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JTSunrise Deluxe Version of Dollar Bill by Screaming Trees / Mark Lanegan. Remembering Him
Some time in late spring 1994, Mark Lanegan got a call from Lori Barbero of Babes in Toyland. She wanted to connect him with Kristen Pfaff, the bassist in Hole. Pfaff confirmed what Lanegan guessed: she'd been making eyes at him during Kurt Cobain's memorial. She wanted to go out with him. They'd talk as soon as she got back to Seattle from Minneapolis. In his memoir, Lanegan tells the story of what happened next
A couple of weeks later, a tearful, completely downtrodden, and embattled-sounding Courtney [Love] called and left a bullet-to-the heart message: Kristen had OD'd and died in a bathtub the first night she was back in Seattle
“I dizzily sat down on the floor, put my head in my hands, and stared numbly through my fingers at the wall in disbelief. Not only was my pipe dream of some sort of relationship with this exotic girl crushed, but horrifically, she was stone gone forever. Life was an utterly cruel, savage beast. Everything and everyone around me was f---ing cursed”
There's a reason Lanegan's book is called Sing Backwards and Weep. It begins with his '70s youth in the working-class enclave of Ellensburg, Washington. Addiction was a fact of life, you couldn't waste any time before you punched a bully out. When Lanegan finally made a musical connection, it was with a giant, surly guitarist. "I tried my damnedest to be friendly with him," writes Lanegan about Lee Conner, "but it was like talking to a stone. His only two speeds were mute or enraged. I would often hear him scream- ing 'F--k you, Gary!' at his dad on the phone”
Lee Conner wrote rock songs with a hook. Conner's brother and bandmate, Van, was trying to recruit Lanegan to form a new covers band that didn't include Lee, but Lanegan convinced them to keep Lee in the band. Mark and Lee would collaborate on songwriting, Mark — who couldn't play any instrument — would sing, and their band named after an effect pedal might just be the thing to get him out of Ellensburg. Van Conner (March 17, 1967 – January 17, 2023) was an American rock musician, best known as the bassist for Screaming Trees
A few years later Screaming Trees would perform on the The Tonight Show, where the strung-out singer ended up on the couch next to actor James Garner, whose appraisal of Screaming Trees' performance was, "That wasn't bad, young fella. It coulda been a lot worse!”
Screaming Trees came out of the Seattle scene so early that their record label didn't know what to do with them. Epic seemed to think they were the latest hair-metal band, a new Twisted Sister or Quiet Riot. Fortunately, some of the company's younger executives got it
Nirvana, of course, would change everything, turning Seattle and grunge into veritable brand names — almost against their own will. Screaming Trees got caught up in that wave, canonized when "Nearly Lost You" landed on the iconic Singles soundtrack. Lanegan's bitter about that, though: not only did Screaming Trees (unlike some other artists on the soundtrack) not get paid, they had to waive their fee for the song being featured in the movie. Plus, the movie was bad. "In other words," writes Lanegan, "we'd given them a hit single for absolutely nothing”
Knowledgeable musicheads don't need a soundtrack to tell them who's part of a scene, and Lanegan was integral to Seattle rock in the '90s. He first saw Nirvana perform at the Ellensburg Public Library. He thought Krist Novoselic would be a great fit for Screaming Trees, whose bassist Van was temporarily out of the group after marrying his pregnant teenage girlfriend, but when Novoselic expressed interest, Lanegan said he'd be crazy not to stick with Nirvana
Lanegan and Cobain became friends; poignantly, Lanegan remembers how closely Cobain would walk to him on the sidewalk, hugging near to him like a little brother
Info from Lanegan book, interweb, and 90s memories, JTS
- Genre
- Folk & Singer-Songwriter