-The grunge revolution starts percolating in Seattle.
-You could just feel days of rain in the music.
-It was this whole lifestyle. Oh, they all wear plaid.
-Sub Pop, a small local record label,
launches this new sound.
-Sub Pop's unbelievable influence...
That was the beginning of the decade.
- you, corporate America.
We're going to take control of our own culture.
-Legends are born.
-Nirvana borrowed $600
and we made the "Bleach" album.
- But success... - Kurt was on fire.
Audience going crazy. - Comes with a price.
-It's better to burn out than to fade away.
-Times had changed.
-They felt things should be going in another direction.
-This isn't really in any of the history books.
♪♪
[ Dial-up modems screeching ]
♪♪
-It's the dawn of the '90s
and a rumbling is heard from the Pacific Northwest.
-♪ Whoa ♪
-The distortion of heavy metal fused with the chaos of punk.
-It was the right music at the right time.
-♪ Come on ♪
♪ Talk to me, I'm sick ♪
-This angsty new Seattle sound is called grunge,
and it'll come to dominate the decade's billboard
charts around the globe.
-It's not even so much as sound as it really is an attitude.
-♪ Come on, baby, now come with me ♪
♪ You don't come... ♪
-It really did express this kind of inner torment and it was fun.
[ Thunder crashing ]
-The often gloomy, rain-soaked city of Seattle
might seem like an unlikely spot
to birth a new form of rock and roll described as fun.
-With all this rainfall, you can see the evidence
of what appears to be a fresh slide there.
-I remember one time in the '90s,
it rained every day for three months.
Actually, I think it was a bit over three months
because it made the news.
You can hear jokes in movies and plays mentioning Seattle
and how it's just this kind of podunk town.
People didn't even know where Seattle was.
-I'm Gillian Gaar, and I'm the author of
"World Domination: The Sub Pop Records Story".
-Because it's a port city,
it was a little darker place than maybe somewhere else.
And it was really depressed in the '80s and '90s.
Part of the problem was just being isolated
in the Pacific Northwest.
So a lot of bands didn't make it up this far.
I'm Charles Peterson
and I photographed the grunge scene back in the '90s.
-But it's exactly this sense of isolation and despair
that inspires a new sound emerging from bands playing
Seattle's dive bars and small music venues.
-♪ The place becoming dark, all things seem dim ♪
♪ Something crawls out and crawls in my head ♪
-You could just feel the days of rain in the music.
I love the drenching guitar sound,
the down tuning, you know, the sludgy-ness of it,
the distortion. It had so much grit in it.
-♪ Oh ♪
-I'm Matt Pinfield, radio and TV host for almost four decades.
I went on to become a vice president of Columbia Records
for seven years, and I'm still going.
-Some Seattle bands first experimenting
with that gritty sound are Soundgarden,
Green River, and Tad, but major labels from L.A.
and New York never signed bands from this forgotten city.
-The music scene in Seattle was very small.
There were a handful of bands playing original music
that was not cover tunes.
I'm Jack Endino. I'm a record producer,
engineer, and musician.
There's a whole history of Seattle bands
that you don't hear about now.
I know because I have some of their tapes
sitting on my living room floor right now.
The bands came and went at a time
when there was nobody to put out a record.
Maybe they managed to come up with the money
to put out a seven-inch and that was it.
-You know, we were in our early 20s
and we had our little day jobs and rent
was maybe $300 a month,
but somebody wanted to hear our music.
Well, the only way to do that was to scrape
together enough money and pull up your sleeves
and put this thing out, and that's the spirit of DIY.
-Nobody was doing it for the money, at least initially.
They were doing it for the love of the music itself
because there was no money.
You know? There just wasn't.
-This do-it-yourself ethos
is fundamental to the birth of the Seattle sound
and leads to the creation of Sub Pop Records.
-Sub Pop's unbelievable influence...
That was the beginning of the decade.
-I was fortunate enough
to kind of come of age during the punk rock New Wave era
of the late '70s.
I was discovering indie singles by Devo from Akron,
or the B-52s from Athens.
I am Bruce Pavitt, and along with Jonathan Poneman,
I'm the founder of Sub Pop Records.
