Cathy Conner, nee Center, can trace her family's musical roots at least as far back as the turn of the century. Her grandfather, Harrison Center, was an avid musician who sold pianos, operated Center's Guitar School and toured throughout the Midwest at the head of the Center Family Orchestra, on the movie-theater circuit, from 1918 to 1920. The orchestra consisted of Center, who played violin and guitar; his wife, who played piano; his daughter, who played violin and piano; and his son, who played trumpet. Center's son went on to marry a musician and the two of them spent a good part of the 1930s touring grange halls in Montana, playing Saturday night dances for rough-hewn, often drunken audiences before eventually settling first in Oregon, then in Walla Walla, Washington, to raise their family. The couple passed their musical aptitude and interest on to their daughter, Cathy, who grew up playing the trumpet and listening to '50s rock 'n' roll, and who eventually married Gary Conner and settled in Ellensburg, Washington, where Conner took a job as an elementary school principal after a sting in the Army in California.

Cathy wasted no time in passing the conductor's baton on to her children. She bought guitars for her two oldest sons, Lee and Van, when they were 12 and 8 years old, gave them her collection of '50s and '60s records, including a splendid set of Little Richard 45s (a rarity in 1970s Ellensburg), and came home weekend after weekend with whatever rock records she could find at yard sales. "I always wanted them to be guitar players," she says now. "I guess I had some kind of vision that they would be famous…that they would be in a band together."

The fulfillment of Cathy Conner's vision came suddenly, when her boys' band Screaming Trees, was swept onto center stage in the wake of the world's discovery of Nirvana and Pearl Jam. After eight years of carrying on a slightly grander version of the Center family tradition – playing in grunge halls before unkempt, often drunken audiences in cities and small towns over the US and Europe, and recording five albums on small, independent record labels – the band hit it unexpectedly big with Sweet Oblivion, its second major-label album, which has sold over 400,000 copies since its 1992 release. "It was weird," says Screaming Trees lead singer Mark Lanegan, who grew up in Ellensburg with the Conner brothers. "For years, there was no market for what we did. Then some of our friends came along and became huge stars and made a slot for us to fit into. Our music had enough in common with those guys' to make it a viable commercial thing."

The implicit self-deprecation in that remark – the notion that Screaming Trees' considerable success is due more to coincidence than to the band's merit – is telling. It sets the speaker apart as a died-in-the-flannel Northwesterner, hinting as it does at the unease this species has with fame and celebrity.

Symptoms of this Northwest anomie can be seen in the trajectories of all the so-called grunge acts who made it big in the early 1990s. They were no sooner discovered than they retreated from the spotlight in one way or another rather than preening in it for as long as possible. It was as if the abrupt ascent into celebrity was a bad accident from which all the bands (or at least those who survived intact) have ever since been trying to recover.

To be a Northwesterner, after all, is by definition to be an underachiever, whether by chance or by design. The most characteristic attitude among Northwest natives and transplants alike is one of resignation – the Mount Rainier of our psychological landscape. To make it big in the music industry, by contrast, is to be limitlessly ambitious. The pop star is as defined by grandiose need for attention and acclaim as by talent or genius. This more or less antithetical relationship between Northwest culture and the culture of celebrity made the explosion of Seattle into the world's pop music scene an impossibility to those of us who live here.

As it turns out, it also was an impossibility to the musicians. And it is this circumstance that makes the story of Screaming Trees so uncommonly interesting. It is a story rife with paradox, unintended turns, and a number of odd twists – some peculiar to Generation X, others distinctly Northwestern.

In the beginning, The Conners' pursuit of music was pure pleasure. The Conner boys grew up in a house indiscriminately steeped in rock music. The first album Van Conner remembers getting from his mother in early childhood was the Beatles' A Hard Day's Night. The second-most-memorable was a Black Sabbath album. "Our mom would buy whatever records they had at yard sales, like for 5 cents or something, and bring them home," Van recalls, "so I had like a million different things." This electric mix was further diversified by the boys' frequent trips to record stores in Ellensburg and Yakima, where for years they spent all the money Lee made on a car-delivered paper route, and whatever money Van could scrape together, on records.

