Stranger Than Fiction by Marc Weingarten Request, August 1996 The members of Screaming Trees get very little enjoyment but plenty of good music out of being in a band together. "Hey man, can I store my motorcycle in your garage when we're on tour?" Screaming Trees frontman Mark Lanegan is barking to fellow Screaming Tree Van Conner from behind a blue-frosted display case stocked with cheesy tchochkes. "Yeah, yeah, whatever," Conner distractedly replies, as he fondles a pair of synthetic moccasins. "Hey, I think I should buy these for my kid. They seem like they'd be comfortable." Conner and Lanegan are browsing the souvenir shop located on the ground floor of Seattle's Space Needle, clearly enamored of the in-your-face tacky fare the store is peddling. "Oooh, now this is nice," Lanegan guffaws, as he holds up a personalized license plate that bears his first name. For the pasty-faced tourists who have lined up to take an elevator ride to the apex of the 605-foot Space Needle, Conner and Lanegan are a strange sight indeed: two hulking (both are well over six-feet tall), downright scary-looking dudes poking fun at the kind of consumerist effluvia those same tourists, after their trip to the Needle's tip, will scarf up like treasured heirlooms. This scenario, however, is a lot stranger than even these clueless onlookers are aware, for Conner and Lanegan aren't often in the business of making nice with each other in public. In fact, Screaming Trees' well-publicized enmity in the past has prevented them from giving joint interviews, which is what Conner and Lanegan have agreed to do today. The occasion? DUST, arguably the band's finest album in a tumultuous career that's crashed and burned more often than a case of bottle rockers. A-list artists who tour and make records aren't in it simply for kicks. They want the world, the old saw goes, and they want it now: money, drugs, groupies, magazine covers, the whole enchilada. Even so-called reluctant rock stars like the members of Pearl Jam cloak their ambition in a sort of benevolent subversion. Don't pay high ticket prices, they plead; meanwhile, they're picking up Grammys. Screaming Trees, however, are always up front with their disdain not only for the star-making machinery and its attendant trappings, but for the sheer necessity of having to function as a band. The four members of Screaming Trees - Lanegan, Conner, his guitar-playing brother Gary Lee, and drummer Barrett Martin - glean very little enjoyment from each other's company, or at least do a good job of concealing it. "It's not like we really hang out with each other too often," says Conner, en route to the Space Needle's panoramic, nosebleed-inducing cocktail lounge. "We all have our own lives. It all just boils down to business, really." The business of making music has produced some glorious results for this volatile foursome, particularly on the group's last two albums, 1992's commercial breakthrough, SWEET OBLIVION, and their latest album, DUST. A dense cyclone of tougher-than-leather guitar squall striated with the band's swirling psych-pop arrangements and lead singer Lanegan's suave growl, DUST may well prove to be a watershed album for Screaming Trees; it could easily vault them into the superstar stratosphere of fellow Seattle bands such as Alice In Chains and Soundgarden. "Been a long, long time away/With one foot in the grave," Lanegan huskily purrs on DUST's opening track, "Halo Of Ashes", which signals a spiritual rebirth for a band that, less than two years ago, very nearly self-destructed in a maelstrom of booze, road weariness, and vicious infighting. "This band is like a marriage in many ways," says Lanegan, whose wan, ghostly pallor leads one to suspect he doesn't see much daylight, let alone eat lunch too often at the Space Needle's vertiginous observation deck. Even though the cocktail lounge serves the requisite fanciful, high-octane umbrella drinks, the newly mellowed Lanegan and Conner opt for Cokes and turkey sandwiches. "Basically, we got out of high school and went through our early 20s together. Now, we've grown up a lot and changed in different ways, but have stuck together strictly because of the music. I think there's something really special about this band. If there wasn't, we wouldn't still be going." These Ellensburg, Washington, natives have been going at it, in the musical AND pugilistic sense, for 11 years, with numerous detours along the way. Both Lanegan and the Conner brothers were reared by teachers; Lanegan's parents taught at a college near Ellensburg, a sleepy, aggressively provincial cow town located a hundred miles or so from Seattle. The Conners' dad was an elementary school principal who later retired and opened the area's only video store. "There's basically nothing to do in Ellensburg except hang out, drink beer, and listen to music," says the gnomelike Conner, who resembles an overgrown facsimile of C. Everett Coop. "I mean, we used to have to drive into Seattle to pick up import records and stuff, 'cause the local store didn't have anything. No bands ever played in our town, so we really had to seek out all the cool stuff ourselves." The Conner brothers' passion for music drew them to Lanegan, a jock with too much idle time. "Mark loaned me a lot of records," Conner says. "He turned me on to a lot of obscure punk. We were all record geeks, but Mark had everything." Everything, that is, except for a band. "One night, we're all at this party, and I feel someone bite me on the ear," Conner says. "I turn around, and it's Mark. He's like, 'Hey, you