As a young person, 18, 19,
I realized that you didn't have to live in New York or L.A.
to put out your own music.
The more I started thinking about
the importance of DIY culture,
the more passionate I got about it.
The idea of saying, "...you, corporate America,
we're going to take control of our own culture."
So that was deeply inspiring.
-The name "Sub Pop" comes from Pavitt's time
working as a DJ down in Olympia, Washington,
at his college radio station KOAS.
-I had a radio show called "Subterranean Pop".
I turned that into a fanzine called "Subterranean Pop",
which was abbreviated to "Sub/Pop".
And then I moved up to Seattle
to try and find some work.
-In Seattle, Pavitt finds a day job
duplicating tapes at Muzak,
the famous elevator music company.
And in his spare time,
he releases his first vinyl compilation.
I released "Sub Pop 100".
It was bands from around the country...
Sonic Youth from New York,
The U-Men from Seattle.
It sold about 5,000 copies,
which at the time was like having a gold record
in the indie punk world.
I was living in an apartment.
College radio stations could call my answering machine
and I'd ship out records.
After I had released "Sub Pop 100",
I decided to focus on Seattle.
The live music scene was going off.
Every musician would check out all the other local bands,
so it was a very vibrant, creative community.
The vibe was really people blowing off steam,
jumping off PA speakers
because they were really drunk, mostly on beer,
but also, notoriously, heroin.
A lot of the bands were listening to punk
and art punk bands like Sonic Youth, for example.
But what distinguishes us
is we also listened to Black Sabbath and Aerosmith.
It was a sound that was coming together.
-Pavitt's next move is setting his sights
on the most enigmatic indie band on the scene, Green River.
-Green River's a live show was amazing.
-Fronted by Mark Arm,
Green River also includes Jeff Ament and guitar player
Stone Gossard, who'll later become
founding members of Pearl Jam,
a band that will go on to sell over 30 million records.
As Pavitt begins negotiating with Green River
to produce their first album,
he meets the man who will become his future business partner.
-I joined forces with a local promoter and radio DJ,
Jonathan Poneman.
-John Poneman was a promoter. He put on shows
There'd be a building that was,
you know, condemned or something like that
and have shows there for a little bit.
-You know, I'm a failed pop musician myself.
So, you know, I kind of decided, "Well,
I'm going to play in crummy band after crummy band.
I may as well rep some of these bands
who might have a chance of doing something."
-Although I'd seen John around
and had a lot of respect for him,
it was Kim Thayll from Soundgarden
that kind of brought us together.
Kim said, "Hey, John is interested
in putting out our first record. You've already got a label.
Why don't you guys just join forces?"
And at the time, I had not a lot of cash.
John had a little bit of cash,
so that kind of made the difference.
-Together, Pavitt and Poneman share a singular vision...
to put Seattle's music on vinyl and on the map.
To do that, they need help.
-Jack Endino did miracles with a very low budget.
He recorded the bands live in his studio.
They sounded totally raw. They sounded great.
-Almost the very first clients that I brought into the studio
were Green River and Soundgarden.
I was doing the damnedest I could with very little gear
and very little time and money
to make some reasonably decent recordings.
But they pretty much let me do my thing.
The most I would ever hear from them was,
"Jack, just make it rock."
-Along with Jack Endino, Pavitt and Poneman
enlist the help of Charles Peterson,
whose photographs become the band's album art.
-I think there are parallels between
the look of my photography and Jack Endino's production.
It's raw, but refined at the same time.
-You had an excellent producer, an excellent photographer.
So eventually, the buzz and the hype would build.
-Sub Pop releases Soundgarden's first single "Hunted Down",
which they include for free
when they send out copies of Green River's "Dry as a Bone".
-We had two great sounding bands in one package.
It was really an announcement to the world that a scene was here.
-The first thing that I heard coming out of Seattle
was about Soundgarden.
A friend of mine from New York City,
he turned me on to the "Hunted Down" single,
and I thought it was great.
I would play it on my college radio show.
-John and I really felt that if we could stay focused on
Seattle, it's kind of like a Motown approach, right,
where you've got an established vibe
and just keep pumping out the underground hits.
