Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [243]
ART CHANTRY There’s only about 10 people who got rich in the Seattle scene, like millionaire-level. And this includes people who ran record labels. Bruce Pavitt, bless his heart. I’ve said a lot of harsh things about Bruce, but I think of them as funny things, in a very black sort of way. But when it came to helping the community, he is one of the only guys who didn’t take the money and run. He actually helped his friends. Say, if somebody wanted to start a restaurant, he would finance it. He would loan people money to go back to school. There’s a lot of guys that would not have survived if he hadn’t come back and helped them. And I gotta say, there’s a spot in heaven waiting for him for that.
BRUCE PAVITT My relationship with Jon was becoming more distant. I had married, I had a kid, so I was less available for travel and for interaction; we used to do a lot of brainstorming and theorizing about stuff when we traveled. Jon and I are different people, but we had a good chemistry with regards to envisioning and creating things together. I couldn’t relate to the corporate culture, so I officially resigned in April 1996. In December, some employees came to me and said, “Bruce, we really miss you, and the company is becoming unbearable.” This was the beginning of “the coup.”
JONATHAN PONEMAN What I had heard was that Bruce was meeting with some employees at Linda’s Tavern, which Bruce and I co-own. The fact of the matter was Sub Pop was not a very nice place to work at that point. Bruce had the good sense of having checked out years ago. I had the impulse to move the label forward. In retrospect, I was very depressed, very tired. I had gotten involved in certain spiritual pursuits; I was trying to distract myself from the growing mess that was Sub Pop.
This was all going down in a period of my life that was very difficult, because my father was dying, and the very week of the coup, my father died. Also, we had ongoing tenuous relationships with Warner and we were borrowing money and we had all these satellite offices that just weren’t managed in a very practical manner. So the company was exceedingly bloated. It was all the bad things about a major label, with the inefficiency of an indie.
LOU BARLOW During that period, I got into Seattle to play a show, and I was in this coffee shop on First Avenue, and they were laying out the new stack of either The Stranger or the Seattle Weekly, and there’s a big picture of Bruce and Jon on the cover, with the headline WHAT HAPPENED? or THE BIG SPLIT. The story detailed the collapse of their relationship, and one of the first things it blames is how poorly the Sebadoh record sold after how much money they spent on it. We only sold 90,000 copies of Harmacy, which would have been great had we not spent $120,000 on a video for “Willing to Wait” and had the song remixed by some big-league cheeseball mixer.
BRUCE PAVITT Jon had set up a meeting with Warner to get a bunch of money. My point was, “Before we borrow more, let’s think about restructuring and reconsidering how money is spent.” I still owned 25 percent of the company and told him I was going to go to Warner and tell them to stop funding the label. Jon was extremely pissed off. He then fired the four people I wanted put in positions of more responsibility. I felt that Nils Bernstein, who’s now the publicist at Matador, was the one person who could get along with everybody, the one person who had a very sane perspective on what an indie label should do and how money should be spent. I felt very strongly if Nils was in there as a president or general manager, the label would be in a much stronger position. I didn