World Domination: The Sub Pop Records Story

PROLOGUE

The Twentieth Anniversary

But really, did anyone expect a little label like Sub Pop to see its 20th birthday? … Seriously, who’d’ve thought it? Other than the humble founders of Sub Pop, that is?

—Press release for Sub Pop’s twentieth anniversary, April 2, 2008

July 10, 2008, Seattle, Washington

The Space Needle, the most eye-catching structure built for the 1962 World’s Fair, has become the kind of architectural icon that immediately identifies its city. Like Big Ben or the Eiffel Tower, as soon as you see it, you know the location. And for the Space Needle, that location is Seattle.

Today, the Space Needle attracts over a million visitors a year, who ride up elevators that travel at the speed of ten miles an hour to visit either the observation deck or the rotating restaurant. Unsurprisingly, the Space Needle has also been the focal point for numerous local celebrations over the years: lights strung from the antenna on top to form a Christmas tree during the holidays, the logo of the University of Washington Huskies football team painted on the Needle’s roof when the team won the Rose Bowl in 1992, the Seattle Seahawks’ 12th Man flag flying from the antenna whenever the football team makes it to the Super Bowl, and fireworks set off from the structure’s top on New Year’s Eve.

But it was still something of a jolt to see a giant flag with the logo of Sub Pop Records rippling in the breeze atop the Needle in the summer of 2008, in celebration of the company’s twentieth anniversary. (The observation deck’s roof was even painted to look like a record label, with the words, Thank You, Seattle. Love, Sub Pop.) After all, Sub Pop wasn’t a major holiday or a huge business franchise; it was a scrappy record company. One that constantly struggled to avoid bankruptcy during its early years. One that defiantly thumbed its nose at the prevailing greed is good consumerist culture of the 1980s by producing T-shirts sporting the single word LOSER. One that perversely seemed to take more pride in its potential for failure than the results of its success, as seen in one of the company’s slogans: Going out of business since 1988.

Yet there they are, Sub Pop’s co-founders, Bruce Pavitt and Jonathan Poneman, chatting with friends and supporters at the celebratory party held at the Needle’s Skyline restaurant (a mere one hundred feet from the ground, in contrast to the main restaurant, which is at the five-hundred-foot level). It’s the first day of events commemorating Sub Pop’s twentieth anniversary, which began a few hours previously, with Bruce and Jon appearing at what was then called the Experience Music Project (a music/entertainment industry museum founded by Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen, renamed the Museum of Pop Culture in 2017). The two sat for a public interview with EMP curator Jacob McMurray, destined for the museum’s oral history archives.

Bruce and Jon looked back at a time when touring bands used to give Seattle a miss, which added to the city’s regional isolation, in Bruce’s words—but how that very isolation fueled a sense of community that led to the creation of a distinctive Seattle sound. They also recalled the more practical concerns of trying to keep a record company afloat during that first, fraught month of April 1988.

I was there when Jonathan struggled with the representative from the phone company, Bruce remembered, arguing for half an hour that they really shouldn’t pull the plug on our service. And that, indeed, we would be paying them sometime. And I knew that a record label without phone service would essentially be defunct. And this gentleman, with his superior negotiating skills, bought us an extra ten days.

There was also a surprise guest in the house: Seattle mayor Greg Nickels, who read aloud the city’s official proclamation naming July 11–14 as Sub Pop’s Utterly Lost Weekend, further urging the city’s residents to join me in celebrating Sub Pop’s questionable taste in music, generous nature, and improbable solvency.

Who wrote that proclamation? Jon joked afterward. Because it was a wonderful marketing opportunity seized. I love it. A few more bands could have been mentioned.

Later, at the Skyline restaurant party, past and present Sub Pop employees and band members reconnect: musician/producer Steve Fisk, the Fastbacks’ Kim Warnick, Mark Pickerel of Screaming Trees, and Carla Torgerson of the Walkabouts. Kelley Stoltz, Death Vessel, and Sera Cahoone provide musical entertainment, though attendees seem to spend most of their time waiting in the long drinks lines. There’s even a special beer created for the occasion: Loser Pale Ale, by the Seattle-based Elysian Brewing Company, a sweet, hoppy brew, with its 6.5 percent alcohol content providing a nice kick. (It was later boosted to 7 percent.) In keeping with Sub Pop’s special brand of humor, the beer’s labels bear the slogan Corporate Beer Still Sucks.

Meanwhile, across town, there’s a revival going on. Green River, who released their first Sub Pop record twenty-one years earlier, have reunited, performing a warm-up show at the Sunset Tavern, in advance of their appearance at SP20, a festival of Sub Pop acts being held over the weekend. After breaking up in 1987, the band has only reunited once before, during an encore at a Pearl Jam concert in Las Vegas on November 30, 1993.

