A music scene, two bands, and six drummers… Part 3 of 3
Skin Yard – Inside the Eye
After bassist Daniel House had left Skin Yard, he was replaced by Pat Pedersen, who was a member of guitarist Jack Endino’s solo band, Endino’s Earthworm (also the title of Endino’s second solo album). After touring Europe (and singer Ben McMillian’s albums with Gruntruck), the band reconvened in the summer of 1992. Endino said it should’ve been a Gruntruck album, but he still likes it just the same. McMillan said to Endino, “Do I want to be in a band with you for another 6 years?”, which I take to be a joke, as they kept working together.
By the time the album came out in 1993, Skin Yard was over. Endino said that they “had to break up before a major label tried to sign them”. A few labels did try after the release of this album, but it’s too little too late.
(Actually, House runs Skin Yard’s social media presence, and someone in Europe tried to get them reunited this year.)
We had gone to the closest city to hit up record stores (it wasn’t really any kind of metropolis or anything), and I managed to find this album. We put it in the car stereo, on our way to the next record store. It was the heaviest Skin Yard by far, and it really was closer to Gruntruck, probably because McMillan was also playing guitar, which he hadn’t done in Skin Yard previously. We went through “Inside the Eye”, “Miss You”, and “Not In Love” which were slabs of speedy metallic grunge, and “Across the Wind”, which was more in line with the slower stuff that had been traditionally closing out every Skin Yard album.
This is currently the only album not available digitally.
Gruntruck – Shot EP
Things were not good for Gruntruck. They had toured with Alice In Chains and Screaming Trees, and also opened up for Pantera, which should’ve given them great momentum. Instead, they were embroiled in a legal battle with their label, Roadrunner Records. Even though the band was at the height of their popularity, the band was flat broke.
PolyGram Records offered to buy Gruntruck’s contract from Roadrunner for $1 million, but Roadrunner refused to sell. The band then filed bankruptcy to get out of their contract. Ultimately, the court did side in the band’s favor, but that momentum was lost.
The most recent lineup of the band recorded the three song EP Shot, and it was released on Betty Records.
I am not sure how I heard about the EP, I think I was in the computer lab at college searching for any band I could think of in the infancy of the internet. At any rate, I needed to get it ASAP.
I went to our local record store, where I asked Maryellen about it. She was a young woman, a few years older than me, but my God did I have a crush on her. She knew everything about music, and she could get anything. She would literally pull out these gigantic catalogs and she could find it, if there were only three copies pressed in someone’s basement of a recording of their dogs barking, she got it for you.
Being only three songs, there isn’t much to say about it, except that it was awesome, heavy rock.
1997-2001
After Shot, Gruntruck officially broke up in 1997… sort of.
McMillan started a new band called Mona Diesel in 1998 with McCullum, which after finding the people he wanted to play with, morphed into the original lineup of Gruntruck. At one point in 1999, Mona Diesel had a website and an EP for sale, but by the time I found out, it was already down. Endino once told me he didn’t think Mona Diesel recorded anything (even though the link came from his 10/1999 newsletter), so I think they were repurposed as Gruntruck recordings later on.
House continued to run C/Z Records. In 1993, a distribution deal was signed with Sony, which sucked up all of C/Z finances. C/Z then partnered with Zoo Records, but when Zoo was bought by Volcano Entertainment, the partnership ended, and C/Z went part-time. C/Z’s final release in 2002 was Skin Yard’s B-side collection Start at the Top.
Endino has continued to play in locals bands and release the occasional solo album, and of course, he has never stopped producing albums. Among them were Brazilian band Titas, Richmond, Virginia’s Doom Metal band Windhand, and a number of Iron Maiden singer Bruce Dickinson’s solo albums. Of course, he continued to do work for alternative and grunge bands, including doing some remasters for deluxe reissues of Nirvana, TAD, and Soundgarden.
Skin Yard – Start at the Top
Pretty much directly after Skin Yard ended, Endino realized “enough good stuff had fallen between the cracks”, and set out to but together a compilation. In genesis for at least 10 years, it saw the light of day in 2002.
What I like best about this collection, is that it’s a mishmash representing all eras of the band (except Inside the Eye). It starts with the out of print Sub Pop single, and collects a KISS cover*, alternate takes of “Gentle Collapse” (titled “Jump the Wall” with alternate lyrics) or “No Right”, and a song from House and Cameron’s pre-Skin Yard band Feedback that they resurrected.
*The CD version has “Snowblind”, but when it was remastered for digital sale, it was replaced with “What It Will Be” (which I’m realizing just now I’ve never heard) and “Written In Black” (which is a faster version of “Through Nothing” from Fist Sized Chunks).
WEED
In 2004, Seattle based Shared Media Licensing launched a music file share program called Weed. It was an effort to let artists be compensated fairly for their work, while letting consumers get the convenience. Each song got 3 free plays, and then you’d have to buy. The artist always got 50% of the sale price, and if a friend bought from your inventory, you got 20%.
At first, it was front loaded with a lot of Seattle musicians and indie artists no one’s ever heard of, but it did have a few unreleased Skin Yard tracks and four new(ish) Gruntruck tracks, which were recorded at some point between 1997 and 2003.
Eventually, Chuck D, Sir Mix-a-Lot, Kristin Hersh, and Built to Spill signed on with Weed. Weed still has an active website, but I can’t imagine it’s still going, and I can’t find any articles to say definitively what its status is.
Gruntruck – Gruntruck
Despite being unsigned, Gruntruck attempted to record a new album in 1997, 1998, 1999, and 2003, but they kept breaking up. They would reunite, play shows (which by all accounts were well attended), start the recording process, break up.
In 1999, McMillian had a blood clotting issue the kept in the Intensive Care Unit for three months, in a coma, on a ventilator. After McMillan made a recovery, Endino was trying to talk him into recording a solo album of the “hundred-or-so” songs he had sitting around.
Ben McMillan died on January 28, 2008 due to complications from diabetes, kidney failure, and blood-clotting. McMillian continued his bohemian lifestyle, as Endino says, he never had a cell phone, a voicemail, or even an answering machine. Most of the time his landline was disconnected. He never used a computer until a few months before his death. Endino said that McMillan would call out of the blue, talk about some stuff he wanted to collaborate on, but he was always “not quite ready yet”. Endino said that McMillan was “long on plans, short on execution. A dreamer who was never very good at interacting with the real world.”
In 2017, nearly a decade after McMillan’s death, the final word on Gruntruck was released. The self-titled album was cobbled together from the prior sessions, all of which Endino helmed. One last gasp from the forgotten group, Gruntruck was a footnote to a footnote.
Eight of the fourteen songs I already had heard, either through luck or my own obsessive qualities in tracking them down at any costs. In 2017, as an adult with a career, record stores mostly deceased, and everything available in an instant, there’s no real personal story here. I pre-ordered it, I downloaded it, and it was bittersweet. A band that I thought was lost forever, provided one, last final statement, thick and heavy like a tombstone.
Thank you for taking this journey with me, I hope it was enlightening, and maybe you found a new band (or two) that you hadn’t heard. Maybe, just maybe, they will become your favorite.