The new Screaming Trees record is called Dust. Which fits.

That there is a new Screaming Trees album may be a bit of a surprise to those who figured the band really had dashed off to Sweet Oblivion after their seventh long player – guided to prominence and prosperity by the presence of a single on the Singles soundtrack – proved itself a radio-friendly shifter.

But that Dust has taken so very long to arrive, and after its still-born twin was discarded, reflects both the pressures of that success and the dawning realization within the band (Mark Lanegan, vocals; Gary Lee Conner, guitars; Van Conner, bass; Barrett Martin, drums) that their work might matter, might have real merit. It also reflects the delicate balance that must now be maintained given that each member – or pair of members, say – has at various stages been in charge.

And that they finally had something to lose.

Maybe commercial validation isn't all it's cracked up to be, eh?

Still, it is never wise to place one's faith in professional athletes, thoroughbred horses, the opposite sex, or rock bands. And yet inevitably one does all of those things, repeatedly.

Hope is a touch cactus.

So, in his way, is Mark Lanegan.

Lanegan lives in an old brick building on Seattle's Pill Hill, where all the hospitals are, a neighborhood on the cusp between housing projects (to the south) and trendy Capitol Hill (to the north). And anonymous, therefore.

He moves from the front door slow and sore, like a very old man. His hair is dyed a fetching blond, and though he is still a rugged, rawboned, lanky figure (a less-worn and better looking Gibby Haynes, when it comes down to it), he is thinner than he has been in years.

He apologizes for a migraine and slips back onto his rumpled couch, turning off the sound on the Kurosawa samurai epic he's been watching. Coltrane sits atop the nearest stack of CDs. He declines an offer to reschedule and, later, one suspects that he doesn't expect whatever's hurting to stop anytime soon. He speaks softly, almost inaudibly, and though his wry, hard laugh still appears unexpectedly, the mirth is gone from his eyes.

Lanegan's best work – within and without the Trees – is sad, beautiful, and cathartic, though he doesn't necessarily accept that judgment. "I'm aware that other people see the records as dark," he said back in '93, "but I don't really see them that way. I see them as being funny, I see them as being uplifting. I don't see them as being serious or dark. But that's the beauty of making records. It doesn't matter what the hell I get out of it."

Sometimes the price for that emotional discharge is too high. Dust's "All I Know" opens with this passage: "Black thorn to pierce the skin/Come back down to earth again/The cold is creeping deep inside/Disconnect the telephone line/Gotta get away..." Quite honestly I don't want to know what he means by that. It's a gorgeous song, though.

Screaming Trees sprouted in Ellensburg, Washington, a conflicted college & rodeo town in the Twin Peaks North Cascades, on the cusp between rain and desert. In the middle of nowhere.

None of them live there anymore, except for ex-drummer Mark Pickerel, who's opened a fine store called Rodeo Records and now plays (with ex-Soundgarden bassist Hiro Yamamoto) in Truly.

In Ellensburg music didn't come with a critical or cultural lexicon attached. You just found it at garage sales. Or down the highway in Yakima, or maybe once a year in Seattle. "I remember when I was in sixth grade my mom brought home Black Sabbath Vol. 4 and other records," Van Conner says. "She'd just get whatever records. She liked the Beatles a lot."

This is how Pickerel once described the Conner family living room: "The first time I went to their house, when I was a freshman, I walked into the door and they had the typical living room: wood paneling and a couple nice paintings, television, couches and everything. And then right next to a framed painting would be a pinup of Duran Duran, and then a pinup of the Sex Pistols. And his mom put them up."

Gary Lee (who answers to Lee) and Van Conner, along with Pickerel and vocalist Mark Lanegan, ended up together in a band that valued Love and Lovecraft and Lee Hazelwood and Black Flag equally.

In fact, when they started out in the mid-'80s, the Trees were closer to naive/outside/folk artists than to the calculating rock world swirling around the big cities. Not so much that their approach was primitive (though it was, comparatively) but because they were largely free from the filters of conventional wisdom. Dick and Jane Elliott, a husband-and-wife team of outsider artists, affix mirrors to various architectural structures (like their house) in Ellensburg, and the Trees' first outings – Invisible Lanterns, Even If And Especially When – were like that, mirrors pointing outside. This is why the Trees' early alliances were not with Seattle bands, but with Olympia and Beat Happening, with whom they recorded an early (and not very successful) EP.

The happy accident was that Steve Fisk had moved to town. Fisk has a penchant for found-sound collages and tape loops best revealed to the public in his Pigeonhed collaboration (with Shawn Smith of Satchel). He also has a fondness for antiquities which lurches to the fore in Pell Mell, the long-running instrumental band. Mostly he's a producer and remix artist (Geraldine Fibbers, etc). But back then Fisk had the keys to something called Velvetone Studio.

For a time in the late '80s, records produced by the Fisk-Trees collaboration gushed out of Ellensburg at a daunting rate, and it's worth remembering that their label for most of that period, SST, was the hippest imprint in the underground.

"Every time we went in to record," Lee said some years back, "we'd go in with like 10 songs, and we'd keep coming up with new songs while we were recording, because we could spend like four months in the studio in Ellensburg. Not constantly. It was really common to come up with a song and be in the studio recording it two days later. And some of those were our best songs."

Sweet Oblivion, the Trees' second for a major label, was a bona fide alt.rock hit. And so they toured, and toured, and the label kept releasing singles – great songs, all – but radio never really responded to anything past the Singles anthem "Nearly Lost You."

