By the time we’re cracking open fortune cookies, Bruce Pavitt and I find ourselves talking about Kurt Cobain and the idea of seclusion. That someone like Kurt, beautiful and stirring, at the height of world fame, needed the confidence and compassion of an inner circle of people to talk with. Kurt never seemed to have that—for whatever reason—says Bruce, solemnness to his voice.

It is the end of a fascinating conversation, with me mostly listening to the stories Bruce has about the genesis of the record label he founded—Sub Pop—his first record player, his forthcoming two books—one about a week in Europe with a crumbling Nirvana, the other a collection of his writings about Independent rock groups—and the idea of being relentless in the pursuit of your own aspirations.

Let me start at the beginning: I’d left the Pub at Third Place at 6:25 PM on a Wednesday, typing the restaurant Bruce had chosen, Sea Garden, into the map app. of my phone. I was directed to 509 7^th Ave. The problem was, though, I wanted 509 7^th South. Having to piss like mad, I got back in my car at 6:55—now late for our 7:00 PM dinner. I wended my way around Jefferson and Jackson and finally found a place to park. I ran down a wrong street, called Sea Garden to make sure it actually existed, and finally found Bruce at a table at the door looking dapper and calm.

“Sorry,” I said, putting down my things.

“It’s no problem,” he said. “Parking is tough around here.”

Sweating a bit from my forehead, I began to tell him about The Monarch and our Drinks With feature. He nodded and listened intently. A waiter came around and Bruce suggested a few dishes—we admitted to each other we’re both noodle fanatics. In our correspondence, he’d said Sea Garden was one of his favorite places and, familiar with the menu, Bruce ordered us the garlic pea vines, noodles in ginger sauce and steamed cod. He was already drinking a Tsingtao beer, so I ordered one too.

His story is at least generally known: he founded what would become Sub Pop at Evergreen College in Olympia in 1979 (he spent the two years prior at a more traditional college in Chicago, steeped in independent music due mostly to the Wax Trax record store). He then moved to Seattle and, along with Jonathan Poneman, founded and grew the Sub Pop record label. The company signed Nirvana and Nirvana became the biggest thing in music and then Kurt died and there was darkness. Before we got to that, however, I found myself intrigued about the idea of what it was like starting the ‘zine Subterranean Pop from his college bedroom.

“What was that moment like when you just decided to do it?” I ask.

“I’ll tell you a secret,” he smiles. “This is a very little known anecdote—I had a girlfriend from Chicago who flew out and broke up with me. I couldn’t sleep for a couple months. So, to keep my mind busy, I just started working on my ‘zine. I probably would have been too lazy to do it, but the turmoil I was going through—the work was therapeutic. Sometimes it takes an event like that that triggers stress and anxiety to get us to actually do the creative act. Once I put out my first issue and it got a good response, I kept doing it. I mailed it to other ‘zines. I put them in a large box with elaborate packaging and shipped them to a distributor, who then got them into indie record stores. I didn’t ask if they wanted them, I just asked: Please distribute these and if you sell them, send me a check.”

I sip my golden-yellow lager, fascinated.

“My ‘zine was an offset print job,” says Bruce, who at the time also had a show on Evergreen’s KAOS radio station, home to arguably the best catalogue of indie music in the country. “It was crayon colors, editions of 500. But what was unique about Subterranean Pop was that it was the first indie rock ‘zine in the United States completely dedicated to regional recordings. I included the addresses so people could mail order the music and I would separate the reviews by region so you could get the aesthetic of each city.”

I tell him about my idea for something called OurTunes, a digital music store to see what people are writing and recording in various cities around the country.

“It all starts local,” he says.

By the time he put out his third ‘zine, it was now called Sub Pop and a writer from New Music Express in England (their Rolling Stone equivalent) found it in a store in Texas and wrote that Sub Pop was the best index that existed of regional American scenes.

The first course arrives now, a plate of thin, crispy noodles in a light brown ginger sauce. The plate sits between us as Bruce continues. “Calvin Johnson came in and wrote a few reviews, but essentially it was just myself reviewing a lot of records that a lot of people weren’t reviewing.” (Calvin Johnson went on to start K Records in Olympia). “I bought a big stapler for $20—that was a huge investment. I bought a rubber stamp with my address on it and that was a huge investment. Resources were very limited, I was a poor college student.”

“What did your parents think?” I ask.

“My parents were intellectuals, they met at the University of Chicago and had six kids. My father, originally from New York, loved theater and film. So they wanted me to be happy, to think critically. There wasn’t a lot of pressure to follow the money, rather they wanted me to follow my interests.”

