“I remember seeing Steve the next day and trying to talk to him and being so at the end of my rope that I broke down and started crying,” says Pavitt. “What hurt me more than anything was that he felt like I didn’t respect him. I didn’t care if they went to a major—whatever. But the fact that he would misread what I was trying to communicate… I was simply trying to be honest. It was such a low point for me, just standing there crying in front of this guy. I just said, ‘I’m sorry.’ ”
Asking for their master tapes and artwork back would have set off legal action neither side could afford. And more important, Arm and Turner didn’t want to ruin their friendship with Pavitt, while everyone in the band simply felt an allegiance to Sub Pop itself. “If Sub Pop hadn’t put out our records, we’d probably still be playing down at the Vogue,” said Peters. “We probably wouldn’t have lasted through the summer,” Arm added.
Mudhoney had no desire to cash in on the Seattle gold rush and would have gladly stayed with Sub Pop if not for the financial irregularities. “They were very smart to leave,” Pavitt concedes, “because at the time we were bordering on bankruptcy.”
Out of loyalty and friendship, Mudhoney let Sub Pop release one last album, so at long last Every Good Boy finally came out on July 1, 1991. It was, as everyone knew it would be, a big hit, going on to sell an estimated seventy-five thousand copies worldwide—a huge success for an indie label—and peaking at number thirty-seven on the U.K. album charts. The album single-handedly lifted Sub Pop out of its financial doldrums.
And when it rained for Sub Pop, it poured. In the spring of ’89 Nirvana had insisted on a contract, which Poneman hastily drew up. “I just remember them being in the office, sitting around signing this contract,” says Poneman. “I remember thinking, ‘This could be important.’ ”
Nirvana’s 1990 “Sliver”/”Dive” single sold an amazing 15,000-plus copies, and at an estimated thirty thousand copies, their first album Bleach had become one of Sub Pop’s best sellers ever. The British music press ate the band up, spinning a tale—with Pavitt and Poneman egging them on—of a trailer-trash rock savant. Some demos the band made with Butch Vig were making the rounds of the majors, and, strongly urged by their mentors in Sonic Youth, Nirvana signed to Geffen Records in April ’91, becoming one of Sub Pop’s earliest and most painful defections.
The news hit Pavitt hard. “It came as a complete and total shock,” he says. “It really scarred me. It made me a lot more guarded and a lot more cynical about what I was doing. I felt that all problems aside, I’d given every drop of blood to making this organization work and making the bands work and it seemed like an incredible betrayal at the time. I wept publicly. I was really, really crushed.”
Nirvana still owed Sub Pop two albums, for which Geffen paid Sub Pop about $75,000, in addition to three “points” (a point being 1 percent of the list price) on sales of the next two Nirvana albums. Upon its release in September ’91, Nirvana’s major label debut Nevermind began selling at a phenomenal pace, netting Sub Pop hundreds of thousands of dollars; then Bleach started selling, too—the label made an estimated $2.50 on each copy sold, and the record eventually went gold (half a million copies).
“Had we not had that agreement,” said Poneman in 1993, “Bruce and I would probably be washing dishes at this moment.”
Whittaker, who had been Mudhoney’s de facto manager anyway, formally proposed that he become the hub of the negotiations for a new label. The band enthusiastically accepted—they wanted someone who knew where they were coming from. “Plus,” Turner says of their colorful manager, “it made a good story.”
At first they thought they’d go to another independent label, so they met with Caroline Records, a big indie that also distributed Sub Pop. Caroline told them they’d have to tour nine months a year “just like Smashing Pumpkins” and that they’d have to “sweeten up the guitars.” Also, side projects like Arm and Turner’s band Monkeywrench were out of the question. All this made the band furious. “We’re just like, ‘Fuck you, how dare you,’ ” says Arm. “ ‘How dare you tell me how to live my life?’ ” If even indies were thinking that way, the band figured, why not just go to a major. So they talked to some majors, although they were wary of what had happened to bands like Hüsker Dü and the Replacements.
