Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [46]
VAN CONNER The Screaming Trees’ first show was at—it’s kinda silly, but we saw this video of the Cramps playing at an insane asylum, so our big thing was to get a show at an insane asylum. I think Mark Pickerel’s mom lived right next to the Eastern State mental institution in Spokane, and I had her talk to somebody, but it didn’t work out. Instead, we played at this group hall in Ellensburg for people who were mentally challenged.
MARK PICKEREL The place was called Elmview. And I don’t remember how we ended up playing there—we had a couple friends that worked there, I think. On one level we were doing it as community service, but obviously we were very well aware of the Cramps video of them performing at a mental institution. So it was partly for our own sick amusement.
Oh, the show was incredible, as you can imagine. Early in the Screaming Trees days, Lanegan could be kind of a performer. When it was time for a guitar solo, his body would go into convulsions and he’d kick his legs around. But on this particular night, one of the guys in the audience was mirroring back every one of Lanegan’s movements. It was just too much for him. It seemed like that was the beginning of Lanegan refining his movements onstage. He seemed more selective with his body language. His stage presence, especially as the years went by, became very still and detached.
GARY LEE CONNER When we played our first club show, at GESSCO in Olympia, I kind of went nuts for some reason. I really got into it, jumping around, doing windmills and stuff. I was like, “Whoa, that was fun!” Eventually, having to go nuts onstage became a burden, because I was sacrificing my playing.
VAN CONNER My parents ran a video store in Ellensburg called New World Video. We had a huge back room there, which we made into a practice space. Lee decked it out. It was like that episode of The Brady Bunch where Greg gets his own room. It was totally psychedelic.
STEVE FISK (producer; keyboardist for Berkeley, California’s Pell Mell; solo artist) Mark Pickerel had sent me a fan letter because he’d bought my first 45 and told me that he really liked it. So when I moved to Ellensburg from San Francisco in the winter of ’85, I looked up Mark, who was working at the video store that the Conner family owned. So I got to be friends with Mark. I was working at Velvetone Studios in Ellensburg, which was started by Sam Albright, my old friend from college.
I didn’t see the band perform until they came to record at the studio. They thought that recording was doing something very much like a live show. Me and Sam Albright were in the control room and the Screaming Trees are out in the studio, facing us like we’re the audience. They had an extreme, jumping, crazy kind of physicality, reminiscent of the Who. It was the most uninhibited thing I’d seen in the recording studio up until that point, and probably for some time since then. Those recordings became the Other Worlds cassette that we distributed on Velvetone Records.
GARY LEE CONNER Me and Lanegan were driving over to the video store or something one day, and we were talking about naming the band the Screaming Freaks. That was something we thought about for 30 seconds. And that name sounded like the Screaming Trees, and we just decided, “What about Screaming Trees?” It was appropriate, because even though we didn’t live right next to a forest—Ellensburg is where the desert starts—outside the town there’s a whole bunch of forests.
I didn’t even know about the Screaming Tree guitar pedal until later. But Van kept saying in interviews that we named ourselves after it, so people were like, “That sounds good.”
SAM ALBRIGHT (Velvetone studio/label owner) They were a young band, but