by Everett True
“Nirvana understood the power of dynamics better than any other Seattle band,” the former Cat Butt guitarist continues. “Kurt knew when to turn his pedal on and when to turn it off and just sing. Melvins could be dynamic in that they were into playing super-slow and kind of stopping and letting the drums fill up the space and Buzz would just hit a chord, but I think Kurt got that from listening to The Beatles and Creedence and Beat Happening and the K bands and those minimalist bands he was into . . .”
“The first thing that jumped out was Kurt’s voice,” recalls Craig. “It was big. We all thought he sounded like Creedence Clearwater Revival.”
“They had a real small-town feel to them,” says Gas Huffer’s Joe Newton. “They didn’t look like big city guys, the way they dressed and the way they carried themselves and they were kind of nervous. I remember seeing them loading in from their van and they had these little funky amplifiers – making do with what they had. But on stage, Kurt had an intensity that you could feel. For whatever that was worth.”
Encouraged by the response to ‘Love Buzz’, Jon and Bruce started talking about releasing an album. There was just one catch, though: Nirvana had to stump up the recording costs – upfront. Kurt realised he needed someone to represent his band’s interests, and started to look around his friends for a suitable contender as manager. He picked on Tam Orhmund, making her a mix-tape of his favourite music – Bay City Rollers, The Velvet Underground, The Knack, Soundgarden, Blondie, Metallica, AC/DC, Redd Kross26 – and suggested that she could manage the band, despite having no previous experience. Orhmund was given a handful of ‘Love Buzz’ singles and told to send them out to potentially interested parties. In the meantime, Nirvana returned to Reciprocal Studios at the end of December to start recording what would become their debut album Bleach.
Kurt borrowed Donald Passman’s All You Need To Know About The Music Business from the library and, after reading it, became suspicious of Pavitt’s bohemian attitude to making records. So, one night, Krist dropped by Pavitt’s place on Capitol Hill and drunkenly demanded that Sub Pop give Nirvana a contract. On January 1, 1989, Sub Pop signed a three-album, three-year deal with Nirvana. It was agreed the label would pay the band $6,000 for the first year, $12,000 for the next and $18,000 for the third.
“It was, ‘Do we pay for the recording or do we pay for an attorney?’ ” recalls Jonathan. “Trying to put it off as long as possible because we wanted to do everything at once. We had to pay off Reciprocal but I didn’t want to write a contract myself because I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing. So I took a music-business book and copied out some stuff that sounded important, put it in a copy machine and said, ‘Here’s your contract!’ And those guys, probably being equally confused by it as I was, saw some numbers that I had scribbled in which at the time were, like, $30,000 or thereabouts! All right! That was for like, LP three or something.”
Was that the first contract you signed with a band?
“Um . . . well, there was a contract for Soundgarden, but that remained not fully negotiated. So for all intents and purposes I think it was.”27
Is the whole story about the contract true? Krist got drunk, and hammered on your door and said, “We need a contract.”
“Yes,” replies Bruce. “That is true. And in retrospect, it was divinely orchestrated, because that gesture saved Sub Pop. We didn’t have contracts back then. For one thing, back in the day, the way of doing business was with a handshake, but over and above that, we did not have the money to hire an attorney. It would have been a while before we signed them. Poneman was very interested in getting bands on contracts. We’d been talking to some majors because Jon liked to work that – you know, ‘Let’s go have a free lunch and listen to what they have to say.’ And they always said, ‘You have to have a contract.’
“I reflect back on that incident sometimes, and when I say divinely orchestrated I mean that, because the timing was perfect in every way. For one thing, I wasn’t at my house. I was at my neighbour’s. I had been partying a little at my house, and then I went next door. And for some reason, I decided, ‘I need to step out of the house.’ And the moment I stepped outside, Krist was walking up to my front door. If I had stepped out of the house a minute later I would have missed him, and he would have woken up sober the next day and probably not threatened to beat me up over the contract. So it’s like one of those little things. Little things add up to big things. But he demanded a contract, and he was intimidating. He was drunk, and he was big, and he was very aggressive. So I called up Jon and said, ‘You’ve got to get this guy signed, cos he is pissed. This is something that has to happen.’ Krist was in the room when I was talking to him. ‘Get the contract. This guy is gonna kick my ass, OK?’