By this time Nevermind was exploding, Seattle was “the new Liverpool,” and Mudhoney was one of the last key Seattle bands available. Even though the band was fiercely independent and probably had little commercial potential, majors were interested because in those heady times no one knew what would sell anymore. Eventually they went with Warner Brothers’ Reprise label. “We just asked ourselves, ‘Who had the foresight to sign Devo?’ ” says Arm, half joking. “And went with that.”
Instead of a high advance that they’d have to sell a lot of records to recoup, Mudhoney asked for a higher royalty rate, control of the cover art, the music, and the recording process. Since the label hadn’t invested very much money in them, the band was under less pressure to make commercial records. (Of course, it also meant the label didn’t have as much incentive to push them.) The individual members of Mudhoney could play and record with all the outside projects they pleased. (Ironically, none of the band’s major label releases ever recouped their advance, meaning that it probably would have been wiser to take a higher advance and a lower royalty rate.)
For the press, Pavitt tried to put the best face on Mudhoney’s exit in typically entrepreneurial terms. “Mudhoney going to Warner Brothers? Great!” he exclaimed. “If Warner Brothers wants to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars promoting our act, and we sell the back catalog, I have no problems with that at all.” But privately he knew that an era had ended.
Bleach and Nevermind had put Sub Pop far into the black, but Sub Pop was never as much fun for Pavitt and Poneman again after the traumas of nearly going bankrupt and then losing Nirvana. “That actually soured their outlook on things,” says Mark Arm. “They were never the same after that. Innocence was lost.”
“I realized that I was in a very sick business—at least in the majors, you know from the get-go that you’re going to be fucking people over,” says Pavitt. “To develop these meaningful interpersonal relationships and then having them ripped apart through business was hard enough one time around, but over and over again, I really started to kind of retreat. I became a lot more jaded. I stopped really trying to get to know the musicians. And it was all done from a distance. I wasn’t going to put myself through that anymore.”
Seattle had become a much different place. In the wake of the major label feeding frenzy that hit the town, a second, far more massive influx of bands from all over the country moved there to hit it rich, further diluting the community. There was a changing of the guard as the original scenesters either aged out of the action or were on tour too often to participate. “It [wasn’t] the tight little circle of friends it once was,” Arm says. “But nothing’s going to stay forever.”
Sub Pop itself changed, too. “The purity of intention, I think, slipped by the wayside,” says Arm. “And they started second-guessing, started getting a little more cynical about trying to sign up things that they thought might sell—and working like a ‘real’ label should instead of just putting out stuff because they really liked it.” Despite the commercial success of some thoroughly nongrunge releases—Sebadoh, Combustible Edison, the Spinanes, the Reverend Horton Heat, the Afghan Whigs, Mark Lanegan, Beat Happening, and Sunny Day Real Estate—in the ensuing years Sub Pop never again captured the imagination of the record-buying public.
Mudhoney tried to emulate Every Good Boy with their major label debut, Piece of Cake, but it was a rush job and sounded it. The band got off on the wrong foot with the label and never recovered—after three low-selling albums, Mudhoney was dropped in 1999. Lukin left the band shortly afterward and Mudhoney took an indefinite hiatus.
The hard truth was Mudhoney never equaled the greatness of “Touch Me I’m Sick.” Even Arm fee
ls the single is the best thing they ever did. “It’s a glorious ‘Here we are, this is what we sound like,’ ” he says. “And we never sounded like that again.
“Steve always likes to say that we’re a footnote,” Arm continues. “And probably in the greater scheme of things, that’s at best what we will be remembered as.”
CHAPTER 13
BEAT HAPPENING
… NOW, I’M NOT JUST YOUR AVERAGE “I KNOW ALL THE PUNK BANDS” KID. AFTER FIFTEEN MONTHS AT THE GOOD RADIO STATION (KAOS-FM IN OLYMPIA, WASHINGTON) PLAYING GREAT TEENAGE MUSIC, I FEEL THAT I KNOW ROCK ‘N’ ROLL. I MEAN, I KNOW IT. AND I KNOW THE SECRET: ROCK ‘N’ ROLL IS A TEENAGE SPORT, MEANT TO BE PLAYED BY TEENAGERS OF ALL AGES—THEY COULD BE 15, 25 OR 35. IT ALL BOILS DOWN TO WHETHER THEY’VE GOT THE LOVE IN THEIR HEARTS, THAT BEAUTIFUL TEENAGE SPIRIT…
—CALVIN JOHNSON, “THE TEENAGE RADIO STAR,” NEW YORK ROCKER (CA. 1979)
Sub Pop wasn’t actually the first bastion of indie rock in the Northwest. Long before Bruce Pavitt and Jonathan Poneman set up shop, Calvin Johnson was spreading the independent gospel throughout the region and indeed the world with his label K Records and his band Beat Happening, both based in humble Olympia, Washington.