By the time Van was in ninth grade, the two boys did nothing but buy music, listen to music, and play music. Van remembers his high-school years as "always, like, driving somewhere to buy records all the time." He and Lee were particularly drawn to punk, much of which they would buy only because the covers looked bizarre.

It was on one of these trips in 1981, when Van was a high-school freshman and Lee a senior, that the boys had their first of three epiphanies. "I bought this Black Flag single, I remember," Van recalls, "and it was like…'Louie, Louie', on one side, with 'Damaged I,' on the other. The singer just screams 'Damaged!' over and over. And I put that on and it was like, I'd never really listened to…I'd heard some stuff that was said to be punk rock, but in Ellensburg people would probably think the Police was punk rock, and this was just this loud guitar totally out of tune and this guy screaming his head off, 'Damaged!' over and over again, and on the back cover, it had these people like waltzing, and I was listening to that music and looking at the cover, and it was like my brain opened up to all this whole different thing."

Conner became notorious among his friends for making maddeningly eclectic tapes after that, with a Beatles song followed by some Black Flag screaming followed by Jimi Hendrix followed by something weird by Robert Fripp…. "People would say, 'When you make a tape, you're supposed to make it with the same kind of band!' But I didn't really see any really big difference, I just thought it would all be music."

Conner's second epiphany came in what he describes as "like a dentition or study hall or one of those classes where there's just a couple people and like a PE teacher sitting up in the front reading a book or something, you know, it's not a real class. And then this guy came walking in, it was Lanegan. He came in this class and I had a Jimi Hendrix button on, and he said, 'Oh! Where'd you get that button?' And I said, 'I got it in Yakima or something,' and he said, 'You know what sucks about this school is that nobody even knows who Jimi Hendrix is.' And I thought, 'You know, that's true, I hadn't thought about that.'"

That proved to be the moment Conner turned irrevocably away from his peers and set out on his own aesthetic path. It turned out that Lanegan was a punk adept as well, and the two of them, along with Lee Conner, who by now was majoring in music at Ellensburg's Central Washington University (from which he would drop out after fighting with his music teacher during sophomore year), and classmate Mark Pickerel, delved ever deeper into punk and cultivated the life and mindset of resolute outcasts who relished the disapproval and harassment of their benighted classmates.

Conner and Lanegan both remember high school as time of willful loneliness and indirection, although, like Lee before them, they were both good students, and Van, as Lee had, played trumpet in the high-school marching and jazz bands. Conner and Lanegan saw one another infrequently, often just to exchange and listen to records, and more or less drifted through high school with no idea of what would come after.

Van, Lee, and Pickerel, meanwhile, experimented with short-lived formations of bands, some of which played cover songs, some of which played original work. It wasn't until after Van graduated, and Lanegan had been out of school for two years, working odd jobs around Ellensburg, that he joined the other three with the idea of trying to form a working band. At one of these sessions, during which the four would drink beer and fool around with various instruments, they finally decided that Lee would play guitar, Van bass, Pickerel drums, and that Lanegan would sing.

Almost immediately, they realized they were on to something. "When Lanegan started singing," Van recalls, "it was like, 'Oh wow…I didn't realize he had such a cool voice.' And not only his voice, but the way he sang things was different than most people. I actually sang in the band we had before that, my voice is pretty normal, and he just had this way of pronouncing words that was different. We were, like 'Cool…. we actually have a singer.' It was just sort of … Boom!"

It is indeed a luxurious shock to hear Lanegan's voice for the first time. Languorous, deep and thick, with a rich rasp that on some songs – particularly early in the band's life – makes it sound as if it is being forced out of a recalcitrant voice-box, it is the antithesis of the generic rock singer's frantic screaming and wailing. Nirvana's Kurt Cobain began one of his last interviews with the declaration, "This guy [Lanegan] has the best voice of all us." Somewhere between a croon and a growl, it is simultaneously soothing, disturbing, and doleful.

