Screaming Trees never really sounded like Seattle to me. They sounded like somewhere much stranger.
They were from Ellensburg, which probably had something to do with it. That's about a hundred miles east of Seattle, out past the Cascades, and especially in the mid-'80s it was a pretty unlikely place to start a band expecting anybody outside town to give a shit. Ellensburg isn't Seattle with fewer clubs. It's a small college and farm town surrounded by a whole lot of Washington.
The original four were Mark Lanegan singing, brothers Gary Lee and Van Conner on guitar and bass, and Mark Pickerel on drums. They got together around 1984 or '85, rehearsing in Ellensburg and eventually making their own records because there wasn't exactly a line of labels waiting outside the door.
The first one was Other Worlds, a little cassette EP on Velvetone in '86. Then came Clairvoyance, also on Velvetone, and by '87 they'd hooked up with SST.
That's when the trail gets really good.
I didn't hear any of those records when they were new. I was in Queens and had no fucking idea what four guys in Ellensburg were doing. I got into Screaming Trees through Uncle Anesthesia in '91, then started working backwards. That's always been one of my favorite ways to discover a band anyway. Find the record that gets you, then start digging backward until the band barely sounds like the same animal.
"Bed of Roses" was probably the first song that really got me.
I remember hearing Uncle Anesthesia at the record store and thinking there was something familiar about the guitars and something completely wrong about the voice. Not wrong bad. Wrong like it didn't belong to the guy in the photograph. Mark Lanegan was still in his twenties and already sounded like somebody who'd been sitting at the end of a bar since 1947.
So I went backward.
Buzz Factory. Invisible Lantern. Even If and Especially When.
That's when I realized these guys had already been around forever.
Those SST records sounded nothing like the stuff MTV was starting to call Seattle music. There was garage rock in there, psychedelia, punk, hard rock, all kinds of weird shit. Gary Lee Conner's guitar could get nasty and fuzzy but also wander off into these psychedelic shapes that made the songs feel much older than the Northwest punk scene they were supposedly part of. Van and Pickerel kept the whole thing moving underneath him.
And then Mark Lanegan would open his mouth and suddenly everything sounded about fifty years older.
I still don't know how else to describe it.
People lump Screaming Trees into Seattle now because it's convenient, and obviously they became part of the same Northwest scene. They played with those bands, knew those people, recorded around the same places, and eventually got swept into the same national story. But they weren't four guys hanging around Seattle waiting for Sub Pop to discover them. They had already made records on their own and three albums for SST before most of America had any reason to care what was happening up here.
Even their little Sub Pop detour was just that — a detour. Change Has Come came out as a double seven-inch in '89, but Screaming Trees were never really a Sub Pop band. By 1990 they were moving somewhere else entirely.
Epic signed them.
That sounds obvious now because every fucking band remotely connected to Seattle seemed to end up talking to a major label eventually, but Screaming Trees got there before the feeding frenzy really went insane. They put out an EP called Something About Today in 1990, and then Uncle Anesthesia arrived in January '91.
Terry Date and Chris Cornell produced it together, which is another detail that tends to get mangled. You'll sometimes see it described as the record Chris Cornell produced, period. He didn't. Cornell and Date did it together.
It's a strange record to hear now because you can feel the band moving toward something bigger without losing all the weirdness that got them there. "Bed of Roses" is the obvious one for me, but the whole album sits in this interesting spot between the SST Trees and what they were about to become.
By the time I found them through that record, Mark Pickerel was already on his way out. He'd gotten tired of touring and left after years of being the drummer in a band that seemed permanently either on the road or preparing to go back out. Barrett Martin eventually took over.
That changed the band.
Not necessarily for better or worse. Just changed it. Pickerel had been part of the original chemistry going all the way back to Ellensburg. Barrett hit harder and had a different kind of motion to him, and when Sweet Oblivion arrived in September '92, Screaming Trees suddenly sounded like they could knock down a wall.
The timing didn't hurt.
"Nearly Lost You" had already turned up on the Singles soundtrack that summer. Then it was on Sweet Oblivion, then radio got hold of it, then MTV. If you were around record stores in late '92 you couldn't really separate the song from the whole Seattle explosion anymore. For a lot of people who had never heard Buzz Factory or Invisible Lantern, "Nearly Lost You" was Screaming Trees.
I understand why. It's a hell of a song.
But Sweet Oblivion is a hell of a record.
"Shadow of the Season," "Nearly Lost You," "Dollar Bill," "More or Less," "Julie Paradise." I wore that one out. It had enough of the old psychedelic Trees left in it to still sound strange, but everything was bigger now. Bigger drums, bigger guitars, bigger choruses. Lanegan sounded even deeper somehow. The band had finally made a record that could exist on commercial rock radio without sounding like they'd spent six months sanding off everything interesting.
And suddenly people were paying attention.
I moved to Seattle in September '92, right as all of this was happening. That's another reason Screaming Trees occupy a funny place in my head. Nirvana and Pearl Jam were already becoming enormous, but the Trees felt different. They were older as a band. They had this whole history sitting behind them that you could actually go dig up in record stores. If you only knew "Nearly Lost You," there were years of evidence waiting to prove that they hadn't appeared because Hollywood made a movie about Seattle.
I finally caught them at the Capitol Theatre in Olympia on October 9, 1993.
What I remember most about Screaming Trees live is that they looked like four guys who might get into a fight with each other at any moment and somehow still sounded incredible.
I don't mean I saw anybody throw a punch that night. I didn't. It was just the feeling they gave off. There was nothing comfortable about watching them. Gary Lee and Van Conner were this huge wall of guitar and bass, Barrett was a monster behind the drums, and Lanegan barely had to move. He'd just stand there and sing.
