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GARRETT SHAVLIK There were times near the end of the Fluid’s being on Sub Pop where we’d do interviews, and some jackass is saying, “Hey, must be killer to be on the ol’ Sub Pop! ‘World Domination’!” I’m like, “Dude, I work for Mr. Mark Arm. Have you seen the sales on Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge? He’s basically paying my fuckin’ bills.”

MARK ARM We agonized over our decision greatly. If we had known that there was even a slight chance that Sub Pop would’ve been financially flush in a year, we wouldn’t have felt the need to look elsewhere.

JOSH SINDER (the Accüsed/TAD/Gruntruck drummer) I wanted the Accüsed to get management and push it further. So I quit, made a demo tape, and took it to Susan Silver. And then TAD was looking for a drummer—Rey Washam was right before me, and I don’t know why they got rid of him or why he quit—and they called Susan asking if she knew anybody, and she said, “I’ve got this demo tape from this guy in the Accüsed.” So I tried out, and Tad called me and said, “Do you want to play drums for us?”

We did a lot of practices, and we smoked a lot of pot. Literally, we wouldn’t practice unless we could smoke pot. We would get in Tad’s little car—he had this Datsun B210—and we would drive around West Seattle trying to find the different people who were selling weed. And if we couldn’t find pot, we would just go, “Well, I guess there’s no practice today.”

I did their last record on Sub Pop, the “Salem/Leper/Welt” EP. Everybody was waiting in line to get their major-record-label deal, and we were like the last ones to get a major deal.

KURT DANIELSON All we could see from our vantage point at that time was continued strife and financial instability at Sub Pop, and we thought that if we went to a bigger label, we would not have that problem. We also assumed that going to a major label, we would be understood and marketed correctly, and on top of that, have financial stability. In fact, when we moved to a major label we were not understood, we were not properly marketed, and we were lost in the shuffle.

ROBERT ROTH Mark Pickerel and I set up a meeting with Sub Pop and went there with four-track demos of some Truly songs. Nirvana had just left Sub Pop that day, and Jonathan was fuming about Nirvana, just fuming. It was great timing for us, because how much more of a receptive audience can you have than a label guy who just lost his best band? He really gave our songs a good listen and said, “Yeah, I love it. Let’s do an EP.” So we were off and running.

JONATHAN PONEMAN When all the bands left it was hurtful. Back at the beginning, I remember having a very poignant conversation with Susan Silver, the manager of Soundgarden. She was saying basically, “Sorry, guys, we’ve gotta go on without you.” The die was cast early on with Soundgarden; we all understood what was going on. But still, having the conversation somehow made it even more hurtful. The thing that I always took as the subtext of that conversation is, “We’re leaving and moving on, and good luck in your future endeavors—if there are any future endeavors.”

CHRIS FRIEL I was 17 when Shadow moved to L.A. My parents have always been just incredibly supportive. They were into it 100 percent. Mike’s parents were not into it at all. They were right, my parents were probably the ones that were sort of crazy.

Duff came to our very first show down there, which we played before we moved. We were in L.A. for well over a year. It was kind of humbling because we had come from Seattle, where we were a pretty big band, to down there, where you’re totally starting over and also really feeling like we didn’t fit in. We just really weren’t partiers. There was drugs, girls, all this stuff that you read about in the rock books. I think we were probably a little scared.

RICK FRIEL You’d be around people who were wasted all the time. You’d be at the Cathouse and see Slash get thrown down a flight of stairs. The whole thing was so foreign to us. But I loved everything about L.A. and Hollywood.