Mark Arm

Douglas Wolk
, July 10, 2008

Mark Arm

Mark Arm has been involved with Sub Pop since before there was a Sub Pop--he knew Bruce Pavitt back when Pavitt was publishing his fanzine Subterranean Pop, and the label's first non-compilation release was Dry as a Bone by his band Green River. Arm went on to Mudhoney, whose debut single "Touch Me I'm Sick" appeared on Sub Pop 20 years ago; this spring, the label released their new album The Lucky Ones. We spoke to him about his longtime association with Sub Pop, and what Pavitt and Jonathan Poneman's brainchild has meant to the Seattle scene.

Pitchfork: How did you first encounter Bruce and Jonathan?

Mark Arm: It was through local punk rock shows. I first met Bruce in 1983, shortly after he moved up from Olympia (Wash.), and he was a DJ at a local all-ages club called Metropolis. I think the first thing I asked him to do was to play Void or the Birthday Party, and a friendship was forged from there.

Jonathan was a local dude about town. He put on shows periodically at odd spaces; he did the local-artists show on KCMU, the local college station, and I got to know him through that kind of stuff.

Pitchfork: Somewhere over the next few years, those "local dudes" turned into Sub Pop, and they released Green River's Dry as a Bone. How did Green River end up putting out a record with them?

Mark Arm: Once Green River started, Bruce took a stab at a record label. He had a record store called Bomb Shelter, and he put out a U-Men EP. I think he just realized at that point that all his money went into records that were sitting in his bedroom and money that was clogged up in distribution and wouldn't come back to him. So to help out the U-Men and Green River, he hooked us up with Homestead-- I'm sure there was some kind of fanzine-writer connection thing there between him and [now Matador owner] Gerard [Cosloy].

We wanted to do a single, and wanted to see if Bruce would be interested in helping us out; he said he was, but Bomb Shelter was closed. He told us who to go to for pressing and helped us with that kind of stuff. At the same time, his fanzine was turning into an audio fanzine-- he'd make cassettes instead of just writing about bands. That culminated in Sub Pop 100, a vinyl LP, which at that point seemed much more real than a cassette. Somewhere in there, he decided that he wanted to do Dry as a Bone, and Jonathan wanted to work with Soundgarden, and the two of them combined their resources and made that happen-- I'm not sure where they got the money! But I kind of remember, in those days, it was like "if we could only get together $2,000, we could go make a record and press it up..."

Pitchfork: At what point did Sub Pop start feeling like a real label?

Mark Arm: They marked the beginning of the label on the day they moved into an office, so I guess you could say that would be the point-- people weren't just gathering at Bruce's house to stuff records, they were doing it in an office downtown. They moved in April 1988-- that's why April Fool's Day is their birthdate.

Pitchfork: The Sub Pop mystique started pretty quickly. I remember, sometime in 1989, going home to Michigan and having my friends say, "Oh, man, you have to find everything on Sub Pop-- everything on that label is good!"

Mark Arm: [laughs] I think that was a well-crafted bill of goods that the company sold. Clearly not everything on Sub Pop was great-- there was a certain kind of general sound to it, and Sub Pop was really shrewd at, for lack of a better term, marketing themselves to the independent underground. So all the early bands were almost afforded the same amount of stature.

Pitchfork: When Mudhoney started, was it taken for granted that you were going to put out something on Sub Pop?

Mark Arm: It was mostly taken for granted. We figured we'd do a single with either Sub Pop or our friend Tom Hazelmyer, who was stationed up at Whitby Island and had just started Amphetamine Reptile. And one of the first non-Halo of Flies things he released was Dope, Guns 'N Fucking in the Streets, Vol. 1, which had "24" on it, and that was recorded at the same time as "Touch Me I'm Sick". So we kinda did both.

Pitchfork: How did the attention being focused on the Seattle scene seem to someone in the middle of it?

Mark Arm: It seemed kind of crazy and out of control as early as 1989, when it was just sort of on a fanzine level, before it even crossed over into a rag like Spin or something. I wasn't going to complain about it-- it seemed like similar things happened with Minneapolis and Austin and Athens before, and now it was Seattle's turn. Which was really weird, because for most of my time going to shows here, Seattle was an outpost that was skipped by a lot of bands. No one wanted to make the drive up from San Francisco. Certain bands would do it-- Black Flag seemed to play every little shithole town there was for a while. The weirdest thing was that in December '83, the Butthole Surfers came up here and stayed for a month. I think Paul had a girlfriend who was going to school at the University of Washington, so they played, like, four shows in their earliest days up here, and that was really, really great, as you can imagine.

Pitchfork: When did it start to feel like the eyes of the world were staring at Seattle?

Mark Arm: The first indication of that was that there was this New York guy, Ed McGinley, who'd buy records at Pier Platters [in Hoboken, N.J.], and he started buying everything on Sub Pop. Then he actually called someone at Sub Pop, right around the time Jonathan and Bruce were putting together the first Lamefest, which was us, Tad, and Nirvana at the Moore Theater, which seats 1,200 people-- Dead Kennedys had played there once. Bruce and Jonathan set up the show, and I remember thinking, "This is insane, you're out of your fucking minds, this is not going to work." And the show sold out! But this guy called up Sub Pop, and as a joke, I think, Bruce got on the phone with him and said, "We're doing this thing, you should come out"-- and the guy rode a Greyhound bus to see it! I thought "this is getting out of control, where someone would think it was that worthwhile."

Pitchfork: At what point did the major labels start pounding on your door?

