by Mark Yarm
Lanegan wasn’t really intimidating to me, but I could see how he could be. Him and his friends all looked like they were out of that movie Over the Edge, with Matt Dillon. Jeans jacket, stringy hair, tough guy.
MARK LANEGAN (Screaming Trees singer; solo artist) When I was a kid, I got caught shoplifting by a store security guard in Ellensburg. The next time I saw that store guard was when I got thrown in jail again—this time for not paying court fees. The guy happened to be in jail, too, right next to me. And the third time I saw him was when I got off the bus to play the Gorge years later. This guy was now head of security at the Gorge. That’s what Eastern Washington is like—you never get too far away from anybody.
MARK PICKEREL A lot of people were afraid of Mark because if he was at a party and he was drinking, once fighting was on his mind or once somebody pissed him off, that was it. But he was also a very loving individual and cared about all of us deeply. Any time there was any shit-talking going on around town, if anybody crossed any of us, he was always the first to come to our defense.
ERIC JOHNSON I lived in this great little building in Ellensburg that happened to be across the street from this apartment where Lanegan lived, so I met him and he turned me onto John Fante and all these different, weird L.A. Depression-era writers that I had never read before. He is probably one of the most well-read people I’ve met.
VAN CONNER After Mark Lanegan graduated, I hadn’t seen him in about six months. We ended up running into each other at a party and he was like, “Hey man, let’s start a band.” Our first practice was around ’84. At first it was just the three of us—me, Pickerel, and Lanegan. I don’t know why Lee would want to be in a band together, because we fought all the time. In our previous band, the Explosive Generation—with Pickerel, David Frazini, and Dan Harper—there was too much violence.
GARY LEE CONNER (Screaming Trees guitarist) When Van was really little, he used to tag along with me, and my friends would get real upset. But in high school, I became reclusive and stopped having friends. So I started hanging around with his friends, which is how our early bands came about. Even though I was four and a half years older than Van, it was like he was the older brother.
MARK PICKEREL My impression was that Lee was jealous that we had this social life that was thriving outside of the band. We were in high school and he’d dropped out of college and was living at home, so his entire focus was the band. And Van and I were doing things like canceling practices to go to a friend’s place or a dance or a party.
Their mom, Cathy, was always really paranoid that Van and I would fall in with the wrong crowd and start doing drugs. At that time we were pretty straitlaced—we actually were going to youth group and church. But Lee was constantly telling his mom that he thought he smelled marijuana in the house or on our clothes. So we decided to punish him by starting a new band that he wouldn’t be allowed to play in. The problem was that our rehearsals were going to take place in his bedroom.
We end up having this band practice with Lanegan, myself, and Van. I think we made an attempt at some classic-rock standard, but Lanegan was trying to play drums and was having a really difficult time holding down the fort. I made my best attempt to sing something like “Sunshine of Your Love,” and we might’ve made one more attempt at another song when Cathy Conner came barging into Lee’s room and demanded that Lee be in our band: “Goddammit, you guys! If you think you can practice here, in Lee’s room, you’ve got another thing coming!”
Until finally, Lee snuck behind Cathy, plugged in his guitar, and started messing around. And during the argument, Lanegan got off the drums—as big and intimidating as Mark could be, I think the whole thing scared the hell out of him—and ended up standing there, totally perplexed. I was used to it by this time and was doing my best not to laugh out loud.
Next thing I know, I’m back at the drum set, and we started playing with Lee in the band. We segued into a fast, punk-rock version of the Doors’ “The End,” with Mark singing. All of us were totally taken aback by Lanegan’s voice. He sounded just like Jim Morrison! I mean, it was uncanny. It was obvious that he was the singer and that it would be ridiculous for me to approach the mic again, just as much as it would be for him to decide to play the drums. We’d stumbled ass-backwards into something good.
After a couple rehearsals like that, Lee presented us with some demo recordings that he’d been making on a four-track. He’d written six or seven of these psychedelic pop gems. They were amazing.
