Cowboys and Indies: The Epic History of the Record Industry (50 page)

The originality of Pavitt’s perspective aroused the interest of the English magazine
NME,
which first reprinted his
U.S. Indie Chart
. Shortening his magazine title to
Sub Pop
in 1981, Pavitt then began alternating the magazine with mix tapes. Inspired by Rough Trade and then helped by them, he got his first taste of record production when their “distribution picked up two hundred copies and I was off! It eventually sold two thousand—good numbers at the time!”

In 1983, Pavitt made his fateful move to Seattle, where he helped set up a store for alternative music and skateboard gear. Called Fallout Records and Skateboards, it became a meeting point in the bohemian Capitol Hill neighborhood. “Although I left in 1985 to start the Sub Pop label,” explained Pavitt, “I helped establish the vibe, which was mostly SST releases, American hardcore punk, as well as U.K. releases from 4AD, Factory, and Rough Trade.” Pavitt also began spreading his message to the local street scene; he wrote a “
Sub Pop
” column for alternative magazine
Rocket
; he hosted a
Sub Pop
show on Seattle radio and deejayed at two clubs, the Metropolis and the Vogue.

In 1986, Pavitt finally set up his own Sub Pop record label, and two years later, he teamed up with a local music promoter, Jon Poneman, who invested $20,000 “and joined me in documenting the Seattle scene, which we both agreed was really taking off.” On April Fool’s Day in 1988, they opened a tiny office, selling mail-order 45s from bands such as Green River, Soundgarden, Mudhoney, and Nirvana.

“Things moved quickly for Kurt [Cobain] and Nirvana,” remembered Pavitt. “Despite his intense, guttural singing style, offstage Kurt was shy and quiet. He was also sensitive, creative, and a genuine fan of new music. His ambitions were initially modest. In the fall of 1988, he was stoked to have his first single, ‘Love Buzz,’ played on the local college station.” Within a year of their debut album,
Bleach,
Nirvana made the cover of Britain’s
Sounds
magazine, toured Europe, and rocked London at Sub Pop’s LameFest showcase.

Meanwhile, in New York, another young man with a giant destiny in the record industry was rising up through his local indie community, producer and Def Jam founder Rick Rubin. As a student in the early eighties, “I hung out at a tiny independent record store called 99 Records on MacDougal Street, run by a guy named Ed Bahlman,” explained Rubin. “He was sort of my mentor in the music business because he put out independent records like ESG, Bush Tetras, and Liquid Liquid. It was just a really cool indie store where I heard a lot of U.K. twelve-inches and independent punk rock.”

Rubin got into break beats and befriended Zulu Nation deejay Jazzy Jay. “I experienced hip-hop as black punk rock,” he said. “It was another way of taking music back. It wasn’t made by virtuosos, it wasn’t about great musicianship, it was made by anyone with an idea or something to say.” He was introduced to a black promoter, Russell Simmons, and set up Def Jam in 1984 while still a student. Following initial releases such as LL Cool J’s “I Need a Beat,” Rubin began mixing up all of his diverse influences. “In high school I had listened to stuff like AC/DC and Led Zeppelin. From there I got into independent punk rock—the Dead Kennedys, Black Flag. Then I got seriously into hip-hop, where it all moved full circle because I was missing the old stuff like Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath.” Blurring the lines between what seemed to be alien genres, in 1985 Rubin produced Def Jam’s first Top 10 smash hit, “Walk This Way,” on which an old Aerosmith rock song was given a striking slant courtesy of rappers Run-D.M.C.

In the opposite direction, Rubin convinced the hard-core punk band the Beastie Boys to try rapping. The resulting experiment was a 12-inch, “Rock Hard,” which led to a No. 1 album,
Licensed to Ill,
including two Top 10 hits, “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party)” and “No Sleep till Brooklyn.” From that collision of genres and personalities came a third important Def Jam group, Public Enemy, who in 1988 released the landmark hip-hop album
It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back
.

Illustrating the constant reverberation of sounds and ideas across the Atlantic, in around 1988, just as grunge and punk-fueled hip-hop began to explode on America’s coasts, back in England, a new kind of postpunk dance wave—inspired by the New York clubs of the early eighties—was starting to swell up through Rough Trade’s distribution networks. Once again, it was coming from Northern England, in particular Manchester, where for six loss-making years, Factory Records had poured profits from Joy Division and New Order into their superclub, the Hacienda.

