Remarkable People: Making a Difference in the Northwest; Interview with Jonathan Poneman

us it's b it's both

it's been

it's been it's b if bevin musician has now in nineteen eighty eight

and starred with bruce and myself and insistent as a full time operations bruce actually started the label a number of years ago it's hard for me to be precise even though we've done a number of different interviews as time goes by the facts start a ball or with time we'll do that to people along but we stars of the time operation in nineteen eighty eight and since then we have stumbled into a high profile that you think has more to do with coincidence and good luck and less to do with a meditation on but at this point in time we have offices in london in a small town called government which is in the middle of farm country in germany i'm here in seattle and in boston massachusetts the of bands or artists from

france in great britain and canada in the united states more regions in the united states record for us we have our records distributed in asia pop culture press right now our initial ascent and say i think that we are regarded by many as being a formidable independent rock label that said we obviously do not move the violence that major labels or orally rules that are distributed by major distributors you're right we have been written about in rolling stone and usually stated by the new york times the london observer their new musical

express span crane the chicago tribune and the wall street journal lewis goes on that i'm not always going to have a article written about us in forbes magazine edges really ironic but i think a lot of it just has to do with the fact that as we moving to the end of the century sir our economy is transferring from an industrial economy to being a marketing knowledge that the economy and i think it was trying to realize that the growth industries in the american economy at the end of the nineteen nineties are ultimately related to the crooning of copyrights and drug information in the processing in whispers of information and see

obvious booming growth of organizations like microsoft across an innocent extreme example and obviously they're in a completely different round from earlier but i think that has obviously its differences and manufacturing automobiles are what i think i am not not that huge and i think that what we're doing very well armed relative to what we started obviously but we'd like to put money back into the organization that i would like to thank for an operation our size that repairs that's in our staff salaries for fairly reasonable and oh yeah and we really try to take care of our bands analysis of businesses to maximum advantage

find me personally the company grosses in the millions as far as what i take home personally is really varied from year to hear my stephen harper's chose to buy a house last year or so we had to do a there was a dividend disperse this person so that allowed me to get a little naive and i chose not to last london but as far as well bruce and i choose to be pay cuts it's really quite modest the company is still too young to support to sort of access that is usually associated with this industry ceo washington

has become a boomtown over the past ten or fifteen years for a number of reasons obviously a very remote region and therefore is discover later than other regions it's also a very beautiful part of the country which is obviously something oscar historic value our economy has not been tarnished by the recent saintly gray those and i'm in the rust belt for example because all through the eighties despite the chaos that was taking place in the airline industry domestically a boeing surged in terms of its productions growth in the orders and that obviously has always affected the regional economy and cry oh i think i think that the music scene as closely associated and i think a lot of

people make a big issue about the weather in seattle they're very poetic way i think that a lot of that really does have to do more with the economic conditions in this area than anything else because the pursuit of rock n roll career for the longest time was the sport of kings evolved purchase an expensive equipment they will invest large sums of my and to be able to establish yourself on to such a degree that somebody from a larger organization would take an interest in bankrolling your career part of this bill what is so marvelous about the success we have achieved another label sun and bands and and man city's haves have achieved over the past ten or so years is that it's been a very well we refer to

as a a diy revolution the eye watering courson do yourself and ultimately we somehow hope to uphold the principles of being able to do a one man to yourself and stephanie mcmahon are those are our code as far as seattle and in general white continues to be prosperous i think a lot of it has to do as well with a coincidence once again is the city has had a strong tradition in supporting the arts you have a very odd liberal and it's very liberal city in general despite growing evidence liquor laws in teen dance martin says it's sad are you still have a a fairly fluent

very socially conscious populous and a lot of baby boomers as well and these people have all grown up valuing the kind of music that we now actually this is a revised version of a lot of the music that was basically and michelle way introduced in the sixties and seventies fashions of are willing to hear him he says the music that has been associated with seattle washington music that was different in music has been associated with seattle washington is a very aggressive very raw form of its harder than rock n

roll its parties and the music that has emanated from this part of the world has always been very at a premium has been on a party ability us at dr your qualities of the music and this is going back to the late fifties and early sixties back to on paul revere and the raiders sonics the whalers jimi hendrix ray charles the people who have come from that and this is in no way to diminish the genius of ray charles and jimi hendrix but therein there was a real emphasis on being able to move and shake and be able to have more of a soulful expression as opposed to the sort of calculated maneuvers that came to be associated with pop music and the waiter

sixties on through the mid to wait seven days and actually for that matter on into the eighties even though the music transformed considerably and eighty six it ceased to be the same kind of guitar driven rock and became much more oriented towards sequences and synthesizers and and our style set and move further away from the archetypes that we're on them are continually being honored by the music has referred to generically as northwest rock as far as music is associated with bruce and i like to see it as being apart from our own participation in this whole thing once again i have to credit the greater support system we have an internal support system i would like to think

that we we operate as a consensus seeking organization internally bruce and i are the owners of the company but i like to think that they're everybody in this company has a tremendous amount of influence in terms of which way the company those who choose to sign i also think we respond to vega served and put that traditional way you know inspired us and our people and that is an early on we were told by a veteran and r person there's nothing more convincing a line going out the door down the block out of the club and we still respond to that a lot of the bands we work with they're very popular in their hometowns sometimes we will hear something that is not popular yet but i think a lot of it just comes

