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What are your favorites among the records you’ve been involved with?

Pretty hard to say really because you know, I just can’t really remember. There’s like 120 of them, and at this point I can’t really remember them that well. I still enjoy the first Mark Lanegan record, The Winding Sheet, very much. That was one of my favorite records, actually. I did a thrash/metal record for the Accused which is called Grinning Like An Undertaker, which...it’s probably the only thrash/metal record I’ve done in my career, and I had a really good time (laughs). It was really fun. I thought they were completely amazing. But I think they were sort of in the wrong city. It was on some weird indie here that no longer exists, and didn’t really do much with it. There was a Screaming Trees record I did for SST called Buzz Factory, that was fun. Heck, my own band’s records, I suppose. Skin Yard albums. We did okay, though.

What are you up to now (May 1997)?

I just finished mixing a record for the Mono Men. I most likely will be doing...I’ve got like any of three different projects that are sort of trying to jell now for the summer, and one of them is going to solidify. I don’t know which one is going to solidify first, so I’m not going to say. I did a record for a Mexican band called Guillotina, which is on Warner Mexico. Did a record for Bruce Dickinson, former singer of Iron Maiden, in England. Couldn’t turn that one down, that was really fun. Went to Australia and did a record for Blue Bottle Kiss, who are very very much in the indie rock sort of vein, even though they’re on a major label in Australia. They sound like they’ve been listening to a lot of alternative rock, so it was a pretty easy record for me to do. I was just in Holland doing some demos for a band. I’m working with a band called the Nitwits, who are an old Dutch punk rock band from like the late ’70s who recently got back together.

How has the Seattle rock scene changed since grunge peaked in the early 1990s?

Just a generational change, really. Generational shift. Two things, really. One is that Sub Pop stopped signing local bands, basically lost interest in the local scene entirely. That’s fine, they felt like they’d gotten as much mileage as they could out of it, and wanted to reinvent themselves. I certainly can’t blame them for that. But there was no other local label really big enough to move into the vacuum. So as far as the outside world was concerned, the Seattle music scene had sort of ended, ’cause nobody was here sort of exploiting it anymore, pushing it to the outside world. There’s a lot of great bands, but nobody’s really paying attention to them anymore.

A lot of clubs opened and then closed. I think we’re back down to three or four clubs now, where we had about ten a couple years ago. The best change is that people are playing in bands again, not as a career option, but for the fun of it. I know a lot of people who’ve sort of come back to just playing in bands for the enjoyment of it rather than okay this, we’re gonna get signed and make a million bucks kind of thing. People I know who used to be in big bands, for instance, who’ve sort of come back to Seattle and now they sort of have normal lives now, and now they have a hobby band or whatever. And everybody plays with each other. It’s kind of the way things were originally, which was that, everybody was in for the fun of it. Suddenly it became this big deal. Now it’s not a big deal anymore, so things have relaxed again a little bit.

Anything else you want to add about grunge or Seattle rock?

We were sort of isolated from the rock press, and isolated from the record industry out here in Seattle. That was fairly important in letting things develop and form an identifiable regional sound that wasn’t just an imitation New York or imitation L.A. sort of thing. I think that needs to be mentioned. It continued right up until ’94. I think ’94 was when the bottom started to fall out. The original thing here peaked in ’89, which was well before Nirvana. Things here were going really strong in ’89, and then things were actually on the way down. And then Nirvana hit, and Pearl Jam hit, and Soundgarden suddenly become big, and the whole thing started up again in like ’91-92. Things went nuts all over again when those three-four bands. That was when the major label thing happened. But before ’91, the major labels had not really discovered the Seattle thing. But the rest of the world had. That’s something that needs to be said. It had already become a very hip place in terms of the underground and indie rock scene around the country and around the world, everybody knew about it. But no money was being made, and there weren’t that many records being sold. But there was a lot of buzz. But once the major labels got in on it and started putting out those records about ’91-92, that’s when the real world suddenly took notice of it. And then the journalists all came to town.