While the voice has changed over the life span of the band, deepening and growing more melancholically rich year by year, it is characterized even on the first Screaming Trees albums, recorded in the mid 1980s, by what strikes the listener as exhausted resignation. The singer sounds as though the major and minor disappointments alike of day-to-day life grind him down into a near-comatose state from which it is impossible to emerge, the effort to continue the descent into death and release being just as untenable as the effort to rise out of his torpor and work up some kind of enthusiasm for living. Thus life becomes a quest for what one Screaming Trees song terms "sweet oblivion" – a state of numbness that amounts to psychological anesthetic against the pain of just getting by.

This overriding tone is heightened by Screaming Trees lyrics, which tend toward gloom and drift. Typical are these lines, from 1988's "Grey Diamond Desert":

I never thought the night would fine me here Black raindrops washed away with drunken tears Live another lie in every mile One wasted day, one million wasted years Better keep on goin' It's the only thing I know Oh, Lord, it won't change Oh, Lord, it won't change It won't change…..

And these from 1992s "Shadow of the Season":

The hour is ended Can't you see There is no way now To be free In the shadow of the season Without a reason To carry on

Among the strange effects this music has on the listener is a feeling of consolation rather than depression. Lanegan's singing confers what Cobain once called, in a different connection, "the comfort of being sad." It is an odd temperament inversion that seems peculiar to the Northwest, whose artists (Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolfe, Theodore Roethke, et. al.) have almost uniformly tended to luxuriate in gloom as a means toward something approximating happiness.

Juxtapose the songs themselves with what the band members try to say when asked about them, and you feel trapped in a room with a monstrous hybrid – half Samuel Beckett, half Spinal Tap – the musicians' explications being somewhat less eloquent than their performances,. Asked about the mood of these songs, all of which deal in sorrow, loss or aimlessness, Lanegan says, "When we're working on a song, the music dictates the mood it's going to be. The music suggests something. To me, that's all it is, the mood. I just try to do what I can to achieve the mood the music suggests. If it's evocative of something, then it's done its job." While acknowledging that the songs all settle in at the depressive end of the spectrum, he also insists., "I find a lot of it uplifting for me, personally, I don't know why."

This moody mix is considerably enriched by the music swirling around Lanegan's voice. The Conners' guitar and bass is melodic, often light and upbeat, and always deliberately pleasant rather than punkishly unpleasant. At the same time, it is massive and thundering, a huge storm system of sound. The aggregate effect, which Van Conner calls "dark pop," is paradoxical, at once gloomy and light – an effect not unlike that Conner experienced while listening to "Damaged I" and looking at the accompanying wistful photograph of the waltzing couple.

The intent with every song, Conner says, "is to have a really nice melody within a song and keep it dark at the same time. It's always hard to do. But Mark, the way he sings stuff, he can usually get it to turn into something kind of scary. A lot of the time when Lee and I come up with songs, we'll try to write something really dark and bring it to Mark, and he'll say, 'I just don't hear anything in there that I like.' And then we'll bring him one that's totally fun and with a real happy melody to sing, and he'll say, "That's cool!' And we're thinking, 'What!?' Then he'll sing it, though, and it'll be that happy thing with his scary way of singing."

The list of disincentives to commercial success for such a band was long and daunting. This is not the sort of shtick you can sell to an American pop radio audience – once described by Frank Zappa as a 13-year-old, bubble-gum-chewing female mall cruiser. Moreover, the group was from Ellensburg – hardly a regular stop on the rounds made by anyone in the music business – and the musicians lacked ambition. "For some reason," Van Conner says, "we had never made any plans past high school, besides maybe going to trade school or something, in electronics or something." There also were no venues in Ellensburg for local bands who preferred playing their own songs. "There just wasn't anywhere to play unless you were a cover band," Lanegan says. "We tried to play covers, but we could never manage to play them in a way that anyone wanted to hear." This was due in part to the group's adoption of the punk ethos that was to come to define the Seattle music scene: disdain for the deliberate tailoring of your sound or your act for commercial purposes.