“So Jon went to the library, and Xeroxed a contract out of some book, and used some whiteout and filled in some names – it was a 10-cent contract with no lawyer. And I remember thinking when they signed it in the office, ‘This could be a significant moment.’ This was the first time we had signed a group.”
Addenda 1: Thrown-Ups
“Thrown-Ups just weren’t ever going to practise, but we were going to have all the fun of a band,” explains ‘guitarist’ Leighton Beezer. “We never practised, we went around acting like we thought we were really cool and people fell for it. Gave us shows. Always regretted it. And . . . uhhh . . . put out records [laughs]. But then the guys in Mudhoney wanted to get a little more serious and write songs, so I kicked them out of Thrown-Ups . . .
“You play music, you don’t work music, right? It’s probably anti-careerism at its heart, but the idea is the same as jazz. It’s not strictly that you can’t practise, it’s like, just don’t get it into your head that you need to practise. And once you get it out of your head that you need to practise, there’s really hardly a good reason to do it. It’s fun to play music, so every now and then you turn on a tape recorder and you’re not practising, you’re recording . . .
“So we were playing Scoundrel’s Lair. Most of us were dressed in polyester housecoats, like your mom would wear, but Ed [ Fotheringham, singer] had rigged up The Bloody Pooper. Which was a family sized jug of ketchup duct-taped to his stomach upside down with a tube attached to it connected to a hole in the back of his pants so that he could go up to the edge of the stage, hang his butt off and go, ‘ Ppplllllbbbbpppp!!!!!!’ Which was appalling . . .
“We were playing one night right around Christmas and Ed says, ‘Well, this is gonna be really ironic, but I’m gonna be the baby Jesus and you guys can be the three wise men. Simple.’ So Ed got too drunk and procrastinated and when I go over to his house to load up equipment he’s barely got anything done. He has a sawhorse, which he’s going to use to make a sheep. He’s spraying it with spray glue and dropping cotton balls on it. So I’m like, ‘Ed! The show is in an hour! Where’s everything else?’ So he goes into the laundry room and pulls out a sheet and rips it so that I can put it over myself and then he grabs some butcher paper and makes this big cone hat and he’s like, ‘OK, You’re a wise man!’ So we grab his sheep and two more wise man costumes and head off.
“And the show is a total drunken spectacle and Ed is so blotto that he can’t stand up so he’s leaning on the sawhorse the whole time. And the audience is reeeaaallly appalled. At the end I went up to a friend and said, ‘You know, we really didn’t get a very good reaction from that.’ And he says, ‘Well, I don’t think you should go on stage as Klansmen and expect to get a good response! And Ed was butt-fucking a sheep!’
“The punchline is: we tried to do a manger scene and ended up with a Saturday night in Alabama.”
Addenda 2: Seattle vs Olympia
Ian Dickson: “Have you talked to Calvin about Kurt?”
Are you kidding? Calvin’s not going to talk about Kurt.
“He’s not? Why not? Is there a jealousy thing going on?”
I have no idea. The only thing Calvin said to me about this book was this: in February 1989, Nirvana got mad
e Single Of The Week in Melody Maker, and everyone was going around Olympia saying, “Oh, Nirvana’s single of the week, isn’t that cool?” and he was like, “Yeah, that is cool. But Some Velvet Sidewalk was single of the week as well. Isn’t that cool?” and everybody was like, “Well, yeah, that’s OK, but . . . Nirvana’s single of the week!”
“He was jealous about Nirvana’s success. The first time I ever listened to ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ was in Calvin’s apartment. I’m sure of it. It might have been my tape, actually. And I remember both of us being like, ‘This is going to be huge.’ He told me, ‘This will sell a million copies.’ I can’t imagine he was blind to the fact of how colossally talented Kurt was. Nobody could miss it. I don’t know, Some Velvet Sidewalk and Nirvana? Sorry, I love Al [Larsen, Sidewalk singer], and I think Some Velvet Sidewalk is a great little jazz-art-noise project, but Nirvana’s like The Beatles . . .”
I don’t want to disagree with you here . . .
“Go ahead! Disagree with me . . .”
. . . but I can see where Calvin’s coming from. They’re both talented artists. Just because one happens to sell millions of records and the other doesn’t, it doesn’t make one more or less talented. It’s down to the criteria you judge talent on.
“Agreed. I’m just saying it’s naïve to think that, ‘Why isn’t everybody excited about Some Velvet Sidewalk?’ Because some people like them, most people don’t – and Nirvana, everybody loves! Tell me I’m wrong.”