-They acted like their acts and their labels were already stars.
Not "This is the next big thing",
but "This is the big thing." [ Chuckles ]
"And why haven't you caught up?" They just put out this idea.
"We have the most amazing rock scene in the world."
-Soundgarden brings the label attention,
and when a cheap lease comes up for an office,
Sub Pop acquires its first bricks and mortar home.
-I remember I had Bruce coming to me. He's like,
"Dude, we just signed the lease." And I'm like,
"Wow, guys, that's a big step here."
Take me up the elevator. We get off, and I'm like,
"Where's the office?" And they're like,
"Oh, wait a minute." We go around.
We go up these little set of steps.
I'm like, "Okay?" And it's just sort of one room,
like the janitor's room or something at some point.
They were storing records in the bathroom.
So when you went in to use the bathroom,
you were flanked by cardboard boxes
of Green River or whatever.
-Now armed with a name,
a office, and some talented friends,
Bruce and John discover they're missing
a pretty key component of any record label.
-We realized all of a sudden, we didn't have any bands.
-At the start of the '90s,
while most of America is riding an economic boom,
Seattle is stuck in the '80s' economic malaise.
To the rest of the country,
the city is just another blue collar backwater
with few opportunities.
Even its indie coffee chain, Starbucks,
is still trapped in the gloom.
-Tall, nonfat, foam latte.
-But just like Starbucks,
Sub Pop is on the verge of breaking out.
By including a free Soundgarden single with every sale
of their first LP, Green River's "Dry as a Bone",
Sub Pop get attention for both bands from radio
DJs across the country.
But soon after, there's a crisis at the young company.
-When John and I opened our office doors,
Green River basically handed us the tape for their next record
and announced that they were breaking up.
-It's a big setback to Sub Pop's immediate plans,
but at least they have Soundgarden
to fall back on.
That is until Soundgarden signed with SST,
a more established indie label from Long Beach, California.
-That was challenging.
However, Mudhoney was a new band
that was formed by the singer of Green River, Mark Arm,
and Mudhoney wound up having their first show,
I believe it was 10 days after we opened our office doors,
and they were incredible.
We had this mind blowing new band
that we just fortunately stumbled into.
-After signing Mudhoney, they had the grunge bands
Tad, L7, and Dinosaur Jr. to their roster.
-The early days of Sub Pop were very stressful,
but also, they were very creative
and they were less regimented.
Anybody who had a good idea, you would just act on it.
A lot of the joy
that I experienced in the early days of Sub Pop
was just spending time with John.
He's just one of the most interesting people I've met.
We think very differently.
But there's a good chemistry there.
-With money tight, Bruce and John turn to their friends
to help out.
-John and Bruce... They really needed somebody.
So they were like, "Come in and be our receptionist
and take photos at night."
And they had what was called the singles club at the time,
where you paid for a year's worth of seven inch singles.
And I would come in, open all the letters,
find out where the checks for the singles clubs were,
run them down to the bank.
That was the first thing. Always, like, get the money
and go to the bank. Get the money, go to the bank.
-Those members of that singles club, you know,
help float the label for a while.
-Their phone was going to get cut off
their first month in business.
So, they themselves would not claim
any great strengths as businessmen.
But they did have a goal.
-To get the world hooked on grunge,
Pavitt and Poneman launched the Sub Pop version
of the British Invasion.
-You're in Seattle.
You're trying to get attention for your label.
You're trying to get attention for your music scene.
You can't get any traction with the media from L.A. or New York.
So Bruce and John came up with the clever idea
to get the UK press to talk about Seattle.
-They thought, "Well, let's bring over
a British rock journalist to write about it."
Everett True from "Melody Maker".
So they bring him over and they set up all these shows
so he could see the bands.
-Bought him drinks, wined and dined him,
and just, you know, had his face get ripped off
at some of these grunge shows at the time.
He was impressed and he thought,
"Well, dang, there's something going on here, you know?"
-Mudhoney was about to go over on their first UK tour.
They got two front page stories in "Melody Maker".
-Then the US media was like, "Wait a minute.
What is the UK talking about here?"
