Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [47]
Later on, Shawn O’Neill, who’s a musician and a writer, and Steve and I made a movie, a B-grade—a C-grade black-and-white sci-fi movie, The Fertilichrome Cheerleader Massacre, and the members of the Screaming Trees are in it. They played the gang under the evil Dr. Stimson, played by Steve Fisk, who—this is after the Great Apocalypse—creates a chemical called Fertilichrome to repopulate the earth. The evil Dr. Stimson ends up experimenting on Mark Pickerel’s character; he shoots him full of Fertilichrome, causing him to explode. We cast latex parts and organs and filmed Mark’s chest exploding, with fluids squirting out. It looked great!
STEVE FISK Their first album, Clairvoyance, was on Velvetone. I sent the record out to radio and booked a tour for them. It was impossible. No one returned your phone calls—no one wanted to hear about a band from Eastern Washington, let alone a small town that no one had ever heard of. I would have to thank Ray Farrell for hooking up the Screaming Trees with all kinds of interesting connections.
RAY FARRELL (SST Records promotion department head; Geffen Records/DGC A&R and marketing executive) There was something unique about them that was reminiscent of ’60s punk records, like the Nuggets compilations. There were elements of Lanegan’s baritone, of the songwriting that they did, that hearkened back to that time period.
Steve Fisk, who I knew from his instrumental band Pell Mell, asked me if I could help book some Screaming Trees shows along the West Coast. I think that the only thing I was able to get was an in-store show at the Texas Record Store, in Santa Monica, and it had a really good crowd. And it was right around that time that some tapes of them got to Greg Ginn at SST, and Greg really liked them. And it was as simple as that: They were signed to SST.
MARK PICKEREL Steve had sent Ray Farrell at SST some music, and he presented that music to Greg, who was also the guitarist in Black Flag. Maybe half a year earlier, Van and Lee and I had gone to see Black Flag play in Seattle. Somehow I managed to get through the pit and leave a cassette in front of Greg’s monitor. He picked it up in between songs and put it on his amplifier, and I remember wondering if he’d actually give it a listen. Sure enough, he did.
GARY LEE CONNER We were in the video store, where we always hung out and worked, too, and we got a call from Greg Ginn. Mark Lanegan talked to him. Greg asked, “Would you be on SST?” Hüsker Dü, Dinosaur Jr., Black Flag, Minutemen—all those bands that we idolized were on that label. I remember being like, Whoa! It was hard to believe.
Signing to Epic later on was sort of anticlimactic—the typical major-label kind of crap. But signing to SST was the coolest and most amazing thing that happened in our entire career. It felt like we were a real band.
LARRY REID I remember this conversation—this is in that period between Roscoe Louie and Graven Image, in 1983. The U-Men are playing at a punk-rock party in the little, tiny room of a basement of this house. And Bruce Pavitt was there, and he told me, “The Seattle music scene is gonna take over the world.”
And I just fuckin’ laughed. Here we are, with what at that point was arguably the biggest punk-rock band in Seattle playing in front of 30 people in the basement of this house. But goddamn, guy was right.
BRUCE PAVITT Sub Pop started with a $20 investment. Fifteen years later, the company received a check for $20 million from Time Warner.
In 1979, I arrived at Evergreen State College in Olympia, from the Chicago area, and was deeply interested in punk. Coincidentally, upon arriving at Evergreen, I found that the radio station there, KAOS FM, had probably the most inclusive collection of independently produced music in the United States.
And in meeting up with some of the folks who worked there, specifically John Foster, who was the editor of Op Magazine,