The Goddess of Illusion in Louisville on Derby Eve

These details from a poster left for my band Enormous Richard at our safe house in Louisville on Derby Eve in the early 1990s shows the local underground's view of their town's biggest annual party.

For the scenester who drew this poster, Churchhill Downs was the "center of hell for the next 2 days". Theo, our hostess, would be "selling beer" on the street, along with the rest of the Louisville service economy, populated as always by rockers and artists and fellow travelers.

The extent to which the Louisville underground had disappeared into their paying gigs in the service sector is made evident in note 4. "If for some strange reason you cannot find Theo, or the keys never reach Uncle Pleasant's," Rhonda Rah noted, "then you are screwed unless Tracy decides to stop by after work. Jane is most likely never going to be off work."

Theo was my temporary girlfriend at the time. She also was the temporary girlfriend of Greg Dulli of The Afghan Whigs, when he was in town, and no doubt the paramour of any number of other itinerant rockers who knew a good time when they saw one.

I wasn't the only guy in our band who knew a good time when he saw one, and Theo quickly moved on from me to the guitar player, as I recall in a couple of chapters from my musical memoir devoted to our Louisville days and nights.

Please note: these are the memories of a twenty-five-year old singer in a rock band, me at the time. I'm not him anymore, though I learned a lot by having been him and I wouldn't trade those experiences for much of anything, even if I no longer live like that guy and wouldn't choose to now even if I had the chance.

Adult themes - sex, drugs, rock & roll - follow. Stop reading now if any of that is not for you!

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From And Let Him Ply His Music: Adventures in Post-Punk and Amateur Folklore, an unpublished memoir by Chris King.

41. A One Nighter in Kentucky with the Goddess of Illusion

The van we had rented for the Metro show in Chicago was a luxury we could not afford. There were no savings, band or personal, to plunder for a van of our own. It was caravan time. We had entered a fascinating phase when we spent more time comparing the shapes of musical instruments to tiny open spaces in crammed car trunks than we ever spent onstage.

Skoob's packing task for our next gig, at Uncle Pleasants in Louisville, Kentucky, was eased considerably by an absence: Guitar Karl and his space-hog amplifier. Cell phones were in existence, and had appeared in our bowdlerized lyrics for "Dogs With Their Heads Out the Window", but they were not yet standard equipment for touring musicians. Calls to Karl's home phone failed to turn him up. So we hit the road to Louisville without him, as a trimmed-down five piece returning to our acoustic roots, with the addition of one large ruddy flower in the shape of an accordion: Chris Bess.

There was an amazing transmogrification that day on Highway 64 between St. Louis and Louisville. Richard Edwin Skubish, an individual I had been watching since fourth grade, finally grew into the size of his head. Skoob stepped into my car in St. Louis as a chipmunk, and stepped out of it in Louisville as a grown, proportioned, handsome man. Suddenly, it was Tom Cruise standing there in Skoob’s gig pants.

The rest of the band was amazed by our reception at Uncle Pleasants, which bordered on the fanatical. People screamed, hooted, hollered, brought us trays of drinks, insisted on an encore, shoved marijuana cigarettes at us. The bookie for a rival club left long enough to buy one hundred White Castle hamburgers, which he showily distributed to the packed house, starting with us. Between songs, after a crazy hamburger parade, he handed five belly bombers up to the stage and asked if we would play his Derby Eve show across town, the biggest local night of the year - the first time we had ever been offered the next gig in the middle of the current one, and at a rival club, no less.

It was all very difficult for any of us to understand. Absolutely none of it registered with me. I was too busy looking over at Skoob, the man. The chipmunk was gone. Our childhood was over. When he stepped down from the stage, the most gorgeous woman in the bar, a ravishing, fleshy blonde, immediately swept him away into the night. The last I saw of Skoob was a strange grown man handing me a phone number scrawled onto a piece of paper, next to a name - Maya - Maya, for Christ's fucking sake, the Hindu Goddess of Illusion.

Through fogs of illusion and booze I watched the headliners, The New Duncan Imperials. They were a countrified trio of theme show shitkickers named after a yo-yo. It began to make sense - the bonanza of crowd affection, that is.

