Green River, Malfunkshun, the Melvins, and Soundgarden all started hitting the clubs (all two or three of them) at about the same time. And since they had some stylistic features in common, a mutual admiration society formed. “We used to jam together a lot, we talked about each other’s bands, what we liked about ’em, what we hated about ’em,” says Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell. “You’d just go to a club and see a band that somebody you’d know started or was coming in from out of town and you’d drink beer and watch the music.”
Steve Turner has a less altruistic theory about the togetherness of the early Seattle scene. “It all grew out of MDA [ecstasy’s chemical cousin] parties,” he says. “They were all standing around saying how much they loved each other as bands. There was a lot of that. I never took MDA—it scared me, watching these people on this love fest.”
Bruce Pavitt agrees that MDA and ecstasy had a huge impact on the embryonic Seattle scene. “To walk into a Soundgarden show and there’s only nine other people in the room, it exaggerated the sense of community there and the sense of drama,” says Pavitt. “It made everything that came out of the speakers sound like the voice of God.”
And MDA was far from the only mind-altering substance the Seattle scene enjoyed. The other major intoxicant in the equation was beer. Perhaps because Seattlites tend to be a bit uptight, they need a few more belts than most in order to unwind. All this combined to produce a strong, if perhaps artificially induced, sense of community in Seattle.
In 1986 Pavitt did a vinyl version of his U.S. underground compilations, releasing the grandiosely titled Sub Pop 100, which featured Sonic Youth, Naked Raygun, the Wipers, and Scratch Acid, as well as Japan’s Shonen Knife and a brief spoken word piece by Steve Albini. The limited edition of five thousand sold out in months. With a staff of one and no recording budget, profits were sizable: “I made enough money,” Pavitt says, “to go to Amsterdam and party for a couple of weeks.”
Although the album might have seemed a one-shot deal, the cryptic message on the spine indicated quite differently: “The new thing: the big thing: the God thing: a mighty multinational entertainment conglomerate based in the Pacific Northwest.” Nothing could have sounded more preposterous, but Pavitt was clearly thinking big—in a 1986 year-end wrap-up in his “Sub Pop” column in the Rocket, he predicted, “The Seattle scene is gearing up for a major explosion…. Expect great records to come out of this region in ’87.” Seattle rock scenester Jonathan Poneman was on the same wavelength: a month earlier he had written in the Rocket: “The town right now is in a musical state where there is an acknowledgment of a certain consciousness…. Something’s gonna happen.”
Unhappy with Homestead, Green River moved to their friend Pavitt’s new label and recorded the Dry as a Bone EP in June ’86, although Pavitt couldn’t afford to release the record until June of the following year. With a hyperbole that became his signature, Pavitt described the record in an early Sub Pop catalog as “ultra-loose GRUNGE that destroyed the morals of a generation.” Although the word “grunge” had been used to describe various kinds of rock music for years, this was the first known application of it to the grinding, sludgy sound of Seattle.
By now Pavitt had worked in just about every facet of the music business—press, retail, radio, and DJing, not to mention producing several nationwide compilations. He put everything he’d learned into that first release.
Pavitt settled on the EP format over the LP for a couple of reasons beyond the simple fact that it’s cheaper. First, a six-song EP would guarantee that wherever a fanzine reviewer or college radio DJ dropped the needle, there would be strong material. Secondly, the EP, with its wider grooves, sounded better, which was essential for music that depended so much on physical impact. And drawing on his retail experience, Pavitt knew that powerful cover art could help sell records; a twelve-inch EP—instead of a seven-inch—meant the cover graphics would be larger. “My first inkling of Sub Pop was at a New Music Seminar where I was working the Homestead booth and Sub Pop were the booth across the aisle,” recalls former Homestead cochief Craig Marks. “They had insanely great graphics. And I knew we were in trouble.”
Pavitt used big, bold lettering and Charles Peterson’s gritty photographs to magnify the power of what was pressed into the vinyl inside. Peterson shot mostly at shows, not in a studio. “His photos were not four guys standing in front of a white wall—no, that’s not where the action is,” says Pavitt. “The action is down at the tavern where people are drinking and blowing off some steam.” Peterson’s photographs were black and white, mostly because most fanzines couldn’t reproduce color (or perhaps because that was the only kind of film he could lift from his day job), and anyway monochrome tends to look more arty. They were full of blurs and streaks of light, which conveyed both the action on stage and in the pit—as well as the disorientation produced by beer and MDA—but they were also carefully composed, lending a subtle sense of classical order to the chaos of flying hair and contorted bodies.
