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By Root 647 0

Have you seen the first TAD single? It has a photo of Tad on it, and the text looks like he wrote it all with the wrong hand: “Hi, my name is Tad. I like make music.” It was ’tardo grammar and punctuation—and I’m not saying that to offend people of intellectual diminishment. Like this guy is musically a savant but had some kind of social or intellectual impairment that made him this brilliant folk artist. I was upset in that the way he was presented diminished the talents of a friend of mine.

BRUCE PAVITT I found out that when Tad was a teenager he played jazz drums at the White House for President Nixon. We didn’t want people to think that maybe he was a refined intellectual and a jazz prodigy, so we tried to put a lid on that story.

BOB WHITTAKER When the London press first got ahold of it, Mudhoney was presented as a blue-collar thing. When the press found out Mark and Steve went to college, it was a real letdown for them.

MARK ARM The U.K. was so fuckin’ class-oriented. Like if rock is going to be authentic it’s gotta come from the lower class, which is crazy. I mean, Mick Jagger went to the London School of Economics.

BRUCE PAVITT It was my contention that people in Europe would get excited about American music if, from their perspective, the bands actually looked or felt more authentically “American.” And Europeans don’t see Americans as refined. They see them as spirited, but somewhat unmannered.

When I told people I was going to the Seattle area to go to college, they were like, “Oh, my God, there’s still cowboys and Indians out there.” And it was seen as extremely backwoods. This is prior to Microsoft and Starbucks and everything else. In addition, Seattle had very little music history, so it essentially had a clean slate. It didn’t have the baggage of San Francisco or New Orleans or Kansas City. So we got to create our own myth.

JOHN ROBINSON (singer for Denver’s the Fluid) We came to Seattle for a show, and Sub Pop had posters made that said MEAN MOUNTAIN ROCK FROM DENVER. And we were just, “What the hell are you talking about? ‘Mountain rock’?” We actually got mad at Bruce and Jon for saying that. They just thought it was funny.

LORI BARBERO (drummer for Minneapolis’s Babes in Toyland) In the late ’80s, we played at the OK Hotel with someone from Sub Pop, and I remember clearly the poster said BABES IN TOYLAND: PREMENSTRUAL GRUNGE FROM MINNEAPOLIS. I was like, “Holy shit!” I thought that was so fucking badass.

CHARLES R. CROSS (The Rocket newspaper owner/editor in chief; Kurt Cobain biographer) Kurt Cobain hated that he was presented as an inbred logger. Though Kurt himself occasionally played into that; he wrote these mythical bios for Sub Pop that they circulated, claiming he met Novoselic at a woodworking class, so he did some of this stuff to himself. That’s not Sub Pop’s fault, but it certainly is true that the way they were marketed made them look like hicks.

Then you have bozos like Everett True who play into that, and the press pumped that up. It almost doesn’t matter what the case was. It’s like that John Ford quote: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

EVERETT TRUE Charles absolutely misses the entire point. The whole point about Sub Pop early on was it was a lot of fun; that’s why we made up all those stories. You might as well create your own myth, because if you don’t, somebody like Charles Cross is gonna come along and create his own myth, and it’s gonna be a lot more tedious. That book he did on Kurt, that’s way more about mythologizing than anything I’ve ever written in my life, anything Sub Pop ever did. What’s that whole chapter detailing what Kurt was thinking when he killed himself? What’s that if not mythologizing?

JONATHAN PONEMAN Kurt Cobain protested vigorously later on in his career, saying, “Those guys portrayed us as a bunch of dumb rednecks.” That we were turning them into cartoon characters. The Beatles literally became cartoons in their marketing. I’m putting way more thought into my explanation than we ever did back then, because it was all intuitive.