Grunge Is Dead

by Greg Prato

  JEFF AMENT: We had a show with Jane’s Addiction — that was the last show — at the Scream, in downtown L.A. The thing that I remember the most is when Jane’s Addiction played, being blown away that this band that didn’t have a record out was playing in front of 2,000 people — who knew all the words to the songs. They were a really weird band. They weren’t conventional in any way. I remember thinking how much I loved the rhythm section — Stephen Perkins and Eric Avery were doing some shit at that point that I don’t think I’d ever seen done on a punk rock level. Stone and I were standing on the side of the stage — just fuckin’ blown away. At some point, Mark and Bruce said how much they thought that they sucked. That pretty much was it — I think Stone and I knew at that point.

  We didn’t know what we wanted to do, but whatever it was, it was different than what Mark wanted to do. I remember reading that Mark thought the end happened when I wouldn’t let his friends on the guest list, because I had filled it with record company people — which is partially true. They were all the people that helped us get most of the shows down the West Coast, and I felt it was the least we could do. Of course, only a few of them showed up — so he was ticked off. I think if we had been better communicators and talked about our differences better, we would have turned into an incredible band. We could probably have been as good as Jane’s Addiction. But shit, we were twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three at the time. I didn’t want to work in a restaurant the rest of my life — that’s for sure. I don’t think any of the guys had to work to pay their rent, so I don’t think it was as hard a decision for them. For seven years, I got up at five in the morning and went to work — I couldn’t wait to not do that. I guess that made me a careerist. I do like how my career turned out.

  MARK ARM: On or near Halloween, we got together at the practice place. Jeff, Stone, and Bruce announced that the band was breaking up. I actually felt relieved at that point — I didn’t know what I was going to do, but a weight was definitely lifted off my shoulders. I think the difference of musical opinion worked well for a while — it worked on Dry as a Bone, which is the best thing that Green River did. But it just became too big of a strain after a while. And fair enough — not everyone is going to be into the same thing. I vaguely remember going out that night and just getting hammered. I ran into Dan Peters at the OK Hotel and exclaimed, “Green River broke up.” And then I puked! [Laughs.]

  KURT BLOCH: By the end, it had occurred to me that that band was not going to last. The “pro rock” faction versus the “anti rock” faction. The world is probably better that Green River broke up into two factions [laughs].

  JOHN LEIGHTON BEEZER: I think they were all getting laid for the first time in their lives. Girls would go to the shows and go, “Oh, these are rock stars — I want a rock star!” And it’s like, “No, no, no — these are fake rock stars, they’re joking!” So they were forced to face this moral issue — “We were kind of doing a put-on, but hey, it’s working. Should we be what people think we are and milk it? Or should we recoil in horror and go, ‘No, this is the exact opposite — this is terrible’?” That’s what split the band apart.

  MARK PICKEREL: I remember being intimidated by Green River’s reputation, because by their description, it sounded like they had a lot in common with the Screaming Trees. I always felt like they were the band we’d really have to prove ourselves against — if we were going to build a following in Seattle. But that didn’t prove to be an issue at all. Before we moved to Seattle, all the bands that performed in Ellensburg were so competitive, and talked so much shit behind each other’s backs. Before we became accepted in the Seattle music community, I remember thinking that all these bands were going to be our enemies. We were so surprised to be warmly accepted by not just the audiences in the Northwest, but by the bands themselves. It seemed like the bands worked closely together to make things work for each other — to serve a common goal.

  We formed the early incarnation of the Screaming Trees — which hosted several names — [in] about 1982. We started a group called Him and Those Guys, which was me, Van Conner, Lee Conner, and a guy named Dan Harper on bass. Van met [Mark] Lanegan at drama class — I believe Lanegan was a senior at the time. It was around my sophomore year in high school. Van approached Lanegan — just from having a mutual appreciation of everybody from Motörhead to Black Flag to more obscure ’60s artists. I was already a drummer — I could play pretty well considering my age. We decided to start this new band, that would just be me, Van, and Lanegan. It was just going to be a three-piece punk band.

