WOOD VIBRATIONS by Mark Beaumont VOX, December 1996 It would take more than on-tour crises with Oasis to ruffle SCREAMING TREES' feathers. This, after all, is the band that drank America dry, danced with the devil, was stalked by aliens and still lived to tell the tale. VOX has a close encounter with the acceptable face of grunge... It could have been The Tour To End All Tours. Small towns could have been levelled, hotels razed and pharmaceutical supplies for most of the West Coast devastated. Promoters across America should have been trembling when they heard the news that their venue was to play host to such an orgy of Bacchanalian excess and bare-knuckle fisticuffs. The two most hellraising bands in the universe on the *same bill*. It should have been *the* rock'n'roll mayhem sideshow of the millennium. Then the headline act's singer didn't turn up. Fans left gigs disappointed and ticket sales for later shows slumped dramatically. There were bitter inter-band fights, shambolic TV appearances and a lack of bonding between the two acts on the bill. Then, at around 4pm on September 11, support act the Screaming Trees arrived to play at a venue in North Carolina to be informed that Oasis hadn't shown up that day. "It was just fine," growls frontman Mark Lanegan, a man who, four years ago, would have been far more likely than Noel to pull the tour in a fit of inter-band violence; far more prone to petulant fits and arrogant posturing than Liam. "We didn't give a shit. There were only a couple more dates left until it finished, so we just packed up our stuff and went on to the next thing." You didn't spot the cracks during the tour? "We didn't really see anything unusual," he reflects. "Except for the fact that their singer is an asshole." Rewind. Amid all the backstage dust-storms and metal mayhem of an American tour, Mark Lanegan droops onto his bunk in the darkened back lounge of his tour bus. He's exhausted from five weeks on tour, the stifling 120 degrees heat and his rampant early afternoon set on the main stage. He won't be hanging out with the revellers tonight. He'll pop over to the bar to grab some lunch, sure, but he'll spend the rest of the day here in quiet solitude, perhaps mulling over the widespread acclaim his latest album, 'Dust', has finally garnered him. He'll keep the curtains drawn, stay far from the maddened, fire-eyed crowd. It's a simple decision: Lanegan, along with the rest of his band, doesn't do "that shit" no more. "We didn't do it collectively as a band," he growls, running a hand branded with star tattoos through his matted ginger hair. "People come to their own breaking point. That's just a part of growing up. At different times everyone in the band has had a go round with something, we still have a drink occasionally - a couple of us do and a couple of us don't. I think we've more or less cleaned up. Compared to our past we're a lot less volatile, a lot less apt to drink for three days straight, do shitloads of drugs and make public asses of ourselves. Today. Who knows about tomorrow?" What was your own breaking point? He spits carefully into a wastepaper bin and devilish glint appears in his eye. "I've had many. I've had that a million times. I always go back for more..." Mark Lanegan has nearly died more times than he cares to remember. Car accidents, motorcycle accidents, heavy machinery accidents, shitty mishap after shitty mishap ever since he was a kid. There was even one time he fell off a bridge and had to spend months in a body cast. Yet every time he's come close to sucking The Big One, he's somehow managed to pull through. Every day Lanegan has a religious experience, just waking up and still being alive. "There have been times when I've been really scared to die," he intones, his voice gravelly and hoarse. "When you're about to die, that can be real scary, y'know? None of it was self-inflicted. I'm not thinking about laying on a wet bathroom floor with a needle in my arm. That's never happened to me." Do you think you have a charmed life? "I don't think you'd be particularly charmed to have that shit happen to you in the first place! I have bad and good luck I guess. Bad luck to have fallen into some of the shit that I have, good luck to get out of it. That's the way I look at it." Luck or no luck, there must have been some kind of guardian angel watching over Mark these last four years. Otherwise there's no way he'd be here. Fact. For six years and over five ragged grunge albums, the Screaming Trees lived it like they were about to die from it. Mark's erratic temper, the fights, the drug abuse and the shambolic gigs when they'd show up on stage so pissed that they could barely hold their instruments became legendary. Mark's two solo albums were wrecked and wrangling affairs, cries from a soul that seemed tormented by a sheer lack of self-knowledge. Then, following the success of their first truly focused album, 'Sweet Oblivion', Mark started losing friends at a devastating rate. Kurt Cobain and Jeffrey Lee Pierce of The Gun Club (with whom Mark had been collaborating on his forthcoming solo project) died within two years of each other, while in the more morbid circles of the grunge fraternity, speculation began over just how long Lanegan might be for this world. "I've lost a lot of friends along the way, even when I was a little kid," says Mark. "I've seen a lot of good people come and go. You just keep going." "How does anybody cope with that, y'know? It's sad. This person who was in your life is no longer there. It's a long life for some of us. You can't help but think about it. "I guess that's where part of having some sort of faith comes in, some sort of purpose, although I admit it's way beyond my understanding. There's gotta be a reason for that. I refuse to believe that this is all and there's no more, otherwise there'd be no point. It's not for me to understand, I guess. I've seen some really great people go down the shitter and... "I guess it's not for me to understand." Maybe it was these emotional stresses taking their toll on Mark's creative process, or maybe it was the strain of two-and-a-half years of touring, but things in the Screaming Trees camp soon seemed to be heading down