This is a Call

by Paul Brannigan

  Back in Amsterdam after English dates with Concrete Sox and Subhumans, Scream’s 28 March set at Van Hall was broadcast live on Dutch radio. Released later that same year on Konkurrel records as Live! At Van Hall Amsterdam, the recording stands as an excellent snapshot of a confident, dazzlingly capable band at the peak of their abilities. ‘Don’t ask me why they want an American band on the radio when there’s so many good European bands,’ says Pete Stahl after opener ‘Who Knows? Who Cares?’, but the incendiary 40-minute set that follows ably demonstrates just why Scream were generating such a strong word-of-mouth buzz on the continent: Grohl’s frenetic drum solo on ‘Feel Like That’ alone justifies the price of admission.

  Before leaving Amsterdam, Grohl decided to commemorate his first visit to Europe by getting John Bonham’s three-circle logo from Led Zeppelin IV tattooed on his right shoulder: he’d attempted to ink the symbol into his own skin at the age of 16, but was disappointed with the end result, later admitting, ‘It looks like someone put a cigarette out on my fucking arm.’ Ironically, though, it would be the discovery of another hard-hitting drummer, Melvins’ Dale Crover, which would leave the biggest mark on Grohl in Amsterdam. And although he could not possibly have realised it at the time, this discovery would ultimately prove to be one of the most significant events of Dave Grohl’s life.

  ‘We were killing time between gigs, staying at a friend’s house, smoking weed and doing nothing,’ he recalled in 2004. ‘I was literally playing through this guy’s record collection, every single last one. When I got to Melvins’ Gluey Porch Treatments, I thought, Here’s another hardcore record. But when I put it on it really fucking blew my mind. This was the moment I fell in love with the dirge aesthetic. The songs were so slow you couldn’t imagine how the band kept time. It was ten to fifteen seconds between each hit. I had never heard anything so heavy before, and the fact these were teenagers from Aberdeen, Washington, playing music heavier than Black Sabbath or any metal record I had heard was unbelievable.’

  Hailed by the venerable Trouser Press Guide as ‘inimitable steamrolling overlords of the slow-flowing magma’, Melvins deal in oppressive downer anthems resembling the sound of the earth choking slowly on its own vomit. Fronted by Buzz ‘King Buzzo’ Osbourne, a maverick malcontent reared on a high-carb diet of Black Sabbath, Black Flag, Flipper, Kiss and Motörhead, the band were cult legends in the subterranean Pacific Northwest rock scene, and a huge influence upon their hometown Nirvana. To Dave Grohl, their viscous punk/metal gloop offered a whole new lexicon of aural abuse.

  ‘I always thought I knew the definition of heavy,’ Grohl admitted in 2001, ‘but hearing Gluey Porch Treatments completely turned my musical perception on its side.’

  Melvins were not the only band redefining the boundaries of underground rock in America in the late eighties. As the American hardcore dream turned sour, and the scene’s early idealism gave way to bitterness, cynicism and in-fighting, a new breed of nihilistic, provocative noisemakers emerged: the finest of these were Steve Albini’s Big Black, Texan audio terrorists Butthole Surfers and Scratch Acid, Washington DC’s Pussy Galore, Wisconsin’s Killdozer, Minneapolis’ Cows and New York art-rockers Sonic Youth. Influenced by post-punk and No Wave acts such as The Birthday Party, Suicide, Killing Joke, Swans and John Lydon’s Public Image Ltd, these disparate, dissolute artists were united in a quest to tear apart hardcore orthodoxy and challenge the punk mindset with excessive volume, confrontational ideas and extreme behaviour. A common overarching raison d’être for these bands was to prod, poke, irritate and inflame sensibilities to the point where even the most enlightened punk-cognisant audiences would wish to inflict physical harm upon them. In this mission they proved remarkably successful.

