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Three separated ribs and no band, no honey, no point of living in Seattle at all. I don’t know why I ever stuck around this shithole city. I should’ve gone adventuring around. But I didn’t. I did nothing, besides squander my life and my money.

Pretty quickly after that it got to be the lowest point in my life. I ended up OD’ing on liquid morphine by accident, because I didn’t know what it was. A guy I knew gave it to me. I go, “Oh, well,” and I slammed it. That night I think I was on 30 Valium, 14 scotches, 6 whiskeys, and 8 beers. Used to do that every night. Sometimes I was up to 50 Valium.

I got dropped off in the cab at home. My friends were in the cab and I could hear them laughing, driving away. I realized as I took the next step up my driveway, Oh, fuck, I’ve gone way too far. I was like, What is that? It was the ground and the trees and the hill. I realized I was laying on the ground. And the next thing I know, I woke up five days later. In my bed. Somehow I must’ve made it there.

That was two weeks after Soundgarden broke up. I think. Because ever since we broke up, I haven’t cared about dates. Ever since Chris broke the band up, I don’t even know what year it was, I don’t even know how many months it’s been, because I had no honey anymore, had no band anymore. I didn’t care.

So I’ve lost track of everything, I’m absolutely disorganized all the time. Time is irrelevant.

BARRETT MARTIN The Trees tried to record with Don Fleming again right after we got back from that Alice in Chains tour in ’93. This time, we were recording in Seattle because we all wanted to be there with our wives, girlfriends. Van had a couple kids. We were kinda burnt, and I don’t think the songs were as good as they could’ve been. And Lanegan just couldn’t sing. He tried, but it just wasn’t working, because he had other priorities.

DON FLEMING (producer; singer/guitarist for New York’s Gumball/Velvet Monkeys) They had really been on the road a lot; I think that that was the initial problem. We probably should’ve done what we did with Sweet Oblivion and just demo first, and then go back and say, “All right, let’s work on these, or write six more.” And instead, we went in and just tracked what was available. In my mind, drug use wasn’t the problem; if that was going on, I didn’t see it. The problem was not having a great set of songs.

MARK LANEGAN Everyone wanted to put out the record to capitalize on Sweet Oblivion. The timing was certainly right, but the music wasn’t, and I just thought, You know what? This is not good. And it wasn’t good because of me. I didn’t come to the party, I didn’t involve myself—I went through the motions, but I didn’t invest any of myself into it. I just didn’t have the strength. After all the touring, and because of some other personal problems, I didn’t have anything to give to it. I was empty. I tried, but the end result was: It sucked.

BARRETT MARTIN We had started working with Peter Mensch and Cliff Burnstein from Q Prime; they manage Metallica and all those bands. They were like, “You know, you guys need a little more time to rest and write more songs, and then let’s revisit this.” So we scrapped the Seattle sessions.

I think that if we had gotten Dust out within a year or two of Sweet Oblivion, it would’ve done better, but four years went by during which Lanegan was battling heroin problems. I went back to work, back to doing construction.

GARY LEE CONNER That was the worst time of my entire life, around ’94, ’95. We had to do something. We weren’t about to break up, because the band was our whole life financially. I rented the bottom part of a house in Ballard, and sat there for two damn years writing songs. And first it was like, Okay, Mark’s going to come over, and Van’s going to come over, and we’re going to work together. And unfortunately, the first few times we tried that, Mark was asleep on the bed in the other room, and every once in a while we’re like, “Hey, how does this sound?” “Okay.”

I wrote literally 200 songs over that period of time, and most of them were utter crap. Sometimes