Music Milestones

Despite the fact that Sub Pop has been declared dead twice in its 20 years on Earth, the venerable indie label that has taken its lickings kept on ticking, right up to the present day. Co founder/label president Jonathan Poneman says he started the label as "a blindly ignorant music fan." And after breaking Nirvana, helping birth emo with Sunny Day Real Estate and changing lives with the Shins, Poneman is a savvier businessman but not a cynic. "Fandom always drives what we do," he says. "When you get down to it, we're all a bunch of music nerds."





20. Sub Pop Turns 20
The label that began life as a cassette supplement to Bruce Pavitt's column about independent music in the 80's grew into an influential American music brand in the 90s with a unique sans serif, black and white visual style and a stable of bands like Nirvana, Soundgarden and Mudhoney that defined the Seattle scene. Since then, Sub Pop has weathered financial storms, corporate buy-in and shifting musical tastes to arrive at its 20th birthday with Grammy winners and platinum albums on its resume. How to celebrate? They've gathered the alumni for two days of "utterly overwrought" Seattle gigs (July 12-13). The Sub Pop Festival, July 12-13, features the reunion of Green River (wherein Pearl Jam and Mudhoney members revisit their Stooge-y past), as well as the Vaselines (playing the U.S. for the first time) sharing a bill with Flight of the Conchords, Iron & Wine and Fleet Foxes. Meanwhile, on other stages, the modern incarnations of veteran Sub Pop acts will play: Greg Dulli, who fronted Afghan Whigs in the early/mid 90s, plays the Showbox with Brothers of the Sonic Cloth, led by 80's Tad frontman Tad Doyle.


19. Mudhoney
While they didn't attain the heights of fame that contemporaries Nirvana or Soundgarden did, Mudhoney has practically epitomized the garage-y, distorted, rough punk-metal hybrid so closely identified with early Sub Pop since the day the band formed in late 1987 on the heels of Green River's break up (more on that at No. 10). Naming themselves after a quasi-pornographic Russ Meyer b-movie, Mudhoney recorded their first single, "Touch Me I'm Sick" and played their first show at a small Seattle club called the Vogue, just as Sub Pop was incorporating in 1988. It was a natural marriage. "Superfuzz Bigmuff," the band's first ep, fittingly, was named after guitar distortion pedals. Sub Pop's use of the word "grunge" to describe their sound came along quickly as well. It helped, too, that British radio loved the band, helping to get the label its first national exposure.


18. Success, New Millennium Style Pt. 1: The Postal Service
The Postal Service's 2003 Sub Pop debut "Give Up," which Billlboard.com called "love songs for robots," was more than just a side-project for Death Cab For Cutie's Ben Gibbard and Dntel's Jimmy Tamborello. The ten-track album, which also featured vocals from Rilo Kiley's Jenny Lewis and production from Gibbard's fellow Death Cabbie Chris Walla, gained sales traction despite a lack of mainstream press and airplay only from public radio and college stations, going on to sell just shy of a million copies -- the label's second best selling album ever (click through to No. 2 on this list to discover Sub Pop's ultimate best-seller). The Postal Service set -- no doubt helped by the fact that single "Such Great Heights" was featured in a UPS commercial and labelmates Iron and Wine's cover was included on the best-selling "Garden State" soundtrack" -- made it onto the Billboard 200, Top Independent Albums and Top Electronic Albums charts, peaking at No.114, No. 3, and No. 1 respectively.



17. Sub Poppers Multitask And Megamart
Not making rent playing clubs and having your records released on Sub Pop? Get a job there. A long line of musicians from Sub Pop bands, or who had other key Sub Pop functions, actually worked at the label. Fastbacks' bassist Kim Warnick (pictured third from the left) was the office manager - her business card said, "I think you better hold." Photographer Charles Peterson, whose blurry black-and-white publicity shots were a key part of the Sub Pop identity, was hired to do design work as well as do menial tasks around the office. Sub Pop counts Mudhoney frontman Mark Arm among its staff even now. In 1993, Sub Pop expanded their territory to a tiny retail store they called the "Sub Pop Megamart" near the Moore Theater on Seattle's Second Avenue a block from HQ. Conceived as a way to sell Sub Pop merch and show off the label's history a la Nike Town without having tourists trekking through the office, the Megamart soon sported it's own cadre of staff as well as a wall of Polaroids of Sub Pop bands like Soundgarden stopping by the store.