wanna start a band?'" After recording and bankrolling a cassette-only EP (OTHER WORLDS), and a full-length album for the tiny Velvetone label (CLAIRVOYANCE), Lanegan & Co. relocated to Seattle, where they shared gigs with other upstart bands such as Nirvana and Soundgarden. With two DIY efforts under its belt, the band began hunting for a label deal and was promptly slimed by music-biz leeches. "This label, which was basically a psychedelic-rock subdivision of Enigma, wanted to sign us to this shitty nine-record deal," Lanegan says. "Thank God for Greg Ginn, 'cause we wouldn't have made another record if he hadn't come along." Screaming Trees recorded three albums for Black Flag guitarist Ginn's seminal punk label SST - EVEN IF AND ESPECIALLY WHEN (1987), INVISIBLE LANTERN (1988), and BUZZ FACTORY (1989) - all of which featured the band's early punk/arena-rock alchemy filtered through a psychedelic-rock prism. "When we first started, we were listening to a lot of 13th Floor Elevators and Love, as well as Black Sabbath, AC/DC, and punk," Lanegan says. "Not many people were doing backward guitar on their albums like we were at the time." After relentless touring ("SST booked you in the weirdest places: apartments, record stores, country & western bars," Lanegan says), Screaming Trees managed to garner a respectable cult of loyalists and jumped ship to Epic. Then the bottom fell out. To hear Lanegan and Conner tell it, UNCLE ANESTHESIA, the band's Epic debut, represents the absolute nadir for Screaming Trees, both psychically and creatively. The rigors of a low-budget touring regimen, combined with a long-simmering animosity between the Brothers Conner and a collective tendency towards mind-obliterating alcohol intake, led to an internal implosion from which the band very nearly did not recover. "Around '90, we all felt that was it, it was time to break up," Conner says. "Even if we had, it would've been OK, because we all felt that we had made a bunch of good albums to that point, even if it was on a pretty small scale." When pressed to pinpoint the cause of the dissension, Conner proceeds to reel off a litany of woes in between chugs on a humongous tumbler of Coke. "For one thing, UNCLE ANESTHESIA was our first major-label album, and we really didn't know how to handle that. I mean, with SST, we had gone into the studio and cut the whole album in a week. With ANESTHESIA we had way too much time on our hands. The only good memory I have of those sessions is playing basketball with [ANESTHESIA producer/Soundgarden frontman] Chris Cornell and [Soundgarden guitarist] Kim Thayil in between takes." Then there's the Conner fissure, which is so deep-seated as to be intractable. "I've spent more time with Lee than with any other human on this planet. We're total opposites, our philosophies," Conner says. "When we were kids, we hung out a lot together, and Lee doesn't tend to think before he does things. Brothers can f*** with you and not feel any remorse about it. He just flies off the handle and can be uncompromising for no reason. I'm a bit more logical, so it tends to balance out." "Also, we just started to get completely f***ed up all the time. Just totally balls-out insanity, thinking that was a normal way to live. All that drinking we were doing was really a symptom. It really had to do with the four of us dealing with our dysfunctional upbringings." The brotherly feud, as well as Lanegan's increasing erratic behaviour (he's been known to injure fellow band members without provocation), only added fuel to an already incendiary situation, but Conner theorizes that the band's well-documented fisticuffs may have provided a salutary release valve. "When we get pissed-off, we tend to do it more publicly than other people," he says. "It doesn't matter if we're in the supermarket or the 7-Eleven. We're four giant guys, and when people see us going at each other, they call the cops. But in a weird way, it may have helped us stay together, because we get everything out in the open. We all know what's on each other's mind, so nothing's bottled up. I'm not gonna read in the trades that I've been kicked out of the band." UNCLE ANESTHESIA sold anemically, a victim of bad timing and an inept marketing campaign. "This was way before the alternative thing, so the label didn't know what to do with it," Lanegan says. "There was no market for the record. The only thing they could think of was to market it as a metal album. That whole experience was just torture." Screaming Trees in tatters (Lanegan and Lee and Van Conner all temporarily left the band and released solo side projects in 1990; Van even served a brief tour of duty with Dinosaur Jr. in 1991), they nonetheless managed to get it together one more time (with new drummer Martin replacing Mark Pickerel) for an album they assumed would be their swan song. "We decided we wanted to make a real classy record, with no f***ing around," Lanegan says. "It was a completely different mind-set from UNCLE AMNESIA. We set a goal for ourselves and achieved it." That supposedly valedictory SWEET OBLIVION turned out to be Screaming Trees' finest hour, an impassioned showcase of the band's dramatic range and songwriting savvy. From the plaintive acoustic grace of "Dollar Bill" to the thunderous yearning of the radio hit "Nearly Lost You", SWEET OBLIVION straddles the point where Lynyrd Skynyrd intersects with Roky Erickson. The album's success also kicked the band into high gear, sending them on the road and off the booze, at least temporarily. "SWEET OBLIVION's success really