch out.”
It felt like Bruce and Jon were starting to release singles every week – Blood Circus, Tad, Swallow, The Fluid, Screaming Trees . . . the list was never-ending. There were other labels – C/Z, Pop Llama, T/K from Portland – but it was Sub Pop, fuelled by Jon’s drive and Bruce’s vision, that led the pack. Band photography by Charles Peterson, production by Jack Endino . . . Sub Pop was on a roll, a home-made production line.
“Technically, the bands all had the same approach in the studio,” Jack says. “Which was like, show up, stick the guitars and everything in the same room as the drums, turn the distortion up as high as it’ll go, and play live. We had an eight-track machine between 1987 and 1988, and so people weren’t driven to overproduce. They didn’t try to get me to do crazy stuff. There wasn’t a lot of architecture going on.”
“‘Touch Me I’m Sick’ was recorded for what, $100?” asks Pavitt rhetorically. “Bleach was recorded for $600, and went on to sell a million and a half copies. It’s possibly the best return on investment of any recording since the Elvis Sun Sessions.14 Endino’s amazing. It takes somebody to recognise the talent and maintain consistent vision, and I think that’s what I brought to the situation.”
“Jack is really low-key and meticulous,” says Mark Arm. “At some point he was working like 60 hours a week and it was then, I think, he lost some of his spontaneity.”
“For about a year, it seemed like every single band was coming to me,” comments Endino. “Maybe they trusted me because I was a musician. Aside from Skin Yard, I played drums in Crypt Kicker Five, and bass in The Ones with [Sub Pop recording artist] Terry Lee Hale – I was in three bands in 1988. Plus, we were dirt-cheap. Whatever the reason, somehow I wound up right in the centre of it. Sub Pop started sending me stuff all the time. Whenever Jon or Bruce would do a one-off single for the Singles Club, they’d send them down to me.
“The seven-inches were a huge part of it,” the producer continues. “During the grunge period I did over a hundred seven-inch records. Nobody cares about them any more, but they were a big deal then. It got your collectable blood flowing. ‘Ah, it’s a collector’s item, they only made 500 of these.’ I really enjoyed the seven-inch thing. It was instant gratification. Get in the studio in a day, record a couple of songs, they come out a few months later and you can say you’ve made a record. So we got to do all these one-offs for other bands that weren’t from Seattle – [LA all-girl band] L7, Babes In Toyland, Helios Creed.”15
I loved Babes In Toyland the most. Everything I understood to be important about rock was tied up with these three Minneapolis women. Kat Bjelland would stand on stage, face contorted with fury, spitting out her love-hate lyrics over a battered guitar lick. In her flat heels and chiffon she had an odd girlishness: pseudo kindergarten curls, crudely bleached, tattered baby doll dress, red lipstick and wide eyes. Courtney Love later claimed to have invented the ‘ kinderwhore’ look (she’d been in bands with Bjelland and L7 bassist Jennifer Finch) – but she didn’t. It was pure Kat. Her legs would be covered in bruises by the end of each show from contact with the guitar, pain dulled by a constant stream of whiskey.
There was nothing ‘girlie’ or childish about her performances. Her screams sounded ghastly and cleansing, an exorcism of her past and a recent succession of bastard boyfriends. At her side stood Michelle Leon, able to hit her bass with a demonic force that belied her size. Behind them, Lori Barbero, the brash, loud one, everyone’s favourite sister, would be kicking up a major league racket on the drums, occasionally singing in her operatic, drawn-out voice. At the set’s end, she’d jump up and take a photo of the audience, like we’d all been invited to a private party. It was Kat that your attention was always drawn back to, though, her eyes rolled back wide to the sky, stamping her foot and grinding her sticker-covered guitar against her hips. Kat was the electricity.
“[Babes In Toyland’s] Spanking Machine [1989] is one of the most genius records ever made,” Courtney raved to me in ’92. “It’s all truth and coolness and acid trips, bad acid trips, and lies, lame ass Minnesota boys and cut open sores and cheap wine and Valentine’s Day and old stinky nighties with no boyfriends and loving Nick Cave and loving Butthole Surfers and harsh winter and cool kitty-cats and feeling like the only fucked-up girl in the world, oh and a few of my lyrics, but no big deal, it just makes it better.”
