When Hollywood begins looking for a locale for the next John Carpenter film in his Escape From-series (following 1981's Escape From New York and this year's Escape From L.A.), perhaps a more rural confine might do. As anyone who has ever lived in a small town will tell you, leaving makes getting out of Alcatraz look easy. And if a big screen art director is looking for an expansive, cinematic setting, he need look no further than Ellensburg, one of the many small towns in the eastern part of the state of Washington.

"It's creepy," says Mark Lanegan, of his hometown and the environs that surround it. "There's just something about Eastern Washington. It's scarier out there than it is in Seattle. People just disappear."

Which, without being too melodramatic, was the fate that most likely awaited Lanegan and his bandmates in the Screaming Trees (guitarist Gary Lee Conner, bassist Van Conner, and drummer Barrett Martin) if they hadn't discovered music. Though escaping a small town might have been the biggest battle they ever faced, the Screaming Trees have bucked all the odds over the course of their 12-year career. They've survived long enough to see numerous bands and trends come and go; they've persevered numerous fights within the band (some onstage); they've put out a prodigious catalog of five albums and four EPs; and they've seen each progressive record find a bigger audience and sell more than the previous release. With their last record they finally scored a hit with the song "Nearly Lost You," which helped fuel their Sweet Oblivion album to U.S. sales of more than 400,000.

And just when it seems like they've finally transcended their roots, they now return to Eastern Washington for what will be the ultimate "fuck you" to the naysayers at their high school reunion. On the heels of a tremendous new album (Dust), the Trees play the mainstage of the 1996 Lollapalooza tour at the Gorge July 30, on a bill with Soundgarden, Metallica, and the Ramones. It won't be unfamiliar turf. "The Gorge is sort of the Alki of Ellensburg," or so Lanegan describes it.

"I used to work out there in the pea field," the singer says, "where the stage used to be before they moved it. I drove a combine out there. I even lived in a trailer park 15 miles from there as a kid. I was 14 years old and I used to wake up in the morning and see black widow spiders hanging on the ceiling."

Lanegan's history with the Gorge, like most of his life story, mixes with the ghoulish macabre of someone who has gone through hell with a fair dose of absurdist humor. The band played the Gorge once before, and that show brings back another memory for Lanegan: "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," the singer recalls, with a big grin now covering his face, "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."

When the Screaming Trees play Lollapalooza--their first Northwest show in almost two years--the script will read like another horror movie, since it's been a return from the near-dead for this band. Many thought the notoriously fickle group wouldn't survive the long hiatus between albums. The rumors of its demise inspire a particularly hollow laugh from Lanegan, who quotes blues singer Bukka White in response. "'I see 10,000 standing around, watching me die.' I felt like that for all intensive purposes," he says. "Maybe a lot of people would like to see us die. But I still enjoy playing with this band. I still like looking over there and seeing a 300-pound Angus Young look-alike every night. It makes me smile."

It is late in June and Lanegan sits in a Greek diner near Harborview, Seattle's public hospital, in both eating and talking mode. He orders a piece of cherry pie and eats that. He orders another piece of cherry pie and eats that too. He orders some pasta and eats that. Though he's suffering from what he calls "a bad lung infection," he inhales a pack of Lucky Strikes during the course of his meal.

"Whatever you say," he warns, "just don't say 'Success Spoils Screaming Trees.'" Success, one gets the sense, is not something that Mark Lanegan has ever inwardly felt much of despite the great acclaim the Trees have drawn and the rave reviews his two solo albums have earned. Lanegan can be painfully shy when talking about himself, yet when he talks of his new album Dust or his bandmates, he lights up with vitality. It's not even that commercial success is something he thinks is evil, he explains, it's more that he mistrusts anything beyond his own control. "But I do hope," he says with a grin, "that Sweet Oblivion will sell another 70,000 copies so I can have a God damn gold record."

The fact that the Trees still don't have a gold record to their name (other than the Singles soundtrack) speaks to the long-standing struggle of this band. Though they predate almost every platinum-selling group from the Northwest, Lanegan reserves his bitterness for outsiders. "A person I know who works with Bush tells me that one of the first songs they ever rehearsed was 'Nearly Lost You,'" he says. "The biggest hit I had was 'Nearly Lost You,' on my seventh record, in fucking 1993, and then these guys come along a couple of years later and are multi-millionaires. I must be doing something wrong. We've never known what to do or when to do it. We've had bad timing."

Yet Lanegan says he wouldn't change a thing about the choices he's made with the band over the years. The Trees are so steadfast in aiming to hit their own standards that Dust almost never happened. The band shelved the first version of the album--at what Lanegan calls "a huge financial and personal cost"--because they didn't think it was good enough. "So I lost a little personal credibility," he says, "which is usual, but the label stuck with us until the record was made. That's what mattered."