“I’m out of touch with the street,” admitted Factory cofounder Tony Wilson in 1987. “Between ’76 and ’81, I knew everything that was being released and I saw a different band each night. But that part of your life passes, and now I rely on other people to tell me what’s happening.” As Factory’s new A&R man, Mike Pickering, explained, “Rob Gretton and I wanted a dance label; Factory Dance … you could feel it happening … God bless Tony, but I don’t think he had the vision Rob had. Tony said dance would never happen.” As a result of this disagreement, Pickering set up his own dance label, Deconstruction, which competed with other house pioneers such as On-U Sound, FON, Champion, and Mute sublabel Rhythm King.

However, Mike Pickering and Rob Gretton still had influence over programming at the Hacienda. Deejay Dave Haslam recalled that “By the middle of 1987, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday were packed every week with twelve hundred people a night. My Thursdays were becoming a focus for the city’s indie dance fans. Pickering’s Fridays were then attracting a slightly harder, blacker crowd.” Then, in early 1988, a new drug called ecstasy entered the building, as another deejay, Jon DaSilva, began Ibiza theme nights on Wednesdays. “The music was coming from all angles,” said DaSilva, “from the deepest Detroit techno, into hip-hop and into garage, back to house and into acid house. It wasn’t just the chemicals, it was the music … The whole thing just hit the Hacienda like a thundering train.”

Despite Britain’s first ecstasy-related death on the dance floor of the Hacienda in 1989, rave culture surged, sprouting new clubs, new acts, and new indies by the handful. That year, Britain’s most iconic goth and coldwave label, 4AD, released a one-off experiment, “Pump Up the Volume” by a studio collective of musicians who called themselves M/A/R/R/S—a milestone smash hit. Dance-infused hits followed from the Stone Roses, Primal Scream, and even the original ecstasy dealers from the Hacienda—the Happy Mondays.

Just as dance culture and sampling went mainstream, Rough Trade’s distribution arm collapsed in 1991. Although £40 million worth of records were flowing through its nationwide veins, its success had made it too large and unwieldy for its idealistic founders to steer. Cash-flow difficulties on the distribution side capsized the entire enterprise—record company included. “Rough Trade’s great flaw was that we never had a financial director who understood the business,” sighed Geoff Travis with the benefit of hindsight.

For the hundreds of hand-to-mouth labels involved, it was more than just a distributor going bust. There had been a powerful cultural dimension to the Rough Trade experiment, and its sudden death created a vacuum. For 4AD boss Ivo Watts-Russell, “It was the end of an era. I, perhaps naively, always thought of Rough Trade as being filled with true music lovers. I felt the label was being handled by people, at the lowest levels, who knew its history and, with luck, enjoyed a lot of what we were releasing.”

Although another distribution company called Pinnacle provided the same core services, “the dream was over,” said Watts-Russell, “and faceless individuals, little different to those working at the major labels, would now be packing boxes with 4AD
product
. I think it was the beginning of the word
independent
or
indie
losing its meaning, its credibility.” It was at this crisis point, however, that one indie chieftain began to show his mettle—Martin Mills, the group owner behind Beggars Banquet and 4AD. As events would illustrate, through crises, Mills was in the process of becoming a resourceful guardian of independent values, somewhat like Chris Blackwell in the early seventies—though arguably more disciplined and committed to a collective cause.

As with most record men, the enigma of Martin Mills makes most sense viewed through the boy’s eyes. His father, the brightest son from a working-class Yorkshire family, studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, where in 1939 he met his wife, an upper-middle-class girl from the home counties whose family history reached back to the civil service in India.

A product of this socially mixed student romance in Paris, Martin Mills was born in 1949. Unfortunately, “I don’t remember my father very well,” he confessed, “because he died when I was eleven. I don’t really have any clear memories of him apart from a few old photographs.” Growing up, Martin Mills was a brilliant student, but the shadow of his father’s death followed him to school and back home again. “It made me very insecure in my teenage years. It made me very, very, very insecure,” Mills acknowledged as a sixty-two-year-old man.

In the austere gloom of postwar England, the beat boom arrived like a circus coming to town. Listening first to the Shadows, then the Beatles, Mills as a boy got progressively drawn to the edgier sounds of the Stones, the Animals, the Kinks, the Who, and the Yardbirds. “I didn’t really get into Dylan until around 1966 when I first heard
Bringing It All Back Home
and began working backwards through his stuff,” explained Mills. “I wouldn’t say that I played Dylan to the exclusion of everything else; he was one amongst many. But I think with the benefit of hindsight, it’s pretty clear to see that he is the preeminent artist of that half century.”