I guess I must be the one person in the world who never thought Kurt was any more talented than anyone else then. I’m not denigrating his talent, but . . . from my and Calvin’s perspective, maybe we feel Kurt wasn’t any more or less talented than Al.
“Right. OK. Here’s a great example from my perspective. I won’t agree with the Al Larsen case but the Melvins . . . as far as I’mconcerned you can go the rest of your life and never find two such colossally talented people as Buzz and Dale.”
That’s a great parallel.
NOTES
1 The Magnet Men became Tic-Dolly-Row once Ben became their singer. Tic-Dolly-Row is a sailor’s term for a vagrant.
2 The acronyms are short for Dirty Rotten Imbeciles and Corrosion Of Conformity.
3 Shonen Knife are a cutsie Japanese all-girl group, utterly charming and kitsch. Formed in Osaka, 1983 and still creating naïve Sixties garage pop, bright and colourful. Burning Farm was the K cassette reissue of their debut album. “When I finally got to see them live,” Kurt commented, “I was transformed into a hysterical nine-year-old girl at a Beatles concert.”
4 It was probably 1986’s melancholy, grungy, powerpop tour de force Especially For You. The Smithereens were contemporaries of The Replacements and R.E.M.
5 Lush were Slim Moon’s band – not to be confused with the naval-gazing UK femme group of the same name.
6 Treehouse: naïve, happy-ish, semi-acoustic grunge-pop.
7 Krist and Kurt had also considered asking Tad Doyle to drum for them.
8 Leaving Trains’ singer was the cross-dressing Falling James – Courtney Love’s first husband. Courtney once told me that she’d married him only because he was dating her best friend Kat Bjelland at the time.
9 Not strictly true – both Led Zeppelin and Scratch Acid had been covered by the trio.
10 “The title means absolutely, unbelievably not bad,” singer Chris Cornell told me in February ’89. “I model my singing on my mom screaming at me to hide the pot plants when the police come round.” Despite their deserved reputation for being heavy doom merchants, there was always a strong streak of humour behind Soundgarden’s music.
11 Alice In Chains were sometimes erroneously called grunge, but they were suburban metal-heads, not punks. They only discovered the ‘grunge sound’ – alongside thousands of other bands – after Nirvana broke big.
12 Homestead was managed by Gerard Cosloy – before he left in the mid-Nineties to dominate the US independent sector with Matador records. Home to Big Black, Dinosaur Jr, Butthole Surfers, G.G. Allin . . .
13 The split 12-inch was issued in the UK on 53rd And 3rd, also home to The Vaselines.
14 The Beatles’ debut album Please Please Me was recorded in 10 hours on February 11, 1963. They came down from Liverpool the night before, stayed in a B& B, were set up at Abbey Road by 10 a.m., had a lunch break and a tea break, and finished off with two takes of ‘Twist And Shout’, John hoarse and stripped to the waist, at around 10.30 the same night. Then drove back to Liverpool.
Fierce soul-influenced rockers The Animals played in Liverpool on May 17, 1964, drove straight to London, where producer Mickie Most had booked an hour’s studio time. They recorded ‘House Of The Rising Sun’ in 14 minutes, two takes, of which the first was better, then did a B-side in the remaining 45 minutes, then went off to do a gig at the Southampton Gaumont. They then went back to Newcastle. Six weeks later ‘Rising Sun’ was number one in the UK and 10 weeks later number one in the US.
The Who recorded ‘Anyway Anywhere Anyhow’ between a soundcheck and a gig at the Marquee on April 13, 1965. They rehearsed the song during the afternoon soundcheck, headed off to IBC for an hour to lay it down around 5 p.m., spent an hour in a pub and returned to the club for the evening show.
15 Helios Creed played mentalist acid-fried rock.
16 It was one of Nirvana’s oldest songs – on the Fecal Matter demo.
17 The Who actually smashed their instruments long before Hendrix – and when they didn’t have any money either. Early Who had the same abandon as early Nirvana. They too were a bit scary, edgy, fearless, anything could happen . . .
18 Kurt continued to use this spelling up to the release of Nevermind , and occasionally afterwards. It’s a nod to Kurdt Vanderhoof, guitarist from Aberdeen thrash metal band Metal Church.
