Grunge Meets Genealogy: Tenino Woman Seeks 1991 Album Featuring Sister

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Linda Faccone will never forget the moment in 1991 when her sister, Patricia Rogers, asked her to go look for an album at Rainy Day Records in Olympia.

The two made a daily habit of a morning phone call, but Faccone heard an unfamiliar sense of panic on the other line that day. Rogers lived in Seattle, Faccone in Olympia, so the latter went to the record store in search of “8-Way Santa” by Tad, a grunge band from Seattle.

“Sure enough, there’s this album cover,” Faccone recalled. “I talked to the manager there, and I said, ‘I’m not sure if this is legal.’”

What followed was a lawsuit against a soon-to-be famous record label and a replacement album cover that led to the original “8-Way-Santa” cover art becoming a collector’s item. Rolling Stone included it in its 2015 list titled “Banned in the U.S.A.: 20 Wildest Censored Album Covers.”

On the grand scale of provocative album art, it wasn’t the most explicit. The album cover featured a Polaroid photograph of Rogers and her ex-husband, Kimball Weber, that had disappeared more than a decade earlier, when the two were still married. 

Neither person wore a shirt in the picture — Rogers had on a skimpy bra or bikini top and Weber’s hand on her chest — nor did they have any idea the long-lost picture would wind up on the cover of an album produced by Sub Pop Records.

Faccone, who now lives in Tenino, only began her search for a copy following Rogers’ death in 2016. Her sister had become a born-again Christian about a year before the album was released; Faccone believes Rogers’ second husband was more embarrassed by the photo’s surprise reappearance than even she was.

“It kind of went away for a long, long time,” Faccone said. “I don’t remember ever talking about it with (my sister). At her memorial service, (Weber) came and we started talking about it. Then, my brother and I started looking for it as a memory of our sister. … Towards the end, when she wasn’t still married to her second husband, I think she might have wanted it herself and would have been happy to have it in her own house. But sometimes as a new Christian, you want to pretend something is in your past instead of embracing it as something that made you who you are today.”

Accounts differed in 1991 as to whether the Polaroid was taken from a house during a garage sale or if it somehow wound up in a pile of donated items the couple got rid of as part of their divorce.

According to Faccone, the outcome of the copyright infringement case brought against Sub Pop gave her sister the option of a $2,500 cash settlement or an ownership stake in what was then a small, independent record label.

Rogers took the cash, which came in the form of a monthly check for $25. Though the other option would have gone against her beliefs at the time, it would certainly have been more lucrative. Notable bands signed to the Sub Pop label at one time include Nirvana, Soundgarden, The Shins, The Postal Service and Sonic Youth.



Tad Doyle, leader of the namesake band, shared his thoughts during a 2016 interview with Vice.

“We had a friend who had gotten a photo album at a thrift store,” Doyle told the magazine. “…we were at a party with her, and we said ‘Hey, can we look at those?’ And Kurt (Danielson) and I started looking through these photos of these people’s lives, and that one in particular was pretty cool, so we said ‘Can we take a couple of these?’ However, when you get photos in a thrift store in an album, you’re not going to consider that somebody’s really going to give a crap about ‘em.”

Doyle went on in the Vice feature to explain that, to the best of his knowledge, Rogers became aware of the situation when she saw a review of the record in Spin Magazine. He didn’t dispute the responsibility the band and Sub Pop had for using the photo.

It wasn’t the last time his band would find commercial controversy. Giant Records dropped them in 1994 in response to a poster promoting their latest record featuring Bill Clinton, marijuana, and the tagline “It’s heavy (stuff).”

Faccone hopes to get her hands on the album cover before too long. She prefers not to buy it online, though her brother got his copy that way. The experience of walking into stores, showing people the picture on her phone and telling the story is a tangible connection to her departed sibling.

“As I talk to people, I do try to track down items or keep an eye out for them,” said Todd Carlson, owner of Rockstar Records in Centralia. He met Faccone earlier this month when she visited his store.

“Obviously when I buy big collections, there’s going to be a mix of everything. Hopefully I’ll be able to find that album cover and be able to give it to her.”

It never dawned on family members that they might want to pick up a copy as a keepsake back in the early 1990s. 

Faccone didn’t want her young children to see it in their house, but now that they’re grown, she plans to display it proudly on her wall. Once she owns the album cover, she plans to track down the edition of Rolling Stone with the list published inside and frame the two together.

“It’s my sister,” she said. “I’m not embarrassed about it. None of us were bothered by it when it came up at the memorial. It brought a lot of good laughter and memories. She was very trusting, a free spirit and only saw the best in anybody. It’s more like a piece of history I’d like to have of her.”