These guys were rowdy rockers in straw hats and baby blue tuxedoes, who sprayed silly string at the crowd and sang nothing but joke songs. Naturally, a crowd that came to see three guys with stupid gig names like Pigtail Dick, Good Time, and Skipper singing songs about Jaegermeister and poking Pocahantas had a terrific head start on enjoying our songs "Hanging Out with Jesus" or “Steady Dick”. Yo-yos, dick jokes, accordions. That made sense. But nothing made sense. The Hindu Goddess of Illusion, a busty blonde from Kentucky, had scooped off Skoob, my oldest friend, the second he shed his chipmunk pelt.

Once illusion was on our side, all things became possible.

Guitar Karl actually showed up, waltzing merrily into a crowd that held us on its shoulders. There was, briefly, competition over who would get us stoned, over who would give Karl acid, over who would put us up for the night. Uncle Pleasants closed, not at 1 a.m. (Cicero's time) but at 4 a.m., and at 4 a.m. the speakeasy opened. When the speakeasy closed, an actress in a local porn film, Call Me Rod, insisted that we stay at her house and play at their cast party the next afternoon.

I woke in the bed of a character actress in an independent Kentucky porn film. (She played a hotel clerk who, in one comic scene, measures Rod's rod.) I took my morning coffee and bong with the male lead, none other than Rod, a drifter the director had met on a Greyhound bus. The director himself, a towering gay man, appeared by noon. His enormous frame cast approving shadows on Matt playing Hang Ups songs by the keg.

Johnny Death was there, and Screaming John, and at some point Johnny Scum appeared, in the more colorful of his only two known outfits, his Domino's Pizza uniform, which he shed down to his underwear. Johnny Scum power-lounged in his skivvies, drinking a beer and smoking a joint while everyone ate his bad free pizzas. Louisville was tilting again and so was the empty keg when Johnny Scum came back to the party, many hours later, off his delivery shift, in his only other outfit, head to toe black leather.

Even Skoob, the man, the stranger, appeared, cradled in the bosom of the Goddess of Illusion, lighting a cigarette off her cigarette, smoked down to the nub.

42. A Farewell to an Honest Wife

[This chapter describes my breakup with my graduate school girlfriend. Skip it for now.]

43. Alone with Lucifer on Derby Eve

She is fickle and unaccountable, the Goddess of Illusion. She lured us back to Louisville with one hundred White Castle hamburgers and an entire porn cast of the most deliciously creepy friends. When we got there, we were alone.

There was a sign on the door of our crash pad. "Theo is selling drinks on Bardstown Road. Make yourself at home. We'll see you at Uncle Pleasants." No one saw us at Uncle Pleasants. The new toast of the town performed at 2 a.m. on the biggest bar night of the year to an empty bar.

Out of loyalty, we had turned down the offer from the rival bookie who did the crazy hamburger parade. We stuck with Uncle Pleasants for Derby Eve. Unfortunately, the rival club, Tewligans, had booked Firehose, the remnants of the Minutemen without d. boon. That was the show to see and everyone, including our new deliciously creepy friends, was across town seeing it.

The highlight of our set was that Guitar Karl fell asleep during one of his own solos. A tape exists of this event. You can hear a very messy guitar solo. And then, suddenly, silence from the electric guitar, followed by the thud of a falling man hitting his own amplifier, which called him back to life long enough to finish the song.

There was one beautiful woman at Uncle Pleasants. She wasn't Maya, but she, too, grabbed Skoob, handed me her phone number, and swept him into the night. That part was not an illusion. Skoob's chipmunk days were gone forever.

I woke alone in Theo's bed. After finding my gig pants, a tattered and patched pair Marine Corps trousers, I picked my way through the chaos of the house. Sleeping members of Enormous Richard and the Call Me Rod cast were intertwined with empty liquor bottles and assorted pieces of garment and garbage. No Theo. I went back to bed.

There was still a tape spinning in her jambox. Her little stereo had a function you could select that kept flipping sides on a cassette and playing it forever. It was a new record by another band that crashed at Theo's house when they passed through town, a nasty post-punk band from nearby Cincinnati named The Afghan Whigs. I remembered Theo's drunken words of wisdom the night before, when she started this tape, Up In It, on its non-stop ride. "I love bands. But most of their music sucks! Not the Whigs!"