Mark Arm: Well, the major labels didn't really start camping outside our door. Around the time we were doing Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge (1991), Sub Pop was in a real financial crunch, so our excuse at the time was "we don't wanna have something as ridiculous as money get in the way of our friendship." What we didn't realize at the time was that there's no way to leave your friends and not have it affect your friendship; I'm sure Bruce and Jonathan felt somewhat betrayed, and I don't blame them for it.

The first thing we did was go to Caroline Records, which was the distributor of Sub Pop at the time, because we were totally wary of major labels based on what had happened to Hüsker Dü and the Replacements, where all of a sudden the sound of the bands changed on record. This guy from Caroline came out and had lunch with us, and said we couldn't have any side projects-- Steve and I had just done the Monkeywrench thing-- we would have to go on tour for nine months like their band Smashing Pumpkins was doing, and we'd have to sweeten up our guitar sound. We thought: Really? That's amazing! And we thought: We've heard this shit, we might as well talk to a major label, because how ridiculous could that get? And none of them said anything nearly as ridiculous, or even remotely along those lines. Maybe they'd put that kind of pressure on you later, but they certainly didn't say anything about it upfront. And that's how we ended up dealing with major labels-- it's not like they were waiting for us, we just hired a lawyer and let it be known that we were looking for something else.

Pitchfork: How much did it seem like there was a grunge feeding frenzy?

Mark Arm: Well, a lot of marginal bands got signed, but, I mean, that's always the case! Most of the bands that get signed are marginal bands, and every once in a while a marginal band will win the lottery. People always talk about how all these bands started moving to Seattle in hopes of getting signed, and I can't think of one band that moved to Seattle and signed to a record label that had any success. There were the Stone Temple Pilots, who started out by aping Alice in Chains and Pearl Jam, but they didn't move here...and then there was the Australian fake Nirvana, Silverchair, you know, the little kiddie version-- they sure were cute.

Pitchfork: Was there ever a band that said, "Hey, guys, let's start a grunge band"?

Mark Arm: I'm sure there were. But by the time that sentence is said, you have missed the boat! You know what I mean? You're chasing a train that's left town.

Pitchfork: Seattle was perceived as having an aesthetic, but a lot of those bands don't sound all that similar in retrospect.

Mark Arm: No! And I didn't think so at the time, either. A lot of them were just loud. If you're talking about wearing shorts over thermals, I guess unfortunately that was an aesthetic. That was just a retarded look.

Pitchfork: After Mudhoney's Reprise period ended, you came back to Sub Pop around 2000. What brought you back?

Mark Arm: We'd heard they were going to do a compilation, kind of a greatest-hits of the Sub Pop years, and we basically had two short albums, an EP and a handful of singles-- it seemed like the whole thing might fit onto one CD. So we met with them to see if they could expand the parameters of this thing, and ended up working on March to Fuzz, which turned out to be the epitaph for the Matt Lukin years. And from that point on, we decided, whether they would have it or not, that they were our default label, and they seem more than happy to continue working with us.

Pitchfork: What was different about the setup of the label after you came back?

Mark Arm: Oh, God! They had accounting! They had contracts-- they knew what they were doing. In the early days, no one knew how you were supposed to run a label, or how you were supposed to even be a band. "Oh, you're supposed to get a booking agent? And they set up the tours for you?" It was just a learning experience for everybody.

Pitchfork: How many people who had been around during the early years were still there when you came back?

Mark Arm: Two. Megan [Jasper] and Jonathan. And Jeff Kleinsmith, who's been in the art department since the early 1990s, but he started after we left the label.

Pitchfork: How has Sub Pop's relationship to Seattle changed?

Mark Arm: The biggest way is that it's not a local label any more. When it started, Bruce initially wanted to model the label on Tamla and Dischord and Postcard. Postcard had a distinct aesthetic in terms of packaging-- that was one thing he was really into.

Pitchfork: Putting the logo really big on the front...

Mark Arm: Well, in the case of your friends in Michigan, that seems to have worked!

Pitchfork: Yeah, Sub Pop and Amphetamine Reptile were the two labels they were really into.

Mark Arm: That makes total sense. They were the two labels that resurrected the single-- the single was a dying form.

Pitchfork: What's kept Mudhoney together for 20 years now?

Mark Arm: [laughs] No expectations? By sheer accident, when we started, we decided to split everything up equally, so I think that kind of negated a conflict that a lot of bands go through. We had, from the get-go, a pretty strong idea of what was possible and what was unlikely. When we signed to a major label, we weren't thinking "we're gonna have a hit record." By the time we started learning about the stuff that came before us, and realizing how most of our favorite bands ended up and how many records they sold, we were perfectly happy being where we are.

Pitchfork: And the corollary is: What's kept Sub Pop going for 20 or 22 years? Besides royalties from Bleach.

Mark Arm: A certain strongheadedness from Jonathan. He could easily have folded it up in the dark days of the late 90s. And, actually, flexibility and openness to different things; it wouldn't have lasted if it decided "we're going to remain a local label." Jonathan still steers the boat, but I think he's long since sort of given up the job as A&R guy, and I think that's really smart-- you have to have someone that's more in touch with the kids. Tony Kiewel is the only person whose job is strictly A&R, but people in the sales department, people who work on the website, people who work in radio are all doing A&R, as well as, you know, their real jobs.

Pitchfork: Any other thoughts on your longstanding relationship with Sub Pop?

Mark Arm: We're super lucky that we've found a place that will let us keep putting out records, despite what they sell! [laughs] It would be hard otherwise to keep a band going this long without having a place that feels like home.

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