GRANT ALDEN (The Rocket newspaper managing editor) The Conner boys were large and not athletic, and Mark Pickerel was sort of sallow and small, and Mark Lanegan was a professor’s kid, I think, but he was this brooding, big, scary guy. They were the four weirdest guys in Ellensburg, Washington, and they ended up in a band together because who the hell else was gonna hang out with them?
VAN CONNER The Screaming Trees’ first show was at—it’s kinda silly, but we saw this video of the Cramps playing at an insane asylum, so our big thing was to get a show at an insane asylum. I think Mark Pickerel’s mom lived right next to the Eastern State mental institution in Spokane, and I had her talk to somebody, but it didn’t work out. Instead, we played at this group hall in Ellensburg for people who were mentally challenged.
MARK PICKEREL The place was called Elmview. And I don’t remember how we ended up playing there—we had a couple friends that worked there, I think. On one level we were doing it as community service, but obviously we were very well aware of the Cramps video of them performing at a mental institution. So it was partly for our own sick amusement.
Oh, the show was incredible, as you can imagine. Early in the Screaming Trees days, Lanegan could be kind of a performer. When it was time for a guitar solo, his body would go into convulsions and he’d kick his legs around. But on this particular night, one of the guys in the audience was mirroring back every one of Lanegan’s movements. It was just too much for him. It seemed like that was the beginning of Lanegan refining his movements onstage. He seemed more selective with his body language. His stage presence, especially as the years went by, became very still and detached.
GARY LEE CONNER When we played our first club show, at GESSCO in Olympia, I kind of went nuts for some reason. I really got into it, jumping around, doing windmills and stuff. I was like, “Whoa, that was fun!” Eventually, having to go nuts onstage became a burden, because I was sacrificing my playing.
VAN CONNER My parents ran a video store in Ellensburg called New World Video. We had a huge back room there, which we made into a practice space. Lee decked it out. It was like that episode of The Brady Bunch where Greg gets his own room. It was totally psychedelic.
STEVE FISK (producer; keyboardist for Berkeley, California’s Pell Mell; solo artist) Mark Pickerel had sent me a fan letter because he’d bought my first 45 and told me that he really liked it. So when I moved to Ellensburg from San Francisco in the winter of ’85, I looked up Mark, who was working at the video store that the Conner family owned. So I got to be friends with Mark. I was working at Velvetone Studios in Ellensburg, which was started by Sam Albright, my old friend from college.
I didn’t see the band perform until they came to record at the studio. They thought that recording was doing something very much like a live show. Me and Sam Albright were in the control room and the Screaming Trees are out in the studio, facing us like we’re the audience. They had an extreme, jumping, crazy kind of physicality, reminiscent of the Who. It was the most uninhibited thing I’d seen in the recording studio up until that point, and probably for some time since then. Those recordings became the Other Worlds cassette that we distributed on Velvetone Records.
GARY LEE CONNER Me and Lanegan were driving over to the video store or something one day, and we were talking about naming the band the Screaming Freaks. That was something we thought about for 30 seconds. And that name sounded like the Screaming Trees, and we just decided, “What about Screaming Trees?” It was appropriate, because even though we did
n’t live right next to a forest—Ellensburg is where the desert starts—outside the town there’s a whole bunch of forests.
I didn’t even know about the Screaming Tree guitar pedal until later. But Van kept saying in interviews that we named ourselves after it, so people were like, “That sounds good.”
SAM ALBRIGHT (Velvetone studio/label owner) They were a young band, but they had a pretty specific idea of what they were after. It was this psychedelic, grungy sound—they didn’t want it too slick. They were big guys, and they played big.
Later on, Shawn O’Neill, who’s a musician and a writer, and Steve and I made a movie, a B-grade—a C-grade black-and-white sci-fi movie, The Fertilichrome Cheerleader Massacre, and the members of the Screaming Trees are in it. They played the gang under the evil Dr. Stimson, played by Steve Fisk, who—this is after the Great Apocalypse—creates a chemical called Fertilichrome to repopulate the earth. The evil Dr. Stimson ends up experimenting on Mark Pickerel’s character; he shoots him full of Fertilichrome, causing him to explode. We cast latex parts and organs and filmed Mark’s chest exploding, with fluids squirting out. It looked great!