Invariably, Peterson’s pictures included the audience as well as the band, something which played into the egalitarian punk ethos that Sub Pop embraced. “What you’re trying to do at these shows is break down the division between the performer and the audience,” says Pavitt. “You’re advertising the fact that there’s a community here—it’s not just this industry that’s manufacturing bands, it’s a happening scene where people are feeding off each other.”
Pavitt wanted a consistent graphic look for Sub Pop’s record covers, posters, and ads, so he gave Peterson plenty of work in the years ahead. “We were extremely conscious about trying to piece it together so there was some kind of unity in marketing and presentation,” says Pavitt. “It helped unify the scene and made it seem larger than it actually was.” Pavitt, no doubt, was thinking back to the unity of the early SST bands, and the way Black Flag, the Minutemen, Hüsker Dü, and others all seemed to form a social and aesthetic cabal. But while SST had cultivated an outlaw image that captured the natural antiestablishment fantasies of the 16-to-25 set, “Sub Pop figured out a cleaner, more graphic, more collegiate way to do it,” says Bob Mould. “It was more wholesome.”
The funny thing was many of the shows in Peterson’s classic early Sub Pop photographs weren’t attended by more than a few dozen people. “Bruce loved those Charles Peterson photos because it made it look like more of an event,” says Bob Whittaker. “Instead of sitting around a stinky club with a bunch of ugly people, it looked like this… scene. And we’re standing around, all smelly, going, ‘Huh? What’s the big deal?’ ”
On a fall ’87 tour, a stylistic rift in Green River widened to a canyon. Arm says the rest of the band was playing things like Whitesnake and Aerosmith’s wretched Permanent Vacation in the van, while he was vainly trying to turn them on to garage-inflected Australian underground bands like Feedtime and the Scientists. What’s more, Ament and Gossard were urging Arm to take singing lessons. Green River disbanded that Halloween. “There was a tension in the band for a while and then it just got to be too great—it was punk rock versus major label deal,” says Arm. “It was obvious that things weren’t happening the way certain people wanted them to happen. So we broke up.”
Ament, Fairweather, and Gossard then formed Mother Love Bone and signed with PolyGram; after that band fell apart, Ament and Gossard formed Pearl Jam.
Jonathan Poneman (pronounced PON-a-mun) grew up in Toledo, Ohio, and went to the University of Washington. Poneman also booked club shows and had a KCMU show that exclusively featured Seattle bands. One night he happened to catch a set by Soundgarden and was blown away. “I saw this band that was everything rock music should be,” says Poneman. “It was very immediate, very raw, very intense, and just completely brazen. There was no feeling of artiness or pretense; it was just in your face.”
He offered to finance a record and the band accepted, but Kim Thayil thought Poneman should team up with Thayil’s old buddy Pavitt, who had a little experience with these th
ings. So Thayil arranged a meeting between Pavitt and Poneman and they agreed to work together. Despite the fact that Thayil was a dear friend, Pavitt was not very sanguine about Soundgarden, but, as Pavitt puts it, “The fact that Jonathan was offering to throw $20,000 into the pot kind of sweetened the deal.”
In July ’87 Sub Pop released “Hunted Down”/”Nothing to Say.” Soundgarden’s Screaming Life EP followed in October of that year, this time financed essentially by Poneman. “Sub Pop, unlike most of these other labels, nailed it musically from the get-go,” says Scott Byron, then editor-in-chief of the college radio tip sheet CMJ. “I remember getting the Screaming Life EP in the mail and just being blown away. And it wasn’t because they had hyped it or anything—they just sent us the record.” The following week Soundgarden achieved the rare distinction of making the cover of both CMJ and Rockpool. Sub Pop was off to a phenomenally flying start.