[ Chainsaw running ]
-Sub Pop's publicity plan includes
using an age old advertising strategy...
To give their bands an origin story,
one distinctly rooted in the American Northwest.
-Bruce and John liked to sell the idea of their acts
being these rough and tumble loggers, lumberjack types,
which, apparently, some of these folks did believe.
I remember reading they were disappointed to find out
that members of Mudhoney had actually gone to college.
That just sort of... "Oh, oh, what do you mean?"
I talked to Kurt Danielson of Tad about that once.
Kurt said, you know, "We knew they were selling
this notion of us as being like this.
And on the one hand, we resented it.
But on the other hand, we got coverage.
It's image and image is a part of rock and roll.
So we'll just go along with it."
-The marketing of musicians as blue collar workers
helps sell records and gives hopes to other bands
living in the remote communities surrounding Seattle.
-If you think Seattle was sort of dark and depressed and '90's,
I mean, Aberdeen... if any place in the Pacific Northwest
there's excess rain, it's there.
-Aberdeen is just one of many small logging towns
still hurting from the '80s recession.
High unemployment leads to high levels of alcoholism.
It's here that a local band named Nirvana first hears
about Sub Pop's talented producer, Jack Endino.
-Kurt just called up and said, "Yeah, I've got this band.
We're coming from Aberdeen. We want to record a few songs.
We just need an afternoon." and I said, "Okay."
In one five-hour session, they recorded 10 songs.
You know, I basically mixed it right then and there.
I thought, "This band is kind of cool.
You know, who are these guys? I kind of like this."
I said, "Hey, you know, do you mind
if I roll the tape again
to make myself a copy of these mixes?"
And they said, "Yeah, go ahead and make a copy for yourself."
And I gave a copy of it to Bruce and John.
Jonathan liked it. Bruce wasn't sure.
-So Cobain convinces Bruce and John
to see his band play live.
-This isn't really in any of the history books,
but they drove up to Seattle and did a little show.
It was at the Central Tavern at 8:00 on a Sunday,
and there was nobody in the tavern except John, myself,
a couple of girlfriends, a roadie. That was about it.
And after that show, which was not too impressive,
I have to say, we decided we'd do a single
and see how it went.
-Sub Pop adds Nirvana's "Love Buzz" to the singles club.
It does okay, but Pavitt's not convinced
they're ready for a full album.
-And so they said, "If we pay for it ourselves,
can we make a full album if we pay for the session?"
So Nirvana borrowed $600 from a friend of theirs
and we made the "Bleach" album.
-The "Bleach" album boosts both Kurt's and Nirvana's confidence
and they start killing it at local shows.
-Kurt was like on fire, like, the audience going crazy.
It was incredible and I couldn't take enough pictures.
-Nirvana's first album doesn't break any sales records,
but Sub Pop now sees the band's potential
and takes them on a European tour with Tad and Mudhoney.
But being on tour almost proves too much for the band
from Aberdeen's frontman.
-John and I decided to put together
a showcase in London.
Now, a week prior to the showcase,
Kurt literally had what I would call a breakdown on stage.
They didn't finish the show.
He told the rest of the band
that he could not do this anymore
and that the band was breaking up.
John took Kurt around the block, just trying to chill him out
and give him some perspective and give him some support.
Kurt said, "You know, when I look out into the audience,
what I see... I see all the kids
who wanted to beat me up in high school."
We pulled Kurt aside and spent the day with him in Rome
and we did some sightseeing,
For him to just experience
one of the world's greatest cities,
chill out, and have some good food.
I think he was able to regain his spirit.
So when the band finally played London at the Astoria
to a sold out crowd of 2,000 people,
they blew some minds.
-Nirvana, along with Tad and Mudhoney, rock the UK.
Europe gets a taste of grunge and they eat it up.
But soon, it looks like the tour
is not the only thing Kurt is anxious to wrap up.
-By the summer of '91, the rumors were starting to fly.
-With the release of "Bleach"
and the buzz growing around Nirvana's European tour,
the once-unknown band now
has interest from major record labels.
And there are rumors that Nirvana is thinking
about making a change.
-John said, "Can you drive down to Olympia,
spend an afternoon with Kurt and convince him to stay on
Sub Pop?"
