• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

This used to happen a lot: A band would come in and say, “Hey, we want some money,” and Jon would say, “Sure, you can have your money. Come in tomorrow.” Oftentimes, we simply would not have the money.

When Steve Turner of Mudhoney came in saying, “Jon said I could get my check for $5,000 today,” I started laughing, kind of a nervous laughter, because we had maybe $20 in the bank. I think Steve just felt like he was being jacked around and that I was disrespecting him by laughing in his face and telling him I didn’t have the money, when in actuality I was barely able to hold it together. Based on that conversation, Steve said, “Well, fuck you, we’re going to a major label.” I remember breaking down and crying in front of him.

STEVE TURNER Bruce is a very emotional guy; he wears it all on his sleeve. I wanted to get out of there before we weren’t friends anymore. We were afraid they were for-real gonna go out of business, owing us a lot of money. It was like a bad breakup, a vote of no-confidence from us. The way I remember it is that we decided we would look around for another label after Sub Pop released Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge. But I didn’t have any desire to go to a major label at the time. None of us really did.

MARK ARM Sub Pop flew the Afghan Whigs out and put them up in a hotel room and had them record at I think Bear Creek Studio, which is a really expensive studio, and we weren’t getting paid? At one point, instead of payment they offered us stock in the company. We were like, “What?!” We didn’t know anything about stocks, but it just seemed like it would’ve been empty paper.

BRUCE PAVITT Mudhoney were our biggest band and they decided to walk because we couldn’t pay them, and not only couldn’t we pay them, we were lying to them about paying them! That’s just really fucked up. What can I say?

CHARLES R. CROSS Seattle was a small enough world where The Rocket did typesetting for Sub Pop, we ran advertisements for them, so we knew they owed us money and we knew the record-pressing plant and Jack Endino and everyone else, and we knew they owed them money, so it wasn’t exactly like a Wall Street Journal investigative report to figure out that they owed $20,000, $30,000 around town and that they had very little revenue. We basically wrote this piece saying there’s some questions on whether they’ll be able to continue. They were quite angry and they felt that our piece affected their ability to get credit.

GRANT ALDEN The inception of the “Sub Plop?” cover story I wrote was that they were not paying their bills and there were all sorts of rumors they were gonna collapse. I knew that they were in trouble. I also knew that if they were allowed to hold on for six months, they were gonna be fine. Because there was the Nirvana record coming out on a major label, which I knew would be enough to get them out of the kind of hole they’d dug—though I had no idea the extent to how well it would do. Also, they had a Mudhoney record coming out, and I knew roughly what numbers that was likely to sell, and that again would be enough.

What I did was slightly unethical, and I’m still troubled by it. I wrote that story as fairly as I could, but with the intent to diffuse the bomb. I said they had problems, but here’s how they’re gonna fix it. It said, “Don’t worry.” It was “Sub Plop” with a question mark. It was not, “They’re about to crash.”

Bruce and Jon cooperated with that story, and they were honest. I felt at the time if we had allowed the rumors to fester, if we had not addressed it head-on, that Sub Pop would’ve collapsed and that would’ve been the end. I don’t think that’s really what my job as a journalist is. But I felt the article was as close to what was true as I could get, and I felt it was necessary.

JONATHAN PONEMAN We ended up putting out Mudhoney’s Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge late that summer. That sold 100,000 copies and got us back on our feet.

JENNIE BODDY Right before the electricity was about to get turned off, it was always a Mudhoney release