  That this emerging scene was informed by, but not in thrall to, the hardcore movement is perhaps best illustrated by the earliest recordings made by Pussy Galore, the unsettling, hate-filled noise collective led by future Blues Explosion frontman Jon Spencer. Though the sleeve of Pussy Galore’s début seven inch, the Feel Good About Your Body EP, bore the dedication ‘Thanks to Ian and Jeff ’ (Dischord owners MacKaye and Nelson having helped guide the band in setting up their own label, Shove Records) the vinyl within mocked the hardcore scene’s righteousness: ‘HC Rebellion’ featured bassist Julia Cafritz reading out letters printed in the September 1985 issue of maximumrocknroll as if they contained the answers to all of life’s greatest mysteries. This determination to offend the punk community in their adopted hometown was even more evident on the band’s second EP, Groovy Hate Fuck, released in June 1986. Amid atonal slabs of noise every bit as abrasive and unpleasant as their titles – ‘Cunt Tease’, ‘Teen Pussy Power’, ‘Kill Yourself ’, ‘Asshole’ – Groovy Hate Fuck featured a brutally offensive song called ‘You Look Like a Jew’, which likened the DC punk uniform of shaved heads and thrift store clothing to concentration-camp ‘chic’ and celebrated ‘smoke rising outta Dischord House’. It’s hard to imagine how Pussy Galore could have tried harder to burn bridges.

  Both Pussy Galore EPs were recorded at Barrett Jones’s Laundry Room studio. Jones knew that these sessions were going to be entirely unlike any he had previously helmed from the moment that Spencer and Cafritz produced a rusty chainsaw, hammers, a steel oil drum and several panes of glass as ‘instruments’. The producer’s abiding memories of the sessions are Spencer encouraging him to make the recordings as distorted and fucked-up as possible – ‘He’d say, “That sounds too good – make it sound worse”’ – and his roommates recoiling in horror as the leather-clad degenerates occupying their suburban home spent day after day assembling punishing walls of noise from screeching guitar feedback, brutish percussion and screamed lyrical obscenities. When Jones played the Pussy Galore tapes for Dave Grohl and Reuben Radding, his friends assumed the recordings were intended as a joke. Jon Spencer would doubtless have been delighted.

  Music critics were at once repulsed and fascinated by this new punk aesthetic and their scabrous songs of loathe and hate, detecting a deep moral core buried beneath the layers of feedback, filth and fuzz. Reviewing Big Black’s masterful début album Atomizer, Steve Albini’s forensic dissection of the ugly urges churning beneath the surface of Ronald Reagan’s whitewashed Pleasantville America, Robert Christgau noted, ‘Though they don’t want you to know it, these hateful little twerps are sensitive souls – they’re moved to make this godawful racket by the godawful pain of the world.’ Writing in the Village Voice, Christgau also coined the term ‘pig-fuck’ to describe the loosely affiliated noise-rock movement: perhaps unsurprisingly, this umbrella term failed to cross into mainstream music criticism, but it’s a memorably unpleasant turn of phrase which goes some way to evoking the violent, perverse and knowingly obnoxious nature of the music in question. As an overview of the scene, Touch and Go’s 1986 compilation God’s Favourite Dog, featuring Big Black, Butthole Surfers, Killdozer, Scratch Acid, Happy Flowers (a Virginian duo featuring the incomparably named Mr Horribly Scarred Infant and Mr Anus) and Hose (featuring one Rick Rubin on guitar) is essential: one listen to Killdozer’s drooling deconstruction of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ should quickly determine your tolerance for the ‘pig-fuck’ aesthetic.

  In the summer of 1986, Steve Albini and Scratch Acid featured on another culturally significant compilation album. Sub Pop 100 was the first vinyl release from a new Seattle imprint owned by local fanzine writer and DJ Bruce Pavitt. Showcasing a range of hard-edged underground sounds from punk to industrial dance, the compilation also featured Dave Grohl favourites Naked Raygun, Portland garage rockers Wipers, Sonic Youth and Seattle punks U-Men. Though Steve Albini’s contribution was simply a short spoken-word intro, it set the tone superbly for the gloriously squally racket that followed. ‘The spoken word is weak,’ he intoned solemnly over whining feedback. ‘Scream, motherfuckers, scream!’

  Albini’s bullish sentiments clearly struck a nerve with Chicago-born Pavitt: while a message on the album insert dedicated Su
b Pop 100 ‘to K-Tel with love’, the spine of the record carried the ludicrous statement ‘SUB POP: the new thing: the big thing: the God thing: a mighty multinational entertainment conglomerate based in the Pacific Northwest’. If nothing else, it demonstrated that America’s newest indie imprint had a certain sass and style.