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16. Singles Club Round 2: The Late 90s
After Sub Pop turned ten, it again flirted with failure as layoffs, money issues and other problems, and found itself leaning on the strategy that bailed it out of early money troubles: a singles club that brought in a steady flow of cash based on the idea that folks would pop for a subscription to whatever the dished up to collectors once a month. From 1998 through 2002, Sub Pop came up with vinyl singles from a Modest Mouse, White Stripes (pictured), Bright Eyes, the Mountain Goats, Death Cab For Cutie, the Jesus and Mary Chain, and others.


15. Lamefest 89: Mudhoney Tad and Nirvana sell out the Moore
While a single sold-out show at the 1500 capacity Moore Theatre in downtown Seattle may not sound like the world's biggest deal for most record companies, for the burgeoning Sub Pop the success of the triple threat bill of Mudhoney, Tad and Nirvana (Nirvana was the opening band!) for a show they called Lamefest represented a big win for the little label. In a town with a dearth of all ages show thanks to the Teen Dance Ordinance of 1985, Lamefest's $6 tickets were eagerly snapped up by young rock fans and the trio of bands played their first show to a crowd that numbered beyond the hundreds while stagedivers battled security and more or less won on a warm June night in 1989.


14. Warner Gets (Almost) Half
Needing cash to weather the post-grunge music world, Sub Pop cut a deal in 1995 that handed 49% of the label to major Warner Bros. While Sub Pop continued to release quintessentially Sub Pop-esque mid-90s albums like Sunny Day Real Estate's self-titled set (pictured) and a new one by 5 Style (pictured), the Warner deal inevitably brought with it a large dose of corporate music business operating procedure. Co-head Jonathan Poneman has listed many mistakes that Sub Pop made after cutting in Warners, among them the fact that they opened offices outside of Seattle and lavished money on advances. It didn't help, either, that co-head Bruce Pavitt left the label just months later.
13. Kurt Cobain's Death and Sub Pop's 6th Anniversary
Rock journalists, fans, and every stripe of Sub Pop-affiliated band converged on Seattle for Sub Pop's sixth anniversary weekend in early April of 1994. Parties were scheduled, gigs were lined up, there were gallons of beer waiting to be imbibed, but the day of the big celebration -- Saturday, April 9 -- fell a day after Kurt Cobain's body had been discovered in his Seattle home. "Everyone was pretty dazed [and] just got drunk," then Sub Pop publicist (and onetime Nirvana fan club manager) Nils Bernstein told the Village Voice at the time. The label's gala at the Crocodile Cafe, crammed with staffers and musicians, became a de facto wake with the press stationed outside waiting for a sound byte.


12. World Domination: Courting Britain
How to catapult your locally respected label into prominence in the wider world? Label heads Jonathan Poneman and Bruce Pavitt, who only sort of jokingly called their strategy a 'World Domination' plan, decided the most ROI was to be snagged by honing the label's image (blurry black-and-white Charles Peterson live shot, check. Loud guitars, check. Colored vinyl, check.) and then schmoozing rock-loving Brit rock mags into covering their bands. Poneman and Pavitt could have sent the stable on slogs through the U.S. club circuit, but instead they hired a London press agent, put together small British tours for Nirvana, Mudhoney and others, and ponied up the cash to bring Melody Maker writer Everett True to Seattle to cover the scene. A 1989 story, one of True's many Seattle stories to come, was effusive, saying the city had "the most vibrant, kicking music scene encompassed in one city for at least ten years." True's coverage kickstarted mainstream press interest in the label outside of the Pacific Northwest.

