0.13 Dark pop  (Page 11/13)

After weeks of searching, I had tracked Conner down in 1996 in his home on Camano Island, an hour or so north of Seattle. The band had not released a record since 1992’s Sweet Oblivion , and I mostly wanted to find out why they had vanished just when they seemed to have hit their stride as musicians.

Conner’s home was about as far from civilization as you could get on the west side of the Cascades. It took me forever to get there—it was at the opposite end of Camano Island from the only bridge connecting it with the mainland, and had been built in some woods at the end of a series of almost unmappable twists and turns in the island’s roads. Conner, with his wife and child, had been sitting out there for a couple of years—“working,” as he put it, “on my problems.” His house was surprisingly tidy, except for the room in which he did his songwriting. A small space with a small window looking out at some woods, it had a desk with an eight-track recorder on it, the rest of the room being strewn with tapes, discs, clothing, books, and discarded junk. In one corner, leaning against the wall, nearly buried in junk, sat the framed platinum record of the band’s hit “Nearly Lost You,” which was part of the soundtrack for the hit movie Singles . When I asked Conner about it, he just waved his hand dismissively.

A working band for more than ten years, Screaming Trees had had an unusually long and productive career. They started touring years before most of the other soon-to-be-famous Seattle bands had even been formed. Conner described those years now as an endless 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 said, “I’d be about dead.”

After five years—by 1988—alternative rock had grown into something economically viable for musicians. The scene consisted of a club network that took form largely to furnish venues to touring SST-label bands. The circuit sustained bands, like Screaming Trees, “whose music,” Conner said, “was friendly enough that you could play it on college radio, but at the same time was too weird to be in the mainstream.” Tour by tour through the late ‘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—pretty much as good as it got for an alternative label.

Although the band never made enough money to live on—generally, their record sales would barely earn back the advances given the group to make the record, and performance fees covered their expenses but little else while they were on the road—Screaming Trees found themselves playing in front of increasingly enthusiastic audiences. Twice they toured Europe, where they played to packed houses all over the continent. Between tours, they 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 Conner brothers’ parents’ video store, and so on. The jobs were easy to come by, Ellensburg being a refuge for underachievers. “It was the kind of town,” Conner said, “where people gave you work that would free you up to follow your various pursuits—like watching television.”