the antithesis of toto

jonathan poneman in conversation with lorraine berry

Sub Pop’s story—its central role in the explosion of “grunge”—has been told many times in documentaries such as Hype! and multiple articles that have explored how a tiny Seattle record label staked its claim to music history.
So, when March Plaidness and I decided that it would be a great idea to speak with Sub Pop co-founder Jonathan Poneman, I spent a while thinking about the kinds of questions I wanted to ask him. I’ve actually known Jonathan since 1983. We met when he had a late-night shift as a DJ for University of Washington’s KCMU (now KEXP) and I worked the graveyard shift at a U-district diner. We dated, and we have remained friends.
Along with Bruce Pavitt, Poneman founded Sub Pop in 1988. It produced early records by bands such as TAD, Soundgarden, Mudhoney, and on June 15, 1989, released Nirvana’s first album, Bleach. For the 1991 release of Nevermind, Geffen paid a buyout to Sub Pop that also included a percentage of sales on future Nirvana releases. The deal kept Sub Pop in the black.
Sub Pop has developed a reputation as an incubator for talented acts. Musicians that the company signed to contracts include The Shins, Sunny Day Real Estate, Iron & Wine, The Postal Service, Flight of the Conchords, Sleater-Kinney, The Fleet Foxes, and dozens of others. It has also branched out into live comedy recordings, and has put out comedy by folks such as David Cross, Sarah Silverman, and Patton Oswalt.
Poneman was born in Toledo, Ohio in 1959 and moved to Seattle as a teenager. He attended the University of Washington where he was part of the KCMU crew. Now 61, Poneman continues to live in Seattle. In 2013, he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease. In 2019, he was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by the American Association of Independent Music.
Our conversation took place via telephone on February 25, 2021. It has been edited for clarity and length.
Also, throughout the interview the term “grunge” was referred to by both Poneman and me as a term that should be understood as always in quotation marks. —Lorraine

Lorraine Berry: I’ve been thinking about how the Sub Pop story has been hashed repeatedly and doesn't really need to have yet another article about it. Um, so I was wondering if it would be okay to talk about maybe some of the larger issues around “grunge” and maybe help locate the movement in a time and space.
I rewatched Hype yesterday.

Jonathan Poneman: How’d it hold up?

[pause]

LB: Um …. it doesn't deal with a couple of major issues that I think get, you know, I mean, one of the things I noticed, and it's probably has more to do with Seattle's demographics and the Northwest demographics than anything…

JP: —is that it’s pretty white, pretty male? 

LB: Oh my God. Really white with, you know, with obvious notable exceptions, but I'm like, Oh my God, it's LOTS of white guys.

JP: Yep.

LB: I was thinking also about the women. Actually, I'm sure you're not surprised to know that there are now academic papers in academic journals about grunge and gender and class.

JP: Yeah. 

LB: I want to start with, uh, maybe some issues around class because that's a particular interest of mine that I write about a lot and I was going to…

JP: You were going to say whether we’ve got it or we don’t.

[Laughter]

LB: So, do you think that grunge came about in a working-class milieu? Because I'm sure that there were a lot of guys in bands who did not have that background. And yet that seemed to be the, the take, you know, that the mythology of grunge is that it ‘sort of’ arose in the dying mill and logging towns of the Northwest and then ‘sort of’ was incubated in some of the more lefty cities like Olympia and Bellingham and Seattle and Portland.