I ask Bruce, who now lives in Madrona (a neighborhood that he says is “Good for my nerves”), what his reasoning was behind naming the ‘zine Subterranean Pop.

“I wanted something that conveyed the idea that this was underground music that had the potential to become popular if it was just given a chance. I really felt this music could be appreciated by a large group of people. Then, 10 years later, we signed Nirvana and they became the biggest group in the world. They’re biggest aspiration at the time, though, was just to get a single out and get it played on KCMU.”

Before Nirvana, however, Bruce started to put out mixtapes, and the ‘zine kept changing, reformatting. And in 1986 he put out a vinyl compilation—now with a record out he could officially call Sub Pop a record label.

“I started to look around and see Seattle had a kind of distinctive music scene, so I began to focus on regional bands. So instead of doing an overview of what’s going on in the country, I just focused on Seattle. That’s when I started working with Jonathan Poneman who was doing the local music show on KCMU.”

Upon moving to Seattle, Bruce opened up a record store, had a column in Charles R. Cross’s The Rocket, and got a radio show on KCMU, all while continuing to get his record label off the ground. “I was relentless in my persistence in doing this. Over that period of time I wasn’t making any income whatsoever, but I was building a brand, as it were. I stuck with it, merely because I found it interesting.”

“Were you dating anybody at the time?”

“I was indeed,” he laughs, before slurping up a forkful of noodles.

We finish nearly most of the dish while sipping our Tsingtao beers. I want to talk about the 90’s and Nirvana but I wonder aloud if it’s irksome for him to keep talking about that. If re-hashing the stories might feel wearisome. Bruce assures me it’s fine, noting that he is releasing a book about it. Our waiter comes around again. Bruce couldn’t be more gracious, thanking him for the food and service. The pea vines are placed on the table, then the cod is put down. We go in for the food. I check the tape recorder, thankful it’s getting all this.

“Nirvana’s songs were so raw,” I say. “Kurt was this troubled man at the time and then their big album Nevermind comes out and it’s very polished, bright and big. What did you think when you first heard it?”

“When I first heard that album—a friend of mine came up to me and Jon one night and said he had a cassette copy of Nevermind. So we went to a car to check it out, and I remember being absolutely blown away by the record. I thought it was amazing. Sure it was polished, but the songs were brilliant.”

“Had you heard demos of the songs before?”

“Oh yes, we paid for those demos. Sub Pop was going to be releasing that record, but, you know, Nirvana was shopping for a major label kind of behind our backs, which happens all the time. There were some new ones in there. ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ was one of the new ones. I thought: My God, this could sell 100,000 copies—but it sold something like 10 million over the next few years.”

“Did you maintain contact with Kurt over those next few years?”

“A little bit. They invited me to DJ their record release party, which happened at Re-Bar. Then later I traveled up to Vancouver to see them play and there was a representative from Geffen with a laptop who said, ‘Based on these projections, they’re going to sell half a million records by Christmas.’ When Christmas came around, they’d sold one million.”

“I can’t help but think that this sounds a lot like Macklemore’s success,” I say.

“Yeah, it’s kind of jaw-dropping. His success is an absolute phenomenon. What’s cool about Macklemore is his stuff was indie and he released it himself—and continues to. It’s an amazing story, I love it.”

“Do you think it’s a sign of things to come, or do you think it’s an anomaly.”

Bruce pauses. I suddenly notice the voices of the other few patrons in the restaurant. I wonder what they’re talking about. Finally he says, “That is a very good question. I do not have an answer for that. But I will say that once a model is established and people can see it’s attainable, there’s no reason it shouldn’t be, and now with YouTube, anyone can create a video and it can, potentially, get a couple million hits.”

“I’m reminded of an article Jesse Sykes wrote in the back of City Arts Magazine, the title of which was ‘Water, water everywhere,’ implying there is too much music.”

“I do think,” Bruce begins, “that society has always benefited from editors. Filters. That’s what I did with my ‘zine, with my record label. Some individuals have an ability to connect the dots, present culture in a way that gets people excited. If there’s just a free-for-all with bands on the internet, sometimes it becomes overwhelming. And unfortunately in this day and age there’s fewer and fewer record stores, community spaces where you can talk and meet people face to face.”

A police car whizzes by our window, the siren fills the restaurant for a moment and then is gone.

“You know, the Dead Kennedys put out an album called, ‘Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death’, saying that this is what American culture is really all about. Not liberty, not freedom, not critical thinking, but convenience.”

I decide to ask a difficult question. “Is it weird being away from Sub Pop?”

