Urban Hat€monger ?

There may be some truth in that I think it would more than likely be elements of both. Most of those bands you listed had left Sub Pop themselves by the time Nirvana left anyway. Soundgarden went to SST in 1988 and then A&M the following year , Mother Love Bone were on Polygram by 1989. If i remember correctly the only real big name bands Sub Pop had by the time Nevermind came out were The Afghan Whigs & Mudhoney

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sleepy jack

I wasn't super sure which bands were championed when but I know Nirvana was kind of being treated like crap by Sub Pop because Sub Pop (as well as the rest of the Seattle scene) didn't see much potential in Nirvana.

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Urban Hat€monger ?

I think it was short sightedness on Sub Pop's part. It's easy to look back now & say that but I remember their first UK tour supporting bands like Fudge Tunnel & Bomb Disneyland in virtually every toilet in the UK , it was Nirvana getting played on John Peel's show and getting a few column inches in the weekly music papers. Nobody gave a flying f*ck about Soundgarden , The Screaming Trees or Mother Love Bone then.

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mr dave

just how much would you be willing to invest in a band fronted by a junkie who (for all intents and purposes) can't sing? i can't see how anyone with ANY modicum of business acumen could look at nirvana and not think 'RISK!' early in their career. but like any other risk, the payoff can, and in this case - was, huge.

don't get me wrong, i think nirvana is great. i just can't see how anyone in business thought they were sitting on something huge until 'smells like teen spirit' hit the air. i figure the people at geffen noticed that seattle was really taking off and fished around for someone who had been flying under the radar and hoped they would get lucky - and they did.

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sleepy jack

I think Sub Pop just didn't invest enough into their artists from a personal standpoint. It seemed like everyone jumped ship from them as soon as grunge got popular. Where as in the mid-90s you had bands like Sunny Day Real Estate who did get a fair amount of attention and after breaking up some of the artists new projects returned to Sub Pop (Jeremy Enigk) same with Carissa's Wierd with Grand Archives and Band of Horses. I don't think their was much of a sense of label loyalty amongst the bands.

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Urban Hat€monger ?

This is a label that signed Tad.

I just thought i'd point this out.

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sleepy jack

How many grunge bands have you heard from that time? Not many of them were fronted by Jeff Buckleys or Van Morrisons. Besides I'm sure vocally Kurt was well liked since the people from that scene were big into underground music and he sounds like the dude from the Meat Puppets.

I don't think you really know much about Sub Pop either, they were signing plenty of bands that weren't the smartest business moves.

That explains why grunge bands were being picked up before Nirvana were.

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mr dave

just because someone does vocals doesn't mean they're good singers. personally i really like cobain's delivery. but that does NOT make him a good singer. he could scream like it was no one's business but to actually sing - not so much. being well liked by his peers doesn't make him a good singer. writing great songs does not make someone a good singer. bob dylan and leonard cohen should not be allowed near microphones.

if anything it seems like subpop were willing to sign anyone who wanted to put something out in the seattle area. there are labels like that in my town too. they don't really give a crap about you or your band so long as you pay the bill to put your record out until you start making money for their business. and still, they've got their main bands with personal friends from high school that come first.

ideally, yeah sure it would be awesome if label heads really took the time to nurture and cultivate their talent but then we'd be calling the bands corporate shills.

fact is - until teen spirit, nirvana was just another seattle band. they had hooks, and a decent record. but cobain was still a junkie. hard drugs = RISK. there's little else that needs to be said on that. had he just been a pothead it probably wouldn't have been such an issue. heroin on the other hand is a big deal.

put yourself in the shoes of a major label A&R guy how do you sell a band with a screaming junkie and sloppy power chords to your boss? geffen basically went in on the tail end of the scene, scooped up the leftovers, scored big and then watched everyone else scrape the grime from the bottom of the barrel. the reason the other bands were being picked up first is because they seemed like safe bets - and they were. i really don't think it was an issue of nirvana trying to remain obscure. i REALLY don't think bleach would be as influential as most people consider it had there not been nevermind to compare it to.

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Urban Hat€monger ?

Virtually every single band in that scene had junkies in them. Mark Arm ,Tad , Cobain , Andrew Wood.

A junkieless Seattle band in the early 1990s would have been an exception , not the norm.

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sleepy jack

I repeat, most grunge bands weren't fronted by Jeff Buckley and just because someone isn't a good singer doesn't mean they shouldn't be allowed to make music. I like Bob Dylan's voice and think it fits his music fine. If you want to go listen to perfect pitch vocalists go turn on some overproduced Celine Dion-esque crap, some of us like vocalists with character and grit behind them.

Um yeah, that would be a risky business move...kind of contradictory to what you were saying earlier.

Which is funny seeing as it seems like Sub Pop is all about side-projects nowadays from past artists. The Elected, Grand Archives, Band of Horses, The Postal Service, etc it's a surprisingly extensive list.

Kurt Cobain wasn't even a fullblown addict until after Bleach.

Are you serious? Alice in Chains was a safe bet? You're aware that their singer was a worse junkie than Cobain was right and earlier? That's not even going into the rest of the bands drug problems. Mother Love Bone's singer died of a heroin overdose. You really need to do your research before you make it off as if Cobain was the only junkie in the grunge scene, he wasn't.

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