by Mark Yarm
Ben McMillan ended up being at one of those parties. It was at 14th and Spring, a block away from my house, and it was in the basement. He grabbed the mic, and he was the first one who seemed kind of comfortable and did something that resonated with us.
JACK ENDINO Matt made it very easy to write difficult music. You could throw anything at him, and he could play it. I rather enjoyed it, but Ben had a hard time singing on some of the quirkier stuff we were doing in the early days. It was a bit prog, actually.
Ben had no history with music whatsoever. He was just a guy with a rich baritone voice who wanted to give it a try. Completely unschooled, no natural sense of melody at all. I basically had to teach him how to sing.
We discovered quickly that Ben was good with lyrics, and he had the pipes, and it was an issue of, “We need melodies now.” He developed a knack for coming up with these melodies and these cadences that would work. But you couldn’t say, “Try it in a different key,” because he didn’t know what a key was. He wasn’t a musician, he was an artist—a very talented artist, actually.
JASON FINN (later Skin Yard drummer; the Presidents of the United States of America/Love Battery/Fastbacks/Feast drummer) When I met Ben, he made more money than anybody I’d ever known before in my life. He sold airbrushed shirts at the Pike Place Market, mainly for tourists. They’d have cat’s eyes and New Wave girls and stuff on them. He made $150 a day, which was incredible. I was like, This guy has really got it figured out, because he’s doing his own thing and it’s creative, and he’s obviously wealthy. (Laughs.)
JACK ENDINO Ben lived in this cooperative, low-rent apartment building called SCUD—Subterranean Cooperative of Urban Dreamers. He was extremely creative, extremely unreliable. Missing practices. Being late. Not coming up with words until literally right when you’re about to record the song in the studio. Always bumming $20 from you. “Ben, you made more money than I did last year. What are you bumming $20 from me for?”
CAM GARRETT (photographer; SCUD cofounder; Ben McMillan’s first cousin) Pretty much anybody that lived in SCUD was some type of artist. We would have regular meetings. Ben was having trouble getting his rent together all the time and making it to the meetings, and we were wondering what to do about him—we didn’t want to kick him out. So we made him president. Then he not only came to every meeting, but he had to chair the meetings, he had to get everybody else there, and he was really good at that. He really blossomed.
DANIEL HOUSE Ben was very gregarious. He was very funny, and he tended not to take things particularly seriously, and I think that’s part of why we clashed. I felt like I would do a lot of work, and I could never get him to really contribute. Then he’d have this attitude of, “Hey dude, whatever. Lighten up.” It’s like, “Uh, you need to show up at practice.” Though I probably did need to lighten up, for what it’s worth.
JAIME ROBERT JOHNSON (a.k.a. Crunchbird; singer/guitarist) Ben used to have this joke he would tell onstage. I got out of treatment once and Skin Yard were playing at the OK Hotel, and I showed up. And he tells the audience, “We’re gonna dedicate this set to Jaime, who’s clean and sober now. We have this box at the end of the stage, so if you have any drugs, put ’em in the box and we’ll dispose of them later.” That made my day.
DANIEL HOUSE Ben worked out a lot, so he was kind of pumped. Lifting weights or going to the gym wasn’t something that people did back then. And then here’s Ben, who’s very dashing and just cut, very trim.
ROBERT SCOTT CRANE Chris Cornell, when he was young—when you look at him on the cover of Screaming Life and in some of those other Charles Peterson photos—he was a boy. He was a very pretty boy. Ben was a man. And I remember young girls were kind of like, Oh, that’s a sexual force up there. He’s like a lumberjack. Ben was this big, muscular guy—and not in a gross, Danzig way.
KERRI HARROP So much of that music has a dude edge to it—there aren’t a whole lot of love songs in the Skin Yard catalog. I don’t get intimidated very easily, but I felt intimidated at shows back then because there were so many dudes. It just seemed so cool, plus they were a couple years older than me, which made it even more daunting. And shows would get wild! With stage-diving and the pit, it’s like, Jesus, something could happen to you.