As I found a nest in Theo's dirty clothes to listen to those furious symphonies of electric guitars, which were seeping into my system like alcohol, I noticed a leg extending from the closet. I sat up. It didn't look like Theo's leg. I got up and looked. It was Guitar Karl's leg. The rest of him, and what was left of Theo, were collapsed deeper in her walk-in closet in tangles of hair and nakedness. I shuffled back to the bed and let the Afghan Whigs scream me back to sleep.

Television's gone
I'm alone with Lucifer

I woke back up in the middle of a blow job in which I was the featured participant. Theo was back. But not for long. When she had finished the job, she said, with a kind of shyness, "Sorry, Chrissy," and went back to the slumbering Karl. I watched as the last of her bleach white leg slid back into the closet, then let the Whigs scream me back to sleep.

Television's gone
I'm alone with Lucifer
What a drag

Matt had to work a shift back home at Blueberry Hill that night. That meant there could be no afternoon acoustic set, no thrift store tour, no more creepy sleepovers for now. Just coffee all around and bongs for the potheads.

When it was almost too late, someone thought to collect Skoob. Fortunately, his latest fling's phone number was still legible on the tiny wad of paper in my sweat-soaked gig pants. When I got him on the phone, Skoob was climbing the walls. "Get me the fuck out of here!"

He had woke up alone in Maya Number Two's apartment, with no clue how to get a hold of us and no idea where he was. She still had not come back home. Skoob had been watching TV and obsessively looking at clocks and beginning to wonder where was the bus station in Louisville.

Television's gone
I'm alone with Lucifer
What a drag
Motherfucker lied to me

Two Louisville gigs, two consorts with goddesses. We never saw either one of them again.

Sketches: The Symphony's French thing (w/ donuts)

Marc-Andre Hamelin playing Saint-Saen's Piano Concerto No. 2. I saw the Friday brunch show, catered by Krispy Kreme. It was a program of French music.

Yeah, he signed my sketch. He joined us in the crowd for the second half of the program, and I lightweight stalked him to get the autograph. This guy can wail on the piano! Just the right dash of showmanship, too.

Felicia Foland, jamming with the band on Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin. A tombeau is a composition for a dead person. Ravel dedicated each of the movements to someone he knew who died in World War I, where he served as an ambulance driver. Good way to meet people who die.

Violinist Allison Harney had a good view of the action throughout. She is really nice looking, on top of being principal violinist of the second violins in maybe the best orchestra in the U.S. That's best of the second for the best. Not bad!

Yan Pascal-Tortelier sub'd for David Robertson on the bandstand. He was super energetic with the hand motions. Kind of looked like he was swimming standing in place on dry land.

I am a David Robertson fan, but Yan had his own thing going on. Conductor Laureate of the BBC and all. The orchestra had a sloppy finish on the Ravel piece (my opinion), but otherwise, all was to the good!

They do the same show again tonight and tonight only. It's a great show, especially for people who don't crave the more edgy, outsider stuff that David makes his own.

He had eight dollars to his name and he sent us one

This is the text of a handwritten letter I received at The St. Louis American last week. It came enclosed with a Western Union transfer for $1.

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I was released from prison on 4-21-09. I was given The St. Louis American on 4-22-09 by a friend and am in love with your publication. My first exposure led me to seek out more issues of your paper. I was amazed to find out that your paper is free!

Upon being released from prison I was given $8.00. I have decided to donate one of the dollars to The St. Louis American. It is one of the best uses of a dollar that I could ever imagine!

In closing, keep doing what you do. I thank you in advance for your great work that will grace your future papers or publications. Thanks!!!

Sincerely,
Donnell Malik Sims

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Something like this makes up for a lot of the other things that going into editing a newspaper that makes enemies, sometimes powerful enemies, and sometimes dangerous ones.

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Image from Convict Gaming.

