This man should need no introduction. At the height of “grunge-mania” he had recorded the records for Mudhoney and Nirvana that started it all. And he did tham fast and cheap. On the back of Nirvana’s Bleach was the famous sentence, “Recorded in Seattle at Reciprocal Recording by Jack Endino for $600.” Faced with 100 clone bands trying to get the same results (yeah, right) he fled to doing recording work in other countries and sticking to working with “rock” bands that he dug. He was also a member of the awesome Skin Yard, where his guitar skills were in fine form. We tracked Jack down in Seattle while he was tracking the new Zen Guerilla album for Sub Pop at Studio Litho for an in-depth interview.

I’m curious about what you were doing before Nirvana and all of that. Obviously you had been recording and playing music before any of that stuff hit and how you got going into recording in the first place.

Well, I started with an electrical engineering degree and ended up working at the Navy yard in Bremerton, Washington, for 2 1/2 years. It was a pretty stupid job after college and so I decided I was going to do something else. I had a plan. I already had some recording gear but I figured I would get some more, learn how to use it and when I’m ready I’ll go back to Seattle. I lived in a mobile home for a winter with just a reel to reel 4-track machine, a six channel Tapco mixer, three mics, a little cheap drumset, a Fender Twin, a bass amp, a bass and a guitar. I just recorded myself for a few months and then I moved back to Seattle and started hooking up with musicians and found myself in a couple of bands. I ended up meeting Chris Hanzsek when he was recording my band Skin Yard for the Deep Six comp, which was in ‘85, and I said I had a bunch of recording equipment and I was looking to work in a studio and he said he had a bunch of recording equipment and was looking to open a studio so we became partners. We then moved into the defunct Triangle recording building in June of 1986.

What did you call that studio?

Reciprocal.

Oh, yeah, the famous one.

I only owned a very minor part of the equipment so I eventually stopped being a partner and just let Chris take over. In keeping with the freelance guy that I’ve been ever since. It never really was my studio at all, it was really his place. I was at Reciprocal for five years - that’s where I worked and it was fun. The first time I did a session at another studio, with different speakers and a different room, I almost made a complete idiot of myself.

Oh, no.

This was like 12 years ago or something. I didn’t realize it, but Reciprocal was a very strange room and it had a very strange, very small control room with big weird acoustics. I was totally used to compensating for it. Once I got into a normal studio, I was just floundering. Everything sounded totally alien. Now I can pretty much go anywhere and I pretty much know what to look for and how to get my sound regardless of where the hell I am. Once you work in other rooms it makes you a much better engineer and when you come back to your studio, it’ll give you a new appreciation for the improvements you can make. You’ll suddenly realize weaknesses that you weren’t even aware of. And you’ll go, “I should put a bass trap over in that corner or I should move the speakers up over there.”

You did a lot of work out of Reciprocal, but it wasn’t all grunge music, right?

No, most of it was rock though. There was the occasional bar band or blues band or god knows. There were some jazz people that I knew that I recorded sometimes.

A bigger variety then?

Yeah, a little bit, for a while we had to record everybody who walked in the door when we first opened up. And then as I sort of started specializing in rock, I ended up just taking those jobs. Reciprocal closed in 1991, Chris closed it down because he had pretty much outgrown the building.

I assume you’d rather being doing rock recording.

Well, pretty much. I like variety and I like doing other things when they come up, people just don’t call me with other things though. There are plenty of rock bands around here, so I have no lack of work.

What stuff have you done recently besides the Zen Guerrilla session?

I did an album for Nebula. Zen Guerrilla just got finished. I was in Portugal doing a band for the month of March and prior to that I did a record in Mexico City in September. I did a record for The Black Halos for SubPop. I got to go to Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada, in November to mix a record by Elevator Through for Sub Pop. This is a band that used to be Elevator to Hell, before that they were Eric’s Trip. They’ve got this very psychedelic record with a Syd Barrett cover on it and I mixed it and it was pretty fun. Hotrod Lunatics, RC5, Us of All were here in Seattle. Guillotina in Mexico. I got to go to Chicago in January and do a record for Thrill Jockey for a band called the Nerves. I got to work in a studio called Uber studio and made a record with no digital reverb or delay anywhere which I don’t think I’ve had a chance to ever do before. The actual room was so good that I didn’t use any reverb on anything. We just used the room for everything.

Just put extra mics up for that?

Yeah. The drums were amazing with the room mics thrown in and when we wanted room on the vocals we just put a mic back in the other end of the room and we threw a little bit of tape delay on the vocals so technically, there’s no digital anything. So that album’s coming out in July, I think.

How do you end up getting jobs in other countries?

All of these records I’ve done, a lot of them get to other countries. That’s basically it. People just track me down somehow and they say, “Hey, we picked up the Accused record that you did eight years ago and we want your sound”, so that’s how I’ve ended up in nine countries other than the U.S. Sometimes I don’t make a lot of money on these things, I just go for the travel and the music is interesting and it’s different from what I get around here. It has to be a decent band, obviously or I wouldn’t make the trouble.

Do you listen to previous albums and demo tapes and stuff before you take on any project at this point?

At least, I’ve got to at least hear a demo or something. It’s nice if I can actually see the band pay live, it’s really the best thing, I don’t always get the luxury of that. It’s funny, when I recorded Mudhoney, I didn’t actually see the band live for like a year and a half or something after I did their first single.

No way.

I was so busy touring with Skin Yard at the time that I just never had a chance to see Mudhoney. In that time they became such a draw here that you couldn’t get into their show. I still haven’t seen Pearl Jam for the same reasons. I don’t really care to see them in a coliseum. It’s not like seeing Green River in the Ditto Tavern.

Given the stuff you’re doing, you’re probably not getting paid exorbitant amounts of money for production jobs.

With the kind of music I do the money’s not there... it’s not that the money’s not there, I’d rather not emphasize money here. I do actually get major label jobs from other countries. I’ve got two gold records from Warner Brazil on my wall and I’ve done a couple of major label records in England and a couple in Denmark and I’ve done some major label records in Germany and actually the Mexican band I worked with was on Warner Mexico for a while. Here in the U.S. I pretty much get stuck with indie stuff, which is fine because the politics of the industry here are much more of a pain in the ass as we all know. In other countries, the major labels seem to act a little more like indies do here. They’re just smaller operations and there’s not all this turnover in the personnel and you don’t have somebody leaning on you in the studio, checking daily mixes or whatever. I’ve done major label records in countries where I never ever even met or spoke with anyone from the major label. The kind of music I do in general is rock and you have to realize that rock is not that big a part of the big picture. You know? Guitar rock and roll is not that big a part of the big picture in terms of the money that’s made in the record sales. Particularly in the last five or six years it’s definitely not been getting a lot of the press. I’d say most of the innovation has been happening in other genres.