Bruce, who is still on the Board of Advisors at the label, chews a bit of cod, then says, “It’s complicated, but I think in the grand scheme of things, as a personality type, I tend to be more of a pioneer. I’m not really a corporate type. I don’t like sitting in large meetings with people, I like to just work with creative people in a quick way and move on my feet. In the early years, the staff was small and Jon and I would do things because we had to. When you look at a lot of the groups that were happening at that time in the 80’s, they were a little edgier, they weren’t really doing it for the record sales, per se. It was more like: How can we put out the craziest bit of art that is going to blow people’s minds and hopefully recoup that investment or get a trip to Europe out of the deal. Putting out radical art was the payoff, and that’s more in line with my spirit.”

I’m reminded that the organization grew into a business at some point responsible for insurance, employees, economic growth. Yeesh!

“There’s less spontaneity,” he says. “I tend to be most productive and effective when I’m working in small groups.”

“Is there one or two things you would have done differently, or wish had happened?”

“I’m sure there is, but you know, it’s all water under the bridge. I feel very fortunate to have experienced what I’ve experienced and now I’m taking a time to reflect on those experiences and share them in book form.” Our waiter, a small man with thinning black hair and a kind smile, checks on us again. I order another beer and another plate of noodles. “I was very dialed in,” Bruce continues. “I look back and think, ‘God, the first Beastie Boys record, the first Run-DMC, I was reviewing bands when they put out editions of 1,000.” He says he wasn’t focused on any one genre, rather it mattered only if the record was independent. “For an artist to put out their own record or work with a small label, there has to be a certain attitude or spirit to begin with. As opposed to moving to L.A., working the strip. Certain personality types were attracted to that whole process—pioneers, critical thinkers, spirited individuals. So what unified everybody was that spirit of independence. It may have been a variety of styles, but that spirit was evident. It was more radical.”

“Are you still interested in finding new bands to shed light on, or is that behind you now?” I ask.

“The whole lifestyle of discovering new music and promoting it, it’s kind of intense. Going out to shows all the time—it’s a great thing to do in your twenties and thirties. But I don’t go out to shows all the time, I spend more time with my family, there’s more time to reflect. I have a friend, Reuben, though, who works for Hardly Art, a Sub Pop subsidiary. People like Reuben are just twenty-four-seven completely plugged in. I would defer to Reuben.”

Bruce’s words, “It all starts local” ring in my ears again. How different the Seattle music scene is compared to the mainstream commercial music stations. And Bruce has seen the evolution of this over the last forty years. “What are your thoughts on the big changes over the last, say, four decades?”

“The pop charts are dominated by a handful of artists, you keep seeing the same players over and over—it’s like this powerful elite group has decided this handful of people will be the pop stars of the next ten years. In the 60’s you still had AM radio stations where DJ’s would pick the music and you had so much diversity. Recently, I’ve found myself enjoying DJing weddings. They’re multi-generational, and as a music historian it’s the once place you can go and you can spin anything you want from the last 60 years, or 70 years! Doing that you realize there were some eras where music was so potent.”

?What are those eras?”

“I would say the 60’s and 70’s were way stronger than the 80’s and 90’s. Seriously.”

“Not just because they were more formative years for you?”

“In the 80’s there are a few artists that stand out, Prince, for example, and I love the Smiths from that era. But that music was never really that popular. Prince and Madonna, and then you’ve got a lot of watered down mid-wave stuff. It’s kind of a blur. Whereas, you play something like Al Green or James Brown, you think it’s good music, not just a kitschy one-off.”

“What was the first record you remember buying?”

“The first record I bought was ‘Revolution’ by the Beatles when I was nine years old. This is a crazy story, but it’s true: I wanted to buy a record player and my parents said, ‘Well you’re going to have to earn the money’ and record players were like forty dollars. So, I saw an ad on the back of a comic book that said, ‘Go door to door and sell Christmas cards with customized names embedded in the card.’ And I could make a dollar for every box sold. It’s July and August, knocking on people’s doors. People looked at me and must have thought, ‘Okay, this kid needs a break.’ But after a couple months of doing this, I made forty bucks. So, I went down to Sears with my Mom and she looked at me and said, ‘Are you sure this is how you want to spend your money?’ and I said, ‘Yeah, Mom, I’m sure.'”

“So the house didn’t have one?”

“No, we had a radio, but not a record player. So I bought one and from that day forward I spent every dime I had on records.”

“Desert Island Question: if you could have the catalogue of any artist while stranded on a desert island, what would it be?”