  But Van’s mom, Kathy, got really pissed off, because we were using equipment that Lee had part ownership of, and that his mom had also. She stormed into our rehearsal, and demanded that we let Lee back into our new band. So we reluctantly agreed, since our only other option was to find another practice space, which we couldn’t afford to do. [At] this particular point, Van and Lee were having a bit of a rivalry. Really competitive. Plus, Lee was going through this phase where he was jealous of Van’s and my own social life. Our social life had blossomed into something where we were continually doing fun things that Lee wasn’t included in. Lee was kind of a social outcast. He was older than us, and we were really his only friends. So that made his mom even more angry, that we were excluding him from our new lineup.

  VAN CONNER: Our first practice was just me, Lanegan, and Pickerel. Lanegan was playing drums, I was playing guitar, and Pickerel was going to sing. But we only lasted one practice like that — we kind of sucked [laughs]. We shoveled it around — my brother played guitar — and we ended up being the lineup that we were in the second practice.

  MARK PICKEREL: By my junior year, Lee had become more serious about songwriting — had bought a home recorder, and started making four-track demos that were really cool and really psychedelic. Really strong songwriting, that was on par with the kinds of songwriting you’d hear from Love, the Byrds, Bob Dylan, the Seeds, the 13th Floor Elevators. The songs were so developed — they didn’t sound like copies of other artists’ songs.

  STEVE FISK: I was working at this recording studio in eastern Washington — a guy I went to college with built a recording studio. I knew Mark, just because he was a fan of one of the records I put out in the early ’80s — my band Anonymous, on [1981’s] Let Them Eat Jellybeans. They decided to come in one day; it was totally their decision. We ended up putting out what they recorded, on a little tiny label we started over there. They were playing like a live show — jumping around and everything. They set up in a line, like they were onstage. Because there were brothers in the band, there was a lot of spirited debate — but really nice people. I worked on four records with the Screaming Trees, I haven’t done that with hardly anybody. And I did all that before I knew anybody from Seattle — so I didn’t even have any comparisons.

  MARK PICKEREL: None of us really knew what we were doing — we all had pretty specific ideas about how we wanted to be presented to the world, and how we saw ourselves. On the other hand, there was a lot of confusion within the band. I mean, I was still a junior in high school when I was recording [1985’s Other Worlds]. So my influences varied from everything to current David Bowie hits to early Cream, 13th Floor Elevators. I was still very impressionable.

  We knew that we were outcasts, so we had that working against us — so we thought. Although coming to find out later that that ended up appealing to people — because we were so sheltered, it really helped us create our own little culture in Ellensburg. I watched that Ramones documentary recently [2003’s End of the Century], and I immediately felt a kinship with those guys. It reminded me so much of our story — four absolute misfits who had a common vision. At the same time, there were a lot of personalities within the band that didn’t really work together, but somehow, managed to figure out a way to continue to move forward every day.

  CHAPTER 10

  “The next logical step is to start a label”: K Records, Sub Pop Records, C/Z Records

  Sub Pop Record
s was the most renowned Seattle-area independent record company to form in the ’80s, and figured prominently in putting grunge on the map. But there are also two lesser-known labels, K and C/Z, which gave a home to future renowned bands. Add to it the emergence of Jack Endino as the “go to” producer of local bands, and grunge now had a launching pad that put it on a global scale.

  CALVIN JOHNSON: I was involved with [radio station] KAOS, which had developed within the context of being a community radio station. The listeners are the programmers too — serving the disenfranchised elements of the community. Out of that grew Op— a magazine dedicated solely to independent produced music. And it wasn’t concentrating on any one genre — it was any genre that had artist-owned voices and labels. I was involved in that as a writer and various capacities. If you looked at music magazines at the time, even Slash or New York Rocker is going to give lip service to major label bands. Which would never get covered in Op. Not only was Op about independent music, but it was concentrating on American music.

