Jack Endino: Soaked in Bleach

"I just got a phonecall out of nowhere, the circumstances were that Kurt Cobain wanted to do some recording in Seattle; he noticed that everybody else was recording with me so called me up. He says ‘Hi, my name’s Kurt, I’ve got some songs I want to record, the band doesn’t have a name yet and we’ve got the drummer from The Melvins helping us out just for the session, we want to come up and do an afternoon, record some songs really fast.’ What gave it credibility for me was that they had Dale Crover helping them out, which assured me that it must at least be pretty good (and it was). So I said ‘yeah, OK’. So Kurt, Krist and Dale walked in the door one day in January 1988 and recorded 10 songs in one afternoon.

That was the demo that I gave to people, gave to Sub Pop, my journalist girlfriend and various other people. That was the demo that got people in Seattle interested in checking the band out. Half of that so-called demo ended up re-released on the Incesticide record, two of the songs are on Bleach and I think a couple more are on the boxset. Most of that stuff was released eventually.

It was riff rock they were playing at the time – nothing wildly new – but the vocals stood out for me insofar as having a good, unique, character to them. Anyone can play guitar, anyone can learn how to play the drums and the bass – whatever. With singing you’ve either got it or you don’t, really good singers in heavy rock are not that common. A lot of people scream or grunt, but actually carrying a tune and having some power in your voice, I just felt like ‘this is it.’ I talked to Dale Crover at the time and he said ‘yeah, the singing, I like the singing too.’ We were in agreement on that, I think that was Kurt’s strong point at the time. He was a much underrated guitar player as well though, not lot of people take him seriously for that.

When Bleach came out it was just another independent rock record, I think it probably sold 25 or 30 thousand copies before Nevermind arrived. If their second album hadn’t existed, Bleach would just have been another one of those cool indie records on my discography - just another grunge record that I did 20 years ago. Maybe Bleach would have sold 40 or 50,000 copies and that would’ve been the end of it. But Nevermind changed the game. Had that not been a hit record we probably wouldn’t even be talking about this right now.

The Bleach CD suffered because it was half as loud as modern CDs are now, when you hear it on your iPod you have to turn the volume up. We recently gave it to George Marino who had remastered Led Zeppelin’s back catalogue and he understood it, he wasn’t going to make it sound like System of a Down. He didn’t slam it against the wall, he followed the Doctors motto. First: do no harm. But Krist insisted on turning up the bass a little bit. I thought ‘alright, he’s the bassplayer, he gets to say that.’

Kurt never had anything bad to say about Bleach that I remember. It’s a fairly accurate representation of what Nirvana sounded like in 1988. He commented mostly on how he didn’t like Nevermind and he wanted to go back and record it on an 8-track machine again, like on Bleach. He felt like Nevermind was overproduced, and he wanted to go back to recording quickly on simpler equipment. He did record quickly with In Utero, they did that record quickly in a week or two, so that is what he though – let’s make a simpler record that’s not so pretty and slick.

This nice thing about this reissue is the live material that’s added to it. It’s a complete live show from February 1990. I knew they had it in the vault because I pulled it out and listened to it in 1998 because we thought there was going to be a 10 year anniversary and we were looking for bonus tracks. I remember listening to it, thinking ‘this is really pretty good, we can use some of this.’ Well this time it came around and I had to remind everybody about this. I said ‘let me mix it down, let’s see what everybody thinks’. Everybody went ‘ooh, oh, wow, alright, sure!’ I did it and, you know what, it’s a really good live show. That’s going to take people heads off."