On the blog of the Rolling Stone dot com

Rolling Stone published a story by me on its website today. It's a brief entertainment news piece about the forthcoming record by Before Cars, a band fronted by Chad Channing, who was the drummer on Nirvana's Sub Pop debut Bleach.

As someone who used to write for The New York Times, I know how you can make a friend for life by giving someone positive coverage in a media venue with name magic. Unfortunately, the guy at the indie label putting out Chad's record went from very helpful to rather elusive when I informed him that I had an assignment for the website, which may or may not get parlayed into a feature for the print magazine, rather than a firm print assignment.

Kind of funny. On the one hand, we all know that the internet is killing print media, and many of us seek much of the information we want and need online. On the other hand, "only on the website" remains in our parlance as an admission of inferior coverage on the part of writers, subjects, publicists - probably even the advertisers whose collective decision-making is killing print as a medium!

Though of course I would like to add a physical copy of Rolling Stone to my clip file (along with print copies of The Times, Washington Post, The Nation magazine, Harvard's black studies journal, TriQuarterly and The Los Angeles Weekly, to name-drop a few), I think I'll celebrate my online-only publication by adapting something my friend Paul Jensen once said.

Someone had said something disparaging in Paul's presence about "fake tits". Paul wasn't going along with that stuff. He said, "The only fake tits are the ones you can't see and feel."

In that spirit, if a publication has the name "Rolling Stone" on it and the writer's fee headed your way is coming in the form of a check made out by someone who works for Rolling Stone, then it's fair to conclude that you have, in fact, been published by Rolling Stone.

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Don't forget to go read that there story of mine on the Rolling Stone website. Now that it's out on digital newstands everywhere, I'll mine my notes and write more about Chad here. A very nice man!

Before Cars has a MySpace page. That's where I got the picture.

All Coltrane, no borders on KDHX Community Media

Beginning April 26, and running for five consecutive Sundays, Joshua Weinstein will be presenting the acclaimed radio documentary Tell Me How Long Trane’s Been Gone on 88.1 FM in St. Louis and KDHX.org worldwide.

Twenty years in the making, this 5-hour audio masterpiece — a thrilling kaleidescope of rare interviews, reminiscences, music selections and commentary — analyzes and celebrates the creative genius of John Coltrane.

First broadcast in 2001, Steve Rowland’s prize-winning Tell Me How Long Trane’s Been Gone is particularly poignant today with the recent loss of many who were interviewed, including the late Max Roach, Dr. Art Davis, Alice Coltrane, Elvin Jones, and Sekou Sundiata.

This week’s episode (Hour 1), entitled “What Was,” features rare recorded interviews with Charlie Parker and John Coltrane; Coltrane’s first-ever recorded performance, in 1946 on alto sax, while with the Navy in Hawaii; interviews with Sonny Rollins, Dizzy Gillespie, McCoy Tyner, Steve Lacy, Rashied Ali and numerous other musical titans; and a fascinating walking tour of the 1940s jazz scene in Philadelphia, where the young John Coltrane began his musical journey.

Each of five one-hour segments will air Sundays at 10:30 p.m. (CST) beginning this past Sunday, April 26 and continuing through May 24, during the first hour of All Soul, No Borders. Programs will be archived on the ASNB page (linked above) for 2 weeks after each airing in case you miss one or what to hear it again.

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Image of John Coltrane, Shadow Wilson, Thelonius Monk, and Ahmed Abdul-Malik at the Five Spot Café in New York in 1957 by Don Schlitten/courtesy of Blue Note.

POTUS #41: George H.W. Bush by Enormous Richard

One of many surprises in Max Wallace and Ian Halperin's most recent investigative book about the death of Kurt Cobain is that Cobain's best man and best friend, Dylan Carlson, was a self-described Republican admirer of George Herbert Walker Bush.

Asked by Wallace and Halperin to give examples of how he differed from his dead friend, Carlson said, "Well, for one thing, I'm a Republican. I was a big fan of [the elder] George Bush; I liked what he stood for. Kurt couldn't stand him. He really liked Clinton."

In other instances of his questionable judgment, Carlson reportedly introduced Cobain to heroin and admittedly purchased the shotgun used to kill him.