In K Newsletter #1, a comic strip depicts the K logo with arms and legs, facing down a monster: “Our hero battles the many-armed corporate ogre,” the caption reads, “breaking the spell of musical repression.” But that was about as explicitly political as K got. Everything else the label and its flagship band did was far more action than talk.
Like so many K bands, Beat Happening looked at the established rules and said, “Why?” They were resolutely unmacho and played melodic, downright quaint-sounding music. They could barely play or sing. Implicit in Beat Happening’s music was a dare: If you saw them and said, “Even I could do better than that,” then the burden was on you to prove it. If you did, you had yourself a band, and if you didn’t, you had to shut up. Either way, Beat Happening had made their point.
The plainly collegiate Beat Happening had the temerity to call themselves punks; that took a little nerve in the mid-Eighties underground, which favored the loud, the aggressive, the noisy. But having a little nerve, they felt, was what punk was really all about. (Besides, Johnson just didn’t have a hardcore type of voice—he had to find some other way to be punk.) And as it turned out, Beat Happening and K were a major force in widening the idea of a punk rocker from a mohawked guy in motorcycle jacket to a nerdy girl in a cardigan.
By the late Eighties, the indie underground had expanded so much that it could support subgroups that had almost no use for any other kind of music, and K Records represented one such pocket. Something that cloistered couldn’t help but erect a cult of personality, and Calvin Johnson was that personality, someone whose first name sufficed, like Whitney or Michael did for mainstream music fans. Thanks to Johnson’s charisma, K Records wrought a small but intensely devoted following of people who felt that any friend of Calvin’s was a friend of theirs.
Johnson built a consensus around himself, leading a veritable children’s crusade out of the doubt that his approach wasn’t valid. In his little universe, it was acceptable to act fey or childlike, like a softball league in which it’s OK to “throw like a girl.” In the process he fostered a noncompetitive, unintimidating atmosphere that reclaimed the kind of people who had been pushed out of punk rock by the more aggressive, conformist aspects of hardcore.
A lot of those people were women. And a lot of them saw Johnson, the band’s other singer Heather Lewis, and even the band’s retiring guitarist Bret Lunsford and decided that they, too, could play in an underground rock band. It’s no wonder Olympia became the epicenter of the riot grrrl movement.
In the Nineties, Beat Happening became the godparents of a whole fleet of bands who flaunted rudimentary musicianship and primitive recordings, a retro-pop style, and a fey naïveté in a genre that became known as “twee-pop” or “love rock.” And as several of the early indies expanded far beyond what anyone could have predicted, K kept the flame of small-scale do-it-yourself alight.
And it did so even as the flame of their counterparts in Seattle began to sputter out. It’s illuminating to compare the Sub Pop and K mottoes. Sub Pop’s catch-phrase was “World Domination” and K’s was “The International Pop Underground”; Sub Pop was about developing regionally and conquering globally in an aggressive, flamboyant, quasi-corporate way, while K was about networking, uniting kindred spirits in a benign conspiracy of outsider geeks. “It was a communications channel, a CB radio channel where people my age were sending up smoke signals all around the world,” says former Olympia scenester Rich Jensen. “It was like, ‘Hey! We’re over here in Olympia!’ And ‘We’re here in Athens!’ And ‘We’re here in Minneapolis!’ ”
The two labels had a bit of a tortoise-and-hare relationship, so it’s not terribly surprising that K’s philosophy, as perfectly exemplified by Beat Happening, has endured, while grunge, pigfuck, and other Eighties indie genres have faded into memory. After all, K proposed an approach too welcoming and accessible not to be influential for a good long time to come.