But that performance didn’t feature all the original members. This one does: vocalist Mark Arm, bassist Jeff Ament, drummer Alex Vincent, and all the guitarists who ever played in the band: Steve Turner, Stone Gossard, and Bruce Fairweather. Mark Arm doesn’t pull the same stunts he used to during Green River’s heyday. (At one show, he leapt from the stage to swing on a light fixture suspended from the ceiling, which began breaking apart. Not one of my brightest moments, he notes. I was pretty high on MDA.) But he does manage to dive into the audience, later resurfacing on the bar. The crowd moshes like it’s 1989, even attempting a little stage diving, though most of those present seem to have outgrown such tomfoolery.

The SP20 Festival officially opens the next night, July 11, with a comedy show at the Moore Theatre. Happy birthday, Mr. Sub Pop! announces host Kristen Schaal (at the time best known for her appearances on the TV series Flight of the Conchords) as she kicks off the evening. And the weather is perfect today—even if this is the suicide capital of the world. The Moore Theatre is an especially appropriate location, as it was also the site of Sub Pop’s first Lame Fest, held on June 9, 1989, and featuring a bill of Nirvana, TAD, and Mudhoney. That show drew a sellout crowd of fifteen hundred, which Bruce and Jon quickly took note of; here was the proof that they had tapped into a receptive audience.

Tonight’s comedy show illustrates how the label’s interests have broadened. As a company that never seemed to take itself too seriously, Sub Pop was always something of a comedy label, even before it signed an actual comedian. Now the roster boasts the likes of David Cross and Patton Oswalt (both of whom are performing this evening), and the Flight of the Conchords comedy duo Jemaine Clement and Bret McKenzie.

On Saturday, July 12, the action moves outdoors to Marymoor Park in Redmond, a Seattle suburb (and home to Microsoft’s headquarters), for the first of two all-day events. SP20 is certainly not a nostalgia fest; evidently, the kids who grew up listening to Sub Pop’s bands now see fit to bring their own progeny to this year’s celebrations. It’s a family-friendly event, with an adult in flannel next to a punk rocker in bondage pants and a hat sporting a pentangle next to a little girl romping around in a red dress with white polka dots. Old-timers have unearthed vintage T-shirts: Green River’s RIDE THE FUCKING SIX PACK, Soundgarden’s TOTAL FUCKING GODHEAD, and the ubiquitous LOSER tee (with a Sub Pop logo on the back).

There are booths supporting the usual indie/progressive causes: the Vera Project (one of Seattle’s all-ages clubs), skateboarding for girls, and Obama ’08. (We’ve given out a few thousand stickers, a staffer notes proudly.) There’s swag to be had as well: a compilation CD entitled Happy Birthday to Me: Terminal Sales Vol. 3 (Seattle’s Terminal Sales Building being the site of Sub Pop’s original HQ). It’s a sampler of the label’s current acts, including the Ruby Suns, the Helio Sequence, the Glitter Twins (that would be Screaming Trees lead singer Mark Lanegan and Greg Dulli, singer/guitarist with the Afghan Whigs), and Sub Pop stalwarts Mudhoney, whose debut release for the label also came out twenty years ago.

Two stages have been set up side by side, allowing for quick changeovers and little downtime between sets. While Sub Pop’s initial roster focused on the Pacific Northwest, the lineup at SP20 spotlights acts from around the country, including the Fluid, from Denver (who, like Green River, have reunited for the event), and Iron & Wine, originally from Florida.

There’s a bit of international flavor, too, courtesy of the Constantines and Eric’s Trip, both from Canada (the latter was the first Canadian act signed to the label), and the Vaselines, the Scottish duo whose bitter love songs were much beloved by Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain. Indeed, it was Kurt’s continual championing of the group that led to Sub Pop releasing The Way of the Vaselines: A Complete History in 1992, three years after the group broke up.

Saturday night closes with a set by Flight of the Conchords; those in search of still more entertainment can head back to Seattle to catch another SP20 gig at the Showbox, featuring Brothers of the Sonic Cloth (the new band founded by Tad Doyle, the mighty lead singer and guitarist from Sub Pop act TAD), and the Glitter Twins.