-Having lost Soundgarden to another label
in Sub Pop's earliest days, Pavitt is anxious
to avoid having it happen again with Nirvana.
-I went down to Kurt's place and I brought two records...
A songwriter named Daniel Johnston
and a vintage disk that had a cult following
by a teen girl group called The Shaggs.
These were the two most outsider records
I had in my entire collection,
and I brought those with me as a gift.
My point was we are an indie label.
We are always going to champion the outsider.
Major labels do not think that way.
You'll have a brief opportunity.
If it doesn't work out,
you're not going to have a relationship.
We, on the other hand, despite our financial ups and downs,
it's in our spirit, it's in our DNA.
This is what we do.
We basically listened to music all afternoon.
And I left feeling that I had made a connection.
I thought, "Yeah, we bonded. That was great."
Later, I was told that at that time,
Kurt definitely was going to a major
and there was nothing
that I could say that was going to change that.
The part of him that wanted to be a pop star
was starting to come out, and the rest is history.
-Nirvana leaves Sub Pop for Geffen Records.
Only months later, they released their second album, "Nevermind".
The first single, "Smells Like Teen Spirit",
goes triple platinum.
-There were a bunch of different radio programmers
and record label people.
We were all outside CBG
for some showcase in New York City,
and the whole conversation on the sidewalk
was all about this new song.
What are the lyrics? What is he saying?
We felt that it was a tremor of something
that was starting to happen. Major earthquake, a blow torch.
-♪ With the lights out, it's less dangerous ♪
♪ Here we are now... ♪
- "Nevermind" knocks hair bands off the charts
and catapults grunge into the top 40.
-Something happened.
They flip the script and they were the crazy... the big band.
Just almost overnight.
-Another Seattle band is ascending right behind Nirvana.
Pearl Jam, whose first album, "Ten",
was released a month before "Nevermind",
helped cement grunge as a new mainstream music genre.
-Soundgarden, Screaming Trees, Pearl Jam, and Alice in Chains
all winding up on the major label album charts.
And then Nirvana, of course,
blowing everybody out of the water.
-Suddenly, the once overlooked city of Seattle
is the hottest town in the country.
-And there was definitely a gold rush.
All the major record labels in the world
were rushing to Seattle.
-As long as you had a name that was like two distinct nouns
and you shoved them together,
the record labels were looking for it.
-Grunge is A... a Marine Corps private,
B... a new breakfast cereal, C... none of the above.
If you answered none of the above, you're right.
What they are are forms of alternative music.
-We all could see what was happening.
This grunge thing had taken on a life of its own
and had become kind of a fad.
-The grunge phenomenon... I had mixed feelings about it.
On the one hand,
I was slightly amused that it had taken off,
you know, Marc Jacobs' runway show
and the movie singles.
It was kind of amusing,
the desperation of the mainstream culture
of wanting to figure out what was going on.
-It was this whole lifestyle or the presumed lifestyle
that we had up here that was being marketed.
"Oh, yes, they drink microbrews all the time",
and "Oh, they all wear plaid."
It was fascinating watching this phenomenon
develop from the ground up.
- "The New York Times" called my business partner,
Jonathan Poneman, to share some in-the-know grunge slang,
and he was smart enough to allow our receptionist,
Megan Jasper, to answer that question.
And she just spontaneously came up with the craziest stuff...
"wacky slacks", "swinging on the flippity flop".
She later told me, "I kept getting stranger and stranger
and I just thought at some point, they'd realize
that this was a joke,
and they just kept going with it."
To this day, I think it's just
one of the most brilliant pranks ever.
-Anything that becomes remotely successful,
they are going to try and make money off of it.
I mean, people have been doing that forever.
Any kind of pop culture thing kind of cannibalizes itself
at some point.
-Sub Pop's dream of turning the Seattle
sound into a global phenomenon comes true.
But as the saying goes, be careful what you wish for.
-Indie bands started to see this phenomenal success.
Sub Pop, to our credit, we gave focus to the scene.
We let the world know that Seattle was blowing up,
and we did our job so well,
there was a stampede towards the major label system.