Finally, everyone in the band lacked, in traditional rock terms at least, star quality. Lanegan, who is shy, truculent and withdrawn, wears a watch cap pulled down to his eyes, seems determined never to be noticed and finds it excruciating to talk about himself ; the Conner brothers are, in Van's words, "extra large human beings" whose girth turns away attention from media executives more fixated on the glamour and photogeneity of musicians than on their genius or musical dexterity. No one looking at these guys could have imagined styling their hair, slipping them into spandex and turning them into the next Aerosmith.

The mid-1980s, when Screaming Trees was first formed, were the Dark Ages of American rock. Radio, having emerged from the horrifying disco years, had settled on bloat rather than redemption. The only music pop stations would play was either oldies, heavy metal or bubble-gum reprise acts like New Kids on the Block. It is hard to remember or even imagine a less creative and vibrant period in the history of American popular music. "Back then, " Lanegan says, "there were only a couple of ways they could market a band. I guess they just didn't see molding us into any teens heartthrobs or heavy metal band."

In reaction, there arose around the country what at the time was called, "Do-It-Yourself Rock" – a movement that consisted of tiny clubs, word-of-mouth promotion, feverent audiences and tiny studios that put out either cassette tapes or small vinyl pressings, these latter replaced later in the '80s by compact discs.

One of these studios, by happenstance, was located in Ellensburg, having been confounded by a CWU alum named Steve Fisk. After graduating from college, Fisk had moved briefly to Seattle, then returned to Ellensburg in 1983 to establish a studio he dubbed Velvetone. The studio issued a single, titled "Anonymous," that prompted Mark Pickerel to send Velvetone a fan letter. Fisk responded and suggested, after hearing the band once, that Velvetone produce their first record.

This proposition was greeted with some surprise on the part of the band. "We never realized we could just put something out ourselves," Van Conner says now. "But then we started finding out about cassettes, how people would just put them out and distribute them themselves, and we had a couple hundred bucks, so we went in and recorded five or six songs, called it Other Worlds, and put it out." The group hastily came up with a name – Screaming Trees – lifted off one of their effects pedals: the "Screaming Tree" treble booster.

After making the cassette, the band borrowed money from friends and from the Conner parents and made a vinyl record entitled Clairvoyance. It promptly sold 2,500 copies, which struck both Fisk – who originally pressed only 1,000 discs – and the band members as astounding.

Fisk put together a West Coast tour, of sorts, for the band in 1984. Screaming Trees would travel by van from one appearance to the next, sleeping on the floors in apartments or houses of friends either of Fisk or of the venue operator where they played on a given night. Some of the gigs amounted to little more than a party in someone's apartment; others might have audiences of 10 or fewer. The total take from the tour was barely enough to feed the band and refuel its van.

At one of the houses where they slept, in Los Angeles, the band met an employee of SST records, one of the leading punk/underground record labels of the 1980s. Shortly after that tour, when the band was back in Ellensburg recording another album, Even If and Especially When, for Velvetone, SST contacted the band in Ellensburg and asked them to send a tape of a live performance, as the label was interested in doing a Screaming Trees record.

The group was thrilled. SST for years had been recording the Conners' favorite bands, including Black Flag, Dinosaur Jr., St. Virus and Sonic Youth. In 1985, they recorded the first of four records over the next five years on SST (the first being Even If and Especially When) and to begin a regimen that would not change significantly until 1991.

The routine was a years-long, demanding lark. The rigors of touring the entire nation by van, playing every night for two month stretches, was exhausting. Arrangements were haphazard: The band would play in one town, then send one of the members out into the crowd near the end of the performance looking for someone willing to put them up for the night. They would get up next morning, drive all day, play again….."If I were going on tour like that now," Conner says, "I'd be about dead. But at the time, we were young….we paid our dues I guess, but we just didn't know it. It just seemed like fun, because you know, we hardly ever got out of Ellensburg before, besides going to Seattle or going on family trips. I'd basically never been away from home until then. There we were going all over the country….we were having a great time."