STEVE FISK Their first album, Clairvoyance, was on Velvetone. I sent the record out to radio and booked a tour for them. It was impossible. No one returned your phone calls—no one wanted to hear about a band from Eastern Washington, let alone a small town that no one had ever heard of. I would have to thank Ray Farrell for hooking up the Screaming Trees with all kinds of interesting connections.
RAY FARRELL (SST Records promotion department head; Geffen Records/DGC A&R and marketing executive) There was something unique about them that was reminiscent of ’60s punk records, like the Nuggets compilations. There were elements of Lanegan’s baritone, of the songwriting that they did, that hearkened back to that time period.
Steve Fisk, who I knew from his instrumental band Pell Mell, asked me if I could help book some Screaming Trees shows along the West Coast. I think that the only thing I was able to get was an in-store show at the Texas Record Store, in Santa Monica, and it had a really good crowd. And it was right around that time that some tapes of them got to Greg Ginn at SST, and Greg really liked them. And it was as simple as that: They were signed to SST.
MARK PICKEREL Steve had sent Ray Farrell at SST some music, and he presented that music to Greg, who was also the guitarist in Black Flag. Maybe half a year earlier, Van and Lee and I had gone to see Black Flag play in Seattle. Somehow I managed to get through the pit and leave a cassette in front of Greg’s monitor. He picked it up in between songs and put it on his amplifier, and I remember wondering if he’d actually give it a listen. Sure enough, he did.
GARY LEE CONNER We were in the video store, where we always hung out and worked, too, and we got a call from Greg Ginn. Mark Lanegan talked to him. Greg asked, “Would you be on SST?” Hüsker Dü, Dinosaur Jr., Black Flag, Minutemen—all those bands that we idolized were on that label. I remember being like, Whoa! It was hard to believe.
Signing to Epic later on was sort of anticlimactic—the typical major-label kind of crap. But signing to SST was the coolest and most amazing thing that happened in our entire career. It felt like we were a real band.
LARRY REID I remember this conversation—this is in that period between Roscoe Louie and Graven Image, in 1983. The U-Men are playing at a punk-rock party in the little, tiny room of a basement of this house. And Bruce Pavitt was there, and he told me, “The Seattle music scene is gonna take over the world.”
And I just fuckin’ laughed. Here we are, with what at that point was arguably the biggest punk-rock band in Seattle playing in front of 30 people in the basement of this house. But goddamn, guy was right.
BRUCE PAVITT Sub Pop started with a $20 investment. Fifteen years later, the company received a check for $20 million from Time Warner.
In 1979, I arrived at Evergreen State College in Olympia, from the Chicago area, and was deeply interested in punk. Coincidentally, upon arriving at Evergreen, I found that the radio station there, KAOS FM, had probably the most inclusive collection of independently produced music in the United States.
And in meeting up with some of the folks who worked there, specifically John Foster, who was the editor of Op Magazine, I started to look at punk through a different lens. John’s philosophy was that punk was a folk music and that what was radical about it was that anybody could put out music and put out their own records. From that position, I started to dig deeper into regional music scenes, specifically into more of what was going on on the West Coast and in the Northwest.
I got to a point where I felt that I wanted to share some of the information with people, so I put out Subterranean Pop fanzine. The first issue came out in spring 1980. Had a budget of about $20—I had an X-Acto knife, a glue stick, and a box of crayons. I invited friends over, and we all individually colored a lot of the pages. Put ’em all in a box and shipped them to a distributor in San Francisco. I just said, “Here’s 200 copies of my fanzine. I know you’re gonna want to distribute this.” They hadn’t ordered any, so I took a risk there. But I got some good feedback and things kept building from there.