-Even indie diehards Mudhoney
are lured away by one of the corporate giants.
But as Sub Pop's roster departs to chase big money,
the company's survival is tied to a 10 cent investment
it had made years earlier.
-Typically, indie labels did not have contracts.
It was a handshake deal.
Once a record became profitable,
the profits were split 50/50 with the artist.
That's just what you did.
However, a few months after we released "Bleach",
the bass player, Krist Novoselic, came to my house
late at night in a somewhat aggravated state.
I was actually kind of nervous because Chris is a big guy
and he seemed very intent on getting a contract.
He wanted to be protected.
So the next day, John went to the public library
and Xeroxed a boilerplate contract,
used a little White-Out, massaged it a little bit.
I mean, this contract cost us
10 cents to make.
-That boilerplate contract
becomes Sub Pop's financial lifeline
by allowing the company to earn a percentage of both
"Bleach" and the highly successful "Nevermind".
-Royalties came in from "Nevermind"
and really helped the label out a lot.
-While Nirvana's success helps keep the lights on
at Sub Pop Records,
for Kurt Cobain, it brings only darkness.
-Until we confirm and notify the family,
we will not release the name.
-A friend of Kurt called me up
and said, "Hey, did you hear what happened?"
-Like so many things in life, drugs work in cycles.
20 years ago, heroin was the rage,
and you better believe it's back.
-This is not a picture, in my view, of a nation
winning a drug war.
-In the '90s, cities across America see
the resurrection of the beast,
another name for heroin.
And Seattle's grunge scene is ground zero.
-Heroin related deaths are up across the country,
doubling over the past three years, in Seattle.
-Heroin has always been there.
It's like this dark demon through the rock and roll world,
rock business for all these years, you know?
And not everybody gets out like Keith Richards, man.
-And by the decade's end, the drug will kill a half dozen
of grunge music's brightest stars.
But it's one of those deaths that sent shockwaves
around the world.
-For people too young
to remember when Jim Morrison or Jimi Hendrix
or even John Lennon died, the death of Kurt Cobain
evoked a similar sense of loss.
-Everybody in the world knows where they were,
like, people talk about when they knew
where they were when Kennedy was shot.
People know where they were when Kurt Cobain committed suicide.
I mean, it affecting an entire generation.
-Reports that Kurt was high on heroin
when he pulled the trigger will make the drug central
to the story of his suicide.
-I woke up that morning and I'd run into Kurt
a couple weeks earlier
and he'd give me his phone number.
And I thought, "Oh, man, I should call Kurt.
You know, I know he's kind of lonely."
And and I looked at the clock and it was like 10:30.
And I'm like, "No, that's way too early for him.
I'll call him later."
And then the phone rang and it was literally
"Entertainment Weekly", "Rolling Stone", "Time".
Internalized it,
and just for the next two or three days,
just made prints to fill magazine requests
and then just kind of had a nervous breakdown after that.
♪♪
-Kurt's death is a loss for music lovers everywhere,
but nowhere does it cut
as deeply as the Seattle music scene.
-They had a public memorial. There's a fountain
and there's a huge bowl.
And people just filled it completely,
just this whole sea of people there.
It was just quite amazing
and astonishing to see.
-That news was very devastating.
Felt really sorry for his daughter.
I had a daughter who was about the same age at the time.
And to think of the effect
that that would have on his kid was just...
It's hard to process.
Kurt was highly sensitive, a creative artist type,
who rapidly became one of the world's biggest rock stars
after growing up in a remote town.
-I mean, I think it's that whole thing
where you want that success, but you don't want all
the things that go along with it necessarily.
All of those responsibilities, like the meet and greets,
the dealing with radio stations,
all the press.
Some people can handle it,
but some people are socially uncomfortable.
-Personally, I had to rethink about what I was doing
with my life. I mean, I helped discover this guy,
I helped promote the act.
In a way, was just kind of a fairy tale scenario.
We're all doing what we were supposed to do
and this is how it ends?
-Even as the founders of Sub Pop mourn the loss of Kurt Cobain,
they also faced the prospect of losing their business.
Record companies being crushed by major labels
flocking to capitalize on the grunge scene
that Sub Pop helped create.
