The Seattle Sound: Underground Rock Gets a Boost From Sub Pop

The headline on Sub Pop Records’ ads in the rockzines reads, “Hey Loser.” And when the owners of the small, Seattle-based company come to Los Angeles, they walk the two miles from a budget motel to their attorney’s office in Century City. Why waste money on a cab or car rental?

Likewise, you wouldn’t confuse Sub Pop’s roster of recording artists with anything found on major labels: a squadron of former Muzak employees, lumberjacks and a 300-pound butcher from Idaho.

In a world where vinyl is obsolete, tiny Sub Pop--whose offerings have been described as everything from post-post-post-punk to neo-proto-heavy-metal--specializes in 7-inch singles.

Where slick, 24-track, digital recording is standard, most Sub Pop releases are recorded on an old eight-track machine.

Yet nearly every major record company in the country has been sniffing around Sub Pop and its alternative-chart-topping acts, with an eye toward acquiring the label and/or its talent. The pickings include Mudhoney, Nirvana, Tad, L7 and the Fluid. Sub Pop music rules college radio the way bands from Athens, Ga. did five years ago.

The label slings hordes of guys around the country in Tradesman vans, bands who flip their long hair on beer-soaked stages and loudly deconstruct ‘70s stadium-rock cliches for the indie-record fan.

Sub Pop is the nexus between Guns N’ Roses (who re construct ‘70s cliches) and the abstruse pop-isms of R.E.M. The label’s offerings have more or less single-handedly brought aggressive rock back to college radio and made Seattle the center for alternative music in the U.S., the way Factory Records made Manchester the world capital of gloom in the late ‘70s or Prince made Minneapolis the international headquarters for moody funk. A Seattle band--any Seattle band--can pack a club almost anywhere in Europe.

And at a time when white rock ‘n’ roll is as stale and directionless as it ever was in the mid ‘70s, Sub Pop’s acts make a glorious noise unto the bored: throbbing, confrontational, guitar-based rock, bottom-heavy, fuzzed-out and greasy, as grounded in Blue Cheer, the Sonics and the Stooges as it is in the Zep.

This grunge factory has as distinctive a house sound as anything since Memphis’ legendary Stax, creating a regional identity strong enough to eclipse that of other Seattle acts such as Heart or Sir Mix-a-Lot, who sell 10 times what any Sub Pop band does. It issues consistently hard-rockin’ product: art music for people who instinctively hate art. You might even call Sub Pop’s sound dumb art music--dumb art music that rocks.

“What I hate is a really pretentious attitude,” Sub Pop co-owner Bruce Pavitt said over a frosty ale during an interview at a West Hollywood biker bar. (Pavitt and partner Jonathan Poneman insisted on meeting at the bar because they had heard it had a lot of different kinds of beer.) “The ‘We’ve got a degree from art school and we’re going to reinvent pop’ sort of thing is what killed rock ‘n’ roll.”

“Our bands were all lumberjacks,” Poneman said. “Or they painted bridges.”

“I think there’s a real difference, though, between--well, there’s dumb and then there’s really dumb,” Pavitt said. “We don’t do the really dumb.

“I think rock ‘n’ roll should be fun. Why bother to say ‘Die Yuppie Scum’ when you can parody all the corporate mania that’s been going on all these years?”

If the Sub Pop attitude sounds like something you’d enjoy, a randomly chosen disc from the label is as sure a bet as a Def Jam record was to a rap fan in ’86 or a Sun single was to a rockabilly nut 30 years earlier.

Sub Pop began in 1980 as a fanzine called Subterranean Pop, a Pavitt-edited spinoff of OP (later Option) covering U.S. independent music region by region. It was also one of the first ‘zines with a cassette-compilation format.

In ‘86, Pavitt released “Sub Pop 100,” a vinyl compilation that featured Skinny Puppy and Sonic Youth, among others. He hooked up a year later with Poneman, who had been a deejay at the University of Washington radio station, hired producer Jack Endino, and became a local label with a vengeance.

