Sub Pop Turns Twenty, Invites Mudhoney, Green River, Wolf Parade to Birthday Party

To celebrate twenty years of providing a home to some of the most seminal underground music in history, Sub Pop Records is throwing a party. Taking place on July 12 and 13th in their native Seattle, the label will gather former and present acts for the SP20 Festival. Leading the charge are old school favorites Mudhoney, the Fluid and a reunion of Green River (which features members of Pearl Jam, Mudhoney and Love Battery) and new schoolers Wolf Parade, Iron & Wine, Flight of the Conchords and No Age. The label will also host a comedy festival featuring Patton Oswalt, Eugene Mirman and Todd Barry. Sub Pop also plans on reissuing some of their greatest hits, with Mudhoney's Superfuzz Bigmuff the first to get the deluxe treatment.

SP20
Beachwood Sparks
Comets on Fire
Fleet Foxes
Flight of the Conchords
The Fluid
Foals
Grand Archives
Green River
The Helio Sequence
Iron & Wine
Kinski
Low
Mudhoney
No Age
Pissed Jeans
Red Red Meat
The Ruby Suns
Seaweed
Wolf Parade

• 
  MUSIC Exclusive Live Chat With Linkin Park and Incubus
• 
  MOVIES & TV Peter Travers: 'The Avengers' Has it All
• 
  POLITICS Matt Taibbi: Jon Corzine Is the Original Zimmerman
• 
  VIDEOS Exclusive Premiere: Tenacious D's 'Tinnitus'

Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

More Song Stories entries »

Twitter