-It was really hard to compete for the artists,
so it was an epic struggle keeping people paid.
We had employees, they had mortgages.
We had to keep things going.
-The thing is, you got to remember
that Sub Pop had ambitions,
but they still didn't have the money
to get a band into the mainstream
and into the media in a country the size of the United States.
So the bands figured this out
and knew that if they were going to try and make a career of it,
that they needed to somehow affiliate themselves
with the real music industry "machinery"
that was established.
-Unable to attract new talent,
the little indie label that could starts running out
of steam.
To avoid derailing completely,
they do something that would have once seemed inconceivable.
They sell out.
-We eventually did a deal with Warner Music.
We only sold 49% of the company,
which was unheard of, so we maintained control.
-But even with the new backing of a major label,
Sub Pop struggles to reinvent itself.
-Once Sub Pop hooked up with Warner's,
they have more money to work with.
They were just blowing it again.
They poured too much money into acts that didn't pay off.
-It was like a classic trap of "What would the majors do?
They would sign this band for a quarter million dollars."
Like, what the... are we doing?
So...
that was dumb.
-When things get so big, we tend to lose control of it.
There's that many more cooks in the kitchen
and you want the money for what you've done
and be compensated for all the hard work.
And at the same time, it loses its original manifesto,
its reason for being.
-Soon after signing with Warner, the Sub Pop founders
will be forced to make an agonizing decision.
-You can't just abandon your baby.
-It's the middle of the decade and grunge is now mainstream.
Seattle's once vibrant indie scene
is anything but independent.
Even the owners of Sub Pop have been forced to partner
with mega-label Warner Music,
but the marriage is troubled almost from the start.
-For me, coming out of the indie culture,
once you shift from hiring friends
who are smart and creative
to "Let's look at resumes from people
who've worked in corporate environments
because we need to grow up.
We need people who have relationships with MTV,"
it's a different vibe, if you will.
And this is something that has killed creative
organizations over and over again,
when accountants by creative organizations
and then start telling people what to do.
-The tension is fracturing the bond
between Pavitt and Poneman.
Their personal differences that they once celebrated
now drive a wedge between them.
-I think Bruce was possibly making as many mistakes
or bad decisions as John was at the time.
And then it just was a lot of misunderstandings.
-Like a vinyl record,
there are now two sides at Sub Pop.
On one, Bruce and the indie ethos
that first launched the label.
On the other, John,
trying to appease the corporate moneymen
that are keeping them afloat.
-'97 came with what they now call
"the coup" in Sub Pop's history,
where some members of the company confronted John
with how Sub Pop was being run.
They finally present him a letter with their demands.
They weren't trying to oust Jonathan by any means,
but they felt things should be going in another direction
and these people should be hired
and perhaps others should be let go.
Jonathan took it as too much of a challenge to his authority,
and he felt he was being undermined.
And his response was to fire the four
that had written the letter.
-I was very upset when John fired some employees
who I personally felt
were actually the most valuable employees in the company.
In fact, I was so upset I didn't just leave Sub Pop.
I moved from Seattle to a remote island.
I just took a hard left turn and left the biz.
-It made two guys that I think are so amazing
be at odds with each other, and there was friction,
and, you know, they didn't speak for a very long time.
-Even though Bruce and John are somewhat equal,
Bruce was the figurehead.
I mean, he was the weird bald guy
with the occasional Castro beard and he represented Sub Pop.
And so, for him to give it all up and leave was...
Yeah, that shocked everybody.
I mean, this is your baby.
Like, you can't just abandon your baby, you know?
But I guess you can.
-After the coup and Bruce being angry
at how things went down, Bruce and John,
they didn't communicate except through their attorneys.
Bruce sold his shares in the company,
which sort of... now he has no attachment anymore.
He described as being like settling a divorce.
-I would say the middle of the '90s,
guitars even kind of went out of favor
for a while after Kurt died.
People sort of got a little wake up call
and just kind of said,
"Is there some other music we could listen to?"
I called it the big grunge hangover,
because I could tell that, you know,
this thing had blown up and now everybody was like...
It's like they wake up the next morning
with a headache and go, "Oh, what was all that about?"
