JACK ENDINO
Photo by Niffer Calderwood
The 'Godfather of Grunge' speaks
interview by John Wisniewski
(February 2025)
When we think of grunge, Nirvana of course comes to mind, along with Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Screaming Trees and other Seattle-area legends as well as the Sub Pop label that helped to spawn many of the acts. Another name that should pop up related to grunge is Jack Endino, who happened to produce debut records from Nirvana (Bleach), Soundgarden (Screaming Life) and Mudhoney (Superfuzz Bigmuff) as well as leading Skin Yard and heading a number of other Seattle-area projects. Appearing in the documentary Hype that chronicled that legendary time/place, he was dubbed the 'godfather' of the scene. Here, he talks about his storied past, what the music scene there was before grunge and what it was like at its start as well as current projects he's working on now, including Kandi Coded, Slippage and MKB-Ultra, which is a lot.
PSF: What was your expectation when you first started with music in Seattle and how you might be part of a scene there?
JE: I just wanted to be in a good band making music I liked. Our band 'mission' was to have high-energy songs with catchy guitar or bass riffs nobody had ever heard before, and we somewhat succeeded there, but we also wanted melodies and hooks, which was how we ended up with Ben McMillan singing instead of getting a typical punk rock screamer or Iggy fan. "Riffs with vocal hooks" was kind of the same formula as many of the grunge bands, Nirvana, Mudhoney, The Fluid, Soundgarden, Screaming Trees, AIC... it's really a classic rock/pop/punk songwriting formula that never goes away. Everyone in the scene was a record collector and deep music fan so you had all kinds of musical influences flying around.
There was no established "music industry infrastructure" here at all, so the ATTITUDE here was always D.I.Y. with a strong nod to punk rock and garage/psych, but the bands that ultimately made the most impact were of course the ones with good singers and decent songs.
PSF: What was the music scene like there just before you started out?
JE: Somewhat small and insular. In 1984, what clubs existed were mostly dominated by cover bands. There were a small number of bands making their own music, perhaps just dozens of them where there are hundreds now. Finding a place to play a show was always a challenge. You could get a Monday or Tuesday night at a bar and invite your friends, which was better than nothing, but if your fans were under 21, then you had to play basement parties or warehouses or community halls, and hope the cops didn't come.
PSF: You started the band Skin Yard. What was the concept for the band and what was it like working on the new Skin Yard remasters?
JE: I started it with Daniel House, a unique and very melodic bass player I met. Concept explained above... we wanted to make music we had never heard before. If something we were writing sounded too similar to an existing song, we dropped it. We challenged ourselves to be original as much as possible- that was HUGE for us. When you have giant record collections, it's easy for influences to creep into your songwriting. That's to be expected but you don't want it to be really obvious, you have to try a little harder. It needed to be a musical melting pot... but still 'heavy rock.'
I'm kind of the caretaker of the band archives, since I recorded everything, so when Daniel expressed interest in doing this box set, I said, here's a chance for me to improve a couple things. Several of them are remixes that improve the songs quite a bit. I now have 40 years of mixing experience (see my remixes of Ultramega OK, Rehab Doll and Roadmouth) versus 2 or 3 years when I recorded these. The song "California" was actually never released because Ben only wrote and sung half the words. Much later, I realized the problem... the song itself was too long! So I shortened it, and suddenly we had a nice little gem of a song, with Ben doing this tongue-in-cheek 'demented lounge singer' persona that he rarely got to use on a recording. The song crystallizes early Skin Yard, when we hadn't decided yet just what kind of band we were going to be. I don't even know what style it is but all the moving parts are there.
PSF: What was it like recording Nirvana's Bleach album?
JE: Just like any other band of the era... They had little money, so we recorded quickly, relying on the band being well-rehearsed, which they were. They also had that "big-riffs-with-melodies" thing going, but what I really noticed at the time was Kurt's vocals, which were outstanding, although I wasn't sure what he was singing about.
PSF: How was Bleach received initially? Did Nirvana have a following before that was released?
JE: Not a huge following, as they had only been playing shows for a year or two at that point. Others could tell you more about this- I am not the best authority.
PSF: What were Nirvana's shows like at that time?
