Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [63]
MARK PICKEREL I moved to Seattle a few months after Lanegan did and started working for Sub Pop early on. My impressions of Bruce and Jonathan were pretty popular in the office. Bruce would come in with some outrageous story about a band expecting this or their attorney expecting that. Every time he got excited, he would pace back and forth in the room, kinda like a caged elephant. He had his hands on his forehead and his eyes were bulging out and he would hold his breath so his cheeks would do this Dizzy Gillespie thing. And then Jonathan would go into this very focused, eloquent speech that would calm Bruce down and assure him that the problem at hand was an outrage, but with proper strategy they could turn the whole thing around. This exchange would happen two or three times a week.
GILLIAN G. GAAR Bruce had these dark, intense eyes and looked very striking because he shaved his head. For a while he had that huge beard—he had the Fidel Castro look. He had an intensity about him that I think made people feel he was more intimidating than he was, whereas Jon seemed more approachable and laid-back.
JONATHAN PONEMAN When I worked at Yesco, which was sold to Muzak, and Bruce worked at Muzak about a year and a half later, we both were sickened by what we thought was a Bonfire of the Vanities–type yuppie culture. At the time, you had the managerial class working upstairs and you had the workers in what was called the dupe room, the duplication room. So we parodied the corporate culture through grotesque overstatement. Instead of making Sub Pop 200 a cheap vinyl record, let’s make it an overstated, bloated box set!
BRUCE PAVITT Part of our shtick was that we were this huge player on the West Coast, and a lot of people bought into that. In the Sub Pop 200 compilation there was a picture of the building, and it said SUB POP WORLD HEADQUARTERS. And so people looked at the picture and were like, “Wow, they’ve got this 11-floor office building!” When in actuality we had maybe 50 square feet.
In the Sub Pop 200 booklet, my title was listed as supervisory chairman of executive management, and Jon’s was executive chairman of supervisory management. We felt there was at that time a lack of humor and a forced modesty in the punk/indie scene, and we were really going against the grain. We were ironically undermining corporate culture.
CHARLES PETERSON When we got paid, we would literally run down to the bank that very minute. If you were last in line, your check might bounce.
CHRIS HANSZEK Jack did a lot of the early records for Sub Pop at Reciprocal, but ultimately when the recordings got done, I was in charge of making sure they got paid for. So I ended up being the guy on the phone with Jonathan Poneman every couple of months, going, “Where the hell’s my fucking money?”
JONATHAN PONEMAN We had ever-changing mottos, like “Going Out of Business Since 1988.” And the mottos keep coming. Later, we did the loser shirts, which was an idea that was cribbed from Bob Whittaker, who quipped, “Why don’t you just make a bunch of shirts that say loser on them?” They became very popular. I remember getting lectured by a band member’s parent or something who got angry at me, saying, “That’s not very good for the self-esteem of the wearers of the shirt.” It’s like, “I don’t give a shit.” (Laughs.)
KURT DANIELSON At the same time, I had this idea for a song called “Loser.” As I once said, it seemed to me like the existential heroes of the ’90s were the losers. TAD needed an extra song in the studio working on Salt Lick with Steve Albini, so I wrote it really quickly and I thought, This’ll be excellent because there’s already gonna be T-shirts that say loser on them, they’ll be promoting the song, it’ll be just magical.
THURSTON MOORE (singer/guitarist for New York’s Sonic Youth; Kim Gordon