  Pavitt started Subterranean Pop fanzine in 1980 while studying for a degree at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. He determined that his fanzine would focus upon the American indie scene and shine a spotlight on home-grown artists. The fifth issue of the fanzine, by then named Sub Pop, featured a 21-track cassette showcasing artists such as Portland’s Neo Boys, Michigan’s Jad Fair, Witchita’s The Embarrassment and Seattle’s Steve Fisk: when it was warmly received, Pavitt included a second 20-band compilation with issue number seven. He described these cassettes as ‘audio maps to America’s more remote locations’.

  While promoting Sub Pop 100 Pavitt was interviewed on the University of Washington’s KCMU radio station by Jonathan Poneman, a Toledo, Ohio-born promoter and DJ. The two had a mutual friend in Kim Thayil, a philosophy student at UW by then playing guitar in a band called Soundgarden, and it was Thayil who suggested that the two music fanatics might want to consider working together. Excited by the challenge of starting a new label, the duo agreed. As Pavitt was already using the name Sub Pop for his own KCMU show and his weekly column in Seattle music paper The Rocket, it made sense to retain it for their new venture.

  Pavitt and Poneman’s gung-ho attitude was entirely in keeping with the mentality of the music scene they determined to document. From the early 1960s the Pacific Northwest musical community was motivated by one simple idea (later copyrighted as a slogan by one of the area’s best-known corporations): Just Do It. From sixties pop/rock bands such as Paul Revere and the Raiders through to garage rockers The Kingsmen and proto-punks such as The Wailers and The Sonics, energy, attitude and soul took precedence over technical ability for local musicians: it was no coincidence that Seattle-born guitar hero Jimi Hendrix had to travel overseas to England for his virtuoso genius to be appreciated. But the area’s ramshackle, adventurous spirit helped propagate one of the most fecund, experimental and visceral music scenes in the nation.

  ‘In high school I had a guitar but I couldn’t play very well,’ says Seattle music scene veteran, and Pearl Jam guitarist, Stone Gossard. ‘But one day I was talking to my friend Steve Turner and he said, “Don’t learn to play your guitar, get a band! Don’t figure it out, just do it!” Being in a garage rock band is the greatest!’ I’d never in my life heard anyone talk about art that way, it was the most liberating thing. I was like, “I don’t have to take lessons? Thank God!”’

  In 1984 Gossard joined Green River, a punk/metal collective Turner had formed with his music-obsessed best friend Mark Arm. Named after the Green River Killer, a serial killer responsible for the murder of at least 50 women in Washington State in the early eighties, the band were influenced by Black Sabbath, Black Flag, The Stooges,The Sonics, Blue Cheer and Aerosmith: just like Dave Grohl’s Dain Bramage on the other side of the nation, they aimed to subvert classic rock clichés in a noisy, ragged punk style. That same attitude fuelled other local bands. Malfunkshun, fronted by the charismatic Andrew ‘L’Andrew the LoveChild’ Wood, mixed the glam theatrics of Kiss and T-Rex with the street-level aggression of Discharge. Soundgarden, fronted by Wood’s roommate Chris Cornell, formed to play ‘Black Sabbath songs without the parts that suck’, according to guitarist Thayil. Skin Yard occupied the middle ground between The Doors and Led Zeppelin. And Melvins showed everyone that playing slow and low was a really, really, really effective way to antagonise, irritate and aggravate causal rock ’n’ roll fans who’d stumble into bars such as the Central Tavern and the Ditto Tavern expecting to have their night soundtracked by covers of ‘Stairway to Heaven’ and ‘Freebird’.

  Mark Arm once attributed the sound of the Pacific Northwest to isolation and inbreeding. To that he might have added intemperance, irascibility and irreverence. Like Liverpool, Belfast, Glasgow, New York and other tough, blue-collar port towns, Seattle bred men with bone-dry wits, quick fists and no-nonsense attitudes. The city’s soundtrack was always going to be dense, raw and fearless.

  ‘It’s still essentially wilderness country up here,’ Poneman once noted. ‘It’s attracted a lot of crazy people. But there’s a lot of the rugged, do-it-yourself, survivalist, drifter types. Apply that to rock ’n’ roll and that makes punk rock. Also, people who live out in the middle of nowhere like to party because there’s nothing else to do, which is why the local music was unusually rowdy.’