Although Poneman’s initial role was just as an investor in the Soundgarden record, he quickly became a full partner. Generally speaking, Pavitt was the creative side of Sub Pop, handling more of the A&R work as well as overseeing artwork and ad copy; the more pragmatic Poneman focused on business and legal issues (although he wound up signing by far the label’s best-selling band). “So many of the crazy ideas were Bruce’s,” says Turner, “and then Jonathan would figure out ways to make it work.”
There were other differences between the two young men as well. Pavitt had plenty of underground cool and preferred artier bands whereas Poneman had more populist tendencies. (It was often said that Pavitt was the “Sub” and Poneman was the “Pop.”) This echoed a basic schism in the Seattle scene. Green River’s Jeff Ament had made no bones about the fact that he wanted a major label career, but Mark Arm remained avowedly indie punk; Soundgarden vocalist Chris Cornell assiduously worked the rock god angle while bandmate Kim Thayil, a Butthole Surfers fan, did an underground show on KCMU (and later on, Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain would vainly try to resolve both impulses within himself). Poneman felt this tension was the engine behind something that would become very big on a national and perhaps international level. At first Pavitt disagreed—“I’d say, ‘Jon, I’ve been following this indie thing for ten years, it’s just not going to happen. Let’s deal with this roots music—it’s going to be small—maybe it’s elitist but it’s pure.’ ”
But Pavitt had something of an epiphany when he started working at Yesco, a “foreground music” company that was eventually swallowed up by the Muzak corporation. By the fall of ’87, Pavitt had gotten jobs there for many of his musician friends, including Mark Arm, whose deep musical knowledge and cutting wit had made him a respected arbiter of cool and an influential tastemaker.
Pavitt had favored more cerebral stuff like Television and the Butthole Surfers, but Arm introduced him to the charms of more primordial bands like the Stooges and Alice Cooper. “He was just a huge influence on me, helping to focus my tastes and opening my mind up to music that didn’t sound like Sonic Youth,” says Pavitt. So when he and Poneman were brainstorming the label, they decided they wouldn’t just sign any old band they liked. “We wanted,” says Pavitt, “to focus on this primal rock stuff that was coming out.”
There was no avoiding the fact that hard rock and metal bore a lot of undesirable baggage, but Big Black had shown a way through. “Albini showed how a band could be ‘alternative,’ ” wrote Clark Humphrey in the Seattle rock history Loser, “without abandoning the larger than life passion of hard rock, preserving the heroics and volume levels of metal without the hairspray clichés.” When Big Black played their August ’87 swan song at Seattle’s Georgetown Steamplant, Mark Arm was standing in the audience, front row center.
Steve Turner wasn’t enjoying college very much, so he dropped out after the fall ’87 semester and started playing in bands again. He still had the jokey Thrown Ups, but, as he recalls, “I was kind of getting the bug to be in a band that actually practiced.”
One night at a drunken party, Turner and Ed Fotheringham jammed with one of the most sought-after drummers in town, Dan Peters. It went so well that Turner asked Peters if he wanted to rehearse with him and Fotheringham and eventually maybe record a single. They were surprised when the highly overbooked Peters accepted. “We didn’t know it at the time,” says Turner, “but he was flying high on MDA when we asked him.”
Fotheringham soon dropped out—“He didn’t want to be in a band that actually practiced,” Turner says, smiling—so Turner invited Mark Arm in. (Peters had met Arm before, when they both found themselves in the bathroom line at a club in Seattle. “He kept saying, ‘Green River just broke up!’ ” Peters recalled. “He was really excited about it. Then he cut in line in front of me and puked all over the toilet.”) Now they found that they totally clicked—and the combination clicked—Turner and Arm’s garagey guitar gnashing meshed well with Peters’s rolling ’n’ tumbling, machine gun–style drumming.
Arm and Turner had known bluff, gravelly voiced Matt Lukin for years, when he began driving up to Seattle punk shows from Aberdeen with his Melvins bandmate Buzz Osborne and their friend Chris Novoselic. They’d become fans of Lukin’s playing, not to mention his fabulous Gene Simmons stage moves and prodigious beer intake, so when they heard he’d recently been left behind when the rest of the Melvins moved down to San Francisco, they invited him in, too. They all played together for the first time on New Year’s Day 1988. (Although one would expect such a hard-drinking band to be hopelessly hung over that particular day, they had laid off on New Year’s Eve—“Amateur Night,” as Lukin calls it.)