That voice did all the work.
He didn't need to climb a speaker stack or run from one end of the stage to the other. Half the time he looked like moving three feet in either direction would have been an unnecessary concession to show business. Then he'd open his mouth and the whole room changed.
That's probably the thing about Screaming Trees I remember most clearly. They could sound enormous without ever looking glamorous.
By then "Nearly Lost You" had given them their big shot, but they never really seemed built for becoming famous. Maybe that's why I liked them. There was nothing particularly polished about Screaming Trees as people. They didn't give off that sense that everybody had sat down together and agreed on what the band was supposed to be.
If anything, they always seemed barely contained.
And then they basically vanished for a few years.
Well, that's how it felt.
They hadn't actually vanished.
Lanegan kept making solo records. The Winding Sheet had already come out on Sub Pop back in 1990, and in '94 he released Whiskey for the Holy Ghost, which is still probably my favorite of his solo records. Those records make sense next to Screaming Trees but don't sound like Screaming Trees with the other three guys removed. They're quieter, darker, more stripped down. You hear folk and blues and old songs lurking around in there, and that voice has even more room to sit right in front of you.
Barrett Martin was busy too. He ended up playing with Mad Season, the band with Layne Staley, Mike McCready and John Baker Saunders, and Above came out in '95.
So everybody was doing things. Screaming Trees just weren't giving us another Screaming Trees record.
From the outside, it looked like they'd stalled.
That matters because the gap between Sweet Oblivion and Dust now looks much shorter on a shelf than it felt while we were living through it. Four years is nothing when you're looking backward. Four years when you're waiting for a band to make another record feels like forever.
By '95 I honestly wasn't sure there was ever going to be another Trees record.
Then Dust finally showed up in June '96.
Jesus Christ, what a record.
I love Dust. Maybe even more now than I did when it came out. George Drakoulias produced it, Barrett was still behind the kit, and Mike McCready showed up on "Dying Days." But none of that is why the record works.
It sounds like Screaming Trees had taken all the things they were good at and let them age.
"Halo of Ashes" opens the record like some giant psychedelic storm rolling in. "All I Know" could've been a much bigger song than it was. "Look at You" is beautiful. "Dying Days" has McCready tearing through it without turning it into a Pearl Jam song. "Sworn and Broken" is one of those Lanegan performances where he sounds simultaneously exhausted and completely in control. Then there's "Gospel Plow" sitting at the end like somebody left the church doors open during a thunderstorm.
The whole record sounds exhausted in places, but in a good way. Like a band dragging itself across the finish line and somehow making something beautiful out of it.
Maybe that's unfair. Maybe I'm hearing the years between records and everything I thought I knew about the band and putting it back into the grooves.
But that's what Dust sounds like to me.
They went out and toured it hard. They did Lollapalooza that summer. Josh Homme from Kyuss played guitar with them on the road for a while, years before Queens of the Stone Age became the thing people now know him for.
And for one brief period it looked like maybe Dust was going to give Screaming Trees another shot.
"All I Know" got some radio play. The reviews were good. The band was visible again.
Then they faded out again.
Not dramatically. That's almost what makes the ending stranger.
There wasn't one enormous public explosion where everybody stood in a room and Screaming Trees ceased to exist at exactly 4:37 in the afternoon. They just became less and less active. Epic was over. Lanegan kept making solo records. Barrett kept playing with other people. Gary Lee and Van had their own things going on. Years started accumulating without another Trees album.
Lanegan put out Scraps at Midnight in '98, I'll Take Care of You in '99 and Field Songs earlier this year. I'll Take Care of You is all covers, and hearing him sing those songs makes you realize how much old American music had been hiding inside his voice the whole time.
Screaming Trees did play again here last year.
June 25, 2000, during the Experience Music Project opening weekend at Memorial Stadium.
I wasn't there, so I'm not going to pretend I can tell you what the show felt like. What I do know is that they haven't played another one since.
As far as I can tell, they're done.
Maybe somebody will prove me wrong. Bands have a way of doing that.
But Dust is still the last Screaming Trees album, five years later, and there hasn't been another Trees show since that EMP weekend. At a certain point you stop waiting for somebody to mail you an official announcement.
Lanegan certainly hasn't disappeared. Field Songs came out in May, and he's also been singing with Queens of the Stone Age lately, which makes a weird amount of sense. He sang "In the Fade" on Rated R, and his voice fits that band's desert machinery so naturally that the first time I heard it I wondered why nobody had tried it sooner.
Still, I miss Screaming Trees.
I think they deserved better than they got.
Not because they should've been as big as Nirvana or Pearl Jam. I'm not sure that would've suited them anyway. And I don't mean "deserved better" in that stupid record-collector way where liking a band automatically means you think five million other people were morally obligated to buy the records.
I mean they were around before the world cared about Seattle. They made their own little cassette in Ellensburg, got records onto SST, made one strange stop at Sub Pop, signed to a major before the gold rush hit full speed, survived a drummer change, finally got the song everybody knew, then spent years being too inconsistent and too difficult to turn that moment into the kind of career people probably expected.
And through all of it, they never sounded quite like anybody else.
That's worth something.
I got into them backwards. Uncle Anesthesia first, then the SST records, then everything else. Maybe that's why I still think of them that way — not as one of the bands that arrived when Seattle became famous, but as this strange trail running backward out of it, across the mountains, all the way to four guys in Ellensburg making tapes because there wasn't much else to do.
I just wish they'd made a few more records.