-But music, like nature, abhors a vacuum.
And what fills the one left by grunge?
-♪ Oh, baby, it's no lie ♪
♪ I never thought I'd make you cry ♪
-Is that, like, Mini-Me over there next to you?
[ Cheering ]
-Things changed a lot at the end of the '90s.
The boy bands really took a hold on popular culture.
Backstreet Boys, NSYNC, 98 Degrees.
-Mid-'90s boy bands are factory produced by label executives,
and the performers rarely, if ever,
write their own songs or play any instruments.
The days of rain inspired angst music of the Seattle
sound is replaced by blue skies and bubblegum.
-Things had changed in a big way, and they do.
You know, everything's so cyclical in music
and the way things go.
-With most of the world moving on from grunge,
many see the indie label who helped launch it
as both corporate and irrelevant.
But Sub Pop is about to prove these people wrong.
-The best part of the story is the comeback.
-Seattle kind of came of age in the '90s.
Amazon came into play. Starbucks started to accelerate.
There was an identity transformation
that happened in Seattle in the '90s, and all of a sudden,
Seattle became the place to move to,
and that had a lot to do with the vibrancy
of the entrepreneurial culture of Seattle.
-Seattle's transformation from damp backwater
to destination city couldn't have happened without Sub Pop
or the grunge movement that put them on the map.
But that metamorphosis wasn't without its casualties.
The tragic loss of Kurt Cobain in 1994
is followed by the death of two more icons.
Alice in Chains frontman Layne Staley
overdosed eight years to the day of Cobain's suicide,
and in 2017, Soundgarden's Chris Cornell
ended his life after a long struggle
with addiction and depression.
But unlike those legends,
Sub Pop records will neither burn out nor fade away.
-Megan Jasper really helped turn Sub Pop around.
She had a long history with the label.
She had worked for them in the late '80s
and early '90s and been laid off.
-Megan Jasper is the woman who delivered her
fake glossary of grunge terms to the media years earlier.
-Then in '97, she decided to come back
and she said that, you know, some of her friends
and others were saying, you know,
"Why do you want to go back there?
They're in trouble now," which they were.
And she knew that. She actually told me that
the staff was so demoralized that they wouldn't wear
Sub Pop T-shirts because they were too embarrassed by it.
So she kind of seemed like a cheerleader in a sense.
-♪ I am thinking it's a sign ♪
-Soon after Megan's arrival that you had the successes
with The Shins and then The Postal Service,
and again, another unexpected success,
they turn out to be a big seller and that really helped Sub Pop.
-Sub Pop's second wave gives the label
its second platinum record after Nirvana's "Bleach".
Postal Service is a new generation
of indie bands out of Seattle,
and their album, "Give Up" speaks to a whole new age.
-♪ They will see us waving from such great heights ♪
♪ Come down now... ♪
-Sub Pop survived, and a lot of the indie labels
from that era did not, so Sub Pop did something right.
-They're willing to try different things.
They've been able to reinvent themselves
and they're running in a more financially responsible manner.
Megan Jasper is now, I believe, CEO.
It's interesting to note that some of the bands
that left came back.
-Mudhoney is back on Sub Pop now, actually,
and quite happy with it, I think.
-Sub Pop's slogan is
"Going out of business since 1988",
and now they're a Seattle institution.
Now, who would have thought that this company that worried
they were going to have to close their doors
after their first month's operation
and they just had their 30th anniversary in 2018.
-They do have a nice ending to this story.
John and I reconnected in the early aughts.
As I started really appreciating the music
and really appreciating the wonderful work
that John and Megan has done,
John and I just started talking more and more.
-Eventually, Bruce Pavitt also returns to the label
he co-founded.
He now serves as a consultant to John Poneman at Sub Pop.
-We were able to help blow up Seattle
with nothing more than a phone and a writing utensil.
That was an exciting adventure.
And it's something I'll always really, really value.
-There were times when they were hanging on by a thread,
almost bankrupt, almost out of money,
yet came back and became a very important
and viable label again.
You know, that's the sign of a great label.
I can honestly say that.
-It's a happy ending.
[ Chuckles ]