Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [126]
RICH JENSEN (Sub Pop Records general manager; musician) The first job I had at Sub Pop, in ’91, was to go into the previous bookkeeper’s office, which was completely strewn with paper, and determine what was a bill. And I put them in a big stack, organized them, and then typed everything into a spreadsheet, which those guys had apparently never heard of. That was my great talent: I knew what a spreadsheet was.
I printed it out on an old-fashioned, dot-matrix printer, and it was a six-foot-long list that I hung up on the window in Bruce’s office. At the bottom it said we owed $250,000. We had $5,000 in the bank. That was probably May. Megan was let go that summer. Most of the staff was. We were reduced to a core group of like five people.
SALTPETER The original Sub Pop office was pretty much a free-for-all. I remember looking in this closet once there and finding the master tapes to stuff, including our album Blood Guts & Pussy. If I’d had the foresight, I would have just stuck ’em in my underwear and walked out. At the time you could pretty much do whatever you wanted. I remember finding a can of spray paint and thinking, This makes sense. I spray-painted on the office floor YOU OWE DWARVES $.
KIM WARNICK (Fastbacks singer/bassist; Sub Pop Records receptionist) And that stayed there forever. I thought it was fuckin’ hilarious.
JONATHAN PONEMAN We were lying to bands, but we were lying to ourselves, as well, by being overly optimistic about when money would come in.
Bands would see records being sold and they’d go, “Where are my royalties?” Never mind the fact that we had bought them a van, we’d flown them to Europe, advanced them rent. We didn’t have even rudimentary bookkeeping knowledge. What we did was definitely fiscally irresponsible. But it’s not like we were being criminals.
THURSTON MOORE When I first saw Nirvana play at Maxwell’s in Hoboken, Sub Pop had helped them out with a van. They had this van, but they had no money. And I remember them just completely destroying all their amps and equipment onstage, and I was like, “How are you gonna finish your tour?” Bruce was figuring out how to get their shit fixed every night.
MARK ARM Every once in a while, I’d go, “Bruce, I really need some money.” And he would cut me a check. Sometimes he’d go, “I really shouldn’t do this,” because by this point I was doing a lot of drugs.
STEVE TURNER I’d been told about Mark dabbling with heroin here and there right after I quit Green River. My attitude was always, and still remains: He’s a big boy, everybody is. It’s not my place to tell someone not to do something like that. That wasn’t anywhere in my scene, and I was not comfortable around people doin’ that stuff, and he knew that. So we weren’t hanging out like we had a few years before. I think for him it’s something he had to go through because so many of his heroes, like Iggy, went through it.
MATT LUKIN I wasn’t aware of it until Mark was knee-deep in it. I remember him scolding me one time because I was spouting off to my friends about him OD’ing. And I go, “But dude, really, are you okay? I don’t want you to be strung out and fuckin’ OD’ing and dying. Let’s deal with it.” But at the same time, I really didn’t want to deal with some junkie dragging me down.
STEVE TURNER Mark wouldn’t do drugs on tour, generally. We would start tours, and he’d be a wreck. I remember a few tours where we stored him like a sack of potatoes in the back of the van. Kinda throw him up on the loft and drive to Minneapolis. And by the time we get there, he’s in better shape.
BRUCE PAVITT Mark says, “You used to give me money for drugs,” and the reality is, Mark would come in and say, “I need money for rent.” So if you have a musician who might get kicked out of his apartment, what are you gonna do?