19 Actually spelt Pufnstuf – a Sixties US children’s TV programme, noted for its psychedelic imagery and metaphors.
20 Marine Boy was a Sixties anime cartoon centred round the adventures of a boy able to breathe under water by chewing ‘oxy-gum’.
21 Young Marble Giants were a minimal Welsh trio, who released one album, 1980’s spooked Colossal Youth. Alison Statton whispered alienation in a curiously disconnected, melodic way – you could almost hear the emptying pits of Wales’ mining villages as she sang about a girl painting her nails. Guitarist Stuart Moxham later produced Beat Happening. In 1992 Kurt listed Colossal Youth in his Top 10 favourite records ever: “I first heard Colossal Youth a year before I put out Bleach,” Kurt told me. “I had a crush on their singer for a while – didn’t everyone?” Hole later covered the Giants’ ‘Credit In The Straight World’ – a song that Kurt had originally earmarked for Nirvana.
22 Jane’s Addiction: Perry Farrell’s arty, Gothic, LA rock band – they released two studio albums, including 1990’s theatrical Ritual de lo Habitual, before drug-associated problems tore them apart.
23 Like many of the Olympia bands, Mick Collins’ raw-assed Detroit garage/Mod trio, The Gories, never bothered to enlist a bassist.
24 4AD was the UK label home to Boston bands, Pixies and Throwing Muses. Highly stylised, artistic, Gothic in origin.
25 Design genius Peter Saville was responsible for the Manchester, UK label’s vision.
26 Redd Kross were Sixties bubblegum pop-loving brothers from LA with a whacked sense of humour.
27 Jesse Bernstein was actually the first Sub Pop artist to demand a contract.
CHAPTER 7
No Intellectual Perspective
IN late ’88, Sub Pop co-founders Bruce Pavitt and Jonathan Poneman realised they were nearly out of funds. In a last-ditch attempt to stir up industry interest, they decided to fly out a UK music journalist to cover their label. So at the start of 1989, it was arranged that I would travel to Seattle to do a two-part story on Sub Pop for Melody Maker. First week, a cover feature on Mudhoney was promised; second week, a follow-up feature on the label.
I wasn’t Sub Pop’s British PR Ant
on Brookes’ original choice. He’d wanted my fellow writers, the Stud Brothers, as their musical tastes (rock) seemed more in tune with the Seattle vibe, but there were two of them – and Sub Pop couldn’t stretch to that. So he sent me over a bunch of records, Sub Pop 200, Mudhoney (the split 12-inch with Sonic Youth) and ‘Love Buzz’ foremost among them. The call came at a good time. I’d started writing for Melody Maker a few months before, and was fed up of ‘the Godfather of Cutie’ tag I’d gained through championing bands like The Pastels, Shop Assistants1 and Beat Happening at NME. Unknown to Anton, I’d already been turned on to Green River. My friends and I hadn’t understood all the (Iron Maiden guitarist) Steve Harris triplets the Seattle band played, but we could relate on a primal level to Mark Arm’s howl.
“Someone from SRD [Southern Records Distribution] came down, and said we’ve got this new label Sub Pop and one of their bands is touring with Sonic Youth,” recalls Anton, who was working for Southern records at the time. “I knew who Nirvana, Nevada . . . whatever they were called . . . were, Tad and Mudhoney, because Peel had been playing Sub Pop 200. Peel liked them – so they had to be pop stars! ‘Touch Me I’m Sick’ was brilliant: that big farty guitar sound. So I started doing press for Mudhoney and Sub Pop.”
I recall opening the package of records in the Maker’s reviews room, on the 26th floor of King’s Reach Tower, on London’s South Bank – placing the singles on to the turntable and leaping up on to the table in my excitement, dancing deranged high above the ground, as astonished editors walked by. I played them over and over, scarcely believing my ears. Before Seattle, I’d never been exposed to rock, avoided its clothing and deceits. Punk in 1977 had seen to that. It’s unlikely I would have been half as enthusiastic about Seattle and its music if I, like my American counterparts, had grown up on a diet of Led Zeppelin and hardcore. But I hadn’t, and neither had most of my British contemporaries. Reared on a constantly changing musical culture where the press determined that bands grew old very quickly, we were always on the lookout for the thrill of the new. Consequently, I was able to write about what was essentially traditional rock music with real enthusiasm. The Sub Pop rock bands, both in spirit and in sound, were new to this naïve English boy.