A lot of scabbing around the old parts of the internet helped me track this down:

a brief history of SPAM-- by Johnny Pseudonym

From Fall of 1999....

For an introduction, allow me to present Pim Valisovich, our token Eastern-European-migrant? staff worker:

"Many people, they come to this site. They ask, what is this S.PA.M.? Is it not a shining city on a hill, all of the people in harmony? The streets, they are paved in gold. The records.And what records! Full of such wonderful music! Music making my eyeballs sweat and fingers tingle! When I come to this site, I see many things. All of them beautiful in their own way. I much like the churches, shiny and white, the spires up in sky. And the women.Ah, the women! Such beauty I have not seen since Anastasia shaved her eyebrows for my birthday at the Terveet Kadet show in 1990. It is a land of wonder, it is."

Yes, it is indeed a world of enchantment out here, Pim. We're proud to have you be a part of it, and we're proud of you, the reader, for choosing to be a part of it too. S.P.A.M. Records is an acronym for Smarmy Post Angst Musicians. The name was chosen in reference to our pasts in Grunge, Fist-Raising Political Activism, Heartfelt and Earnest Punk Rock, Sensitive Folk Music, Bad Poetry, and General Teen Angst. .
My name is John Geek, and I'm one of the people who started this ridiculous project in early 1996. Contrary to "popular" belief, and often my own statements, the label actually began before the first Geekfest. The first semi-official release was Bobby Joe Ebola and the Children MacNuggits' "Two Cats Running EP" in February of 1996, financed by Corbett's shitty job as a manager at Round Table, a coffee wench at Starbucks, a credit card, and loans from our equally destitute friends. As we had no idea how to run a record label, we were hoping that someone else would pick up the record for release and distro and so hid the statement "A S.P.A.M. Records release" somewhere in the insert. We were blissfully unaware that once you record, make 1000 copies, and start selling a record you pretty much ARE the record label. D.I.Y. by default, baby. We've always had a serious disparity between how many interesting ideas we've had and how much business sense we've got. "Two Cats" did, however, feature the pug-001 call number, which we decided to appropriate for future S.P.A.M. releases. Coincidentally, right after this very first S.PA.M. release came out, the last serious relationship I was in ended. So much for Rock n' Roll getting you laid.
There was a bit of a lull after this as we tried to figure out what the hell to do with all these CDs. We ended up giving most of them away, often seeing them appear later in the discount bins of our favorite used music stores. Bobby Joe got a bunch of play on Dr. Demento and some college stations, most notably the cable-only KSUN in Sonoma (primarily due to our friend Mark who was the music director, and had loaned us a bunch of money). They were played nonstop all day, sort of an evil Belle and Sebastian to the Sonoma kids. The compilation was spotted in stores in far-reaching locations such as Wyoming, for some reason, where it was still in the discount bins.
Geekfest rolled on, S.P.A.M. was pretty much its official label even though we had little idea of what running a record label entailed, Bobby Joe Ebola toured, etc. In October of 1997, they put out "At One With the Dumb", their first LP (pug-003). Corbett had to sell his car to pay for this one. It eventually rendered him bankrupt, along with fellow buddies and financiers Tony and Mark. People seemed to like it. About this time, Astrolloyd put out their self-titled 7" (pug-004), made possible by loans from my Dad and my crappy job at Rasputin's Records. Also about this time, we started getting the hang of that well-stocked-merch-table-at-shows kinda thing, along with the local store consignment kinda thing and the mailorder kinda thing.
Everyone began to slowly realize that we could do a lot more with S.P.A.M. Records if we just put some time in it, so we decided to make it an official collective with all the people who were helping out anyway. Meetings began in earnest, sometimes at Punx With Presses, sometimes at Gilman, sometimes in someone's living room. Many cigarettes were smoked. Plans were discussed. Ideas were bandied. Nobody really knew a fucking thing about how to run a record label, but that's ok because we had ENTHUSIASM! The meetings were roughly half Geekfest discussion, half S.P.A.M. discussion. We worked out a seemingly complicated (but actually really straightforward) scheme for how to put out releases, pay the bands, do promo, get distro, break even, etc. The idea of it was that everything was done by consensus, and that the label would essentially be an umbrella for D.I.Y. projects by the bands themselves, and projects brought to the table by S.P.A.M. workers as their pet projects in an order determined by a collective-wide vote. Each project was to be treated as a little separate mini-business, with the coordinators and sponsors of each one determining how much work needs to be done, what way they wanted to pay various people for it, etc. Basically, this encouraged everyone to do their own projects as opposed to just "working for an indie label". Technically, anyone could become part of the collective if you just showed up and made yourself useful and didn't piss everyone off to the point where they wouldn't vote for your inclusion. A formally informal collective. We're still trying to figure out if it works.
What does the future hold? We shall see. Unless, of course, you happen to die before you get there. Or if I die before we get there. I'm sure there will still be a future if that's the case, but I wouldn't give a flying fuck about it. You probably wouldn't if you were dead, either.