Authors: Paul Brannigan
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
Sub 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 record 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.
‘Before Seattle I’d never been exposed to rock,’ True admitted in 2006. ‘Punk in 1977 had seen to that. It’s unlikely I would have been half as enthusiastic about Seattle and its music if I, like my American counterparts, had grown up on a diet of Led Zeppelin and hardcore. But I hadn’t, and neither had most of my British contemporaries. Reared on a constantly changing musical culture where the press determined that bands grew old very quickly, we were always on the lookout for the thrill of the new. Consequently I was able to write about what was essentially traditional rock music with real enthusiasm. The Sub Pop rock bands, both in spirit and in sound, were new to this naïve English boy.
‘Here were bands that achieved what I had thought hitherto impossible : they made metal sound cool. During the mid-eighties pop music was anti-guitar. Jon and Bruce’s stroke of marketing genius was to push rock ’n’ roll as rebellion – an ancient credo – while allowing people to listen to big dumb rock and retain their hipster credibility. Up until grunge, there had always been a line drawn between popular and underground music. Sub Pop confused that line once and for all.’
True’s feature focused largely on Sub Pop’s big hitters Mudhoney and Tad, a monstrously heavy, elephantine riff machine fronted by the super-sized Tad Doyle. While in Seattle, he was also taken to see one of Sub Pop’s brightest new hopes, Aberdeen, Washington’s Nirvana, a ragged ‘power trio’ featuring vocalist/guitarist Kurdt Kobain (as Kurt Cobain was spelling his name at the time), bassist Chris (Krist) Novoselic and drummer Chad Channing.
True had just made Nirvana’s début single
Love Buzz/Big Cheese
one of his
Melody Maker
Singles of the Week. He had hailed the band as ‘beauty incarnate’ playing ‘love songs for the psychotically disturbed’.
Now featuring a second guitarist, Jason Everman, in their line-up, Nirvana played their first show as a quartet at the University of Washington’s HUB Ballroom on 25 February 1989. Seeing the band in the flesh for the first time, True was far from impressed. In his 2006 Nirvana biography
Nirvana: The True Story
, he described Nirvana as ‘another formless compendium of noise for noise’s sake’.