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 ’85 with Jack, Daniel House, Ben McMillan and Matt Cameron. Their first show was opening for the U-Men, and a year later they were on Deep Six with Green River, Melvins, Soundgarden, Malfunkshun 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.
The first Skin Yard record is weird as hell.
That’s something that gets lost when people call every old Seattle band “grunge.” There’s post-punk in there, strange time signatures, noise, bits that almost sound psychedelic. They hadn’t settled into that heavy ugly thing yet.
By Hallowed Ground, they were getting there.
Then there were the drummers.
Jesus.
Matt Cameron left and ended up in Soundgarden. Steve Wied came through before going on to TAD. Jason Finn played with them before eventually ending up in the Presidents. Barrett Martin played with them before Screaming Trees and 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 now because he recorded half the damn city. But Daniel House is just as important to this story. He played bass in Skin Yard and ran C/Z Records, which put out Deep Six in the first place.
That’s the thing about Skin Yard.
They weren’t just standing somewhere near the beginning of the Seattle scene. The people in the band were actually building parts of the machinery underneath it.
Fist Sized Chunks came out in ’90 and 1,000 Smiling Knuckles the next year. Those are probably the two I play most. Ben McMillan sounded completely unhinged when he wanted to, and Endino’s guitar never seemed interested in doing anything the easy way.
By the time I moved to Seattle in ’92, Skin Yard were basically at the end.
That still pisses me off a little.
I’d spent all this time in New York discovering Seattle bands, finally moved across the country, and managed to arrive just in time for one of the ones I wanted to see to break up.
Great timing, Nate.
Inside the Eye was the last record. It came out around the end of the band, and then everybody scattered again.
Ben McMillan and Scott McCullum had already started Gruntruck. Daniel kept C/Z going. Jack went right on recording bands and making his own music. Barrett Martin eventually turned up in Screaming Trees.
Of course he did.
Last year Start at the Top came out, collecting singles, 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.
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.
Preferably loud.
