Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [45]
MARK PICKEREL A lot of people were afraid of Mark because if he was at a party and he was drinking, once fighting was on his mind or once somebody pissed him off, that was it. But he was also a very loving individual and cared about all of us deeply. Any time there was any shit-talking going on around town, if anybody crossed any of us, he was always the first to come to our defense.
ERIC JOHNSON I lived in this great little building in Ellensburg that happened to be across the street from this apartment where Lanegan lived, so I met him and he turned me onto John Fante and all these different, weird L.A. Depression-era writers that I had never read before. He is probably one of the most well-read people I’ve met.
VAN CONNER After Mark Lanegan graduated, I hadn’t seen him in about six months. We ended up running into each other at a party and he was like, “Hey man, let’s start a band.” Our first practice was around ’84. At first it was just the three of us—me, Pickerel, and Lanegan. I don’t know why Lee would want to be in a band together, because we fought all the time. In our previous band, the Explosive Generation—with Pickerel, David Frazini, and Dan Harper—there was too much violence.
GARY LEE CONNER (Screaming Trees guitarist) When Van was really little, he used to tag along with me, and my friends would get real upset. But in high school, I became reclusive and stopped having friends. So I started hanging around with his friends, which is how our early bands came about. Even though I was four and a half years older than Van, it was like he was the older brother.
MARK PICKEREL My impression was that Lee was jealous that we had this social life that was thriving outside of the band. We were in high school and he’d dropped out of college and was living at home, so his entire focus was the band. And Van and I were doing things like canceling practices to go to a friend’s place or a dance or a party.
Their mom, Cathy, was always really paranoid that Van and I would fall in with the wrong crowd and start doing drugs. At that time we were pretty straitlaced—we actually were going to youth group and church. But Lee was constantly telling his mom that he thought he smelled marijuana in the house or on our clothes. So we decided to punish him by starting a new band that he wouldn’t be allowed to play in. The problem was that our rehearsals were going to take place in his bedroom.
We end up having this band practice with Lanegan, myself, and Van. I think we made an attempt at some classic-rock standard, but Lanegan was trying to play drums and was having a really difficult time holding down the fort. I made my best attempt to sing something like “Sunshine of Your Love,” and we might’ve made one more attempt at another song when Cathy Conner came barging into Lee’s room and demanded that Lee be in our band: “Goddammit, you guys! If you think you can practice here, in Lee’s room, you’ve got another thing coming!”
Until finally, Lee snuck behind Cathy, plugged in his guitar, and started messing around. And during the argument, Lanegan got off the drums—as big and intimidating as Mark could be, I think the whole thing scared the hell out of him—and ended up standing there, totally perplexed. I was used to it by this time and was doing my best not to laugh out loud.
Next thing I know, I’m back at the drum set, and we started playing with Lee in the band. We segued into a fast, punk-rock version of the Doors’ “The End,” with Mark singing. All of us were totally taken aback by Lanegan’s voice. He sounded just like Jim Morrison! I mean, it was uncanny. It was obvious that he was the singer and that it would be ridiculous for me to approach the mic again, just as much as it would be for him to decide to play the drums. We’d stumbled ass-backwards into something good.
After a couple rehearsals like that, Lee presented us with some demo recordings that he’d been making on a four-track. He’d written six or seven of these psychedelic pop gems. They were amazing.
GRANT ALDEN (The Rocket newspaper