Along the way Lanegan finally finished his second solo outing, Whiskey For The Holy Ghost. It was a brilliant, brooding, gloomy record. Not the kind of thing to play late at night with no cork in the Scotch, but at least there were no firearms in the house.

Everything seemed in order for a band who could note with pride that each record had doubled the sales of its predecessor. They had just come off the road and were about to go in the studio and make another record, Lanegan said before Christmas of 1993. "This is our work, we figure why not do it all the time? It's been a scramble, a mad dash, really, trying to get it all together in time, but I think we're going to make it."

Well, they made it, mostly. It just didn't turn out well.

"Lee and I both got married right after touring Europe," Van says. "Then we just started working on songs. We went in to do what we thought was going to be the record, and nobody's heart was really in it or something. I think everybody was still burnt from the stuff that happened during Sweet Oblivion, just actually selling some records for once, and having to do everything we'd ever done in a shorter period of time and a million time more than we ever did. It just didn't click."

"It was recorded, every last bit," Lanegan says. The band flew to New York for mixing sessions, and... "I knew before that it probably wasn't going to come out, but that's one of those exercises we like to go through in this business. I went ahead and finished it, just to see. And I think the second guy who understood that it shouldn't come out was out new A&R guy at the time. I think since he had just started working with us, he didn't really want to say, 'This is shitty', and waited for somebody else to say it first. Once I found out that he agreed, I knew he was cool."

"When we got to New York," Van says, a little sad at the memory, "everybody was kind of like, 'Let's see if we can make something out of this.' Just wishful thinking. On the first day I got there I started talking to Mark about it, and basically just came to the conclusion that there's no way this is going to be good enough, you know? Somewhere we ran off this kind of work ethic, where we don't want to put out something that sucked, basically."

All that remains of those sessions is one track on Dust and a cover of the Jesse Colin Young & the Youngbloods classic "Darkness Darkness," oddly placed on the soundtrack to Schwarzenegger's True Lies. ("I haven't really been able to hear our song on the movie," Van laughs. "I guess it's just suggested somewhere.")

Another experiment, the addition of guitar tech Kent Steedman as an extra guitar player, survives only as the title track on the John Lennon tribute, Working Class Hero.

It's not like band members haven't been busy. Drummer Barrett Martin (who replaced Pickerel after Uncle Anesthesia, and who also play a tasteful stand-up bass in other settings) has worked steadily, including with Mad Season. Lanegan (and Martin) cut an anguished version of "She's Not For You" for the Twisted Willie Nelson tribute. Van's been working in a group with Mudhoney drummer Dan Peters and Tad bass player Kurt Danielson (Peters and Danielson were once in Bundle of Hiss together) and younger brother Pat. Lee now lives in New York, where God knows what trouble he's gotten into. And they spent a season – between recording sessions – doing the Big Day Out tour in Australia.

"We just didn't have the raw material," Van says. "We could have whipped it out. We've whipped out so many records...we thought, well, this time we'll just take it as long as it takes, and then as long as we're really happy with it and it's really good..."

"There was really way more pressure in all ways," Lanegan says. "When you have pressure from out there you put pressure on yourself, too. And we had a lot of pressure on us. We pressured ourselves to write shitloads of songs. We wrote so many, just worked really fucking hard. For whatever reason it wasn't right until it was."

"I think we were really, really drunk the last time," Van chuckles, "so it was easy to hang out together. And this time we were a little more sober."

Mind you, this isn't the first time the Trees' have tossed away an entire album. Buzz Factory was originally recorded as a double-LP set, with Donna Dresch on bass. (The Trees have a contentious history, and at this point it was Van who had elected to leave the band.) Dresch left to join Dinosaur Jr., then formed the acclaimed Team Dresch. Van returned and they started over. Lanegan's Whiskey For The Holy Ghost took years and a number of producers and recording sessions to finish.

Dust is also the first Trees record on which outside musicians have been more than spot players. Benmont Tench plays keyboards on seven of the ten tracks, Mike McCready adds a guitar solo to "Dying Days," and Masters of Reality vocalist Chris Goss (briefly associated with the Trees' label) adds backing vocals on two tracks.

And, of course, some of the delay has to do with producer George Drakoulias' schedule. "He said, 'Ah, you gotta wait, I've gotta do this Tom Petty thing, six more months,'" Van shrugs. "We waited six more months and ended up actually writing some more songs in that time period, and finally got in the studio. And it was supposed to take like a month and a half. Six months later, we just got done mastering it. There might be a couple little things in mastering that we need to fix, but it's done, basically. We're very happy that it's done, very happy with it, actually, too."

"I figure if it's decent, it doesn't really matter," Lanegan says. "If nobody knows who we are when they first see this record, or first hear it on the radio, that's a good thing as far as I'm concerned. I'd rather have kid think this is a brand new thing, if they like it, than a band that's been making records forever. A bunch of old men. It can really work against you, man."

Alternative rock – whatever that is or was – is now mainstream pop radio. Screaming Trees are opening for the Ramones on Lollapalooza, on a tour that quite improbably includes old Northwest friends Soundgarden and the Melvins. "We wanted to do it a couple years ago, and didn't get asked," Van says. "For once, things kind of worked out a little bit for us, as opposed to just being in total chaos. I've heard from some friends who've been on it that it's pretty laid back. Sometimes you play two nights in one place, and you're also going to get days off. Just kind of going along, going to the catering, dressing room, back to the catering, play the show, go to the hotel, rock, watch the show..."

[more articles]