White Trash Disposal
Melody Maker, June 27, 1992Nirvana, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam... Does the world really need another Seattle-based guitar band? The Stud Brothers say yeah and furthermore Screaming Trees could well be the best of the wild bunch.
"Hey Van"! says a beaming, angel-faced kid. "Hope ya don't mind, I'm packin'."
Van Conner, Screaming Trees huge, baby-faced bassist, sighs. He does mind. There follows a brief discussion which ends with Van apologising for being such a pain-in-the-ass liberal and the kid nodding sympathetically and handing over a loaded gun.
Van doesn't like people to be armed at his parties. He says it makes for a tense atmosphere. We'd go along with that.
Five minutes later, the kid's back having decided he'd rather pack than party. Van duly returns the weapon and the kid wanders off into the night.
In these five minutes Barrett Martin, Van's housemate and the Trees' drummer, gets wind of the incident. He swaggers over to Van, a bottle of Jack Daniels clenched in his fist. In pointed cowboy boots, tight, tattered jeans, a battered leather jacket and with his hair swept up and back, he looks like Peter Fonda in "Easy Rider".
"Hey Conner!" says Barrett. "Word's out yer yeller! What've ya gotta say 'bout that?"
"Aw, f*** off Barrett," says Mark Lanegan, the band's vocalist who's propped up against the fridge nursing a bottle of vodka. "Least Conner's name's the right way round."
Barrett wheels to confront Lanegan. Van smiles sheepishly.
Screaming Trees are one of the greatest rock'n'roll bands we've ever heard. A great American rock'n'roll band. As American as apple pie, Levi's jeans, the National Rifle Association and pick-up trucks. The group - Mark, Barrett (formerly of Skinyard), Van, and his brother, the guitarist Gary Lee Conner - hail from Ellensburg, a small cattle town in Washington State populated, they say, almost entirely by "white trash".
Screaming Trees know white trash, love and hate white trash, laugh at it and fear it. But it's their white trash genes that make them, as a band, so compelling.
Screaming Trees met in high school. Lanegan, the local football star, used to get together with Van to trade info on punk records. As they grew to like one another they found themselves doing little else. Realising they were both about to flunk out, they decided to form a band on the grounds that it was better than working in the slaughterhouse or scrubbing septic tanks, according to Lanegan, the only work available in Ellensburg.
"I guess most bands get together to make the kind of music they wanna hear," he says. "We got together because the other options were just too bad to think about."
The pair enlisted Van's older brother, Gary Lee and, in 1986, released their first LP, "Clairvoyance" on Velvetone, Ellensburg's only label. They then moved to Seattle and signed to SST for whom they recorded three albums - "Even If And Especially When", "Invisible Lantern" and "Buzz Factory". In 1990 they moved to Sub Pop, already label to their friends Nirvana and Mudhoney (Dan Peters, Mudhoney's drummer once played for the Trees) and put out "Change Has Come". In the same year they signed to Epic.
Screaming Trees are soon to release the astonishing "Sweet Oblivion", a shockingly vivid picture of life and death in rural America. Lyrically it draws upon, among other things, Van's experience in the Charismatic Church (he was a born-again youth leader), Lanegan's alcoholism (at one point things got so bad his liver went on vacation and Lanegan was left with a body covered in livid hives that wept gin, his favourite tipple), secret small-town loves and, of course, Ellensburg's overt white trash bigotry. Musically it alludes to Presley, The Doors, Black Sabbath, The Byrds and Neil Young's Crazy Horse.
The guitars are sometimes a rockabilly twang, elsewhere a firestorm, Lanegan's extraordinary voice moving from maudlin Cohen guru to ecstatic preacher man and far beyond. "Sweet Oblivion" evokes flickering images of gun-racks, log-jams, bar fights, fields of wheat and incest, and in it and over it all the perpetual presence of the Baptist Christ, the all-American God.
Sadly, the release of "Sweet Oblivion" is to be delayed in order that Epic can give its predecessor, "Uncle Anesthesia", its first British release. This nine-month-old album is none too exciting. Very basically, from its title onwards it comes over as an amateurish rehearsal for "Sweet Oblivion" where sketchy ideas are poorly disguised by overly lavish production.
It does have its moments, the title track for one and its opener, "Beyond This Horizon", both a passionate latterday blues slashed by Gary Lee's flailing fretwork. "Uncle Anesthesia" lack the thought, drive, commitment and desperation that makes "Sweet Oblivion" the classic it is.
"Frankly, we'd got really lazy," says Mark Lanegan. "We weren't even getting together to write songs. In fact, we'd decided we weren't gonna be making records together any longer."
"We felt that 'Sweet Oblivion' was gonna be our last hurrah," says Van. "So we paid more attention to detail, got our shit together."
They go on to explain that "Uncle Anesthesia" was a slapdash affair, further confused by the involvement of six producers - Mark, Gary, Van, ex-drummer Mark Pickerel, Terry Date and Soundgarden's Chris Cornell. It's perhaps worth mentioning that, as slapdash affairs go, it's a pretty good album, better than most in fact. It just pales into insignificance when compared to its follow-up.
Van says bluntly, "It's like going outside naked."
It's the in-your-face honesty and raw bloody emotion that make "Sweet Oblivion" such a great, great album. It's so honest and emotional that the band can't even listen to it. It'll be a f***ing crime if you don't.