Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [242]
I personally felt if we continued to spend at the rate we were that we would once again be in a situation where we would be desperately low on funds, and I initiated the idea of working with Warner Bros. I thought, Why not just go for it, as opposed to creating a corporate culture, spending all your money, and going out of business? Jonathan was kind of apprehensive about it, but we got on the same page. Dana Giacchetto was our money manager; Sub Pop was his first really big account. He was a very persuasive and charming guy.
Around November ’94, we actually talked to Microsoft about doing a joint venture. That was an unusual approach. Dana’s idea was Microsoft is in Seattle, they have tons of money, they are in media, and if we went to other labels and said, “We’re negotiating with Microsoft,” that would move things along. It was a very smart move. Microsoft said, “Sub Pop, you’re cool, but we’re not interested in working with record labels,” and that was it. However, to the people at Warner, we were talking to Bill Gates, the richest guy in the world, and maybe they should offer more money—which they did.
RICH JENSEN I know there was a period in 1990 where Sub Pop was taking meetings with various executives at major labels to talk about partnership deals and asset sales, but that quieted down during the collapsed period and it didn’t really get going again until about ’93, and eventually the deal was consummated with Warner Music in ’95. It was a pretty remarkable, historic deal that basically provided a lot of money without too many strings attached. It was $20 million for a minority stake, noncontrolling interest of 49 percent. I think the deal ended up being four times what we expected—we had been thinking $5 million.
BRUCE PAVITT After Dana engineered this deal, everyone wanted to work with him. He went on to manage Leonardo DiCaprio’s money. Later, it became known that he never did go to business school and didn’t have a business degree, and he wound up going to jail for a couple of years for embezzlement.
MEGAN JASPER Post-grunge, Sub Pop’s roster was all over the map: there was Plexi, who were glam; Mike Ireland; the Blue Rags, who were blues; Damien Jurado; the Supersuckers; Combustible Edison; Velocity Girl. I heard a lot of people asking, “What’s going on?” There was confusion about what kind of label it was; it was in the process of evolving into something else.
LOU BARLOW (singer/guitarist for Westfield, Massachusetts’s Sebadoh; bassist for Amherst, Massachusetts’s Dinosaur Jr.) With Sebadoh’s third Sub Pop record, Harmacy, things just went wrong. They’d hired people from big labels to do radio promotion and get placement for us on shows like Friends. They were trying to get our wannabe–hit single “Willing to Wait” to play when Ross and Rachel were splitting up or something.
The only reason I wasn’t comfortable with it was because I knew that we as a band were flawed in a way that would prevent us from reaching that kind of level. The drummer that we had was just a friend of ours who could barely play, and drums are the texture that really determine whether it’s gonna reach the next level. We’d even hired a producer who, during the course of Harmacy, was begging me, “Fire your drummer! You’ve got to do this!” And I was like, “We’re sticking with Bob. He’s a friend.”
Sub Pop was becoming corporate, and trying to play the game on that level. There just weren’t any returns on it. They lost a lot of money on us, and I think they lost even more on the Supersuckers.
NILS BERNSTEIN There was the major-label idea that we need a few huge bands to float all the small bands. So they have this huge radio