made me reprioritize my life," Conner says. "It made me think, 'Hey, maybe I don't want to die before I'm 30'." Two years of touring and recidivist partying, however, threatened to derail the momentum the band had gained from SWEET OBLIVION's not-quite-gold success. Shortly after punching the clock on MTV's Alternative Nation extravaganza for three months without a break, Screaming Trees returned to Seattle and immediately booked studio timed to try to write and record a follow-up to SWEET OBLIVION. As rain clouds shroud the Space Needle's observation deck in a blanket of gray, Conner and Lanegan share a match for their cigarettes and expound on the band's lost opportunity. "We were looking for something to click, like it did on SWEET OBLIVION," Conner says. "We also did it in Seattle, which sucked. Everybody would run home because we were just coming off the road. Also, the sparks just weren't flying with [SWEET OBLIVION producer] Don Fleming the way they had before. We all had the mark of the beast or something." Lanegan languorously exhales a billowing mass of smoke and adds, "I can listen to all of our early records, even though there are things I would've done differently on every one of them. But that record just sounds flat all the way through to me. It's just not that good." Rather than take their chances with what they felt to be a desultory, if not outright awful effort, Screaming Trees scrapped the completed album altogether, hired a new producer (gonzo knob-tweaker George Drakoulias), packed their bags for L.A., and started over again. The resulting DUST fuses SWEET OBLIVION's soaring majesty to sitars, mellotrons, strings, and elegantly skewered, quasi-modal arrangements. Lanegan's trademark dusky baritone has become a limber, emotionally charged conduit capable of expressing vulnerability ("Look At You"), heartache ("Make My Mind"), or spiritual epiphany ("Traveler"). Not that Screaming Trees have abandoned their classic-rock lineage for good; the slinky riff in "Dying Days" is copped from Cream's "Tales Of Brave Ulysses", and there are sly references to "I Am The Walrus" and Peter Frampton's "Do You Feel Like I Do" on DUST's first single, "All I Know". But, unlike so many recent bands who slavishly attempt to re-create the sound of '70s FM radio, DUST is no geezer-rock reclamation project. Despite the bad juju that seems to follow Screaming Trees around, they somehow have managed to follow up one of the best guitar-driven albums of the decade with an even stronger record. Conner and Lanegan attribute DUST's artistic success to an intensely focused collaborative effort, thanks in large part to a self-imposed detente that enabled the band to concentrate on nothing but the work at hand. "We probably work a lot more closely than most bands," Lanegan says. "Somebody would make a demo of a song, then pass it along to another member who might redo it in an entirely different way. Sometimes we had four different versions of the same song, which we would then make into the finished track." Drakoulias (the manic, mercurial Svengali behind albums such as the Jayhawk's TOMORROW THE GREEN GRASS and the Black Crowes' debut) was a key catalyst. "George tries to get everybody in the right mood," Conner says. "He has a lot of ideas that he'll just throw at you, in order for you to take that extra step. We must've recorded a million takes of 'Look At You' before Barrett just said, 'F*** it' and started playing this really loose-wristed pattern just to spite George. Well, of course, we played it back, and George was like, 'It's great!' And it was." "George is a taskmaster," Lanegan adds. "He guilts you into getting a good performance. He's a really imposing presence in the studio. We nicknamed him Iron Balls Drakoulias." Although expectations are high for DUST, Screaming Trees aren't holding their breath in anticipation of the kind of mega-success that has befallen their mates in Soundgarden. "Look, it would be great if it did really well," Conner says, "but we're not the kind of band to sit back and think, 'Hey, this is gonna be big!' Most bands are lucky to even make a record, and we've made seven. If it all ended right now, I'd be happy." But DUST is just the beginning for Screaming Trees in 1996: They are first-stage headliners on this year's testosterone-heavy Lollapalooza tour, along with Metallica, Soundgarden, and their childhood heroes the Ramones. "The Ramones are the reason I picked up a guitar to begin with," Conner says. And what about the oft-stated contention that Lollapalooza had abandoned its venturesome eclecticism? "I know people have been saying that this bill isn't as varied as last year's, but people should be open to this kind of music, too. Bands like Metallica shouldn't be excluded just because they sell 10 million records. If I was a kid now, I'd want to see everything: Sinatra, Sonic Youth, Metallica. There could be more rap acts involved, but I still think it's a great bill. I'm psyched to play and see all those bands." The esprit the corps has never been stronger for Screaming Trees, but this is a band for whom the ability to do great work, rather than the bonhomie of working together, matters most. Even if they have to endure each other's bullshit and emotional baggage, they are destined together, if only because they can't do it any better any other way. "We get along well now," Conner says. "But the more shit you have on each other, the worse it is. You've got to get past the shit and move on. Everybody who's ever had a sibling can relate to that." [ more articles ]