  In the summer of 1985, Skin Yard bassist Daniel House took the initiative to document Seattle’s newest musical community, harvesting tracks from Green River, Malfunkshun, Soundgarden, Melvins, the U-Men and his own band for release on a compilation album entitled Deep Six on the C/Z Records label. Heard now, the resulting album is an uneven, rough-hewn collection of Sasquatch stomp-rock, but at the time it was compelling proof that something was stirring in the backwoods. It was also a massive inspiration to Poneman and Pavitt when they came to create Sub Pop.

  To some extent, Sub Pop had advantages over other start-up businesses. Pavitt and Poneman were already plugged into the underground community as a result of their work in press, radio and retail, and they had ready-made media platforms from which to hype their new enterprise. But they were also shrewd enough to recognise something which the owners of more earnest US hardcore imprints would never explicitly acknowledge – that the underground music industry was still, at heart, part of the entertainment business, and that in showbiz, packaging, promotion and perception are just as important as product. When Pavitt worked at Seattle’s Bombshelter record store, he noticed that Anglophile music fans would pay exorbitant import prices for anything and everything released by 4AD, Postcard or Factory records, for those labels had developed an iconic identity which transcended the appeal of individual artists. He pondered as to how his fledgling label might create a similar aesthetic.

  The answer came to him in spring 1987, while visiting friends at Room Nine House, a rented property shared by members of the psychedelic rock band Room Nine, local drummer Dan Peters, UW photography student Charles Peterson and an ever-changing cast of Seattle scenesters. A punk rock fan, Charles Peterson had been documenting live gigs in Seattle since the early eighties: his unfiltered, light-streaked and movement-blurred black and white images screamed with vitality and energy, slamming the viewer into the heart of the moshpit. Live shots of Green River, Malfunkshun and Soundgarden hung all over Room Nine House, reeking of sweat and alcohol, testosterone and adrenaline. Seeing them for the first time, Pavitt saw a visual identity for his fledgling label.

  ‘I looked at those photos, and I immediately knew that he was catching the energy of the groups, and combining these images with the music would work,’ he told Pitchfork.com in 2008. ‘Every record label needs a visual motif to establish [itself], and those photos would help do it. Those photos inspired me to focus on trying to release records by Seattle groups.’

  Sub Pop’s first single-artist release was Green River’s Dry as a Bone EP: music from Soundgarden, Blood Circus, Swallow, Fluid and Mudhoney (a post-Green River vehicle for Mark Arm, Steve Turner and friends Matt Lukin and Dan Peters) followed. The releases had a defined, uniform look: each had a black bar across the top with the band name written in capital letters, followed by the release name, all in a sans-serif font. Charles Peterson supplied the cover images. Text was kept to a minimum: more often than not only Peterson and producer Jack Endino were credited. The idea, as Pavitt explained in Sub Pop’s official biog, was to ‘pump up the visceral connection to the records’ and add ‘a sense of mystery’.

  ‘Not only did we put an emphasis on design,’ Pavitt told NME in 1992, ‘but on consistency of design, à la Postcard or Blue Note. This was very key. If they liked the Mudhoney records and there was hype on Mudhoney and there was another r
ecord that came out that kinda looked similar, then people would automatically pick that up. It’s the oldest scam in the book.’

  The release of Mudhoney’s début single Touch Me, I’m Sick created a genuine buzz around the label, nationally and internationally. Released in August 1988, ‘Touch Me, I’m Sick’ remains one of the great punk anthems, a glorious yowl of dissatisfaction and self-loathing powered by rusty Stooges-meets-The Sonics guitar slashes and a flat-out fucked drum pattern which threatens to collapse to the kerb at any given moment. Two decades on, it ranks alongside The Kingsmen’s version of ‘Louie Louie’ as the timeless definition of Seattle rock.

  For all the acclaim and attention Touch Me, I’m Sick generated in the underground, however, by the end of 1988 Sub Pop was fast running out of money. In a last-ditch gamble to build their industry profile, in February 1989 Pavitt and Poneman paid for Melody Maker journalist Everett True to visit Seattle to soak up the scene. The pair were aware that, in their constant, relentless search to uncover music’s ‘Next Big Thing’, the weekly UK music magazines were given to hyperbole, their journalists rarely letting facts stand in the way of a great story. This suited Sub Pop’s own marketing strategies just fine. And with Everett True they lucked out. His excitable, action-packed 18 March 1989 feature on ‘Seattle: Rock City’ made the Sub Pop scene look like the epicentre of a thrilling new rock revolution.