JP: A lot of it was a marketing conceit.
The formulation of grunge as a marketing tack actually happened: it became a global parameter by way of the British music press. Talking about magazines like Melody Maker or New Musical Express or Sounds and some others dominated in the British music industry in the latter half of the 20th century.
So to answer your question, Evan True—Jerry Sacary—the journalist who wrote the ground-breaking grunge article for Melody Maker, he was writing that article for the “quote, punters, unquote,” who picked up Melody Maker every week. And the answer to your question would lie with who he was writing for.
Basically, Bruce and I were very cognizant of the mythology. We knew the mythology that we were trying to conjure. A lot of it was tongue-in-cheek, a lot of it born of the kind of Don Kirshner, who was such a marketing impresario, what he did. Or what KISS did. You know they take these exaggerated, heroic dumbbell caricatures.
And so we, we kind of took elements of that, the kind of artistic pretense of “destroy all monsters”and Iggy Pop, and your midwestern intellectual revolutionary art rock of the late sixties and early seventies and stirred it up, and then there was a very organic rock scene that happened in the Pacific Northwest. Which we had nothing to do with. We were carpetbaggers.
What I mean is there were groups like The Melvins who very naturally fit into that mythology. There was nothing contrived about them. They were three dudes from Aberdeen who started a band and they quite innocently stumbled on to a sound that ended up becoming the blueprint for a certain kind of grunge.
But to answer your question, I go back to what I was saying initially, you know, grunge, as a movement was pretty well set on its course by Jerry Sacary. And, I think he was trying to sell it to British music fans of a certain age, certain temperament who read these certain few magazines every week.
I don't think the American rock audience really came into calculation. In fact, his trip to Seattle when he interviewed us for that article, it was definitely his first time to Seattle and may have actually even been his first time in the United States. But he was already a pretty well known journalist. The point that I'm making is that he wasn't focusing on an American audience yet.

LB: [I should note that I was born in the UK and still have close ties there.] Right. But, um, what you're saying about the British music press in the mid-to-late eighties makes perfect sense because it also ties into the thing I was thinking about, which is that, uh, a lot of intellectual culture, working-class culture in Britain in the eighties was in opposition to that wretched woman who was prime minister

JP: Maggie Thatcher

LB: —and I found myself wondering if, uh, grunge could have arisen in America without eight years of Reagan and four years of Bush, like those 12 years. For me, it's always funny because when I have nostalgia, it's about being in my twenties and, you know, and all of those things you do in your twenties, you know, you have a body that basically does whatever you tell it to, and you have all this energy and there were things to do and people to see.
But immediately when I think of that time period, I think of the absolute, shit politics that we were dealing with at the same time.

JP: Right. No, definitely—

LB: Do you see “grunge in quotation marks” arising out of that?

JP: Absolutely. But you know, it's funny because it was, who was politically, it was Bruce and me, it was our intention to basically provoke a number of different groups. You know, I don't know if you know anything about the pop music history of Olympia, Washington, but Evergreen [State College] has been spawning rock bands and rock and roll conceptualizations for well over 30, probably close to 40 years now. And it continues
And again, in the eighties there was the ascendancy of this kind of neo-naïve primitivism, best represented by a group called Beat Happening. And a gentleman named Calvin Johnson who went on to form K records and Calvin was an early mentor and dear friend of Bruce’s. The thrust of what was going on there is, like a lot of primitivist movements there was a real rebellion against “quote expertise and unquote.” Not playing music that’s too polished. The antithesis of what they're doing is a band like Toto. You know, soulless professionals. So there came a time in Olympia and what was going on was becoming too precious and too dogmatic for its own good. I remember the ration of shit that Bruce got from his friends when we put Chris Cornell, bare-chested on the cover of Screaming Life. So on one hand we were flipping off that group.
Then on the other hand, there was a—it wasn't partisan—political. We were very much into, um, letting the ferocity of the music broadcast, in a non-verbal way, the anger and the disappointment of the generation coming of age.

LB: Yeah. Those of us who had been young enough to see, uh, the sort of progress that was being made in the sixties and the seventies and then the door just fucking slammed shut in 1980. 

JP: Yeah, exactly. And haven't been pried open since.

LB: You know, I, it's funny, I've been watching all of these postmortems about the Trump presidency and the deterioration of the Republican party over the last four years. And I’m like, “Dudes, 1980. If if you're not talking about 1980, you're not contextualizing this, this has been a long time coming.  

JP: Yeah. Even longer than that. The 1964 Southern strategy.

LB: Right. You run a politics based on racial resentment, you end up with fucking Nazis.

JP: Yep.

LB: So, anyway. (Pause) So how, when you talk about the ferocity and the anger, how did, how did grunge not go off in the direction of sort of the right wing proud boy, uh, you know, that sort of acting out of that type of masculinity. I mean, I don't remember grunge being that way.
I remember it being much more, I don't know…. Um, well, um, you know, the sort of [I struggle for words as my brain summons the images of tee-shirt skinny white boys playing in front of mosh pits of more white boys.]