“At first, we had no idea that we were creating this supposedly singularly unique aesthetic,” explains Charles Peterson. “We were way more impressed with Touch And Go, Homestead, SST and Dischord. Bruce and Jon had this joke about ‘Sub Pop World Domination’, that we were somehow going to be huge. We were like, ‘Yeah, whatever.’ We just wanted an easy way to pay cheap rent. And musically it was exciting and fun and the bands were making some good records . . . but, shit, we weren’t The Replacements, we weren’t Sonic Youth, we weren’t Black Flag or the Butthole Surfers. That was the real thing.”
“Any scene explosion always has an incubation period,” says Hazelmyer. “One thing that’s never been written up is the influence Minneapolis bands like Soul Asylum, Hüsker Dü and The Replacements had on Seattle. Have a look at the pictures of those Minneapolis guys from ’81, they’re dressed like grunge guys – flannel shirts, torn jeans, long hair. I remember The Replacements showing up on television while I was at a party, and the whole room stopped and was glued to the set. To me they were just a band from back home, but to a party that hosted many of the future Seattle heavyweights, the ’ ments were idols. I’ve read Cobain citing [Replacements singer] Paul Westerberg. There was definitely an influence.”
What were the audiences like at the early Seattle Sub Pop shows?
“Small,” replies Peterson. “No more than a hundred people. The Central Tavern held 250 at most.”
How did the audience dress?
“Terribly,” laughs the photographer. “Dress was not a big concern in Seattle. It still isn’t. There’s a picture of an early audience in ’83 that I call the ‘stray dogs from every village’. There is no uniform sense of style at all. There’s a little bit of hippie, some glam, there’s the trench coat, the flannel coat. One boy’s got the leather jacket with the Sid Vicious pin on it, a little bit of punk. We just liked thrift store clothes. It was an amalgamation of stuff. It started to split up into camps. I was more with the Mudhoney camp where we were into peg trousers and some old school penguin shirts. A little more garage rock.”
I always maintained that Mudhoney had a strong Mod feel.
“Except for Matt Lukin, you wouldn’t have caught any of them dead in a flannel shirt,” nods Charles. “It comes back to the old school punk aesthetic. That’s what we all were inspired by and grew up with. I was more of an anglophile than them. Mark was more into weird US hardcore like The Angry Samoans. That we were all the godchildren of punk rock has been downplayed. What Soundgarden did was entirely different from what Mudhoney and Nirvana did. You’d go to an Alice In Chains gig and there’d be nobody there who would go to a Mudhoney gig. I didn’t go to a Pearl Jam gig for years.”
“The crowd would be anywhere in age from 18 to 29,” recounts former Nirvana soundman Craig Montgomery, “dressed
in old jeans and rock T-shirts, leather jackets were big, plenty of flannel, long underwear . . . People here grew up wearing flannel shirts. They were warm and cheap – not necessarily the heavy-duty lined ones – you could get them off the rack in any department store. Lots of people had long hair, Doc Martens boots or Converse shoes. The audience was college kids and slackers – certainly not mainstream rock’n’roll fans or the Goth crowd or hardcore punks. I hate to use the word grunge, but . . .”
“I came from the Eastside, so it seemed like we’d co-opted some of the bondage stuff you still had to buy in weird underground sex stores back then. It was all just black jeans,” says Julianne Anderson. “No one gave a flying fuck. Everyone wore hand-screened T-shirts. Some of the girls, myself included, got very involved with thrift store clothes, like the Fifties house dresses and the vintage stuff. There was no continuity, there was no trend, all that nonsense with the flannel, that was a media invention right there. Yes, some people wore flannel shirts, but . . .”
What about Tad?
“He was from Boise!” Anderson exclaims. “Flannel shirts, those heavy wool, plaid shirts? It’s cold and wet here, people, please! None of it was thoughtful or intentional. People stand in rock clubs every day and wear whatever they found at the thrift store and thought was funny at the time. It’s happening across the country as we speak. Whether or not there’s going to be books written about it – that’s where the whole magical uncertainty of life comes up . . .”
“Everybody had long hair and they were pretty dirty,” recalls Carrie Montgomery. “People wore long cut-off Levi’s and band T-shirts – that was the uniform. It was very liberating as a girl because you didn’t have to put together a special outfit every night you went out. One time Mark [Arm] and I cut our hair really short, and it was a big deal. But then everyone did after that, of course.”