And Dust is a triumph. Lanegan boasts that the band aspired "to make a record that would last, and sound like 'When the Levee Breaks.'" And they pull it off, crafting an album that has a big rock sound but also has many subtle textures and touches. It has a sense of timelessness to it, particularly on "Sworn and Broken" and "Witness," songs that could be from any of the last four decades. The record is also notable for a stellar cast of supporting musicians including Benmont Tench (Tom Petty), Chris Goss (Masters Of Reality), and Mike McCready (Pearl Jam). Lanegan says the back-up help came about because of happenstance.

That's also how he describes the events that led to his two highly-acclaimed solo albums on Sub Pop. He says the solo records came out of some work he was doing with his close friend Kurt Cobain, and that he felt it was pretentious to release a solo album. "It happened because Kurt and I were going to do this thing--with Krist Novoselic and Mark Pickerel--of Leadbelly covers. And that just kind of fell apart. But Pickerel and Jonathan Poneman kind of dreamt up the idea of doing the solo thing. I had some demos that I'd been working on and a bunch of demos I'd done with Kurt, that I never really gave him credit for."

As for his relationship with what he jokingly calls the "Angus Youngs" in his band, Lanegan has nothing but fondness for his long-time bandmates, and tells story after story of times early in their career (and a few more recent) when a Screaming Trees show ended with he and Lee taking on the audience. "They can say anything they want or flip me off but they can't spit on me or throw anything at me," he warns. At times these stories have a ring to them that suggests that they are simply part of a long pattern that begins in Ellensburg--the brothers Conner and Lanegan against the small-minded of the world. "I remember one time onstage in Germany," Lanegan says. "Some guy kept yelling at me, 'Mark, Mark!' So I finally stopped and said, 'Yeah, what the fuck do you want?' And he said to me, 'Mark, why are you not so fat?' It was bizarre."

Van Conner sits in the Cyclops Cafe over a plate of hummus. Though there really is no leader of the Screaming Trees, every other member cites Van as the reason the Trees have lasted so long. "Van is the Screaming Trees," Lanegan almost shouted at the Greek diner. "He is the heart and soul of the band. He's the only reason I'm in it."

Despite that assertion, Van shares a certain shyness with Lanegan (and with his older brother Gary Lee, who is shy enough to bow out of interviews). So it's surprising that Van was the Screaming Tree who was most public in the documentary film Hype, joking about the band's trials. He still hasn't seen it, though, and now seems almost embarrassed by doing something as un-Tree-like as appearing in a movie. "How drunk did I look?" he asks.

If Van is the glue that keeps the fragile personalities of this band together, he says that's only because he's got a sense of humor and because, at this point, he's seen it all before. He's quick to note that life as a Screaming Tree has "always been a struggle."

Some of that turmoil went away with the success of Sweet Oblivion. "When that record came out, I had to go buy it at Fred Meyer. I said, 'I wonder if it will be at Fred Meyer?' So I went down there, and they had it. I called up Lanegan, and he went and bought it too--at a similar store where you wouldn't even have imagined them carrying our record years ago. They weren't carrying our Velvetone release."

Conner is referring to the band's brilliant debut album, Clairvoyance, recorded for the indie Ellensburg label in 1985. He says one of the ironies of having a breakthrough record like Sweet Oblivion is that many fans think that disc is their debut. "When you think about it, most people who know our band, that's where they know us--that last record. They probably got really confused in the record store when they saw all these other albums."

Since the Trees' early albums on Velvetone and SST, Conner says popular trends have shifted. "We've always been a hard rock band," he says with pride. "Remember when Pearl Jam first came out with their record? We would have been considered on the other end of the spectrum from them. But now we have way more in common with Pearl Jam than we do with Green Day."

Conner points out that the Trees have the same slot on Lollapalooza that Pearl Jam once had. "And playing before the Ramones is going to be a childhood dream for me. Seeing them when I was in high school, I never even imagined I'd go on a tour with them."

No matter how far the Trees progress, Van says it's easy to remember their early days in Ellensburg. "In high school there was music that if you liked it, you'd make everyone else insane. So we thought, why not make them hate you more?"

He still remembers when he first met Lanegan, who was "carrying around a bunch of albums by bands like The Damned. But the response that got in Ellensburg was anger. People would say, 'What is this shit?' Their first reaction was that they were really pissed off."