Carlson always has insisted that Cobain was not suicidal, which is why he didn't hesitate to buy his gun-loving friend a gun. Read Wallace and Halperin's book Love & Death for why Cobain's other guns had been confiscated and how that fits into speculation that Cobain was set up to be murdered in a staged suicide.

Carlson's reported admiration for Bush #41 reminded me of the song I wrote and recorded with my first band Enormous Richard, "New World Order Man," which qualifies for my POTUS series of presidential portraits.

I am somewhat proud to have recorded evidence from back in 1991 of my name-checking Dick Cheney, then Bush #41's secretary of defense and nowhere near the household name (and emblem of evil) he would become as running mate and VP for Bush #43.

The lyrics are mostly clear and self-evident, except for the last line, which is garbled so I will spec it out here:

New World Order Man
He's as old as Eve and Adam

Free mp3

"New World Order Man"
(Chris King, Richard Skubish)
Enormous Richard
From Enormous Richard Answers All Your Questions

More in this series

POTUS #8: Martin Van Buren, by Bad TV
POTUS #14: Franklin Pierce, by John Morris
POTUS #17: Andrew Johnson, by William Tonks
POTUS #18: Ulysses S. Grant, by Waterloo
POTUS #26: Theodore Roosevelt, by Tim McAvin
POTUS #40: Ronald Reagan, by P. Mirkin & The Bodags
POTUS #43: George W. Bush, by Steve Allain

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Dylan Carlson's band Earth has a MySpace page. Happy Earth Day!

Picture of Bush landing after parachuting at an advanced age by Associated Press.

Anything but an error, and just the opposite of fatal

Late last night gave me several reasons to feel good to be alive. Here is one.

I was getting out of my car in the South Grand neighborhood to see Dave Stone's trio at Mangia. In the car, I had been listening to the extraordinary 2005 solo record by Jack Endino, the legendary Seattle producer and guitarist in Skin Yard and Kandi Coded. Endino had given me that record, Permanent Fatal Error, and several others when I visited with him last Saturday evening at his Soundhouse Recording studio.

Endino took the call. He was in the studio, but said he was comp'ing drum tracks and had a minute to talk. I thanked him effusively for his record, the Kandi Coded demo, The Funhouse Comp Thing punk anthology and the test pressing of Chad Channing's debut record with his band Before Cars.

These are all amazing records - I will return to all of them, and to my visit with Endino, on this blog - and I felt particularly honored to receive them as gifts from the man who produced them (and so many other great records, including the earliest Nirvana recordings).

That was nothing to me, though, compared to what came out of Endino next, after we had finished talking about the music.

"I saw the blog about your daughter - that was hilarious!" he said.

He had to mean my post yesterday about the tot's despair when she pushed me to look at the visitor numbers for her new blog and I discovered that I had been her sole visitor that day.

I loved the thought of Jack Endino interacting with Leyla's blog, and I had the distinct sense he was rooting for her. I very much like that sort of thing, when artistic appreciation gives way to an ordinary human connection. Makes me glad to be alive and doing what I'm doing.

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The Endino MySpace page currently has a nice selection of tracks from Permanent Fatal Error. It rocks so damn hard! Picture of Edino by my friend Ranee Ruble in his studio last Saturday.

My daughter, the blogger, not liking the numbers

Yesterday was a gloomy day in the publishing empire that is our household.

It wasn't the newspaper I edit, The St. Louis American - we put to bed a big fat strong paper shortstaffed on deadline.

It wasn't my book publishing ambitions - after more than a year of inactivity, an old friend recently showed interest in helping my novel find a home.

It wasn't my dwindling freelance business - after months with no sidework, I landed an assignment from Rolling Stone to write about Chad Channing, the Nirvana drummer before Dave Grohl who has a great debut record coming out in June.

It wasn't my blogs - I am having fun with them, and for whatever reason people are reading them, more than I expected.

The problem was with the new blog in the family, the baby blog, my daughter's blog.

She asked to start one when we were in Los Angeles last month on a working vacation. Not something I would have chosen for her to do at age six, but I didn't mind helping her set one up. I didn't see any reason not to add a stat counter to track her visitors.