CALVIN JOHNSON (K Records cofounder; Beat Happening singer/guitarist) We met in September of 1980, but I’d been hearing about Bruce for about a year before, through people at Op Magazine. I grew up in Olympia, but my senior year of high school I moved away just for one year, and that was right about the time Bruce moved to Olympia. He actually took over my time slot on KAOS and did the first issue of the Sub Pop fanzine while I was gone. I started working on the fanzine with the second issue.
Most of the fanzines that existed in 1980 were very Anglophile. They were oriented toward whatever the latest flavor-of-the-month, major-label New Wave band was: XTC or Gang of Four or whatever. But Bruce was writing about bands that no one had ever freakin’ heard of. And he was concentrating on Northwest bands like the Beakers and the Blackouts. That was exciting.
BRUCE PAVITT I called it Subterranean Pop because my theory was that there was a tremendous amount of music happening in America that had the potential to be very popular. But because the distribution channels and the media channels were shut off, those acts had to work their way out of the ghetto. So it was an underground culture that had the potential to be very popular. Nirvana was the ultimate example of that.
The name changed from Subterranean Pop to Sub Pop on the second issue. I proceeded to put out more, and a couple years later we put out a cassette compilation, Sub Pop 5, which featured tracks by a group from Lawrence, Kansas, called the Embarrassment and tracks by the producer Steve Fisk and one by myself. The big “hit” was a novelty piece by an artist named Doug Kahn, and it was a montage cut-up of a Ronald Reagan speech. The cassette did very well—I sold like 2,000 copies, which at that time, for cassettes being duped out of your bedroom, was huge. At that point I began alternating between cassette versions and written publications. We put out nine issues—three of them cassettes—and that was kind of it.
STEVE FISK To me, the idea that a bunch of little know-nothings in Olympia, Washington, can make a bunch of cassette tapes and get them reviewed in Australia, get them sold in Japan, get John Peel’s attention—that’s radical. That was a radical thing to do in ’81.
CHRIS PUGH (Swallow guitarist/singer) I met Bruce in Olympia. There were only one or two places to play in Olympia back then, but there was a bubbling undercurrent of things going on. People were having dance parties at their apartments. All kinds of people were starting bands, getting their ideas out. It was a DIY kind of thing. People weren’t terribly concerned with musical ability.
DONNA DRESCH I remember the first show I ever went to in Olympia. I was just wandering around with some other teenage friends of mine downtown. We heard people say, “There’s a show in the alley!” So we went in the alley and the whole place is lit with candles, and at the very end of the alley, which is like another miniature alley, Beat Happening was playing. And it was just a guitar and two drums, l
ike a floor tom and a snare. And Calvin was dancing and singing in this totally surreal, almost a cappella–style punk show. Everybody was slam-dancing in this little alcove in the alley.
I thought it was amazing. I remember having heard Beat Happening on the radio and thinking, These guys can’t even play their instruments! But then I understood it.
GARY LEE CONNER You know the scene in A Charlie Brown Christmas, where they’re all dancing and Schroeder’s playing the piano? That’s what the Olympia scene was like. It was really innocent, and it wasn’t about anything except having fun and playing music.
MEGAN JASPER (Sub Pop Records receptionist-turned–vice president; Dickless singer) If you watched Bruce dance, he always did Calvin-esque kind of moves. You could tell they were close. It was like this weird Olympia thing. They would do almost like disco moves, but then they would freeze and stay frozen for 20 beats or so, and then start moving again. They’d be shaking their arms around. It was just a really funny, unique style of dancing. It was also really fun to imitate.
MARK PICKEREL We thought it was unusual that Calvin took such an interest in the Screaming Trees. He talked about us being his favorite band. And his actions backed that up—I mean, he was booking little tours with us and distributing our cassette right away, and he wrote a really great review of our music in a publication.
But musically, it didn’t seem like we had anything in common. I was surprised when Beat Happening wanted to collaborate on an EP with us and it turned out pretty good. It was a little bit awkward just because none of those guys knew how to play their instruments the way we did. Not that we were super-accomplished.