DAWN ANDERSON A lot of people I knew didn’t really like Skin Yard that much, but I just loved them. I used to ask people, “Why don’t you like Skin Yard?” “Oh, they’re just so arty, they’re too complex.” I guess they were a little too intricate and didn’t just “rock out with a cock out.” And some people thought Ben’s voice was kinda weird—he was doing more of a spacey David Bowie thing. And then someone suggested that it was because they weren’t cute, but I disagree with that. After all, I married the guitarist.
JACK ENDINO I proposed naming the band Skin Effect because I’m an electrical engineer, and skin effect is a particular electrical phenomenon related to high voltages. Then we discovered there was a band in town called Cause/Effect, so that was out the window. Matt said, “Why don’t we call it Skin Yard?” None of us were particularly happy with it as a band name, but nobody actually vetoed it.
DANIEL HOUSE Our first show was June 7, 1985: the U-Men Leave Home show. The U-Men were the band in underground Seattle. And it was a big deal that they were going on tour.
JACK ENDINO We were the first out of five bands: U-Men, Baba Yaga, Girl Trouble, the F-Holes, and there was a performance artist called Function Disorder. The MC was Slam Hate. It was in a hall called the Odd Fellows Hall. It was a big show by any standard.
Larry Reid put the show on. He tossed us the opening slot just to be nice to us. Well, just to get Daniel to stop calling him. Daniel was very persistent about promoting the band. Probably got on a lot of people’s nerves, but then a lot of things happened that wouldn’t have happened otherwise.
JULIANNE ANDERSEN (Supersuckers/Gas Huffer booking agent) Daniel House was a player. A player in a scene that didn’t have players. Daniel House in L.A. makes sense. Daniel House in Seattle did not.
DANIEL HOUSE I’m that guy. I’m the guy who is gonna make the shit happen if everybody else is sitting around with their thumb up their ass. I was the one hustling for gigs. I networked in that scene and knew a lot of people. I was the de facto manager of the band.
I remember being kind of pissed off that we opened that show, which goes back to the arrogance of youth. It’s like, dude, it’s your first show, and it’s a big-deal show.
LARRY REID The U-Men going on tour was another watershed moment, because it was the first local punk-rock band that really went on a legitimate tour.
GILLIAN G. GAAR (journalist/author) I can’t remember who said this first, but he put it well: “It seemed more amazing that the U-Men put a record out and went on tour than it did that Nirvana went to number one.” I mean, how could people get on a record and how did records get out there? It seemed totally unattainable, and you had no idea how to do it. Like nuclear physics or something.
MIKE TUCKER The U-Men toured in a 1963 Chevrolet Viking school bus. It was pink, so it was kind of phallic-looking. And it barely ran. We built plywood boxes in the back for their equipment, and we had a couple sleeping spaces on top of the equipment. When I went with them on their maiden trip to San Francisco and Los Angeles, and then on to Austin, in the summer of ’85, the whole ceiling of the bus was pasted with pornography; primarily straight, hardcore pornography. We also had all these Uzi posters, which Larry and I had gotten at a gun show that we got kicked out of.
So we get pulled over in Los Angeles, the cop came on board this bus with the pornography and gun posters—and at the time, the band looked like complete freaks—and he just shook his head, like, Just get out of here. I’m not even gonna bother with you.
TOM PRICE The first one was called the Doomed Faggots tour. Because we were doomed—we knew we were gonna be miserable and starve.
JIM TILLMAN In a sense we were doomed because there really weren’t many places to play. And we were discover
ing that.
JOHN BIGLEY We went down the West Coast, and everything between Los Angeles and El Paso either got canceled or fucked up. We went to the Woodshock festival in Texas, which was our excuse for touring, and wound up staying in Austin for a month. Woodshock was held on this ranch in Dripping Springs. Naked cliff-diving, eatin’ mushrooms, bathtubs full of marinated beef ribs. It was a mind-blower. Made some pretty strong friendships through it, with bands like the Butthole Surfers and Scratch Acid.
DAVID DUET (Cat Butt/Girl Trouble singer; U-Men roadie) The first U-Men tour, I flew down and met them at Woodshock. I’d moved from Austin to Seattle Thanksgiving of ’83 with my girlfriend Lisa. I met John and Tom on the bus home, and that pretty much instantly blossomed into a cool friendship.