Then I made what is starting to look like a bad call. I explained the stat counter and showed her how to see how many people had looked at her blog and even where they live. She really got a kick out of that, like pretty much every other blogger.

Then, alas, she started to worry about her numbers.

"Daddy, how many people looked at my blog today?"

This is not such a horrible question to ask when there have been ten visitors, even seven. She is discouraged, sure. It doesn't help that our blogs are linked on Stat Counter and she can see on the bar graph how many, many more visitors my blogs got that day.

But even ten visitors is something to go on, even seven. Even five.

But yesterday was a bad day.

"Daddy, how many people looked at my blog today?"

I looked at the blog. Then, I looked at the stat counter.

There had only been one visitor: me. Her dad.

Of course, that is how it should be. There are just not that many compelling reasons for anyone other than her family members to follow the blog of a six year old girl.

But, still, that's my kid, and she is watching her numbers, so I figured I should post something up here about her blog and see if she wins over any new readers.

Endino: "I don't name them, just record them"

I would have thought I was an oddball, thinking of Jack Endino (in terms of what I cherish the most in my own record collection) more as "the guy who did Up In It by The Afghan Whigs" rather "the guy who did the first Nirvana demos and Bleach."

But, in fact, this guy has been all over the map, literally and sonically, and long after Nirvana he keeps setting musical standards that keep bringing him different kinds of new bands wanting him to do his thing.

Endino kind of stumbled onto this theme as we were chatting at his Soundhouse Recording studio in Seattle on Saturday when I asked him what all he had lined up.

"Next Wednesday I have 3 Inches of Blood, they're from Vancouver, British Columbia. Then, in June, I am doing a record for Skeleton Witch," he said.

"I guess they are both metal. Two years ago I did a record for a band called High on Fire that was very heavy - actually, I'd call it stoner rock, doomy - but the record did well and, as a result, I got a lot of metal bands."

At that point he started to warm to his theme.

"It's like I did a grunge band that did well" (an understatement of the century for the producer who launched Nirvana!), "so I got a lot of grunge bands. I did a punk band that did well, so I got a lot of punk bands. I did Hot Hot Heat, so I got a lot of new wave pop," Endino said.

"That's how a self-employed producer's career goes. But it's all rock & roll to me. It's all guitar, bass, and drums. I just try to make them sound like they sound when they play live ... only better."

I don't have the patience to count the titles on his discography, but let's just say Endino has made a lot of records for a lot of bands (in twelve different countries, by his count). But on a Saturday night in Seattle, freshly home from a tour of his own - opening for Turbonegro, one band, it seems, he has not produced - he still generates enthusiasm rifling off their names (which often require careful alternate spellings).

"Last year, I recorded a band named Valient Thorr - that's 'Valient' with an 'e' and 'Thorr with two 'r's'. Yes, that is how it is spelled - I don't name them, just record them," he said.

"They have a lot of fans in Seattle and all over the world. They have these 'Thorriors' fan clubs. Google it, and the number of webpages that comes up is disturbing. I was amazed at how many fans they have. But the record sold well, and it helped my career."

His cell phone buzzed and rattled continually with calls and messages, as we spoke. After checking one, he said, "That's Early Man. The band is freaking out over the mastering job on a record I mixed. It's vintage old-school, like the first Metallica record, aesthetically the kind of thing I could do in my sleep. It's like we're in a dim place. in a cave."

In a dim place, in a cave. Or in a cinder block studio, behind a house on 15th Avenue Northwest in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle, where I hope Jack Endino's discography just gets longer and longer and longer, full of more and more names only he and a few nameless Thorriors the world over can spell.

Third in a series of posts that shook out of my reconnecting this weekend with Endino, whose previous band Skin Yard slept on the couches and floors in the house I rented on The Hill in St. Louis, ca. 1989.

Also in this series:

Endino nears a decimal anniversary for "Bleach"
Up against it where Endino recorded Nirvana

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The gig posters are from the tour Endino's band Kandi Coded had just finished with Turbonegro. Got to love a living legend who comes home from the road with gis g posters, like a kid fresh from his first road swing ....

