Green River interview

mark arm

July 8, 2008
Mark Arm on Grunge, Green River, and Reuniting For SP20

Without Green River in 1984, there might be no Sub Pop Records today. Without Sub Pop in 1987, there might be no Mudhoney—or even Pearl Jam—in 2008. (Green River begat Mudhoney and Mother Love Bone; MLB begat PJ.) And without either in the 80s, there likely would have been no "Seattle Sound" explosion in the early 90s.

Fortunately, the timing and location were right for both the post-punk-rock band—originally comprised of singer Mark Arm, bassist Jeff Ament, guitarists Steve Turner and Stone Gossard and drummer Alex Shumway—and its fledgling label. Sub Pop released the band's second EP (Dry as a Bone) in 1987, and its first LP (Rehab Doll) in '88. The rest, for all involved, is culture-influencing history.

Ongoing history. This weekend, the label will celebrate its 20-year existence with a two-day music festival featuring the very band that put grunge—and Sub Pop—on the map.

Seattlest recently had the pleasure of chatting with Green River (and Mudhoney) frontman Mark Arm about his (first) seminal band's story, sound, and Sub Pop-honoring reunion.

Whose idea was the Green River reunion?
[Sub Pop] asked me about it around a year ago when they started thinking about the festival.

How did you get back together? Was it as easy as picking up the phone?
It was sending email, making calls. Getting everyone on board was the easy part. The logistics were tough. I just got back from a tour [with Mudhoney] and Stone's on tour with Pearl Jam right now. Getting in the same room took some work.

Was the Green River breakup a bitter one? Were there hard feelings?
I can't speak for the other guys, but I don't think anyone felt fucked over. When you're young and you have strong feelings about something ... we just didn't want the same things.

People want there to be drama in a band breakup because it makes for a good story, right? I'm sure on some level, feelings were hurt. But there was nothing that kept any of us from being friends. There wasn't a rift between us, in the long run or even in the short term. We all remained on speaking terms after the band broke up. There was no real animosity.

Come on Down was later labeled the first "grunge" album, and Green River the first band of the genre. Did you think you had a new sound at the time?
No. We thought we were part of, for lack of a better word, the hardcore scene. Green River was maybe a little bit more locked up than Black Flag, but we ran across a bunch of bands that we thought we had stuff in common with. We were part of the zeitgeist of the time. We were, for the most part, kids who grew up with hardcore and were growing out of it, rediscovering some of the records that we'd sold. There were a lot of people all over the country doing the same thing. A lot of bands were slowing down and adding metallic touches to their punk.

So it was just a label put on the music after the fact?
Yeah. To give everybody in Seattle the proper credit, though—both Malfunkshun and the Melvins existed before Green River. They had aspects of that sound, too.

There are some great songs on Dry as a Bone and Rehab Doll, but the albums never seemed to get their due.
I think they did. We were a fairly successful band at the time. We got to tour and release a few albums. We had a pretty strong local following, played a lot of shows in town. Green River never had any chance of making any money, but we did pretty good.

What do you think of the band's music when you hear it now?
Surprisingly, there are a couple of songs that were on our very first demo that are really pretty good, but my vocals are really bad. I think Come on Down has three good songs on it. Dry as a Bone is pretty kick-ass all the way through. But Rehab Doll suffers from horrible mid-80s production. That's the stuff I noticed in listening to everything in preparation for [the reunion show].

Will Sub Pop be giving those records the deluxe reissue treatment?
I haven't heard tell of any such thing. There are several versions of stuff for Rehab Doll that Jack Endino recorded. I don't know if he still has copies of that, but I sure would like to hear it. I think it sounds better than the stuff that actually came out on the LP. It wouldn't have that big, gross snare sound.

So how much rehearsal time will you get in before the show?
We had two rehearsals in April. And we'll have a bunch starting July 6. As many as we can.

Still remember the Green River lyrics?
I don't know that I ever remembered them. But they're coming back to me.

What will the band's lineup be? Will both (later guitarist) Bruce (Fairweather) and Steve be there?
It's going to be everybody who was ever in Green River. So, Alex on drums, Jeff on bass, and all three guitar players—Stone, Bruce and Steve. They'll be a three-guitar army.

They'll all play the whole set?
That's the way it seemed in April. We'll see what actually happens. Because Steve quit the band early on, he didn't learn the later songs. So it's up to him to get up to speed.

What former band would you love to see play together again?
You know, that's happened a lot lately. There was The Stooges and MC5. And we were asked to host a day of All Tomorrow's Parties, where we got The Scientists to come out from Australia, with the original lineup—except for the drummer, who's dead. Also, there's The Blasters. The only thing I could ask for right now would be Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band, but that's just never gonna happen. I think Captain Beefheart—Don Glen Vliet—has MS or something.

Any chance the Green River reunion could become something bigger?
There's no plan. I can't imagine a tour that Stone and Jeff would quit their day jobs for. [laughs] No matter how good the money might possibly be for Green River, it would not be anywhere near what they're making.

See Green River at Marymoor Park on Sunday at 7:20-ish. The band's slice of SP20 proceeds benefits The Northwest Parkinson's Foundation.


http://seattlest.com/2008/07/08/mark_arm_talks_grunge_green_river_r.php

Marie Curie

Thanks for posting this!

IAmMyself

Hey Ed had his side gig, Stone could take on another and Jeff definitely could do it!

Yellow Bedwetter

nice interview
i wonder if these cds can be found at an fye?

Stephen Flow

great read, thank you for posting.

mark arm

Rock band Green River reuniting after 21 years

By Jonathan Cohen

NEW YORK (Billboard) - Green River, an early grunge band that included future members of Pearl Jam and Mudhoney, has gone deep into its back catalog for its first show in nearly 21 years in Seattle on Sunday.

The band will perform as part of the two-day 20th anniversary bash of Sub Pop Records, the iconic indie label whose roster spans early Nirvana to comedy duo Flight of the Conchords.

Green River has re-learned two unreleased songs from its early demo, "Baby, Help Me Forget" and "Leech," said bassist Jeff Ament, who went on to co-found Pearl Jam with bandmate Stone Gossard.

"In a weird way, those are probably some of the best songs we have," Ament said. "It's funny how it works. At the time, we thought they were way too simple or not challenging enough. But in retrospect, they're really great pop songs. We re-learned those two, but there are five or six songs that never got released."

Green River, which also includes Mudhoney principals Mark Arm and Steve Turner and drummer Alex Vincent, rehearsed twice in late April but has since reconvened three additional times.

Speaking a day after the latest rehearsal, Ament said, "We had a go at 16 or 17 songs and we have 14 right now, but we may need to get that down to 11 or 12 for Sunday. We have a 40-minute slot."

Ament didn't rule out the possibility of future Green River activity, saying, "It would be fun to write a couple of new songs with those guys." His true goal is what he calls "the ultimate pairing: we need to go ask the Stooges to do 25 shows or something. For me, then it would be worth it."

On Saturday, Ament and Gossard will join their Pearl Jam bandmates for VH1's "Rock Honors" tribute to the Who. The group will perform the Who's "The Real Me" for the occasion. "It's always cool to learn a song like that, which is so different than our own style," Ament said. "We've also never played with horns and a string section before, so that will be an added special thing for us."

Lost Dog 1977

a Grren River Deluxe edition can be a sweet gift, maybe with a DVD with the reunion live....pray to

gozzo5058

Thanks for posting the article. There was some things in there I wasn't tuned into. Thanks again.

mark arm

http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/feature/137651-interview-mark-arm

Thu: 07-10-08
Interview: Mark Arm
Interview by Douglas Wolk

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, becasue 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.