down to be able to spot that comes down to something as simple as just having listened to music for so long they knew you can recognize something there was going to be popular even before other people have had the opportunity to expose china and determine ultimately its popularity this i was a musician it is still strong influence now i played bass guitar in guitar and noodle around with anything that i can possibly get my hands on there are some people if you hand them an instrument master it within days some of the notes and the sort of person who sort of the inverse of that i will basically deconstruct to know know are for purposes i will be a top state the

basic mechanics of the way it works cece basically forget everything basically music to my own hands but as stated it and making it sound like a rival revolutionary avant garde musicians basically just on the stove and now a living room you're basically at this point is this is a strategy that sounds like there's less chance to see the spirit in the air this is serious on some of the best rock n roll has a certain mean spiritedness to it however the bottom of underneath all pop culture that is associate with

rock music there's a sense of humor in may not be a sense if you know i care jerry lewis our ally andrew dice clay or david letterman and that doesn't necessarily have to be wacky or and it doesn't have to be a comedic way doesn't lay defenseless the one credo that we try to live by is not to take ourselves too seriously and usually even in the most morose so closing moments that some artists karen taylor it's very funny as i said and he saw me as but it arouses a certain amusement a certain recognition

sometimes it's a self recognition on and i think a number of different emotions number of different thoughts and feeling sorry vote from theater art music and i think at the end of the day is most important to be able to realize the rock musicals or of ways the city announced a way to have fun its narrow way in which to live one's life that's not a manifesto a lot of people treat it that way particularly people who come basically you can't get any other kind of intellectual nourishment on it seems to me that this music the music itself is not that intellectual international a lot of the people who make the music are there is often individuals and not all of them

and i think that i would like to think that a lot of those people the approach what they do thoughtful i'm sometimes i all sides though local band the super suckers these are individuals who i think are pretty bright individuals regiment but they come across on stage it's kind of a no holds barred party band and one does not associate that with sort of cerebral tendencies it's a great classical musician i think that there is definitely an intelligence there to be able to recognize

you know once a place in the scheme of frank sinatra and not trying to over embellish and over and allies and become unbound and pretension because that's a lot of great rock bands his surname they feel like they have no because it had people watching i'm kind of hit shows it feel like all were artists now we're going to make a statement that's just like rock and roll can be a place for making a statement but the state has to be a ba really really simple because of that attraction a the thrust of the music that cynicism it sits there all day you really are there is there is there isn't a rundown public enemy

and it would be like saying that chuck d is playing at being an african american militant i think that there is an element of like you know those charity from my understanding a relatively stable middle class background and the germans obviously making a lot of money now ah but he still is very or has it actually i must say having been listening to the very latest public enemy records but he has a he has developed a reputation as being a very thoughtful very a very very evocative provocative musician participant in this community i think that doesn't mean that at all because he has and they come from northwest background or he may be making money that

doesn't mean that is play acting and being out and you know a militant and all because he may take extreme positions in some of his songs that does not mean that he and sometimes it doesn't mean that he is necessarily that way every aspect of his life i don't think that these people are nearly play acting i don't think that they are merely being ironic i think that there is an element of of truth an element of familiarity in that which they choose to portray so why these people become consumed in these images i think at the time that is people started to do a sort of shtick there was a lot more meaningful because in the mid to late eighties in the sort of underground

american rock same that somehow grew out of there are a lot of restrictions and there is a lot of dogma which was born of of a number of different politically motivated schools that existed in this particular community and what we chose to do was to basically you know tossed all this pretentious rigmarole aside and get down to business and having fun and being alone and being able to celebrate you know being part of this particular region and let's face it when somebody you know associate me now it's become something different but when somebody associate somebody as being a resident of the pacific northwest bigfoot

notions of people who are you know raising raising came out emails and that's the sort of the thing that as far as you know manufacturing mythology those were served the references broadly speaking they've got transferred into the creation of these characters a lot of these people just like those that combined with just some really grates you know rock n roll credits now everybody from iggy pop and alice cooper to you know to a lesser degree you know there's even mick jagger and you can hear on this have all sorts of people in the home and funk and alec james brown the new main allison to one of the early sub pop

bands and go geez this this sounds like the godfather of soul but the the correlation it would make is that there is an emphasis on a lot of the emphasis on the groove and simplicity i think there are references in a breeze earlier interview my partner made references to the three b's that the big black black sabbath and mississippi so much analysis and ok yeah i think so

oh i think the young with an abstract hanging go geez you know what is this you know i can't i can't make out with this is all my fangs that though where it's very importance from was no census subjective experience happy i am a real fetishist i mean certainly with us most severe rock listenership really cares that much may be that some who grew up listening to bob dylan or bruce springsteen or something i think about that i think though us

fossil where isis a lot of intelligence meaningful verses but i i think and i'm doing that the toll of war and that always exists is betraying the wrong criticism of the beat of rock n roll and peoples you need to communicate and express the artistry and sometimes they exist in tandem and sometimes that it is nothing but a tug of war back and forth there was no resolution