“If I could have one genre, it would be—I’m actually a huge fan of Jamaican music from the late 70’s. The Golden Era of reggae. There’s so much soul. So I’d probably choose that. But the Seattle bands of the late 80’s and the early 90’s were also very soulful, emotionally intense, very expressive. It wasn’t about getting the Letterman gig or playing every note just perfectly, it was about going on stage and you’d either fail or succeed based on how things came into alignment.”

I begin to feel an extra spark as he talks about that generation of Seattle music. This. This is what I was waiting to hear.

“Groups like Nirvana and Mudhoney,” Bruce continues, “were super hit and miss. Nirvana did a number of horrible shows. And they also did some amazing ones. Because when they walked on stage you weren’t quite sure what was going to happen. That was more the punk rock attitude of the time. Where you kind of go into a Shamanic trance and rock the crowd and you weren’t sure what was going to happen next. And now I feel like a lot of the indie culture is a little too safe, polished, a little too worried. We’ve lost something in that process.”

“But you didn’t hear that when you first heard Nevermind?”

“Well in that I heard a lot of soul. It was polished, but there were some brilliant songs and Kurt’s voice was unbelievable. It wasn’t as raw as the first record but I thought they found the perfect balance, the perfect compromise. It got on the radio but there are hundreds of people who come up to me who say they heard ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ while at work and they just got up, left work, and went to buy it.”

“Nirvana was able to marry rawness and polish successfully.”

“And I must say the Macklemore story is pretty interesting—aside from it being a business phenomenon, putting out their own stuff and charting and charting—this guy took a lot of risks. ‘Same Love’ is historically significant. That song probably helped pass the same sex marriage initiative in this state. And a song championing thrifting? Where did that come from? Then the ‘Can’t Hold Us’ track which is, musically, incredibly busy—I think if I was in a meeting with some marketing people I would have said it was way too busy, it will never blow up. But it did. It’s got that incredible vocal hook. And I’ve seen people respond to all these tracks when DJing and it’s just striking a chord with everybody. Macklemore is different than Nirvana with Kurt’s gutsy raw emotion, but I have to give huge props to him for taking a bunch of risks.”

“And he does a good job of repping the city,” I say.

“Hell yeah! When you have an artist blow up like that, the whole city gets juiced up.”

“It seems to me the city is going through a similar renaissance now as in the 90’s. It seems like there was a malaise that occurred after the grunge era, especially since so many people died. People not wanting to recognize the city as a creative hotbed until recently. But I think that’s changing.”

“Interesting,” Bruce says. “Personally, for me, after Kurt’s passing, I was like, ‘Wow, so this is what it’s all about? You help launch an artist’s career and they become so big that they can’t handle the stress and they kill themselves? I think I’m just going to move to a remote island [Orcas Island] or something for seventeen years.’ I really had to reconsider what I wanted—everything in the city came to a lull for a while.”

“Macklemore’s violinist writes a regular piece for us about being on tour and in the most recent one, he talks about his difficulties and Macklemore’s own difficulties being on tour, quoting Macklemore saying something like, ‘This is what I do and it’s hard and at times very fun. But it’s no better or worse than anything else.’ So, it seems to me, that talking about all that is important. Transparency is important. And it didn’t seem Kurt Cobain had that openness that maybe Macklemore now does?”

“You’re absolutely right.”

“You have to risk sharing your thoughts despite the worries of what it might do to all the people dependent on you.”

“Also if you’re dealing with the stresses of that sort of situation, it helps, not just to discuss them publicly, but to have an inner-circle of people. Kurt didn’t have that, he was very reclusive. It was his personality even before his fame. I remember going down to Olympia and seeing Calvin Johnson in the summer of 1991 and asking, ‘Hey have you seen Kurt?’ and Calvin saying he hadn’t seen him for six months despite the fact they lived down the street from one another. It’s very important to share your thoughts with others.”

The bill arrives accompanied by two fortune cookies. We crack them and show each other what they say. Our beers glasses are empty, the plates cleared. I turn off the recorder and we chat a bit more about the need to share and what, Bruce thinks, off the record, may have hurt Kurt in not doing so.

When we finally leave Sea Garden, we walk together down the street. As when our conversation began, Bruce asks me a bit more about The Monarch. If we have offices? What sort of apartment do I live in? He recalls living in a small room when first starting Subterranean Pop in Olympia that went for $200 a month. All of this is encouraging and heartwarming.

Bruce Pavitt will be signing copies of his book Experiencing Nirvana at Fantagraphics in Seattle Dec. 7^th from 6-8 PM.