On Sunday, Marymoor Park’s stages host appearances by acts both near (Seattle-based Kinski) and far (France’s Les Thugs, who also reunited for SP20). LA alt-country act Beachwood Sparks, which broke up in 2002, is yet another group to have reformed specifically for SP20; they’ll go on to release one more album for Sub Pop, 2012’s The Tarnished Gold. There’s been ongoing revelry in the backstage VIP area as well, with attendees quaffing Loser pale ale and dining on ribs, soft tacos, and Kobe beef burgers. There’s Jack Endino, who produced virtually all of Sub Pop’s first releases; Chad Channing, the drummer on Nirvana’s Sub Pop album Bleach; Kevin Whitworth of Love Battery; Candice Pedersen, co-owner of Olympia-based K Records; Linda Derschang, whose first bar, Linda’s, was co-owned by Bruce and Jon, and was something of a Sub Pop clubhouse during the 1990s. Soundgarden couldn’t be persuaded to reunite for SP20 (that won’t happen for another year and a half), but Kim Thayil and Matt Cameron are nevertheless in attendance.

Green River play in the afternoon, Mark Arm wearing the same Green River Summer Camps T-shirt he wore at the Sunset Tavern. Oh my God! one attendee shrieks in disbelief as the band takes the stage, amazed that he’s actually going to see the group hailed as the Band Who Invented Grunge.

Ah, grunge. It’s a term that’s been used with both affection and disparagement. But if it wasn’t for Sub Pop’s success in marketing the alternative rock genre, there would be no festival today. Indeed, Sub Pop used the term in promoting the first Green River record the label released, Dry as a Bone, describing it as ultra-loose GRUNGE that destroyed the morals of a generation.

Mark writhes around the stage, contorting his body like a pretzel, surpassing even Mudhoney’s performance the previous day. Classics like Swallow My Pride and Come on Down are present and accounted for. Prior to Leech, Arm playfully accuses the Melvins of stealing the song from a Green River demo and crediting it to themselves, Making us the Willie Dixon of grunge, he says, referring to Led Zeppelin’s drawing on Dixon’s You Need Love for their Whole Lotta Love (Dixon sued and was eventually credited as co-author). Luckily, Mark continues, now that we’re all back together, we’ve melded the legal power of Pearl Jam and Sub Pop, and we’re going to crush those bastards!

He also serves up a mini history lesson, introducing the band members by referring to their pre–Green River bands: On my right, Bruce Fairweather and Jeff Ament from the Montana hardcore band Deranged Diction! On my left, Steve Turner and Stone Gossard from the proto-grunge band the Ducky Boys! And on the drums, Spluii Numa’s own Alex Shumway! Oh—and I’m the evil genius behind Mr. Epp, he concludes, cracking a grin, well aware that most of the audience has no idea who any of these bands are. The set concludes with Alex diving into the crowd, while the rest of the band members toss brand spanking new RIDE THE FUCKING SIX PACK T-shirts into the audience’s eager hands.

SP20 closes with Wolf Parade, a Montreal-based band that has just released a second album for the label, At Mount Zoomer, which hit the Canadian Top 20 (and reached no. 45 in the US). Is it odd to end a festival celebrating a Seattle label with a band from Montreal? The crowd doesn’t seem to mind, having been swept up in the delirium of such numbers as An Animal in Your Care, I Am a Runner, and Soldier’s Grin. Their final song, I’ll Believe in Anything, from their debut album, Apologies to the Queen Mary, has an additional resonance on this night. After all, it was Bruce and Jon’s unshakable belief in their label that kept Sub Pop going during those first rocky years, eventually resulting in the kind of phenomenal success they could have scarcely imagined when they were begging the phone company not to cut off their phone line.

For a label known for its penchant for hyperbole, it was surprising that Sub Pop’s co-founders didn’t take the stage at some point during SP20 to engage in some self-congratulatory badinage, as they had at EMP. At that event, they’d also reflected on the personal and professional changes they’d gone through over the preceding twenty years.

The long road that we’ve traveled here, I think, has been illuminating in that it’s often been very humbling, Bruce said. And we’ve gone through this very strange dynamic, up and down, being showered with attention and stepping into our ego, and then being beaten down and humbled the next day because we just bounced a check to our favorite employee. And you go through that a couple hundred times, and it kind of strengthens your character a little bit, and gives you some perspective. And it’s been a good thing.

The spirit of the twentieth anniversary is really not so much about Sub Pop as much as it is about our community—the culture at large, Jon explained in an interview with me shortly before SP20. "This culture, and the individuals who have participated in it, continue to thrive. And speaking for myself, I’m middleaged. This has kind of defined my life. And these people are my family, and this company is, in many ways; it’s my family, and it’s been my life mission and work heretofore.

So I don’t want to make too much of it, but it’s a celebration, he continued. "It’s an opportunity not just for a family reunion, but for the youngsters amongst us to see even a fragment of what this all was and what it all can be. I