Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [48]
I got to a point where I felt that I wanted to share some of the information with people, so I put out Subterranean Pop fanzine. The first issue came out in spring 1980. Had a budget of about $20—I had an X-Acto knife, a glue stick, and a box of crayons. I invited friends over, and we all individually colored a lot of the pages. Put ’em all in a box and shipped them to a distributor in San Francisco. I just said, “Here’s 200 copies of my fanzine. I know you’re gonna want to distribute this.” They hadn’t ordered any, so I took a risk there. But I got some good feedback and things kept building from there.
CALVIN JOHNSON (K Records cofounder; Beat Happening singer/guitarist) We met in September of 1980, but I’d been hearing about Bruce for about a year before, through people at Op Magazine. I grew up in Olympia, but my senior year of high school I moved away just for one year, and that was right about the time Bruce moved to Olympia. He actually took over my time slot on KAOS and did the first issue of the Sub Pop fanzine while I was gone. I started working on the fanzine with the second issue.
Most of the fanzines that existed in 1980 were very Anglophile. They were oriented toward whatever the latest flavor-of-the-month, major-label New Wave band was: XTC or Gang of Four or whatever. But Bruce was writing about bands that no one had ever freakin’ heard of. And he was concentrating on Northwest bands like the Beakers and the Blackouts. That was exciting.
BRUCE PAVITT I called it Subterranean Pop because my theory was that there was a tremendous amount of music happening in America that had the potential to be very popular. But because the distribution channels and the media channels were shut off, those acts had to work their way out of the ghetto. So it was an underground culture that had the potential to be very popular. Nirvana was the ultimate example of that.
The name changed from Subterranean Pop to Sub Pop on the second issue. I proceeded to put out more, and a couple years later we put out a cassette compilation, Sub Pop 5, which featured tracks by a group from Lawrence, Kansas, called the Embarrassment and tracks by the producer Steve Fisk and one by myself. The big “hit” was a novelty piece by an artist named Doug Kahn, and it was a montage cut-up of a Ronald Reagan speech. The cassette did very well—I sold like 2,000 copies, which at that time, for cassettes being duped out of your bedroom, was huge. At that point I began alternating between cassette versions and written publications. We put out nine issues—three of them cassettes—and that was kind of it.
STEVE FISK To me, the idea that a bunch of little know-nothings in Olympia, Washington, can make a bunch of cassette tapes and get them reviewed in Australia, get them sold in Japan, get John Peel’s attention—that’s radical. That was a radical thing to do in ’81.
CHRIS PUGH (Swallow guitarist/singer) I met Bruce in Olympia. There were only one or two places to play in Olympia back then, but there was a bubbling undercurrent of things going on. People were having dance parties at their apartments. All kinds of people were starting bands, getting their ideas out. It was a DIY kind of thing. People weren’t terribly concerned with musical ability.
DONNA DRESCH I remember the first show I ever went to in Olympia. I was just wandering around with some other teenage friends of mine downtown. We heard people say, “There’s a show in the alley!” So we went in the alley and the whole place is lit with candles, and at the very end of the alley, which is like another miniature alley, Beat Happening was playing. And it was just a guitar and two drums, like a floor tom and a snare. And Calvin was dancing and