With his mother working as a grade school principal in Oxford, Mills moved into student digs down the road, graduating from Oriel College in 1970 with a degree in philosophy, politics, and economics. While England was up to its eyeballs in psychedelia, “those years were not wild at all. I never took drugs, I was very rarely drunk. I had been an
extremely
conscientious schoolboy, and I obviously learned to have a bit more fun as a student. I think I was probably a late developer, to be honest. I was very shy as a teenager, and it wasn’t really until university that I began to come out of myself.”

After he applied for a job at every record company in London, the Hammersmith labor exchange found him work as a statistician for the Lane Committee, a group of politicians and specialists reporting on the reform of Britain’s abortion law. “I ended up being the person that wrote the report,” explained Mills. “I actually did all the analysis of all the research and pretty much wrote the statistical side of the report.”

Teaming up with a friend, Martin Mills and Nick Austin set up their own specialist record store, Beggars Banquet. They opened a total of five Beggars Banquet shops, and, as with other specialist retailers of the seventies, the punk explosion was cue for a label, Beggars Banquet Records. After three years releasing punk records, their lucky ticket, Gary Numan, arrived right in the middle of the 1979 recession. They were dipping into the cash register to pay for his synthesizers as bills began piling up in the back office. “We were about to go bust. We were bouncing salary checks. The shop’s cash flow just couldn’t fund what we were trying to do with the label anymore. We were steering over the cliff at that point.”

Luckily the redundant managing director of Arista’s London office found them a lucrative deal with Warner. Mills and Austin sighed a shoulder-load of relief cashing their £100,000 check—a lifesaver, and in hindsight a smart gamble on Warner’s part, comfortably recouped a few months later by Gary Numan’s transatlantic smash hit, “Cars.” Reinvesting profits into a new sublabel, Mills and Austin set up 4AD, run by one of the store managers, Ivo Watts-Russell. Ironically, the younger imprint, by about 1985, began to eclipse the parent company with a string of dark gems: Bauhaus, Modern English, This Mortal Coil, Dead Can Dance, and the Pixies.

By the mideighties, Nick Austin was cartwheeling off on his own artistic tangent. While Martin Mills was focusing his efforts on breaking the Cult, Austin’s fascination with New Age music and jazz-funk left him isolated inside his own company. With tensions turning to estrangement, Mills bought him out. Possibly regretting his ill-timed departure, Austin sued a few years later.

“The fallout with Nick Austin was the only big one of my life, and it was mega fallout,” confessed Mills. “We spent three months in court with each other at the end of it. So it was an absolutely enormous event. It put me hugely into debt.” Ivo Watts-Russell confirmed the saga cast a dark cloud over the group. “It was just so strange from my perspective. It just seemed obvious that Nick, having not really succeeded with his new solo venture, decided he deserved more money from Martin. By this time, 4AD was doing really well, was even financially very flush. The Cult, I think, were also doing quite well. Perhaps Nick felt he was entitled to some of that.”

To pay for his legal costs, Mills had to tap into 4AD’s cash reserves, but in doing so he rewarded Ivo Watts-Russell with 50 percent of the label. “He did not have to do that,” said the equally gratified Watts-Russell. “I only went to the courthouse once to see what was going on, but I did go on the day the judge ruled in Martin’s favor.” Unaware the heavyweight independents from London to Los Angeles were all lurching irreversibly into the jaws of major buyouts, Martin Mills stepped out of the courtroom into a bright future. “In the pub afterwards you could see this
huge
weight lifted from Martin’s shoulders,” remembered Watts-Russell. “We all had tears in our eyes.”

Symbolizing his ascension to the top of the indie mountain, it was Martin Mills and Mute financial director Duncan Cameron who ran in as firefighters once Rough Trade collapsed. They set up a new distribution company called RTM. “The objective was to try to preserve the spirit of Rough Trade,” explained Mills, “but to put it in a more organized and secure context. And those labels that went from the Cartel to RTM didn’t lose any money. We came up with this rather neat idea to subcontract the actual distribution to Pinnacle, so RTM was actually a sales and marketing organization, and it subcontracted all the putting of records in boxes to Pinnacle. There was a slice of the distribution fee which went to repay the old debt. It took about eighteen months, but it succeeded in getting everyone’s money back.”