JP: It's hard for me to have the perspective, Lorraine. Because, you know, I never saw grunge as being a true phenomenon any way, which I think has to do with my proximity to the heat, to the characters and the music that being defined as grunge.. But I know these people, you know, and I know these people as a cast of characters. They are not a uniform partisan, I mean they didn't have a partisan bent. They were just a bunch of people who had genuine desires and general ambitions like anybody else. A lot of them were white and a lot of them were male. But that was basically what the music industry had been up to that point. Right. We're hopefully in a progressive society, where we're always working at trying to correct those things, but it waxes and wanes.
And, uh, as we just discussed, there’s been a lot of stalling out lately, but hopefully things will change.
But what we call “grunge” in the United States, what happened when the, when teen spirit was smelled and the what we’ll call a “movement” kind of went mainstream as it were. You started having people of all stripes and persuasions, coming out with their grunge flavors and personalities. And a lot of those people, that is the people from the Pacific Northwest, from Seattle and area, and in particular from this region, and here in this region, in the I-5 Corridor specifically, is pretty progressive. [I-5 passes through western Washington and Oregon and bisects the Democratic-voting cities of Bellingham, Seattle, Tacoma, Olympia, and Portland.]
So it's no surprise that most of the people who participated in those communities were of that generally progressive ilk.

LB: Although I, I have to say, I still strongly remember, uh, the Portland Skinheads so it wasn't all progressive.

JP: Oh, by no means and the same thing happening in Seattle right now. I’m making a generalization. 

LB: I actually agree with you. I agree with you that it was progressive. But in a lot of ways. But similarly in thinking about the women.
We've been talking about men a lot and I'm thinking about bands like Seven Year Bitch and Hole and L7 and Sleater-Kinney. Do you think that from your much closer experience to grunge than me, that, that, um, that gender showed up in grunge in interesting ways?

[Decide I’m phrasing this wrong]

Or do you think that, I mean, I don't know. I guess what I'm asking is, uh, do you think there was a different energy with the mostly female bands than there were with the male bands? Did you see any of that?

[Hang my head in exasperated shame that I just sounded like some kind of feminist essentialist, which I am most definitely not].

JP: Not really. I mean, there was not a language though, I'm not talking about words per se. There wasn’t a vocabulary. The, um, the style, the expression, the modes that existed, not just in grunge but in all of rock because at that time that the bands, there was no real decidedly female or non-binary approach to music and music performance. There were the unusual case of performers who started forging their own vocabulary. But L7 very much “aped the dudes” playing rock. I don’t mean anything by it, do you know what I mean?

LB: Totally. I was going to say that a lot of the female bands were playing, they were performing the way the men were performing. It wasn't distinct.

JP: Yeah. Courtney made some real headway in trying to build a vocabulary. I’m not an expert in this, but just knowing how many dudes were in bands and how many of those bands dominated the record industry for decades, generations, and it’s obvious and quite unfortunate that one gender basically formulated a lot of the vocabulary and imagery that was consumed by rock audiences.

LB: And, you know, in some respects, some of that has changed. Some of it has not. Obviously. 

JP: Is changing, you know, it's, I think, it's moving non-binary, which I think is healthy, in that it’s the establishment of a neutral language that is not solely the possession of one gender. Which makes it interesting to me.

LB: Yeah, I agree. I agree. Oh, one last question on grunge. I'm wondering what it's like for you as someone who was so close to, you were obviously immersed in the scene … um … it’s interesting to me to watch how waves of nostalgia cycle? Like in the seventies, people were nostalgic for the fifties, and in the nineties, they were nostalgic for the seventies, and. Now there are comedies set in the eighties. What is it like to watch, because I assume that the night is coming …

JP: As I speak to you, there are no less than three major grunge documentaries in production—

LB: Bingo! Okay. So exactly. Right. So what is, what is that like for you to suddenly see this? I mean, for those of us who are outsiders, the nostalgia is more, I assume that when most of us are engaging in that nostalgia, it's like I said, the reason that music sparks emotions is because of who we were and where we were at that point in our lives.