About sixty miles southwest of Seattle is Olympia, Washington, a peaceful, immaculate town of thirty thousand, all clean streets and pristine little parks. Like so many state capitals, its cultural life is a bit wanting, but just a few miles out of town is the Evergreen State College. The school, which keeps no grades and urges students to determine their own courses of study, has attracted free thinkers, self-starters, and neo-hippies from all over the country ever since its founding in the early Seventies.
The school also hosts community radio station KAOS. Back in the mid-Seventies, few people differentiated between the steady trickle of music that appeared on independent labels and music on majors; KAOS music director John Foster was one of the first to attach a sociopolitical significance to the distinction. The concept would resonate for at least the next two decades.
At the time, the main genre of independently released music was grassroots folk, which happened to dovetail into two of the key ideas of the American independent rock movement: regionalism, as in the idea that a localized sound would both serve the tastes and needs of its community and defy the homogenizing effects of mass media; and egalitarianism, in that music didn’t need to be made by professionals, as the big-time entertainment business would have the public believe.
Foster championed independent music at KAOS, instituting a rule that 80 percent of the music the station broadcast had to be on independent labels. He also founded the Lost Music Network (LMN), an “educational non-profit organization with members all over the world doing their part to educate others about musics that are not widely known.” To that end, Foster founded Op magazine, which started out as an insert in the KAOS program guide and became a freestanding publication in August ’79. Each issue featured subjects whose names began with successive letters of the alphabet; the first issue was “A,” the second “B,” and so on. (Foster packed it in after the “Z” issue in 1984 and joined the Peace Corps.) The idea was resolutely anticommercial—the self-imposed restriction of the alphabet kept the magazine out of the music industry’s hype loop. Op treated independent labels as ends in themselves, not as mere stepping-stones to major labels, and made a point of reviewing the lowly cassette format, providing a key boost to the small but bustling underground cassette scene in the Eighties. The writing was varied and often excellent: Evergreen grad Matt Groening wrote a definitive piece on rap in the “R” issue, famed experimental guitarist Fred Frith was a frequent contributor, and Olympia high school student Calvin Johnson wrote an article about the San Francisco punk band the Avengers for the first issue.
Johnson had spent a good chunk of his childhood in Olympia—his late father had been press secretary to Washington governor Albert Rosellini in the early Sixties—and had gotten his first KAOS DJ gig at the age of fifteen, thanks to the station’s community outreach program. The station was still dominated
by hippie types who were into what Johnson called “really bad music,” but Johnson got a weekly slot playing punk rock and quickly discovered U.K. post-punk groups like Delta 5, the Raincoats, the Slits, and Young Marble Giants, all of whom were on England’s Rough Trade Records. Those bands prized creativity above technique; women played prominent roles in all of them.
Not only did Johnson avidly embrace his mentor John Foster’s ideas about circumventing the big-money media and keeping culture closer to the people; he also held up Foster as a key musical influence. As a singer, the normally low-key Foster would let it all hang out in his a cappella performances. “You should have seen him in Portland last spring,” Johnson wrote in a 1982 issue of Op. “Wow, made my heart skip a crazy beat…. He was going out on a limb there, singing some crazy song about Los Angeles or something. It was embarrassing. That’s how good it was.”
When Johnson and his family moved to Maryland for his senior year of high school, he discovered the thriving D.C. punk scene and was mightily impressed with the independence and drive of the teenagers who, against all odds, had created their own community. He met Ian MacKaye just one day before he moved away again, excited to have come across someone who thought about music the way he did.
Bruce Pavitt, then an Evergreen student, took over Johnson’s punk rock slot at KAOS. When Johnson returned to Olympia in 1980 as an Evergreen freshman, he and Pavitt became fast friends. “He just had presence,” says Pavitt of Johnson. “He had presence and vision. As we all were, he was really caught up in the possibility of expanding the power of regionalism in independent music…. Calvin was a very early supporter of Dischord and all-ages shows and all those DIY punk philosophies. He got it, and he got it from day one.”
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