Pop Smarts

Everywhere you turn, you hear another critic bemoaning the sorry state of pop music: the glut of one-hit wonders, the death of the album, major labels jumping on the bandwagon of the latest Billboard chart topper. But anybody who thinks there's been a radical downward shift in pop music is ignoring its history. Pop music began as a singles format—to this day, dance music, hip-hop, and R&B are singles art forms. There have always been one-hit wonders, and sometimes they even grow into critically acclaimed bands: Radiohead was once tagged as a one-hit wonder, but its last album was up there with Bob Dylan on the 1997 critics' polls. Those wailing about the album dying are ignoring all pop music before Sgt. Pepper or Pet Sounds. And record companies are, above all, companies. They're in it to make money. Maybe what's brought on all this wailing is the assumption that the early 1990s were anything but an anomaly in the music industry. During that period, major labels did their best to conceal the importance of the profit motive. "'Credibility' is a word that was used a lot around 1993—you know, 'We're going to release a nine-minute song to college radio,'" recalls Robert Roth, front man for the Seattle band Truly.

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So many "credible" bands (Nirvana, Sonic Youth, Mudhoney) signed to the corporate labels like Capitol, Warner Bros., Epic, and Columbia, that it's now impossible to "sell out" by signing to a major label. Eventually, everybody gets a deal (and today's bands would laugh at the reported $60,000 advance that shocked everyone back in 1988 when Mother Love Bone took it). Nobody cares if you're on a major or an indie, as long as your music is good.

Unfortunately, artists face more of a struggle to make the music they want on major labels, where accountants wield their balance sheets like swords. But a new generation of bands are learning from the experiences of "credible" bands—Royal Trux, the Lemonheads, the Posies—that were scarfed up by major labels in the early '90s and are now finding their way back to indies. The lesson: Clearheadedness and a good lawyer are any band's best assets.

Back in the day...

A lot of Seattle bands have been through the worst of the major labels' '90s ride. Pilot and Truly are just two of a list that includes Love Battery, Hammerbox, Flop, and others who learned hard lessons from dealing with both majors and indies. Their experiences are potent examples of the music business's cyclical nature.

Truly—with members Hiro Yamamoto (Soundgarden's original bass player), Mark Pickerel (the original Screaming Trees drummer), and Robert Roth (formerly of Storybook Krooks)—was hailed by some as a "Seattle supergroup," when its first two Sub Pop EPs appeared in 1991 and 1993.

"We got offers [from major labels] in '92, and we could tell that they wanted clone-type bands, so we blew them off," Roth recalls.

"Capitol told us, 'We want to build a career'—which is the biggest con in the world," Roth says. "I don't know if it was a complete con, because the industry really did change its focus for a while. When we were signed to Capitol, we were told: 'Push the envelope. We don't want you to focus on singles until your second or third record.' For a window of a couple years, a band could get signed and make the record they wanted to make—that hadn't happened since the '60s with Jefferson Airplane, the Doors. Then the whole industry shifted towards one-hit wonders, three-minute pop, Green Day, and whatever. The people we worked with [at Capitol] were frustrated—a lot of them have changed positions or been fired. Now I imagine it's much worse—they're looking for the '90s equivalent of the Partridge Family or something.

"Mark [Pickerel] has his own record store [Rodeo Records in Ellensburg], and kids used to come in looking for the latest Drag City single—the new Pavement, or whatever—but in the mid-'90s people stopped searching, because anything cool was pretty much guaranteed to be snapped up by a major label in a few weeks. Those adventurous kids don't exist now."

Indies and majors: Is there a difference?

It would be nice if there were obvious heroes and villains to this story—heroic little indie vs. big bad major—but the truth is, there aren't. The general consensus among musicians who've worked with both indies and majors is that they're pretty much six of one, half-dozen of the other. "I don't know anybody who's been on an independent label—or a major label for that matter—who's had a positive experience," says Jeremy Wilson, the front man for Pilot.

Wilson signed his first record contract as an 18-year-old member of the Dharma Bums. Now 30, he's dealt with both respected indie labels and majors. He thinks the majors have only themselves to blame for the industry's current sales slump. "The record labels lost billions of dollars because of the grunge scene," he says. "In 1991, before Nevermind came out—when there was a true, viable independent music scene with its own network set up—it was easy to tour the US because there weren't tons of bands doing it. There were 6,000 to 7,000 releases a year. Within two years, the majors pushed it to over 17,000 records each year. Which means you've completely glutted the market. All these mom-and-pop stores can't stock all these records. We're paying for it now."