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11. Sleater-Kinney's Last Album
Sleater-Kinney, comprised of fierce guitarist/singers Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker and drummer Janet Weiss, had been a beloved indie rock group at least as far back as 1996's "Call the Doctor" (the song "I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone" made many a mix CD). But after spending its entire career on Kill Rock Stars, the band's lone release for Sub Pop, 2005's "The Woods," was regarded by many as the best of its career. It also turned out to be the trio's last album, as they announced an indefinite hiatus in the summer of 2006, with no plans for "future tours or recordings." The album, which saw the band exploring a bigger rock sound partially inspired by having opened for Pearl Jam in 2003, peaked at No. 2 on Billboard's Top Independent Albums chart. "I definitely think we wanted to do something that was challenging and creative and kind of took our musicianship up a notch, where we were doing things that weren't straightforward and weren't really easy for us," Tucker told Billboard.com at the time.


10. Green River
Green River was never the most famous Sub Pop band, but they hold a crucial place in the label's history because of the members' future endeavors. Green River never went platinum, the didn't get written up in the mainstream music press and never had videos on MTV, but the band Frankensteined glam, punk and metal in a way that became synonymous not only with early Sub Pop but with late 80s Seattle music as a whole. Soon the word "grunge" would be applied. The 1988 Sub Pop mail order catalog described the band's "Rehab Doll" as a mix of "gritty vocals, roaring Marshall amps," but Green River is easily just as important because when it broke up, singer Mark Arm and one-time guitarist Steve Turner formed Mudhoney while bassist Jeff Ament and guitarist Stone Gossard formed Mother Love Bone, and then, Pearl Jam.

9. The Loser T-Shirt
There was a time in the early 90s, when every rock show was overrun with teenagers in black t-shirts emblazoned with the word "Loser" in giant white type. When Bruce Pavitt and Jonathan Poneman started the label in 1988, they intrinsically understood the power of branding and part of the $43,000 they'd scrounged up actually went to making "Loser" t-shirts -- the perfect slogan for a label then releasing rough, sludgy rock from bedroom-, small club-, and garage-bound Seattle bands no one had heard of yet. The back of the shirt simply bore the black and white reversed Sub Pop logo used on all of the label's merch -- from the front of their singles to promo photos of bands. The now instantly recognizable mark had been crafted by Helene Silverman, West Anderson, and noted northwest poster artist Art Chantry. The "Loser" shirt pre-dates -- but was popular alongside -- both Richard Linklater's zeitgeist-y 1991 film "Slacker" and Beck's inaugural hit, "Loser" in 1994.


8. The Singles Club: Sub Pop, Seven Inches A Month
There's a simple logic to the kid-like idea of wanting to "collect them all" that small labels had not really tapped into -- at least not masterfully -- until Sup Pop kicked off their Singles Club in 1988 with the release of the "Love Buzz" 7-inch on by a new trio called Nirvana. For $35 bucks a year, subscribers received a new 7-inch from a different band each month. The singles, which included sides from the likes of Mudhoney, the Flaming Lips, Fugazi, and Sonic Youth were always limited to 5000 copies or less and were often issued on bubble-gum colored vinyl complete with a cover bearing Sub Pop's logo, their Futura Bold typeface, and some Seattle-born snark ("Hey Loser... all you have to do is send us your money" the solicitation cards read). The money, meanwhile, bankrolled the label other releases and to a large degree, helped keep it afloat in the early years. The Singles Club's first incarnation ran until the end of 1993, and some of the coveted 45s can still fetch hundreds of dollars on eBay.


7. The Shins Hit the Charts
The achievement doesn't need much embellishment or explanation: In January of 2007, the Shins earned the highest chart position of any previous Sub Pop release when its third album, "Wincing the Night Away," peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard 200. The album also went on to grab a 2008 Grammy nomination for Best Alternative Music Album (Ironically, the White Stripes, who had at one time released music on Sub Pop, won that Grammy).
6. Soundgarden's First Label
Before they were a massive arena band with multiplatinum major label albums and singles on the Billboard charts, Soundgarden was one of the bands working the insular Seattle rock clubs of the mid to late 80s. While that scene was small by anyone's measure, Chris Cornell's arias of metal-tinged vocals, Kim Thayil's chugging riffs and a rhythm section powered by in-demand drummer Matt Cameron, along with a work ethic that made them strive to play as often as possible quickly turned Soundgarden into the one of the biggest draws among local bands. Sub Pop, even before officially incorporating as a label in 1988, was quick to recognize the band's power and potential and jumped to be Soundgarden's first real label, releasing a single ("Hunted Down") and an EP ("Screaming Life" on orange vinyl) in 1987 before the band went on to bigger indie SST and, eventually, major A&M. But Soundgarden's role in Sub Pop history is even more involved. Thayil and co-founder Jonathan Poneman were friends and DJ's on local station KCMU at the time and not only did Poneman become Soundgarden's manager for a brief moment during this time, one version of the story has it that Thayil was a driving force behind getting Poneman and Bruce Pavitt to really pursue pairing up to run Sub Pop.