  Bruce Pavitt moved to Olympia in ’79, and was involved with KAOS and Op Magazine. He did his radio show, Subterranean Pop, which was all independent, and decided to do a fanzine — like Op, but it was only about local punk rock and new wave bands. But he was focusing on the Northwest and Midwest — two areas that were completely ignored. From the second issue on, I was working with Bruce pretty closely. It just seemed like the next logical step is to start a label that would work with our local scene. It wasn’t a label until years later — it was a fanzine from 1980 until ’83. And then after that, he moved to Seattle, and it was a column in The Rocket, called Sub Pop. It was also a radio show on KCMU, but it wasn’t a label until the late ’80s. When Bruce went on tour for one summer, I was answering all the Sub Pop mail and starting to do K [Records].

  ART CHANTRY: Calvin Johnson was a huge influence on Bruce. There came a point where Bruce was basically “Calvin Jr.” He would even walk like Calvin. If you take enough MDMA, it starts to, like, rot away at your joints — the cartilage in your joints. You start to get this loose-limbed, weird walking way. Both those guys had that walk after a while — you saw them walking down the street, and you couldn’t always tell who it was, because they were both shaved-headed.

  CHRIS PUGH: The Supreme Cool Beings, Calvin and the Cool Rays — Calvin Johnson had a thing going, Beat Happening came out of that.

  CALVIN JOHNSON: Living in Olympia at the time, I had been playing music with people. I felt that I needed to try something a little more straightforward. It was a band with five people — that seemed cumbersome and hard to manage. So I was in this band with my friend — just the two of us. Then [my friend] left town for a while, and I thought, “Maybe I’ll add something to it — three people.” So we had me, Heather [Lewis], and this woman Laura — that was starting in February of ’83. Sometime over the summer Laura moved away, and we just said, “Hey Bret [Lunsford], do you want to be in our band?” By the end of the year, we played our first shows as Beat Happening — December 1983. That’s when we recorded our first session with Greg Sage as well.

  We played a [house] party in Olympia — we didn’t have any equipment. We asked if we could borrow the equipment of the other band, and [they] said, “Yeah, no problem.” But then when we got there, the other band said we couldn’t. We decided to play anyway, without their equipment — I think Bret found a guitar in the house somewhere, and we just used garbage cans or boxes as drums — and without a pa. I felt with Beat Happening, we would never be relying on equipment or technical issues to be who we are, to perform. That was tested early on, at that party. And we were able to proceed on our own terms — without the performance suffering. It was probably even better that we didn’t have the expensive drum kit.

  KATHLEEN HANNA: The stuff that I was really into was K Records — the Go Team, Beat Happening. They were really influential.

  TRACY MARANDER: Everyone in Seattle seemed like, “We’re hipper than everyone else.” In Olympia, the people at the shows seemed somewhat more friendly; people in the audience seemed more nerdy. Most of the women in Olympia wore skirts — kind of that ’50s style, with little bobby socks, skirts, and shirts. Everything was more quirky and laidback.

  ALICE WHEELER: The kids from Olympia … it was almost a precursor to “the grunge look” — the really long, straggly hair. We all had thrift store clothes. But I think the punks liked to have more vintage stylish clothes, and the headbangers just had flannel shirts and ripped up jeans.

  TINUVIEL: I moved to Olympia in ’88–’89 — I was in New Mexico before. I was sick of the desert, so I wanted somewhere “watery” [laughs]. The first person I met was Slim Moon, and the next [people were] Kathleen Hanna, Kurt Cobain, Calvin Johnson. Everyone was in at least three bands.

  JACK ENDINO: There were two people involved in starting Sub Pop — Jonathan Poneman and Bruce Pavitt. Bruce and I, we never really connected. I’ve hardly had more than a couple of conversations with Bruce — in twenty years. He’s a hard guy to talk to — he’s very reserved and private. Whereas Jon Poneman is the opposite — the “public face of Sub Pop,” the guy I’ve always talked to and had a good relationship with. Bruce was “the idea man,” and Jon was “the nuts and bolts” — the guy who made the deals happen. They were an interesting couple.