When we got to Austin for Woodshock, the base point for Tales of Terror, Tex and the Horseheads, the U-Men, and all the other assorted musicians that were hanging about was Chris Gates from Poison 13’s house. It was quite the rowdy party scene. The morning after we all hooked up, I remember being woken up by a cop knocking on my knee with his billy club. A majority of us were passed out across the street from Chris Gates’s house—in a funeral home parking lot, with various tarps and blankets thrown over us. A funeral procession was trying to get into the lot.
JOHN BIGLEY The plan was to tour out of Austin, but the only other show we did was Houston. All the other shows got canceled. That happened a lot in the mid–’80s: The venue would cease to be before you got there.
TOM PRICE You could barely call it a tour. It was more like a migration for the summer. A couple weeks after Woodshock, we’d have a show somewhere in Austin, so we’d just hang out until then. We’d find jobs and shoplift food from the 7-Eleven. We’d stay with other musicians, like the guys from Poison 13. That was a huge influence, seeing all these cool bands, which were Texas rock and roll but punk, too, definitely not fitting the hardcore mold.
CHARLIE RYAN In Austin, these people let us stay on their couches for weeks. They fed us and put us up, and it was a monthlong party for us—until they got sick of us. “When you goin’ home?” “Well, we’re broke, so we ain’t goin’ anywhere.” That was our excuse.
Finally, a few of them said, “We gotta get ’em out of town.” So some of the bands actually put on a show and gave us the money so we could put gas in the bus and leave.
TRACEY ROWLAND When the U-Men were in L.A. at the beginning of the tour, Larry couldn’t make it, so he talked me into going down—to keep ’em out of jail, I guess. So John’s girlfriend Val and I drove down in my 1964 Volkswagen Bug. The band’s bus was such a wreck that everywhere we went in L.A. during that week and a half, we went in this Bug.
So the band, Mike T., Val, and me are all crammed into this Volkswagen Bug, and we pulled into this gas station to get gas, and we all piled out of this Volkswagen. And there’s Duff McKagan!
DUFF MCKAGAN I was coming home from work, and I ran into them. I was living in a cockroach-infested single-room apartment. L.A. at the time was Quiet Riot, Ratt, some really terrible bands. In L.A., Guns N’ Roses was considered a punk-rock band. We were huddled in this corner of Hollywood, snapping viciously at any gig we could get.
JOHN BIGLEY Tom goes, “That’s fucking Duff!” There’s this fuckin’ wanker wearing a bullet belt, with his pants tucked into his cowboy boots. His hair is all teased out and long and crazy. You know, Hollywood butt-rocker guy. “Duff, what’s goin’ on? Look at you, man!”
He goes, “Got this band goin’. It’s goin’ really well.”
“What’s it called?”
He sighs. “It’s the singer’s name …” He whispered it: “It’s called Guns N’ Roses.” Yeah, he was embarrassed. He used to be in a band called the Vains, man. Guns N’ Roses?! “The singer is calling himself Axl.”
Guns N’ Roses. Axl. We’re all laughin’. “Wow, how magnificent!” I go, “That sounds like fuckin’ shit. Good luck with that, you freak.” But he was super good-natured about it.
The band laughed about it for a couple of days. “Duff’s doing metal!”
Then, fuck, two years later: “Welcome to the jungle!”
CHRIS HANZSEK We tried to make Deep Six a post-hippie, communal “Let’s make a record we all love” compilation. The compilation was inspired mostly by Jeff and Mark in Green River. I think they might’ve even first mentioned it to me, like, “Hey, what do you think of this idea?” And then right away I loved the idea, and my girlfriend Tina agreed to be the general financier.
TINA CASALE (C/Z Records label/Reciprocal Recording studio cofounder) I first met Chris at Penn State in ’78. He turned me on to all these crazy bands: Television and Patti Smith and the Sex Pistols. I immediately shaved the top of my head; there used to be a hairstyle—it wasn’t a mullet—where you shaved the top of your head and left the rest long.
