Sub Pop is one of the most important and influential American record labels. Started in 1988 by Jonathan Poneman and Bruce Pavitt, and based in Seattle, Sup Pop put out early recordings by such groups as Mudhoney, the Afghan Whigs, the Flaming Lips, Soundgarden, the Screaming Trees, and Nirvana. Poneman and Pavitt not only have good taste and a keen sense for what will sell, but are also masters at branding and marketing. For example, their Sub Pop Singles Club, in which subscribers willingly fork over their money with no prior knowledge of the participating bands, was a game changer, and the label came up with a t-shirt with the word “Loser” emblazoned across the front, and the Sub Pop logo on the back. The shirt is now iconic.

On June 9, 1989, Sub Pop’s “Lame Fest” was held at the Moore Theater in Seattle. Nirvana, Mudhoney, and another young Sub Pop group, TAD, were on the bill. It was a wild night, with the bands and the crowd battling the security guards.
 

 
Dangerous Minds has an excerpt from the upcoming Gillian G. Gaar book, World Domination: The Sub Pop Records Story, in which details of the event are told. The passage also gets into the second Lame Fest, as well as the Nirvana contract, insisted upon by the band, that would one day benefit the label. The text begins with reference to the recent attention Sub Pop acts had received in the British press.

Sub Pop’s profile was further heightened stateside at the label’s first “Lame Fest,” held on June 9 at Seattle’s Moore Theatre, featuring Nirvana, TAD, and Mudhoney and billed as “Seattle’s lamest bands in a one-night orgy of sweat and insanity!” Initially, there had been doubts that the show would make any money; local bands played clubs, not a fifteen-hundred-seat theater. But the concert ended up selling out.

“Booking the Moore was an epic gesture, which is how we did things,” Bruce Pavitt notes with pride. “The bands were killing it live, so we knew Seattle would go o if we could get people there. The theater’s manager let most of his security staff go prior to the show, thinking that nobody would show up. And there was complete pandemonium. Google those YouTube videos, kids, it’s an epic moment!” The show doubled as a release party for Nirvana’s first album, Bleach (the first thousand copies on white vinyl).

Nirvana had also recently become the first act to sign a record contract with Sub Pop. Earlier in the year, Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic had turned up at Bruce’s house one evening, demanding a written contract; previously, Sub Pop had only made verbal agreements with its artists. Jon [Poneman] hastily drafted a one-year contract, with options for two further years; the contract was signed on June 3 but backdated to January 1, 1989. “Righteous heaviness from these Olympia pop stars,” was the Sub Pop catalog’s assessment of Bleach. “They’re young, they own their own van, and they’re going to make us rich!”

The success of the first Lame Fest led to a second one being held overseas. “Jon and I had very little resources but a lot of enthusiasm at that time,” Bruce recalls. “And we were constantly brainstorming and trying to piece together strategies that would help convince the rest of the world that Seattle had an amazing rock scene. Once we saw that model work in Seattle, we were really dead set on getting all three bands playing in London and getting as many press people and photographers there as possible.”

With Nirvana, TAD, and Mudhoney all touring the UK and Europe that fall, a Lame Fest date was arranged for December 3 at London’s Astoria Theatre. Bruce cites the concert as “a true turning point in the international stature of the Seattle music scene.”

 
Much more after the jump…

 
Experiencing Nirvana: Grunge in Europe, 1989 is one of those perfect records of music history that galvanizes the pedestrian as easily as the aural devotee. Chronicling eight electric (and sometimes volatile) days of Nirvana, Mudhoney, and Tad’s 1989 European tour, Sub Pop co-founder Bruce Pavitt has curated his memories, reflections and beautiful photography in an intimate compendium.On the very cusp of the grunge explosion, Pavitt had the wherewithal to photograph the small moments—moments which provide an ambient framing for this lovely scrapbook.

Bruce was kind enough to give Dangerous Minds an exclusive interview on the book, which helps support Seattle’s Vera Project.

(And for those of you in the New York area, Pavitt is launching a month-long installation exhibit at Rough Trade NYC. This Saturday, he’ll be there signing copies, with a Q&A session lead by Michael Azerrad. I’ll be in the corner fangirling and livetweeting @Amber_A_Lee.)

Amber Frost: How did this book come together?

Bruce Pavitt: My friend and editor Dan Burke and I originally released Experiencing Nirvana as an e-book using iBooks Author. Ian Christe from Bazillion Points then contacted us and offered to release it as a hardcover. The whole project has taken about a year and a half, and it’s been quite a process.

Amber Frost: The concept of a retroactive tour diary is total brain candy. Is it what you had in mind at first? Or did the format take shape as you organized your thoughts and materials?

Bruce Pavitt: From the beginning, we knew that we had a series of images that told a story; in fact we feel that Experiencing Nirvana would make an ideal storyboard for a film! Of course, we realized that the photos needed to be embellished with reconstructed diary entries to fully bring the images to life.

Amber Frost: There’s this strange sense of excitement in a lot of the photos—how much of that was the band’s growing success, and how much was just the thrill of being young and traveling?

Bruce Pavitt: A bit of both. My biz partner Jon and I knew that Nirvana, Tad and Mudhoney were three of the greatest live bands we’d ever seen. Those feelings were validated from both the crowds and the critics overseas. People went off at every show, and it built to a climax when all three bands shared the same stage in London. The photos show our appreciation of both the bands and the awe inspiring scenery.
 