In its first few months, Sub Pop put out classic EPs by Soundgarden (now on A&M;) and Green River, inventors, with the legendary Melvins, of the famous riffy Seattle grunge sound (Green River later split into Mother Love Bone and Mudhoney).

Next came a series of colored-vinyl singles from Seattle-area bands released in severely limited editions, the sheer rarity of which made them irresistible to record collectors. Then followed a spate of LPs, the all-Northwest “Sub Pop 200” compilation, and even singles from out-of-state artists.

“There’s something Machiavellian about our business plan, because the whole mystique of the label tends to grow proportionally to the records’ unavailability,” Poneman said. “Of course, it could backfire--we’d really like to sell 100, 200, 300,000 copies of a Mudhoney record--but in the meantime, we’re going to continue to do business the way we’ve been doing it.” (Mudhoney so far has sold 30,000 in the States, 60,000 in Europe, making it a superstar in the underground indie scene.)

The intense demand for Sub Pop product allowed the label to do two things few indies have yet tried: They ship their records on a C.O.D. basis to a few independent stores, eliminating the traditional bane of the industry--slow payment and bankrupt distributors--while strengthening their cash flow. And the bulk of their singles go to a “singles club,” a $35-per-year service that nets subscribers a limited-edition 7-inch in the mail each month from bands around the country.

This small-is-beautiful system, while limiting growth--the chains, where by far the majority of records are sold, don’t deal on a C.O.D. basis--allows Sub Pop to thrive as a small business.

“When some labels put out records,” Poneman said, “somebody runs off with their money in Europe. When three distributors go out of business on the West Coast in one month, which happened a couple of years ago, it zaps all their funds. But whenever we ship a new record, we get a major influx of cash right off the bat. . . . It’s like, let’s make some money.

“As a label, we’ve had a choice to make: pour all our eggs into one basket and then watch that band go on to another label who will exploit what we did; or limit our distribution, have stronger cash flow and pour the money we make back into the band’s career, helping them tour, make videos and other things indies of our size can’t even think of doing. Major labels, who have a big enough capital base, can’t be spontaneous, can’t reflect the street.”

Soundgarden, whose awesome 1987 “Screaming Life” EP is perhaps the quintessential document of heavy Seattle grunge, was the first (and so far only) band to leave the label, first to SST, for which they recorded the Grammy-nominated “Ultramega OK” LP before being snapped up by powerhouse A&M.;

“Bruce and Jonathan are the Don Kings of Seattle rock ‘n’ roll,” Soundgarden guitarist Kim Thayil said of the Sub Pop owners. “The scene was already there; they just packaged it.”

Pavitt and Poneman prefer to think of their label as a punk-rock Motown. “We think that emphasis on singles, that drive toward classic songwriting is vital,” Poneman said. “Putting someone in a 48-track studio with a name producer and the drum sound of the week isn’t necessarily going to make great rock ‘n’ roll.”

“That’s what the ‘60s punk bands were all about,” Pavitt said. “Great anthems that could potentially change your life, especially if you were 16 years old and hated your parents.

“Music Machine’s (1966 hit) ‘Talk Talk’ was like that. So is Mudhoney’s ‘Touch Me, I’m Sick.’ We’re pretty assertive about letting bands know what we like. But there’s no Holland or Dozier or Holland lurking around here. Basically, from the beginning a lot of our bands have hung out together, been produced by the same guy, an ongoing musical dialogue in Seattle. We just happen to be around to capture it. And the out-of-town bands are ones our other artists have played with and raved about. I think it’s important to run a label like a large family.”

But what about the hype?

“We use the same machinery as everybody else,” Poneman said. “We made certain investments to get the press happening--hiring a brilliant publicist in England; bouncing our rent check to get Mudhoney a van to go out on the road; flying certain European journalists to Seattle--that most indies wouldn’t. The payoff, ultimately, is that you get coverage. I’d like to perpetuate the myth that there’s a grass-roots explosion for Seattle grunge, but the truth is that we’ve helped it happen.”

Said Pavitt, “What would the Stones have been without the hype? Just a white R&B; band with some good songs.”