Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [53]
CHARLES PETERSON At the time, none of the indie labels were really using photography; it was more about illustration. So Bruce was like, “Let’s use photography,” because you can use photography to make something look larger-than-life. It was a small scene—at any given show, there were maybe 50 to 150 people, max—but by using a wide-angle lens and just getting right in the face of the performer and maybe including a slice of the audience or the performer interacting with the audience, it looked like, Oh, my God, this is so exciting!
BRUCE PAVITT Both Charles and Jack Endino captured the energy of the bands. And they were perfect complements for one another. Jack became, in effect, Sub Pop’s house producer.
CHRIS HANZSEK I didn’t have the time for C/Z, or the money for it, because I was now a studio owner. I rekindled Reciprocal in early ’86 with Jack Endino, in Ballard. It was in a classic wooden building in the shape of a triangle that had previously been a studio called, imaginatively enough, Triangle Recording. A month or two into our partnership, Jack decided that he wanted to pursue being a producer, and asked me if I wouldn’t mind being the studio owner, so I bought out his contribution.
Plus, I was feeling a little bit bitter still about everybody heaping on me with the Deep Six thing, so believe it or not, I had a little bit of a distaste for running the label. At one point, Bruce and Jon actually called me up and invited me down to their office. Bruce was sitting on the floor, laying out some artwork for the Green River record, and Jonathan said, “Sit down, we want to talk to you.” They said, “Are you still going to release records on C/Z?” And I said, “No, I’ve decided not to go forward with it.”
They just kind of looked at each other and smiled and went, “Okay. That’s good.” They wanted to make sure I wasn’t still competing with them.
DANIEL HOUSE Chris and Tina had done Deep Six, and they had done the first Melvins single, which was a six-song seven-inch. He’d told me that he had no interest in doing this anymore. He had a futon bed underneath which was all his unsold inventory. And so I offered to basically take over the ownership of the label and buy his inventory from him.
Skin Yard had recorded enough material for a full album and no record labels were biting. So taking over C/Z was basically me just going, Well, how hard can it be to put out a record? I can do this. So I took over C/Z in ’87 and my first release was CZ003, the first Skin Yard record. I was pretty connected with all the bands in town, so I started putting out records by my friends’ bands, like Coffin Break and My Eye.
JACK ENDINO At first, Daniel and I were going to do C/Z together. CZ003 was the first Skin Yard record. CZ006 was a compilation record called Secretions that someone else put together, but I ended up being the guy who got it dumped in his lap. And that was the last thing I did for C/Z in an organizational sense. From then on, it was just Daniel’s. He was actually working for Sub Pop then, but pretty soon, he started getting more and more serious about C/Z.
STEVE MACK My college roommate at the University of Washington and I were looking for another place to live. And in the student union building there was this ad posted on a piece of paper, with all these things cut out of different magazines and collaged together. Scrawled in black Magic Marker, it said: DOGS FUCK THE POPE, NO FAULT OF MINE—that’s a Hunter S. Thompson quote. CHANCE KILLS US ALL, EVENTUALLY, WITH NO CHOICE. We thought, This is the guy for us.
So we called the guy, Todd Chandler, and went over to look at his place. He had the Misfits cranked at full volume, and we thought, Okay, this is going to work. We lived in that house for three months before we had to move out, at which point we all moved to a much larger house. That’s when Leighton