JP: Same for me, it’s just that I have the added burden of having to talk about it all the time. Conversations like this—you and I are old buddies—and you know, we've had variations on this conversation over the years. So this is a joy. But you know, a lot of the requests that I get ask the same old questions. And it's like being—earlier in a conversation—and you're taking about being in our twenties. You know, nostalgia is one thing, but when I get into these conversations and the same thing kind of drives me crazy about my job. It’s like it anchors me at being 27 or 28 years old for the rest of my life. You know, I'm a 61-year old person with 61-year old perspectives, problems, interests. But as soon as the mic goes on and they want to talk about certain things, I'm suddenly 28 years old again. And it's kind of like, you know, fitting into an old dress or a suit or old pair of pants. It's great that you can do it maybe, but do you want to?

LB: Exactly. Right. That, that makes perfect sense to me what you're saying. Um, and, uh, I think, yeah, you're absolutely right. I think that for certain people, nostalgia is like amber? It’s a hard piece of amber and they're looking at the things inside it. But in a weird way, I’ve been a sort of having that same experience, and it has happened multiple times in the last couple of years and I’ll see an actor that you remember from a film in the eighties or nineties and there’ll be a photo of them and they’ll be on screen and you’ll go, “OH MY GOD HOW DID THEY GET SO OLD?” And then you’ll look at yourself in the mirror and go … OH.

[Conversation temporarily dissolved into discussion of skin regimens, baby faces, mullet haircuts, how much I had hated Florida, followed by a discussion of the latest on my kids and my gaga love affair with my new granddaughter, midlife crises, and hair length during the Pandemic.]

LB: Cool. Cool. So, you know, um, so one last question. Tell me about what you're excited about with Sub Pop right now, cause I I know you guys have got a lot of things going on, including the opening of your new store.

JP: Yes, the new store in the shadow of Amazon. Of course we're a brick and mortar stores selling well, there's all sorts of irony and context there, I don’t have to point it out to you.
We have a lot of artists doing variations … we have interesting projects. We have an artist who I've taken a particular interest in called Ya Tseen, which is Tlingit for “be alive.” And the gentleman who is spearheading that is named Nicholas Galanin, who is First Nations or Native American Tlingit, and other visual artists who also put together in this band, and it’s called “Indian Yard” and it's coming out in late April.
So much great stuff coming.

Jonathan Poneman’s legacy as an independent music impresario (or con-man, depending on who’s telling the story) began in his adopted hometown of Seattle as a college radio volunteer / DJ. An introduction into the city’s burgeoning music scene of the early 1980s soon followed, including a brief and entirely self-appointed stint as Soundgarden’s manager. Eventually, JP was encouraged by that band’s guitarist, Kim Thayil, to find something else to occupy his attention. This suggestion spurred JP to join up with erstwhile college radio colleague, Bruce Pavitt, to forge a fully functioning, Seattle-based record label with employees, a fax machine, and everything. By April 1st, 1988, both partners had quit their day jobs, rented an office, and gone massively into debt. They expected it all to last about a month. In 2018, Sub Pop celebrated its 30th birthday with a free outdoor festival for 55,000 of its closest friends.
When Bruce retired from active participation in the label in the late 90s, Sub Pop entered into a precarious era of diminishing sales and morale. The smart money would have been on JP also cashing out, but neither “smart” nor “money” have ever been traditional components of Sub Pop’s mission strategy. JP persevered, holding the company together with scotch tape and promises until it more than regained its footing in the early 2000s with a renewed vigor and hit records from The Shins, Postal Service, Iron and Wine, and David Cross. 
With over 50 million global record sales, more than 2 million dollars donated to hundreds of non-profits, and a Sub Pop retail store located inside the Sea-Tac International Airport terminal, JP has captained the label to become effectively synonymous with Seattle and as home to a wide range of artists from all corners, including Soundgarden, Nirvana, Beach House, Father John Misty, Shabazz Palaces, and Weyes Blood. 
Jonathan lives in Seattle on his beloved Queen Anne hill with his wife and two dogs.

Lorraine Berry grew up in Everett, Washington—home of an ever-present pulp mill stink and a 1917 Massacre of IWW workers—and attended the University of Washington. She writes for a number of publications and was nearly finished with a novel manuscript in the Before Times. Her current activities include spending an inordinate amount of time in the kitchen wondering why she she’s in there, debating whether the Pandemic is an adequate excuse for eating cookies before breakfast, and worrying if her brain will eventually return to its locked and upright position. After three decades away, she’s back living in the PNW in Eugene, Oregon.