Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [257]
Every night, I’d get a call at some point from Mark, and it’d be, “What are you doing?” He’d always say, “Bring me a tape.” So then I had to drive across town in the middle of the night. Usually when I’d get to his apartment, a hand would come out, he’d grunt, maybe say hello, and take the tape. I maybe went in his apartment one time that entire two years.
VAN CONNER I don’t want to blame anybody. I was probably carin’ more about drinkin’ then. Lee would have blowups if we’d be fucking around—maybe I’d be drunk or maybe Mark would disappear for a few days—but through it all, Lee just kept plugging away.
GARY LEE CONNER By the time we got to mixing Dust, it was ’96. Things had changed, musically. Nirvana was gone; Pearl Jam was big, but they weren’t like what they were. It was kind of flavor of the week then. What’s going to be next? At the time, it was bands like Prodigy—it was going to be electro, or whatever the hell they were.
Dust ended up selling 100,000 or 150,000 records. Which was good, but we’d always been used to the next record doing better than the last one. We got Lollapalooza, and we were like, Whoa! At that time, that was a big deal. But things had changed, plus Mark was not doing very well. It’s not real fun being on tour with him, because he’s looking for drugs all the time. This is an example of what it was doing to the band: Right before Lollapalooza, we were playing some shows by ourself …
BARRETT MARTIN We were in Cleveland, and the irony was, we played one of the best shows of our careers. We played for like two hours at least, way beyond what was expected, and we were taking requests. Lanegan was in a really good mood. We never took requests, you know? And at one point he was doing question and answer; he was on a bar stool just talking to a thousand people.
Backstage, Van and Lee started arguing about something ridiculous, and I basically said, “Oh, come on, you guys, knock it off. That was a great show.” And I said something like, “Lee, stop whining.”
And every now and then Lee would spaz out and do something. And he threw a beer bottle—a full beer bottle—really flung it at me, and it almost hit me in the head. Except I saw it out of the corner of my eye, and I ducked. It grazed the back of my head and stuck in the Sheetrock. That’s how hard he threw it. If it would’ve hit me in the head, it would’ve done some damage.
GARY LEE CONNER Mark kept wanting to borrow money from me. So I would give him a couple hundred bucks or something, and Van and Barrett were like, “Maybe you shouldn’t give him money for drugs.” At that point, it wasn’t just heroin, it was crack and shit like that. And he’s going to ghettos and telling us about almost getting killed in a knife fight.
I couldn’t tell Mark no, really. He was just going to get mad and stomp off, and it’s not real fun to have him mad at you. I got really upset, and I threw a bottle at the wall. Man, I almost hit Barrett in the head. I just cringe when I think what could’ve happened.
VAN CONNER We said something to Lee that made him mad—I don’t know what it was. He threw the bottle at Barrett’s head, and then he picked up another bottle to throw it, so we had to jump on him to stop him, and he fought his way over to the kitchen area of the dressing room.
BARRETT MARTIN Van leaped out of his chair and tackled Lee. And I jumped up, too, but Van and Lee were already on the floor, or starting to fall down. I was somehow in the middle of it, or like right next to them, and the melee knocked this refrigerator over. And the refrigerator fell on me. I probably should’ve just let them go at it and stayed out of the way! The refrigerator did not hurt me—I didn’t break any bones. I just kinda pushed it off me. And then it turns into this urban myth that Barrett was almost crushed under a refrigerator.
VAN CONNER Everybody was tired of dealin’ with drug issues and personality problems. We fought like we always