Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [44]
Van Conner and I met when I was a high school freshman, in fall 1981. It was a school-sanctioned band trip to Walla Walla, and I had my Walkman and was running low on options for listening. I happened to be passing Van as he was going through his cassettes and I asked him if I could glance at what he had. I didn’t think he would have anything good, because Van was kind of a square kid back then—his clothing did nothing to indicate that he was into, you know, good music. He had everything from standard stuff like Cream and Jimi Hendrix to a lot of groups I hadn’t heard before, like Echo and the Bunnymen, XTC, Siouxsie and the Banshees. He told me, “Most of these cassettes my brother made for me.” His brother being Gary Lee Conner, who had already graduated from high school but still lived at home.
Van told me his brother played guitar and was looking for somebody to jam. So I brought my drums over and set up shop in Lee’s bedroom, which was in a garage that had been converted into a rehearsal space. Lee was obsessed with the 1960s, everything from the Monkees to the 13th Floor Elevators.
Van was the original singer. At that point, our name was Him and Those Guys. Later, we became the Explosive Generation. Shortly after we formed, Gary Lee Conner Sr. booked us at Lincoln Elementary School, where he was the principal. We played the Sex Pistols and Dead Kennedys and Rolling Stones and Cream at this third-grade assembly. It was the most awkward experience of my life up until then. These third-graders were just completely terrified by us. Not only were we playing pretty edgy material, but it was really loud and out of tune.
VAN CONNER (Screaming Trees bassist) My dad got in trouble for that. A bunch of teachers complained officially because he was bringing “satanic” music into the school.
MARK PICKEREL Later on, Van started telling me about this guy Mark Lanegan, who he shared a drama class with. It turned out that Lanegan was a big fan of the Damned and Black Flag and Motörhead and all these bands that we thought belonged exclusively to our weird little group of art-fag friends.
Lanegan came from a circle that we were all afraid of. It was a crew of guys that were hillbillies and some jocks and stoners—but the edgier side of each one of those cliques. I think Mark spent maybe a season playing football. Back in those years, he was a stoner and did a lot of drinking, so it’s hard for me to imagine that he attended practices religiously.
I was kind of afraid of Mark because he was quite large in high school—he had to have been a good 60 to 80 pounds heavier than he is now. He was wearing a beard and looked like a logger. The jobs he had were usually manual labor, so he dressed the part. He was flying the flannel, as Mike Watt would say, a good eight years before it was in Vogue and all the fashion magazines.
VAN CONNER I met Mark Lanegan in detention when I was a sophomore. He saw that I had a Jimi Hendrix button on my coat, and people in Ellensburg didn’t even listen to Jimi Hendrix back then. So we started talking and he told me about this band the Stranglers, who I didn’t know. And then we started trading records.
Lanegan wasn’t really intimidating to me, but I could see how he could be. Him and his friends all looked like they were out of that movie Over the Edge, with Matt Dillon. Jeans jacket, stringy hair, tough guy.
MARK LANEGAN (Screaming Trees singer; solo artist) When I was a kid, I got caught shoplifting by a store security guard in Ellensburg. The next time I saw that store guard was when I got thrown in jail again—this time for not paying court fees. The guy happened to be in jail, too, right next to me. And the third time I saw him was when I got off the bus to play the Gorge years later. This guy was now head of security at the Gorge. That’s what Eastern Washington is like—you never get