Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [36]
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.