Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [258]
BARRETT MARTIN Van and I and Lee agreed that we couldn’t keep touring like this. We’re doing the shortest set we can legally get away with. So I went and saw Peter Mensch in New York and said, “Look, man, if we keep playing shows like this, sooner or later something very bad is gonna happen. Mark’s gonna overdose or worse, and that is the end of the Screaming Trees. We really should not even be on the road at this point.” And he agreed. So we stopped.
GARY LEE CONNER We knew that we needed to get off Epic, because it wasn’t really helping us much. They had advanced us $1 million. We negotiate with them, and they sent us a letter saying, “You are off Epic. You owe us a million dollars for those records, but forget about it. If you sell records, it’ll go against it, otherwise …” So basically, we got away with a million dollars from Epic, even though I never saw a damn thing for it, except for several kinda bad videos and two pretty good records.
We mostly stopped doing stuff in ’96, though we played a few other shows after that. Mark would nosedive, then get up, then nosedive again.
BARRETT MARTIN It took a while for Mark to get sober, and he finally did. He went to rehab, actually at Courtney’s urging, so I have to give her some credit for that.
COURTNEY LOVE I love Lanegan. To this day, I love Lanegan. Love Lanegan. LOVE him! I’ve never met a creature more noble and quiet and seriously cool than Mark Lanegan. I sent Dylan and Mark to rehab, but I separated them. I had to make a calculation, which is a little vicious of me, about which one I thought had the best chances of succeeding, so I sent Dylan to the really hardcore one, Cri-Help, and I sent Mark to Los Encinos. Mark got better.
MARK LANEGAN I mean, there was a time when I thought I didn’t have any choice in the matter, when I spent almost a year in various “situations”: jail, rehab, halfway house. And just through the sheer fact that I wasn’t able to get outside, so to speak—and also because I really just did not want to live that way any longer—for me it wasn’t hard. It was the end of a nightmare that had lasted for years and years. I had always hoped that I would be able to stop, but I never was able to. Eventually, I was. A lot of that had to do with changing my way of thinking on a great many things; again, some battles you just have to give up. I was pretty stubborn, I thought I could do a lot of things myself. Nobody likes to believe that they need anybody’s help in anything, and the smarter you are—and I’m not smart—or the tougher you are—and at times I thought I was pretty tough—the more trouble you have. The smartest guys I ever met are not around anymore, because they thought they could think their way out of an unthinkable situation, and the tough guys have to just be beaten up repeatedly, and some guys just never do make it out.
GARY LEE CONNER By the time we played our last-ever show, which was the opening of that Experience Music Project in Seattle in 2000, Mark was cleaned up and doing pretty good. The main thing I remember about the EMP show: $65,000. That’s how much we got paid. That was the most we ever made. It was a good show. We got Josh Homme from Kyuss to play with us again; he’d played keyboard and guitar with us when we toured for Dust, and that was a nice addition.
Mark didn’t even tell us this was going to be our last show. I remember sitting in the dressing room and he was telling someone else it was going to be our last show. Nobody was that surprised, because we’d spent the last two years trying to get on another label. We’d done two demos on our own and another one with some big-time producer. Nobody seemed