EVERYBODY LOVES OUR TOWN

saucershipstoragtime:

SKIN YARD Psychoriflepowerhypnotized 7”

JACK ENDINO (Skin Yard guitarist) There was a little bit of weirdness with Sub Pop, because Skin Yard was not a band that they felt was appropriate for the label, and it wasn’t hard to see why—we were a little too metal. But strangely enough, our bass player, Daniel, wound up working for them for a couple years. It used to drive Daniel nuts that he couldn’t get his own band onto the label, but I stayed the hell out of this because I was still recording all the records for Sub Pop.

DANIEL HOUSE (Skin Yard bassist) When I first started working there, it was Bruce [Pavitt], Jon [Poneman], and me. Charles Peterson had been there earlier and a couple people would come and go. Bruce seemed to have almost contempt for Skin Yard. He hated Ben’s singing. Too melodramatic. He felt like there were elements of our music, the prog- rock elements, that were anti-everything that his label was trying to establish. Jon liked our band. And he actually tried to push Bruce to put us out, but Bruce wouldn’t budge. They eventually put out a Skin Yard seven-inch to just shut everybody up, or at least that’s how I saw it.

Excerpted from Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge. Order info here.

The Skin Yard catalog is now available on iTunes, “all completely remastered, one title reMIXED, one title never commercially released before, and a couple of tracks never heard before before this,” per the band’s Facebook page.

room1000yearswide:

Skin Yard (with Matt Cameron)

“In the Sub Pop 200 [record] booklet, my title was listed as Supervisory Chairman of Executive Management, and Jon’s was Executive Chairman of Supervisory Management. We felt there was at that time a lack of humor and a forced modesty in the punk/indie scene, and we were really going against the grain. We were ironically undermining corporate culture.”

—from my interview with Sub Pop cofounder Bruce Pavitt