  LARRY REID: We were at a house party — the U-Men were playing in this basement of this house near the University District — and Bruce had just moved to Seattle. He walked up to me and said, “The Seattle music scene is going to take over the world” [laughs]. Under those circumstances, to make a preposterous statement like that … but he said it with conviction. He wasn’t laughing. Damned if he wasn’t right — and again, this was 1983. [Pavitt] is a bit of a savant — kind of a genius.

  The architects of Sub Pop Records, Bruce Pavitt and Jonathan Poneman

  STEVE FISK: No one understands that [Sub Pop] was a cassette magazine first.

  KIM THAYIL: Sub Pop was a magazine. As a matter of fact, the volume numeration that you find with [the] magazines continued with the record label — to this day. I think the first four magazines were all paper with different sizes and formats. “Number five” was a cassette magazine where they had a small little pocket magazine insert, along with the cassette. “Number six” was a paper magazine, “seven” was cassette, “eight” was a Xerox copy magazine, “nine” was a cassette, and then “ten” was vinyl — [1986’s] Sub Pop 100 — which had Sonic Youth, Steve Albini, Shonen Knife, Skinny Puppy, and the U-Men.

  BRUCE PAVITT: I’d also opened a record store, Bomb Shelter. So I was pretty active at the time.

  MARK ARM: I’d known Bruce and Jonathan for a number of years. I was a DJ at KCMU — both Jonathan and Bruce worked there. Jonathan hosted Audio Oasis, which only played local artists. He was also very involved as a local promoter, scrounging up new places for bands to play.

  JONATHAN PONEMAN: I was at the University of Washington, when I stumbled into KCMU, and discovered it was easier than I had thought to become a DJ. This woman, Rhoda Mueller, owned a tavern, the Fabulous Rainbow — it’s now the Rainbow Tavern. [She] called and said, “I have Tuesday nights free in my bar. You’re playing all this local music, you guys need money, why don’t you turn this into a fund-raising night for KCMU, and you can affiliate it through your radio program?” So through that, I started to see a lot more bands, and gave a number of these bands their first Tavern shows. It coincided with a time where the bands were really starting to gel, and the other thing — when you add alcohol, everything gets a lot crazier. And when you add X, things get crazier still. There was a lot of that going around. I was pretty much just off to the sidelines playing in my band, doing Audio Oasis, and putting on some shows. But it became very clear to me — around 1985 — that the music scene in Seattle was going from being a dismal/backwater music scene to something original and inspired.

  BRUCE PAVITT: First met Jonathan in ’86 — Kim Thayil introduced me.

  KIM THAYIL: Bot
h Jonathan and Bruce wanted to put out a Soundgarden record. They had different resources — Jon had the financial resources, Bruce had established a network of magazines and record labels. So he was tied in with any national or international indie music scene. That was an important resource for us. He couldn’t afford to make a record at that point in time, and I thought, “Well, both of you guys are interested in making this record, and you guys have two different capacities which could be useful to us. So why don’t you work together?”

  JONATHAN PONEMAN: I’m not the most gregarious guy in the world — I never really knew [Bruce] on the social basis. But we both had the same idea at the same time, which was these bands are really great, they need to be documented — there needs to be a label to do it. And then Kim said, “Bruce is talking about doing Sub Pop on a more full-time basis.” I had interviewed Bruce on Audio Oasis at the release of Sub Pop 100, and I had put on the Dry as a Bone record release party at a club that I had been booking.

  Finally, Bruce and I got the idea that we would work together on doing a Soundgarden record, and take it from there. We found as things were coming together for the Soundgarden single and for [1987’s] Screaming Life, that we enjoyed each other’s company, and complemented each other. Bruce said, “I’ll take you on as a partner in Sub Pop.” So we went into business formally, where we quit our jobs and made this our day job. We moved into our first office in the middle of March 1988, but the lease began on April 1, 1988. We’ve always seen that as “day one” as Sub Pop.