Sub Pop 1000

We STILL want your money!

Yes, I know.

I may as well be a carnival barker; inviting you, valued listener, to step-right-up! If Sub Pop has ever had a mission other than to separate you, gullible customer, from your wallet (and the contents therein), it’s to inspire nasty, compulsive behavior.

We’ve been doing it the same way for over 25 years: by putting out crucial, limited-edition vinyl records.

Back in 1986, before Sub Pop was a company with debt, mass firings and other trappings of corporate culture, our founder, Bruce S. Pavitt, was already plotting a generation’s takeover.

Sub Pop 100, the first vinyl featuring the now-ubiquitous logo, was the first step in his elaborate scheme. Featuring the “spoken word” of Steve Albini and stellar tracks by Sonic Youth, Wipers, U-Men and Scratch Acid among others, Sub Pop 100, with brain-melting cover art by Carl Smool, was a utopian endeavor at its heart: a “greatest hits” compilation for a world that might actually enjoy “underground” music – a mostly laughable conceit in the mid-80s. Its first-and-final pressing was for 5,000 copies.

(We feel your pain, covetous collector, but that shit’s long gone, save the occasional eBay sighting.)

For Sub Pop, 1988 was a year of many firsts: our first office, our first employee, our first bounced check(s) – and that was just April! Sub Pop 200 was conceived over a bottomless trough of beer at the Virginia Inn; twenty masterpieces spread across three twelve inch vinyl EPs with a glossy booklet, this limited edition boxed set was to feature only our friends and our friends’ bands. We then hired an unemployed British actor, re-christened him “Everett True” and bribed a failing music rag to publish our words with that byline. The rest is so much spilt porridge, as they say, and having friends like Nirvana, Soundgarden and Mudhoney didn’t hurt either.

(Sub Pop 200 is still available on CD, old timer; the classic Charles Burns illustration alone makes it worth the purchase.)

At last, it’s 2013, and the music industry is well into its second decade of epic free fall. Once seen as a colorful holdover from a bygone era, like polio and honor killing, record-making is resurgent, and you, discerning buyer, stand to get fleeced by those who would have you spend extravagantly on something unnecessary or worse just ‘cause it’s Record Store Day.

Don’t be deceived! After all: WE still want your money!

Our Silver Jubilee commemorates 25 years of going out of business, and to celebrate, your friends at the Sub Pop water cooler have put together a compilation worthy of your time, money and admiration – though maybe not in that order. We don’t write pithy, half-baked reviews about the music we love; we commit it to vinyl!

Sub Pop 1000 is our gift to you, patient benefactor, for your unwavering devotion in the face of occasionally wavering good taste. Put together as a labor of love, Sub Pop 1000 carries no further agenda than to provide a crucial, maximal listening experience for its own sake. By that measure, it succeeds and then some. With artists from disparate parts of the globe, our quest for World Domination appears to be complete – again!

Sub Pop 1000 will be a one-time pressing of 5,000 on tricked-out colored vinyl, with cover art by Nathan Fox, a 16-page booklet and an MP3 download coupon. Sub Pop 1000 will be available at your local record store on 4/20/2013 (aka Record Store Day, though Sub Pop 1000 is NOT a Record Store Day exclusive), through this here Sub Pop Internet Shopping Place and at our 25th anniversary Silver Jubilee on July 13th. It’s also available digitally, for whatever THAT’S worth.

Your uncle in the record business,
-Jonathan Poneman

A limited number of copies of the Sub Pop 1000 LP are available through this very website, otherwise, they will be available at your local independent record retailers as an official (but not exclusive) part of 2013’s Record Store Day.