Everybody Loves Our Town_ An Oral History of Grunge - Mark Yarm [80]
VAN CONNER Around the time my son Ulysses was going to be born, we’d been touring a lot. To be honest, it was hard stinking work, and I thought maybe I could get out of it. Plus I didn’t want to be gone from home with a baby. I knew we had more touring coming up, so I quit.
GARY LEE CONNER One of the people called us up at the time was Krist Novoselic. He was like, “Oh, I hear you need a bass player.” And this was when Nirvana was first starting out. To them, we were like “big band with records on SST.” Actually, if we hadn’t got Donna Dresch, we would’ve gotten him. I joked with Krist years later about that: “It’s probably a good thing you didn’t join the Screaming Trees.”
DONNA DRESCH They called me, and I was like, “Yeah!” We went to L.A. and recorded a double album, and then we went on a tour of the States for two months. We started listening to Mudhoney’s Superfuzz Bigmuff on tour, and they were like, “We want our record to sound like this.” So when we came back, they said, “We don’t want to put out this double album.”
On tour, we’d get a hotel with two beds in it, and me and Mark Pickerel would always share the bed. It was never romantic, but we were always super-cuddly, which I think is hilarious now, because I’m a gold-star lesbian—never had a boyfriend or anything. I found out a couple of years ago that Lanegan has this druggy, crazy-guy reputation, but I don’t know that about him. I knew him as being really funny and caring and thoughtful.
Lee would just go bananas onstage. At one show, he was rolling around in glass—I don’t know if he broke the bottle on purpose or if it was an accident or if someone threw it onstage—and when he stands up he’s all covered in blood. He rubs the blood on his face, sticks his tongue out, and goes “Aaayeahhhhhh!” and then continues on with his perfect guitar solo.
VAN CONNER The guys said Lee acted even weirder without me there. I wasn’t there to control him, I guess. We hadn’t been apart for more than like two days our whole lives, probably. I don’t know if you ever saw that movie Strange Brew, but there’s that part where the brothers are separated for 10 minutes for the first time ever? Maybe he had a Bob and Doug McKenzie–type withdrawal. I spent more time with him until I was 30 years old than probably any human being has spent with another. That’s probably why we couldn’t stand each other by the end of the band.
When they came back, they said, “We were wondering if you wanted to be back in the band again?” At the time, I was getting a divorce from my wife—we were super-young and didn’t know what the hell we were doing—so I was like, “Okay!”
MARK LANEGAN We didn’t have a damn thing in common except insanity. So we fought a lot.… And when [Van] came back, the very first show back, I was walking off while the show was still going, like I usually did, and I heard a commotion that sounded not like your usual applause. I came back out and there he was beating the shit out of Lee Conner, onstage. (Sighs.) It was like prison. Without the sex.
VAN CONNER When we on tour for our album Buzz Factory, SST told us it was going to come out every day of the tour, and it didn’t come out until the last day. Finally, we all talked and we’re like, “Fuck this, we’re gonna get a fuckin’ manager to deal with the fuckin’ record label.” So we called Susan Silver and we said, “Hey, you want to do it?” She was like, “Yeah, sure.”
We did a record on Sub Pop and then went on another European tour. When we got back, Soundgarden had just signed to A&M, so Susan was like, “Do you want to be on a bigger label?” We’d never even thought about it before Soundgarden got signed.
MARK PICKEREL Susan took on a fairly motherly role in our lives. When we were working on Buzz Factory, it was so sweet, she came down to the studio with a bunch of groceries for us. If it hadn’t been for Susan, I don’t know that we would’ve ever been signed. A lot of labels turned us down before Epic signed us.
VAN CONNER At Epic, we met this guy Bob Pfeifer, who had been in this band from Cleveland called