Endino nears a decimal anniversary for "Bleach"

When I stopped by to see Jack Endino at his Soundhouse Recording studio in Seattle on Saturday night, he was fresh off the road.

More properly, traveling at his current level, he was just off the plane, having performed the night before at The Great American Music Hall in San Francisco. That was the last gig of the tour for his band Kandi Coded, which had been out for three weeks in support of Turbonegro.

Endino had been out on tour in Europe on April 5, which marked the 15th anniversary of the death of perhaps the most influential musician he has yet produced: Kurt Cobain.

"Fifteen years doesn't mean as much as a decimal," Endino said, when I asked if any reporters had tracked him down for a reaction. "I didn't hear a peep."

He expects and is almost certain to get a different response on June 15, which will mark a decimal for Cobain's band, Nirvana: the 20th anniversary of the release of Bleach, their debut album. Sub Pop is readying an archival reissue with bonus tracks, which Endino has been laboring over.

"The bonus material has some live tracks I mixed down a few weeks ago, some stuff that people haven't heard, the Bleach lineup with Chad (Channing) on drums," Endino said. "It's surprisingly good. Chad was a better drummer than people realize. It's actually pretty tight."

I picked his brain about Bleach a bit. He didn't want to retell any oft-told tales. "It took me thirty hours to make the record," he said. "I hardly remember any of it." But he did brighten at one memory.

"When I met Iggy Pop, he said, 'Oh yeah, you made the good Nirvana record,'" Endino said with the big, bright smile that alternates, on his face, with his deep thinking listening scowl.

"I met him backstage at a show here in Seattle. I had been introduced to Iggy as 'the guy who made the first Nirvana record'. Iggy was effusive, he was thrilled to pieces. He went on about how much he loved that Bleach album - 'except that one pop song'!"

Second in a series of posts that shook out of my reconnecting this weekend with Endino, whose previous band Skin Yard slept on the couches and floors in the house I rented on The Hill in St. Louis, ca. 1989.

Also in this series:

Up against it where Endino recorded Nirvana

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Photo of Endino with his listening scowl by my friend Ranee Ruble, who accomanied me to his studio.

Up against it where Endino recorded Nirvana

This is me in front of what Jack Endino has described as a "triangular, wedge-shaped building with a door at the pointy end and an air conditioner above the door, on your left as you are driving down Leary Way" into Fremont from Ballard.

Endino thinks the building is now used by Death Cab for Cutie as rehearsal and storage space. For a number of busy years ending in the summer of 1991, Endino ran this space as Reciprocal Recording studio. It has a spot in rock music history, this oddly shaped little structure. As I just added to the Wikipedia entry for the Fremont neighborhood,

A wedge-shaped building on the diagonal street Leary Way that cuts across Fremont from the adjacent Ballard neighborhood was once home to legendary Seattle producer Jack Endino's Reciprocal Recording studio, where he recorded (among many other records) Nirvana's first demos and the band's debut on Sub Pop Records, Bleach.

I like Bleach just fine - considerably more than Nirvana's breakout record, Nevermind - but this building is hallowed ground to me because of something else Endino recorded here: The Afghan Whigs' record on Sub Pop, Up In It, which rates as one of my very favorite rock records, ever.

The photo was taken by my old friend and former colleague Ranee Ruble as we drove from a meeting with Endino at his current place in Ballard, Soundhouse Recording, to a local gig in Fremont at High Dive.

At the High Dive, a band up from Portland (where Ranee lives) had to endure an insult against his town by one of the local Seattle bands on the gig. I was so appalled that I gave the front man from the Portland band, New York Rifles, the only thing of value I had on me: the address to this historic little nook from rock history. I expect to see them posed up against this wedge one day on the band's Flickr site.

Videos of note

Three songs from Bleach at the bassist's mom's house.
"Negative Creep" live at a record store the year Bleach was released (1989).
The sublime "Retarded" from Up In It live in St. Louis (!) in 1992.
The equally sublime "Hated" (also on Up In It) from the same show.

First in a series of posts that shook out of my reconnecting this weekend with Endino, whose band Skin Yard slept on the couches and floors in the house I rented on The Hill in St. Louis, ca. 1989.