JE: The early shows I saw were not all that great. Kurt was still getting accustomed to singing and playing guitar at the same time. But they got better fast. Kurt learned to write simpler guitar parts that made it easier to sing, which was something Skin Yard also had to go through. British post-punk was an influence in 1984, Joy Division/Gang Of Four/Wire had HUGE influence in Seattle, so some of our early stuff was pretty angular and dissonant (Kurt talked about having that influence also, on the early songs e.g. "Paper Cuts," "Hairspray Queen," etc.. but he called it 'new wave' instead of post-punk). Ben would complain, "How am I supposed to sing over this stuff?" because our riffs would be too weird. We learned restraint, and it gave Ben more room for his melodies. Other Seattle bands went thru this same growth process.
After Skin Yard broke up, Ben took this to the opposite extreme with his next band Gruntruck... Huge, very basic riffs with room for GIANT vocal hooks that got them on MTV.
Nirvana when they got started had to open a lot of shows for other bands. They opened for Skin Yard four times! Then the fifth time we played with them, Nevermind had just been released and WE opened the show! That's show biz for ya!
PSF: Your music production had a special sound, which helped to shape the sound of grunge. How do you feel about this, looking back?
JE: It's true. I have an aesthetic for rock that informs everything I do in the studio. I think one of the main things, is that I have always been violently opposed to click tracks for rock bands, because they make music sterile and safe. The longer I do this, the more certain I become of my approach. 95% of drummers play terribly with a click, period, and what kills me is that some who are seasoned professionals don't even realize it. When people tell me that my recordings 'capture a live feeling', I smile because the whole POINT is to capture the illusion of a live performance in a studio environment. An entire range of emotional expression exists in the tiny speed fluctuations of a band playing in real time, and we unconsciously recognize this as 'live feel.' Most of the time, playing rock and roll without a click track makes for a more exciting recording. That's how the typical band plays live. If you want a live feeling in the studio, your recording methodology itself should not explicitly remove it! I like to say "take off the training wheels and play some real music," which might be a little snarky but is pretty accurate. It challenges, it sets the bar HIGHER. Sometimes drummers don't agree, and I have to do what the customer wants. It's not "my" record, it's theirs, but my opinion remains the same, even if I have to be silent about it. Sorry to go on about this, but as you can tell I feel pretty strongly about it.
JE at Dave Grohl's studio; Photo by Dan Matthews
PSF: You made an appearance in the film Hype, where you are referred to as "The Godfather of Grunge". Did you see the grunge movement coming?
JE: I kind of did, I sensed at the time that I had a ringside seat for something exciting that was taking shape. I absolutely knew something cool was happening, and as the recording engineer I was hearing it before everyone else did. It didn't have a name yet. Nobody is certain where the term 'grunge' came from, that was later.
PSF: Tell us about your new bands that you play in Kandi Coded and Slippage? As well as MKB-Ultra.
JE: I guess I need to update jackendino.com, because all of those bands are years in the past. Slippage (for whom I played drums) ended in 2012 after one album, Kandi Coded (with me on guitar) ended shortly thereafter after 3 albums. MKB Ultra (with me on guitar and my wife Mia K. Boyle on vocals and songwriting) ended in 2020 after 2 albums.
Since then, I made 4 albums as a guitarist and co-producer with Sky Cries Mary, an album in 2021 playing guitar with a band called Purple Strange that included Ron from Room Nine on guitar, and an album in 2024 producing and playing bass with a band called Monster Creep featuring my old friend Allen Ensign on vocals/guitar. All these bands played live, but the band I have been most active with onstage for the past 6 years is called Beyond Captain Orca. It's an instrumental psych trio, I play guitar, and every show is 100% improv. Nobody "solos"- the idea is to draw people in, not push them away. We have a chemistry that doesn't work in the studio, it requires an audience, so we record every live show, multitrack, and I mix them down and post them on our site, beyondcaptainorca.bandcamp.com. Each one is different, and there must be around 40 of them posted by now. We just played Freakout Festival on Nov 10th.
PSF: What are you working on now?
JE: Along with working always with new bands nobody's heard of, I've been doing a lot of archival stuff. Sub Pop is about to release two big projects I did: compiling and remastering the entire catalog of The Gits, and remixing 3 albums for the Fluid, one of the greatest NON-Seattle rock and roll bands of the grunge era. I also mixed an unreleased album for legendary early-90s Seattle band Imij which will hopefully appear someday, and have been working with '80's recordings from Bam Bam. I've done remasters of two Love Battery albums just for vinyl reissue. A few days ago, I digitized an old tape from Jerry Miller, the recently-deceased Moby Grape guitarist. I never know what will be next! So the Skin Yard remasters, in the midst of all this, were a pleasure.
Photo by Mia Boyle