By 1988, the underground rock scene — was known as the "alternative" scene – was in full flower. It consisted, in Conner's words, of a club network that took form largely because of SST tours. The circuit sustained bands "whose music was friendly enough that you could play it on college radio, but at the same time it was too weird to be in the mainstream." Tour by tour through the latter half of the '80s, the Screaming Trees crowds grew larger, the record sales greater. By the time their last SST record, Buzz Factory, was issued in 1989, sales had climbed to over 30,000 — "really good for an indie label," in Lanegan's words.

Although the band never made enough money to live on – generally, record sales would barely earn back the advances given the group to make the record, and performance fees covered their expenses while they traveled – Screaming Trees found themselves playing in front of increasingly enthusiastic audiences. Twice they toured Europe, where the lack of an American-style rock radio industry gave more market clout to word-of-mouth advertising. "We played to a lot of packed shows over there, " Conner says, "and people were really excited." In the US, by contrast, shows were hit-and-miss, with the biggest crowds showing up in Chicago and in what Conner calls "full-on college towns."

Between tours, the group would return to Ellensburg to work and save up money. Lanegan worked variously in pea fields, in a potato warehouse, as a fencebuilder, in gas stations, in the Conners' video store, and so on. The jobs were easy to come by, Ellensburg being a refuge for underachievers. "It was the kind of town," as Conner puts it, "where people gave you work that would free you up to follow your various pursuits … like watching television.

All of the band members remember those days with particular fondness, before music becane, as Lanegan says now, "a job." None of them expected to attain stardom or wealth, or to be performing and recording into adulthood. Center family tradition had it, after, that musical performance was temporary and more or less recreational. "We never really thought about music as a career or anything," Lanegan says. "We never dreamed we'd being doing it this long, or even looked down the road, it was just that we were having a lot of fun making records and goofing off, and for us it was just great to be able to get out of town and travel. We could make a little bit of a living when we were on the road. But then we'd come back and either have to get a job or quick make another record and get on the road again. We never really thought about the long-term possibilities."

Even so, as record sales grew and demand for Screaming Trees concerns grew along with it, the band eventually decided it needed a manager, as the rigors and obligations of nonstop touring grew into more than they could handle on their own. Screaming Trees soon found itself hooked up with Seattle's Susan Silver, who also managed the Seattle bands Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, and – early on – Pearl Jam, and who was an advisor of sorts to Nirvana.

The first thing Silver told band members was that they needed to sign with a major label. "We were like, 'What!'" says Conner. "Why would we want to do that?" "It seemed strange to us," adds Lanegan. "For us, playing music was just a lot of fun, more or less something that we were having a good time doing. It beat sitting around Ellensburg and working at those crappy jobs."

Dubious, the group told Silver that they would be doing a New York concert and that if she wanted to invite record-label representatives to attend, she could. Executives from Epic, who by 1990 had decided that the alternative music scene had grown into something with commercial potential, showed up. Not long after, the group signed with Epic, and began work on a new album, eventually released, in 1991, as Uncle Anesthesia.

Showbiz tradition dictates that when the band members went into the studio to begin recording Uncle Anesthesia, they should have been thrilled. After 10 years of playing a grimy club curcuit well out of the lucrative limelight, they were on the threshold of stardom and wealth, suddenly supported by the recording technology and marketing machinery of a huge record company.

No sooner did the studio door close then in, however, than all four Trees wanted out. "We didn't even want to be in the same room with each other anymore, and it shows on that record," Lanegan says. Suddenly, after 10 years of virtually living in the same room – "living in each other's pockets," as Lanegan puts it – the four found themselves utterly sick of one another. "We were never the best of pals," Lanegan says. "We don't have a lot in common, except for the music, we came together because we were in a place where we were the only guys we knew who were listening to music, and so just our being a band together grew out of that. It wasn't like four guys who were best friends deciding to have a band together."

It is more likely the band's sudden ascent into the commercial rock industry was utterly at odds with the definition its members had forever had for themselves. They greeted their rise to a major label with considerable skepticism and unhappiness, as if theirs was an ascent into Hell. "Everybody in the band was like, 'Oh, OK, I guess we're going to maket his record, like 'Big Whoop.'" says Conner. Part of the band's lack of enthusiasm for one another's company, and part of it, Conner continues, "was out of the weird thing of being on a major label all of a sudden. We just didn't have as much heart in it as our records before that.