Pavitt’s picture of Kurt Cobain in Rome
 
Amber Frost: What was your sense of the tour’s significance at the time? Did you have predictions? How did they turn out?

Bruce Pavitt: I’ve never taken more photos, neither before nor after. I instinctively felt that this tour would be historically significant, and both Jon and I believed that this London showcase would put Seattle on the map. As it turned out, NME proclaimed Nirvana to be “Sub Pop’s answer to the Beatles.” Our gamble paid off.

Amber Frost: You describe a lot of stress on the tour—particularly with Kurt wanting to simply go home. How fragile or stable did the band feel?

Bruce Pavitt: Both Tad and Nirvana were fairly ragged after zig zagging across Europe in a shared van for almost 6 weeks. By the time we met up with the crew in Rome, Kurt was out of patience. It was just day by day after that, until the band finished up in London.

Amber Frost: A lot of Nirvana’s legacy is obscured by the tragedy of Kurt’s death, so much so that his personality is often simplified into depression and addiction. How would you describe him as a person?

Bruce Pavitt: Kurt was essentially a sweet and sensitive guy, creative, humorous and a true fan of indie music. He was also moody, introspective, and appreciated his alone time.

Amber Frost: In the book you obviously talk about Mudhoney and Tad as well Since grunge was gaining popularity as a movement, did you predict at all that Nirvana would becoming its unwitting “stars?”

Bruce Pavitt: My Sub Pop partner Jon Poneman was Nirvana’s earliest and biggest fan. However, by the time Nirvana played London in December of ’89, I was a true believer.

Amber Frost: With the genre name no longer in use, and Sub Pop now an institution, what do you think the “legacy” of grunge is?

Bruce Pavitt: Grunge was very welcoming and inclusive. For a not-so-brief moment in time, anyone with a flannel shirt and a pawn shop guitar could feel that they had a chance to change the world. I welcome a resurgence of that attitude.

 
Sub Pop writes, “Six hundred bucks well spent—not that we had it at the time.”

Click here to read larger image.
 
Via CoS

Art by Dimitri Drjuchin

Fear Fun, the album by “Father John Misty” that I’ve been raving about to everyone who I’ve had a conversation with about music, on this blog—and in the pages of this month’s PAPER magazine—since last fall, is finally out on Sub Pop Records. The “Father John Misty” moniker is a deliberately curious pseudonym for Josh Tillman, better known as the former drummer for Seattle-based folk rockers, Fleet Foxes.

“Misty,” he told me, “is a horny, drunk, shamanic drifter character offering you a cup of his home-brewed ayahuasca tea.”

Trying to describe music in words is like doing a sketch of a novel, but in a nutshell, here’s what you get with Fear Fun: Blenderize Physical Graffiti, Roy Orbison, Waylon Jennings, Nilsson, Loudon Wainwright III, Leonard Cohen, Neil Young and the Rollings Stones with Hermann Hesse, Charles Bukowski and Richard Brautigan.  That’s what it tastes like.

Fear Fun is a striking, often inscrutable obelisk of a album, a multi-layered work with clever, sardonic “literary” lyrics. It’s something that deserves to be listened to all the way through, as if you’re reading a novel or watching a film. Fear Fun has a dramatic arc and a certain resolution of tension by the end. The album was produced by the amazing Jonathan Wilson and engineered by Phil Ek on analog tape, so it sounds great. It’s a unique piece of art to unleash on an OCD world carrying iPods, but one that can be enjoyed in that context, too.

If this sounds intriguing—and I hope that it would—you can order Fear Fun via Amazon or pick it up at your local record emporium. There’s even a limited edition pink vinyl version. The amazing cover painting is by talented New York-based painter, Dimitri Drjuchin.

Aaron Frank writes in the LA WEEKLY:

As we arrive at Tillman’s Econoline van parked a few blocks away [to smoke a joint], he explains his decision to release Fear Fun under the name Father John Misty, as opposed to J. Tillman, the moniker under which he’s released his previous solo albums. “In my mind, this J. Tillman person is a far more romanticized, fictionalized person to the world than this ridiculous name, Father John Misty,” he says. He goes on to explain how he felt distanced and trapped by his songwriting persona as he matured in his personal life.

“I wanted to bring my conversational voice and my musical voice in to alignment. The ridiculous name is about satisfying this morbid sense of humor I have that says ‘Maybe the most honest thing you can do is to just call yourself something stupid and say something real.’”

The name Father John Misty is partly a reference to cocaine, as in “Misty Mountain Hop,” and partly a reference to Tillman’s life-long exploration of religion and spirituality, which started with his evangelical upbringing in the suburbs of Washington D.C. Out of despair, Tillman considered becoming a pastor for a brief time during his youth. “I wasn’t good at sports. I wasn’t good at school. I didn’t see anything outside of Christian jobs,” he says. After becoming unglued from religion in his teens, “I was so angry and terrified that I’d been raised that way that, at some point, my number one mission became to make as big of a joke out it as I could.”

Father John Misty performs tomorrow, May 4th at the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Father John Misty: The Misguided Ayahuasca Tea Session