Everyone liked what they heard and decided to make a go of it. Arm suggested the name “Mudhoney,” after a 1964 movie by mammocentric B-movie director Russ Meyer, whose work had developed a hipster cult following by the early Eighties. Turner liked the name. “It was slightly cheesy and corny,” he says. “And from the Sixties.”
However, Lukin still lived two hours away in Aberdeen, where he worked as a carpenter; Peters was already in two other serious bands, so Mudhoney clearly had only limited prospects. “We knew that we weren’t going to be taking it that seriously or anything,” Turner says. Their only goal was to maybe put out a single and have a little fun. “We could write some songs, record them, and, chances are, we could release it on Am Rep,” Turner remembers thinking, “or at least Pavitt’s thing.”
Arm played some boom box tapes of Mudhoney as an audition for Pavitt. The tapes were virtually inaudible and the band hadn’t even played a show yet, but Pavitt trusted Arm’s taste implicitly and, besides, Mudhoney had an outstanding pedigree. So in March ’88 Sub Pop paid $160 for Mudhoney to record five songs with Jack Endino. Pavitt and Poneman were especially keen on working with Mudhoney, since Green River’s dissolution and Soundgarden’s recent move to SST had gutted their roster. Mudhoney decided to go with Sub Pop. After all, Pavitt was a friend—they knew and trusted him and he lived right in town. Besides, Sub Pop had just gotten an office. “They had high hopes and dreams,” Turner remembers wistfully.
That spring Pavitt and Poneman decided they would quit their day jobs and make a serious go of Sub Pop. They incorporated in April, with $43,000 of seed money cobbled together from a loan, family, friends, and Poneman’s savings. “Of course that was spent in, like, thirty days,” says Pavitt. “We almost went bankrupt after a month.”
By early summer Mudhoney had developed a buzz in their hometown and lived up to it with a savage live show. “It was incredible from the very first time they performed,” says Pavitt. “I’ve never seen anything like it…. Emotionally, a lot of the music was very menacing and intense, very physically expressive. The way they moved… they fell down on the floor and who cares if you miss a few guitar chords—the looseness of it was really pretty revolutionary. It really projected a ‘fuck it’ attitude.”
After playing their first shows opening for visiting New York bands Das Damen and White Zombie, they opened for Seattle Neanderthal-rockers Blood Circus that July. “It
was sold out, lines around the block, fire marshals were there,” said Turner. “The interest in these brand-new bands that didn’t have any [records] out took people by surprise. The local scene was starting to explode all of the sudden.”
“It was really incredibly easy for us,” says Turner, still sounding a little amazed about it. “We basically said we were a band and we had two labels that would put stuff out and we could get shows any time we wanted them—at the two places that had shows. It was that easy.”
Touch Me I’m Sick” and “Sweet Young Thing Ain’t Sweet No More” make up Mudhoney’s debut single, and everyone was sure that “Sweet Young Thing,” an almost dirgey blues-based number complete with slide guitar, was the hit. “It was so slow and gross and weird,” agrees Bob Whittaker. “And ‘Touch Me I’m Sick’ was this little jingle on the other side.” But things didn’t work out that way; maybe it had something to do with the fact that “Sweet Young Thing” is a vivid depiction of a mother finding her young drug-abusing daughter vomiting into a toilet bowl.
Not that the flip side is so soft and fluffy—“Touch Me I’m Sick” is mainly a nasty, brutish, and short guitar riff powered by Turner’s fuzz pedal, more a rhythmic noise than a melodic figure. (The riff itself harks back to the Stooges’ “Sick of You,” which in turn bore more than a passing resemblance to the Yardbirds’ “Happenings Ten Years’ Time Ago.”) The song was suffused with self-loathing and anger, although in a typical disavowal Arm claims the chorus line was just a catchphrase that they built a song around. But a review of the single in the Rocket questioned why a bunch of white middle-class guys from Seattle could be so angry, whereas groups like Public Enemy and the Sex Pistols had legitimate reason. “You can be pissed off and bored anywhere,” Arm retorts.
Our Band Could Be Your Life Page 54