The band members reacted to their new status as a major-label band by feuding constantly and "just going through the motions" of recording. When the record was issued the band did a brief tour that was marred by, among other things, fist fights between band members, breaking out on stage during performances. Even so, sales almost immediately hit 40,000. Given that the band felt it was the worst work it had ever done – and Uncle Anesthesia is, indeed, the least interesting of the Screaming Trees' albums – the sales figures came as a shock.

Rather than galvanizing or reassuring them, though, the sales only seemed to further depress them. After their tour, Van Conner left the band to tour with Dinosaur Jr and Mark Pickerel left the band for good. "They left me and Lee alone with a record and no band," laments Lanegan.

With that, the Screaming Trees story should have come to an end. Van and Lee Conner both began projects with new groups, Lanegan recorded a solo album on Sub Pop, and Pickerel vanished. It took the Conners and Lanegan only a few months, though, to releaize that, for whatever reason, they would never duplicate with other musicians the particular emotional and musical magic that had come out of their long collaboration. Before long, the three were back in contact, exchanging songs each had written, signing a new drummer (Barett Martin), and talking about making, Conner says sardonically, "One Last Record, the best record we had ever made. There still was a lot of weird things between us all, but we just kind of put them all aside."

The group convened in New York to record. "I remember when we got to New York," Conner says, "right off the bat, everybody was fighting and it was just weird. But then when we got in the studio, we started recording, and, I don't know, it was really a lot of just feeling put into it or something that made it all really good. About halfway through, I remember listening to what we'd done and thinking, 'Wow, this is really going to be cool.'"

While the band was recording, Nirvana's Nevermind album was released, and the grunge phenomenon was unleashed. For the first time, it was commercially permissible to play alternative music on mainstream radio stations all over the world. "Nearly Lost You," a song from the coming Sweet Oblivion album, started playing on radio stations all over the world. When Sweet Oblivion was released, Conner recalls, "the record just started selling, and we kept touring and touring and touring and touring, and it it kept on swelling." With album sales at 400,000 and climbing, Screaming Trees had arrived.

Pleased as they were with the album itself, though, the experience of hitting it big was little more than Uncle Anesthesia writ large. Screaming Trees just couldn't seem to fit into the role of "rock star." Everything about the role, from the splendidly appointed tour bus to the large, luxurious performance venues to the endless series of interviews with rock journalists, left the musicians feeling disaffected and alienated. It was as if they no longer knew why they were writing and performing songs. "When we were done touring," Conner recalls, "it was almost like all the smoke cleared and we were just standing in the middle of a field alone, it was like, 'What do I do now?'"

In times past, the band would have waited to let the answer come up on its own. This time, they were surrounded by people who felt the answer was to record another album immediately. As Conner remembers it, "Everybody was telling us, 'You have to hurry up and put out another record! Right away! You've got to get out there while it's hot!' This time there was all this expectation, where in the past we would write songs because we liked them. So we tried writing again this time, and they just didn't come. The songs just did not come out, did not work. We wrote for like half a year or something, and I knew they weren't as good, but we thought that if we got in the studio, we could pull it off again somehow." By mid – 1993, they convened to record a new album. "And we went in there and there was no spark at all, there was just nothing. It was just really depressing. It was like trying to make something out of nothing, and it didn't work. So we kept writing, and we wrote more and more, and it seemed like every time we'd get something that we thought was good, it just like would fall apart."

Eventually they recorded an album's worth of songs, listened to the result, then refused to release it.

The band members went their separate ways after that, for more than two years, each seeking his own variety of sweet oblivion, with the Conners and Lanegan each writing their own songs feverishly, in solitude, with no idea what lay ahead for them. Lee Conner moved to New York, where he involved himself in various private music projects. Van Conner married and moved to the sound end of Camano Island, in a house surrounded by woods. Lanegan came back to Seattle, recorded another solo album on Sub Pop, and spent his days reading and hiding in his apartment. Barrett Martin hooked up with two other disaffected grunge musicians-turned-celebrities – Pearl Jam's Mike McCready and Alice in Chains' Layne Staley – along with bassist J.B. Saunders to form the group Mad Season, which recorded and released an album, Above, in 1995.

