Nine iconic grunge records

There’s a triangular building at 4230 Leary Way. It sits in Ballard, a working corner of Seattle, and before it became a studio called Reciprocal Recording it had been a neighbourhood grocery shop and then a studio called Triangle Studios, which is where the shape in that name came from.

Jack Endino worked inside it for five years. These are nine records born in that room, ordered by the day they were cut rather than the day they reached the shops. Release dates shuffle the deck.

The room comes first. Endino has said the control room was so small you couldn’t fit all the members of a band inside it at once, and that single detail explains a great deal about how fast these records had to be made and how little space there was for changing your mind.

1986 and 1987, the first two

Green River, Dry as a Bone. Cut in June 1986. It came out the following year as a mini-LP, with Mark Arm singing and Stone Gossard on guitar, and Sub Pop describes it as an eight-track recording made by Endino.

Soundgarden, Screaming Life. From 1987. It’s the record that dragged everybody else through the door, because when Kurt Cobain rang Endino to book some time the reason he gave was that he’d heard how this one sounded.

1988, the crowded year

Mudhoney, Superfuzz Bigmuff. Six days of sessions, scattered across July, August and September 1988, produced twenty-three minutes of music. It shipped in October.

TAD, God’s Balls. Tad Doyle has listed what he carried in with him, and the list runs to an empty car fuel tank, a hacksaw, and a length of brass tubing that had once been part of a microwave transmitter a friend gave him in Boise.

They also drew a cello bow across the cymbals. What came back sounded near enough to guitar feedback.

Earlier the same year, on 23 January, a band that hadn’t settled on its name yet had already passed through. Ten songs went down in one afternoon, recorded and mixed.

Endino was paid a hundred and fifty-two dollars and forty-four cents for that day, and afterwards he asked whether he could hang on to a copy of the tape. The copy reached Sub Pop.

1989, three in a row

Nirvana, Bleach. The sessions run from 24 December 1988 to 24 January 1989, and they add up to thirty hours of studio time across six days, for a total bill of six hundred and six dollars and seventeen cents, fronted by Jason Everman.

Mudhoney, Mudhoney. Twelve songs, and the first full-length after the previous year’s EP. Same room, same man behind the desk.

Those numbers deserve a pause. In that same 1988 the studio took an award as the best recording studio in the Northwest, and at its busiest it was booked as much as seventeen hours a day.

1990 and 1991, the tail

L7, Smell the Magic. The three songs that opened their run with Sub Pop went down there in a single day, and the record then widened out elsewhere, with Michael James and Daniel Rey in Los Angeles.

Coffin Break, Rupture. From 1990, out on C/Z, which was Hanzsek’s own label. Streaming services pair it with the Psychosis EP from the year before, made in the same room.

Seaweed, Despised. An EP from 1991, and the last one here. The studio shut that August.

Why it shut

It didn’t shut for lack of work. Hanzsek explained that after five-plus years of cheap, creative and technically solid recordings he no longer wanted to keep cementing his position as the owner of what had effectively become the Sub Pop production facility.

In other words, he stopped because the success of those records had handed him a job description he’d never chosen.

The building stayed up and changed hands more than once. Word of Mouth came first. Then John and Stu’s Recording, and later Hall of Justice, run by Chris Walla of Death Cab for Cutie.

What the bill says

On his own site Endino writes that he’s worked on over seven hundred records since 1986, for bands from fourteen countries, which is a career that started in a room where a whole band couldn’t stand up at the same time. His FAQ says something else that belongs to exactly these years.

Putting a producer credit on records that took a week or less struck him as ludicrous.