CHRIS HANZSEK We lived in Boston for two years, where I got my technical start in recording. A couple of college roommates wrote me a letter that said, “We’re living in Seattle now, and you ought to check it out.” My friends sent me compilations called the Seattle Syndrome, parts one and two, a record by the Blackouts, a record by the 3 Swimmers, and a single by the Fartz. I went, “Seattle looks like it’s got a bunch of crazy people doing crazy stuff.” So that sealed the deal.
We moved there in ’83 and on the first day of 1984, Tina and I opened a studio, the original Reciprocal. I did some sessions with the Accüsed; I did Green River’s first demo. When you’re recording for 10 bucks an hour, you can be remarkably popular. But after our one-year lease was up, the landlord saw to it that we didn’t want to continue. It was the loss of the studio that made me think, Geez, what else could I do while I’m hot to trot here?
KIM THAYIL Originally, Chris and Tina wanted to finance a record with Green River, and they came out to see a show we were opening for them. They were really impressed and wanted to make a flip-sided record: Green River on one side, Soundgarden on the other. We could’ve just left it at that, but Mark Arm and I thought it’d be important to include the Melvins and Malfunkshun and the U-Men.
We struggled with whether we should ask the guys in Skin Yard to be on it. So we debated it for a while: “They’re a little bit different, they’re a little bit younger, but they’re kind of like us, and we like Jack Endino. Maybe make it six bands, everyone contribute a couple of songs.”
CHRIS HANZSEK The label’s name, C/Z, was Tina’s idea. She told me that I was the Z, and she was the C. I said, “But my name doesn’t begin with Z,” and she said, “That’s okay, it’s in the middle.”
DANIEL HOUSE Back then people in the Seattle underground weren’t putting out records, and for the most part, when you did, you’d put out a single or maybe a four-song EP. Then suddenly, there’s this guy, Chris, who was recording a bunch of bands. He kind of came out of nowhere. I remember feeling that I had to talk Chris into including Skin Yard on Deep Six.
KIM THAYIL Chris Hanzsek was pretty confident that we could make the record without the U-Men, and I had to keep pushing Chris, saying, “Getting the U-Men would be very important to help get attention for the record.”
LARRY REID I remember us being completely on the fence about it. It was just that we were leaving on a big fucking tour, to play with the Minutemen and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. It just wasn’t fitting into our schedule. We had to get to fucking Idaho that night. But Daniel was bugging me about it. We recorded “They” in one take—used whatever kit was there, didn’t unload amps, just guitars. It was 10 minutes from the time we pulled up to the time we left.
TOM PRICE All I remember is it was recorded at Ironwood Studios. I don’t remember actually recording the song—at that point I was kinda whacked out on drugs—but I’ve heard people say that there was some problem with getting us to do the record in the first place because we thought the other bands on it were too heavy metal.
TINA CASALE I had minimal input in the whole thing. I helped clean the studio up and put the tape on the machine, bu
t Chris was the recording person. When we set up the mix-down, we said to the bands, “You can have two members come in and help with the mix-down.” Allowing the whole band to come in would’ve just been chaos.
REGAN HAGAR Each band was allowed one band member to come back to mix, and Andy and I both went. ’Cause we were like one, in our minds. We’d say, “These rules are set up, but we are excluded because we’re in Malfunkshun.” Our egos were really, really healthy.
When we were mixing the songs, we had Kevin really loud and all this guitar stuff going on, but when the record came out, it wasn’t that way. I was told that Tina decided that ours wasn’t good enough. So they remixed it without us, which was frustrating.
TINA CASALE Many years later, I heard that Stoney Gossard said that I was kinda controlling. Well, maybe to a point I was, because I can be a little bit overpowering.
CHRIS HANZSEK Part of any conflict that arose with Green River or anybody else was they were suddenly in a relationship with Tina, and they hadn’t learned yet to appreciate her matter-of-factness and East Coast directness. She was kind of like a pit bull for a girlfriend.
I just remember there was yelling and there were tears. And Stone wasn’t the one who was crying. Tina had another side to her, too.
KIM THAYIL Our mix might’ve ended up suffering the most because Chris and Tina were arguing during our mix session. They had a certain mix of “Tears to Forget” that sounded muddy, and I was trying to get it brighter. This argument started between Tina and Chris about how they should mix, and then some personal stuff started coming out.
