Gordon Raphael

When he assumed control of CZ, House had already put out a 250-copy cassette, Pyrrhic Victory, a goal attained at too great a cost.

Its ten tracks included Current Bands, Skinyard, Soundgarden, Vexed, with unreleased tracks by long gone groups 10 minute warning gordon raphael's color twigs the horrible truth the probes mental mannequin and house and matt cameron's instrumental band feedback House used CZ to put out records by his band and his friends' bands, My Eye, Coffin Break, Vexxed, Slack, and the party art band Crypt Kicker 5, led by singers Jamie Caffery, Rhonda Pelican, and Chip Doering, named after a line in Bobby Pickett's Monster Mash.

He also put out a series of Teriyaki Asthma compilations, seven 7-inch EPs, each with four different bands.

Skinyard moved to the Arizona-based Toxic Shock label for the 1988 album, Hallowed Ground, and from there to SST's sister label, Cruise, for the albums Fist-Sized Chunks, One Thousand Smiling Knuckles, and Inside the Eye.

Engineered by Jack at Ultralab.

Not sure if that's a pre-Reciprocal studio or maybe his home setup, or maybe just another Seattle studio he was using.

Guessing his basement studio, he and Chris Hanzik founded Reciprocal, like you said, in 86. the year that this came out, and some early Green River recordings were done at Ultralab that came out later on Sub Pop's Dry as a Bone reissue, assisted by Bruce Jones and Gordon Raphael, released as CZ3, first being the Deep Six comp, which also came out in 1986, and has two Skinyard tracks on it, and the second being Melvin's Easy As It Was, 7-inch, later expanded to 8 songs, then 10 songs, and then 26 songs.

CZ released the first Skin Yard on CD in 1990 with one song taken off, Burning the Candle, which we talked about in the interview, and seven additional tracks, five never before released and two from the first Skin Yard single, released in 1987 as CZ-004.

One aspect of them that I find really interesting is the people they choose to surround themselves with, their inner circle.

So there's Ryan Gentles, who's the manager, Gordon Raphael, who's the producer.

Are they deliberately choosing people here who are not perhaps what might be expected for them to surround themselves with?

As a way to push back a little bit against the industry plant theory of the Strokes that they were- Because they're offered

Exactly.

They want a guy with a minimal track record.

The guy who produced the first two records, this guy named Gordon Raphael, who was really in, I would say, the impression I get of him is that he was in that space between the professional music industry and the amateur music industry.

in that in New York at the time, he was recording bands, a lot of whom were just wanting to make demos so they could book shows locally.

make lots of other records with him.

I had Gordon Raphael on not that long ago.

And of course, there's that connection with Moses.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Kind of.

His technique, Gordon Raphael, was also very influenced by Moses Schneider's way of recording.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Like Gordon, Raphael from, yeah, he ended up here, bizarrely.

Actually, he lives on the end of my street, so yeah, very odd.

Yeah.

okay.

We got that Gordon Raphael super compressed sound, as we mentioned in your book.

There you go.

Is this it? By the