The last two years, Van Conner says, have been "hellish. For me it's been really hard, and Mark's gone through hell, too." He has spent his time writing songs with no particular purpose in mind, and going over again and again in his mind the reasons for having gotten into the music business in the first place. If it wasn't to hit big – and, judging from the misery of hitting it big, it wasn't – then what was it all for? And how can he recover what it was? Conner is sitting in the kitchen of his Camano Island home now, looking out at the swampy patch of forest he can see through the window. "It was really weird, going from 30,000 to 400,000," he says. "It's almost like we have been on this steady course for the last 10 years, sticking kind of down the same road of being just a rock band, and everything just changed around us. We started out doing this and kept doing it and kept doing it, then all of a sudden we're in the mainstream now, and it's bizarre, it's like we went from being totally out in left field to being in the middle."

He feels that his band and the other Seattle bands who hit it big all inadvertently moved more or less along the same path. "We all just kind of like took our music seriously, I guess, but at the same time tried hard to not take it seriously. There's some kind of weird middle ground where, when you're playing your music or whatever, you're serious about it, but when it comes to thinking about it or living with it, it's more like, 'I didn't have anything better to do, so I'm in a band.' I mean, all of us started playing because we really didn't have anything better to do. We had absolutely no expectations of ever becoming actually successful as a band. There's some reason you keep going, although you don't know what it is. It's almost like we just walked into this blindly and ended up where we are today."

Which, judging from his demeanor, is a place he'd rather not be. Conner finds it oddly comforting to come upon someone who knows or recognizes him and asks, "Did you guys break up or something?" He laughs, as if having disappeared was the high point of his career, and his band would indeed break up if only its members could find something more satisfying to do than to collaborate with one another on new songs. "I wonder how many people think we broke up?" he asks wistfully. "Or wishes we had?"

It is rare for a group of kids to concoct the genuinely compelling stew of art and emotion that makes up a great rock act. It is rarer still for a scene to take hold the way the music scene in 1980s Seattle did. But once upon a time in the Northwest, kids like the Conners, Lanegan and Pickerel converged from all over the region – Stanwood, Aberdeen, Olympia, Ellensburg, Boise – and tapped into a thriving counterculture that nurtured and sustained them for years until the mainstream music industry uncovered and destroyed it. "The whole Seattle thing," Conner says, "was just being totally balls-out and over the top, just having no respect for yourself, no restrictions when you're playing, you just kind of let loose." Now, suffering a kind of post traumatic shock, many of those musicians, back from the world's center stage, are trying just as hard to regress to those enchanted days as they fought before to make their way there in the first place. "I feel," Conner says softly, "like a guy who's been in prison for a long time, gets out, and doesn't know what to do."

The band seems now to have settled into something of an uneasy compromise between oblivion and High Visibility, a resignation to their celebrated status. Late last year, they reconvened to begin work on a new album after working on songs separately, in solitude, for two years. Songwriters for some 15 years now, and celebrities for only a fraction of that time, the musicians spent their time in retreat recovering their skills and passion for their craft.

Lanegan and Conner both say that they found, as they had with Sweet Oblivion, that their time apart and out of the spotlight had restored their peculiar creative magic. Both say that recording sessions in Los Angeles and New York were tremendously satisfying. "It was like we had too many good ideas this time, which is better than no ideas," Conner says. "Everything sounded good because it felt good."

The group looks ahead with a mixture of excitement and trepidation to the release next month of its new record, entitled Dust. "Now we have to start that insanity all over again," Lanegan says of the coming round of tours and interviews. But then he adds: "We've been through so many intense and crazy situations together, I guess now we know what's good for us and what isn't. We might run around like maniacs again at some point, but right now it's peaceful."

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