Skin Yard are one of those bands where the family tree almost becomes more famous than the band.
I first got into them because of Jack Endino.
This was back in Queens, around '91. His name kept turning up on records I was buying — Nirvana, Mudhoney, Soundgarden, all this Seattle stuff — and eventually I figured I should probably hear the guy's own band.
So I found a Skin Yard record.
That sent me down another hole.
Skin Yard started in Seattle in 1985. Jack Endino and Daniel House got things moving, Matt Cameron came in on drums, and Ben McMillan joined on vocals a few months later. Their first show was opening for the U-Men that June, which is about as Seattle-in-1985 as a sentence can possibly get.
A year later they were on Deep Six with Green River, Melvins, Malfunkshun, Soundgarden and the U-Men.
If you're trying to figure out where all this Seattle stuff came from, that compilation is a pretty good place to start. Not because everybody on it sounds the same — they absolutely fucking don't — but because they don't. You can hear a bunch of bands in the same city dragging punk, metal, noise and whatever else they had lying around into different shapes before anybody outside the Northwest had decided what to call any of it.
Skin Yard's first album came out on C/Z in '87, and it's weird as hell.
That's something that gets lost when people call every old Seattle band "grunge." There's post-punk in there, strange rhythms, noise, bits that almost sound psychedelic, guitars going sideways when you expect them to go forward. Parts of it sound like a band that hasn't decided what kind of band it is yet, which is one of the reasons I like it.
By Hallowed Ground in '88, they were getting heavier.
Then there were the drummers.
Jesus.
Matt Cameron left in '86 and wound up in Soundgarden. Steve Wied did a couple of shows. Greg Gilmore did a couple. Jason Finn lasted longer. Then Scott McCullum — Norman Scott — came in and played on Hallowed Ground and Fist Sized Chunks. After another stretch where Skin Yard basically stopped, Barrett Martin took over and stayed through the end.
Try keeping that straight without pulling records off the shelf.
And that's before you start following everybody into other bands.
Cameron went to Soundgarden. Wied ended up in TAD. Gilmore turned up in Mother Love Bone. Finn eventually wound up in the Presidents of the United States of America. McCullum started Gruntruck with Ben McMillan and Tommy Niemeyer. Barrett Martin went into Screaming Trees and later Mad Season.
Seattle music gets ridiculous like this.
You start with one band and twenty minutes later you've got six records spread across the floor trying to remember who played drums on what.
Jack is obviously the name everybody knows because he went on recording so many of the records that made me start paying attention to Seattle in the first place. But Daniel House matters just as much to this story for a different reason. C/Z had been started by Chris Hanzsek and Tina Casale, the people behind Deep Six, and House took over the label in '87 while he was still playing bass in Skin Yard.
That's the thing about Skin Yard.
They weren't just standing somewhere near the beginning of the Seattle scene. The people passing through the band kept turning up in the machinery underneath it — studios, labels, other bands, other records. Follow Skin Yard far enough in almost any direction and you hit something else.
Fist Sized Chunks came out on Cruz in 1990, after one of the band's periodic disappearances, and 1000 Smiling Knuckles followed in '91 with Barrett Martin on drums. Those are probably the two I play most.
McMillan could sound completely unhinged when he wanted to, and Endino's guitar never seemed interested in doing anything the easy way. That's another reason I don't think sticking the word "grunge" on Skin Yard and walking away tells you very much. They could be ugly and heavy as hell, sure, but there was always something stranger underneath it.
Daniel House left in '91, and Pat Pedersen took over on bass. By then the family tree was branching again. McMillan and McCullum were getting Gruntruck going while Skin Yard were winding down, and Barrett Martin was about to turn up in Screaming Trees.
Skin Yard kept going long enough to record one more album in 1992.
Unfortunately, this is where my timing becomes fucking perfect.
I moved to Seattle in September of '92.
Skin Yard had already stopped.
I'd spent all this time in New York discovering Seattle bands, finally moved across the country, and managed to arrive just in time to miss one of the ones I really wanted to see.
Great timing, Nate.
The last album, Inside the Eye, had been recorded during '92 but didn't actually come out until 1993, on Cruz. By then the band was finished. There wasn't some giant farewell moment that I remember. They just reached the end, and everybody scattered into the rest of the story.
McMillan had Gruntruck. House kept C/Z going. Endino kept recording bands and making his own music. Martin was already moving into Screaming Trees.
Of course he was.
Then late last year C/Z put out Start at the Top, a collection of singles, compilation tracks, outtakes and other stuff that had been scattered around for years.
Hearing Skin Yard again in 2001 was strange.
Not because the records sounded old.
Because suddenly you could hear how much of what came later was already sitting there — and also how much didn't come later. That's important. The Seattle story gets cleaned up too easily once you know how it ends. You hear an old record and start looking for Nirvana in it, or Soundgarden, or whatever became huge afterward.
Skin Yard don't cooperate with that very well.
The early stuff is too weird. The lineup keeps changing. The records don't move in a perfectly straight line. They disappear for a while and come back. Half the people involved wander off and become important somewhere else. Even Jack Endino, the guy whose name originally led me to the band, sounds more interesting to me here when I stop thinking of him as "Jack Endino, producer" and remember that he was the guitar player in this strange fucking band first.
I don't think Skin Yard ever made the one perfect record that would explain the band to everybody.
Maybe that's why they're still easy to overlook.
But if you want to understand how Seattle got from a bunch of weird little bands playing clubs in the mid-'80s to what happened a few years later, you need Skin Yard somewhere in the pile.
Not because they invented everything.
Not because everybody copied them.
Because they were there while the pieces were still moving around.
Preferably loud.