Though Van is looking forward to Lollapalooza, he recalls that one of the last times the band played a show in Eastern Washington it was something of a catastrophe. "We were at the old Capitol Theater in Yakima," he says, "and there were about a thousand fans but absolutely not one security guard. We went back to our dressing room and it was full of people. We said to the promoter, 'You didn't hire any security?' And he said the people in Spokane said there wasn't any trouble. The cops eventually came and maced people, and there were big headlines in the Yakima paper that said 'Riot at Screaming Trees Show.'"

Barrett Martin is the newest member of the Trees, but he's already spent as much time in the band as many groups stay together. He previously played with Skin Yard, and even before joining the Trees, he had a reputation as one of the best drummers in the area.

Though Martin isn't originally from Ellensburg, he jokes that he gets in under a grandfather clause since he's from Tumwater. "It was weird there too, just like in Ellensburg," he says, sipping coffee in his house in north Seattle. "As for the 'Burg, besides the Trees and Black Angus restaurants, there's a guy who plays NFL Football, and those are the three greatest achievements."

Martin also argues that his Ellensburg citizenship should come from the fact he once was locked inside the Conner family video store (the site of the band's first rehearsals). "I was helping Lee move some of his record collection, and their dad, the infamous Gary Lee Sr., decides to go get some doughnuts and he locks us in there for an hour. It wasn't funny at the time."

Martin's first encounter with the Trees came when an early band he was in called the Thin Men opened up for them. "They were amazing," he recalls. "Lanegan was this stoic guy in this long flannel shirt. Van was on the other side of the stage--this groovy bass player, just swinging really hard."

A few years later when original drummer Mark Pickerel left the band, Van called him up and asked him to rehearse. He says the musical connection was instantaneous. "I realized they were like this team of draft horses and I'm there trying to hold them down."

He'd heard all the rumors about fighting in the band but that didn't dissuade him. "I had heard about the brawling brothers, and I've witnessed the spectacle a few times, and been in the middle of it. But it's one of those bands where we're able to be critical and judge each other, but musically we all keep each other in check."

One of the high points both for Martin, and the Trees in general, came when President Clinton used the drum riff from "Nearly Lost You" as the background during the Inauguration ceremony. "It was really weird, these tribal drums; but I thought it was pretty cool because I came up with that part."

Though all the Trees have had side projects during their last hiatus, Martin's has been the most public as the drummer in the band Mad Season. "We just decided that we were going to do these blues jams with Layne [Staley], and we recorded it in seven days. We were going to put it out on an indie label but then Columbia got wind of it and wanted to put it out. We sold half a million copies." Martin says another Mad Season project is in the works, this time perhaps a double album.

In addition to Mad Season and the Screaming Trees, Martin has also been doing some acoustic world music in a combo that features Peter Buck (R.E.M.), Justin Harwood (Luna), and Skerik (Critters Buggin). Martin, who has quite a background in jazz, says he doesn't understand why more rock musicians don't take the opportunity to play in a variety of combos. "If you're in a rock band, you're not supposed to play with other rock musicians unless you're getting on stage in a benefit concert. When you collaborate you create music that wouldn't exist outside of itself."

But when he talks about the Trees, even the outgoing Martin is more reserved. "The Trees are a real self-deprecating band," he notes. The band was actually considered for Lollapalooza twice before, including last year, but was afraid such high profile touring might be its undoing. Now, on a bill with Soundgarden and the Melvins, Martin notes that the Northwest bands that many critics wanted to count out have returned. "Everyone thought that the beast had gone back to sleep, but it comes back again," he says.

"There are very few bands who even make as many records as we've made," Martin continues. "The very nature of the music industry is so fickle and lots of bands have these high expectations that if they don't have a bit of immediate success, then they break up. I sort of think the Trees are a band because they have to be. They couldn't not be a band. These guys all grew up together in this redneck, narrow-minded environment and then they realized that through the power of music they could elevate their self-esteem. At the same time, there's all these other people of the same generation who feel the same way who are looking for a connection like that. That's no secret. Nirvana were the first to strike that nerve."

Lanegan runs out of smokes back at the Greek diner and we take a walk to the store for more tobacco. He ponders a question asked in jest about whether being in the Trees is a blessing or a curse, yet he considers it for several seconds before answering that, "being in the Trees is like a life sentence." The next day he and the band will fly to L.A. for a video shoot, then two weeks of club shows before starting up the Lollapalooza dates. Because of his illness, he's missed all rehearsals except the one the previous night, though he reports that the group is playing better than ever.

"At our rehearsal last night I was thinking," he says, walking intently towards the supermarket, "how amazing it is that we're still around after all these years. The fact that I'm here today--still in this band--that's amazing. It's the most unlikely thing of all time. We're just these four 'tards from Ellensburg."

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