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5. Sunny Day Real Estate and the Rise of Emo
Emo may currently be a lucrative pop punk genre tag that calls to mind groups like Dashboard Confessional, Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance but that was not always the case. Sub Pop band Sunny Day Real Estate was key in steering what had been a flavor of mid-80s punk created by DC bands like Rites of Spring and Fugazi towards its now-standard more rock-bound sound. Sunny Day's 1994 Sub Pop album, "Diary," marks the moment when classic emo became modern emo.

4. The Geffen/Nirvana Connection
With a round of heavy layoffs and a pair of distribution deals that didn't come to fruition, 1991 started out as a very rough year for Sub Pop. Two local pop culture publications, the Rocket and Seattle Weekly, ran cover stories that year detailing all the label's money troubles and imminent demise. Right in the middle of the mess, Nirvana bassist Chris Novoselic reportedly demanded that Sub Pop founder Bruce Pavitt pony up an actual multi-recording contract for Nirvana. For the first time, Sub Pop went for it, and later that year when major Geffen/DGC wanted Nirvana, the big label had to buy out Sub Pop's contract to the tune of a percentage of future royalties and a little Sub Pop logo on the band's next albums. To say that the Geffen infusion that came along with the multi-platinum success of 1991's "Nevermind" -- and the interest in Nirvana's Sub Pop back catalog -- practically saved Sub Pop would not be an understatement.


3. Flight of Conchords: Sub Pop's First Grammy
Sub Pop has always been identified with the various flavors of indie rock, but it was comedy that finally brought the label one kind of mainstream recognition: a Grammy. In some ways, perhaps David Cross set a standard with his 2002 album. "Shut Up You Fu*king Baby!," Sub Pop's first full-length comedy set, earned a Grammy nomination for Best Comedy Album. Five years later, New Zealand musical comedy duo Flight of the Conchords (pictured) not only repeated Cross's feat, but they topped it. In February 2008, Conchords' album "The Distant Future" became the first Sub Pop release to ever win a Grammy.


2. Nirvana's "Bleach"
"Hypnotic and righteous heaviness from these Olympia pop stars. They're young, they own their own van, and they're going to make us rich!' Whoever wrote that Sub Pop catalog blurb touting Nirvana's debut album, "Bleach," had no idea how prescient they were. For under $700, the trio of Kurt Cobain, Chris Novoselic, and drummer Chad Channing had cobbled together songs from singles and demos in a series of sessions with producer Jack Endino. Released in June of 1989, "Bleach" goes on to be the best-selling album in Sub Pop history, notching over 1.5 million copies sold.

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1. Sub Pop Officially Becomes a Label
Sub Pop co-founder Bruce Pavitt had been using the name Subterranean Pop for a zine about indie music in America since 1979. By 1983, he was writing a column in Seattle's music paper, The Rocket, and doing a local radio show, both called Sup Pop U.S.A. While he did include the occasional cassette compilation along with the zine, it wasn't until he teamed up with promoter and fellow KCMU dj Jonathan Poneman around 1987 that the label really took shape. Some iconic Sub Pop releases were unleashed in 1987 - notably Soundgarden's "Screaming Life" ep - but the pair didn't officially incorporate Sub Pop until April 1, 1988, an April Fool's move that's now survived 20 years -- longer than many of the bands that made the label famous. If Pavitt and Poneman had never gone into business together, their tongue-in-cheek "world domination" - which began by documenting a scene and went beyond that - the world would not have ever really embraced that unique group of bands from the Pacific Northwest quite the same way. Sub Pop rounded up some good sounds and they gave it a brand name. And depending on how you feel about it, you can arguably either thank Sub Pop or blame them for popularizing the music usage of the word grunge.

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