the pan. They rushed into sessions for their new album with the same carefree vigour that gave its predecessor, 'Sweet Oblivion', such a refreshing slant on the grunge formula. This time, however, the recording fell apart as the album neared completion and the entire record was scrapped. "There was nothing wrong with the songs," Mark explains, spitting into the dustbin again, "but there was probably something wrong with the way we approached it. You've gotta be in the right frame of mind to go into something like that. "After two-and-a-half years of being on the road, to go straight into a recording project and not really having the time to take the songs apart and put them back together - we have a certain way of doing things - we skipped a couple of real important steps for us in the whole album-making process. The results showed we had to go back and do it the right way. It was rushed and nobody was prepared to work." Was that a depressing time? "I was real happy when it was scrapped, so I think I woulda been depressed had it come out. We've done it all before. We went in and recorded a double-album once that we never released. "We took a couple of those songs and a month after we did the double-album we went back in and recorded (fourth LP) 'Buzz Factory' with a bunch of new songs we'd written. At least it was only one album this time." "We really thought we'd lost it," hulking guitarist Gary Lee Conner reveals a few days later over lunch in Arizona. "We went into it with the same attitude as 'Sweet Oblivion' and we totally fell flat onto our face and we had to work out where we went wrong. To me, that was the lowest point." It could all have fallen apart right then, as it had promised to do countless times before. Instead, the Seattle foursome hunkered down and wrote around 400 songs over the next year and a half, working almost as a tune assembly line. Black Crowes producer George Drakoulias was roped in on knob-twiddling duties and ten of those songs became 'Dust', the most accomplished, subtle, mature and downright brilliant rock album to leap from the American underground's post-grunge loins this year. An album which sees a bunch of brawling, lumberjack-shirted also-rans emerge clutching all the delicate poignancy, restraint and top-hole tune action of prime REM. Plus, on tracks like 'Gospel Plow' and 'All I Know', it *rocks* like a motherfucker taking tabla lessons. Yes, this is the All! New! Screaming! Bastard! Trees! finally fulfilling the potential of their raw early work. And, one suspects, the rejuvenation may have something to do with giving up the raids on the pharmaceutical cupboard... "I guess we don't walk onstage so drunk that we can't play," says Lee's brother Van, relaxing with a beer in the Dallas dressing cabin. "Instead of enjoying being all fucked up... we did this show where we walked onstage totally sober and we all looked at each other like 'What!?!' Then we started playing and it was like: 'Fuck, yeah! This is how we used to play!' "Everyone's focused on going out and doing a good show and there's no other bullshit going on, which is what it's all about. It's stupid to work so hard on something, then go out and mess everything up on stage. It's better to go out and kick butt." Back in the tour bus, Mark - looking anything but the cleaned-up, born-again ex-druggie thanks to a five-week-old beard that's the result of an on-the-road no-shaving-policy - chews, spits and philosophises. "You get to a point when you're sick of living a certain way and always feeling a certain way," he drawls, "and it depends on how bad you feel. It can be really easy if you don't have any choice. There's been times when it's been easy, times when it's not so easy. It's been a long time since it hasn't been easy. I can pretty much give or take anything that comes my way." Is it hard to resist the temptation of 'The Way It Was'? "If it's the temptation to get shit-faced, it's pretty easy to pass that up. I haven't really had a problem with passing that up, it's just that I don't always *like* to pass it over. There's a million types of temptation." That glint in his eye again. "Sometimes it's really hard to resist." Temptations, y'say? That'll be new touring guitarist Josh Homme, then, fresh from thrashing his heard out in Kyuss, the only member of the band who openly indulges in the odd 'recreational' cigarette and, by all accounts, a wide-eyed hellraiser *extraordinaire*. "I suppose I try to be a bad influence on some of the guys," he grins, "especially Van - he's the most vulnerable so I try to sink my teeth into him. Part of the reason they asked me to come is because they want to see it happening just in case they wanna dip back in." Oh-oh! So, Van, do you think these latent rock'n'roll excess tendencies will be given a thorough airing when the Screaming Trees kick off their UK tour this month? He breathes heavily and smiles. "It's too late. They're already out." What *have* you been up to? "I've been decadent, disgusting and cruel. That's all I can say." Barrett Martin, drummer and mystic, stumbles in, searching for peanuts. "What are you doing, Barrett?" Van shouts. Barrett smiles and gives the thumbs-up: "Good!" The minute he's gone, Van turns to your correspondent, points frantically at his ears and giggles. "Totally deaf..." Barrett Martin is a walking X-File. In his hotel room in Toronto a few weeks ago, he saw the image of a man hanging from his ceiling fan. Moments later, all the interior doors in the room began to shake as if someone was knocking on them all at once - only one of a long stream of brushes with the supernatural he seems to be prone to. Plus, his World War II pilot grandfather is documented as having flown through a formation of UFOs during the '40s, while Barrett has even had the odd close encounter himself. "I actually have seen what I think was a spaceship up close," he says with the practised tone of someone who knows he is about to be regarded as a prize fruitcake. "It was a few years ago when I was hiking in the Cascade Mountains - that's where some of the first sightings in 1947 were, which coincides with a lot of the nuclear testing that was going on in the South West. It was a midsummer night sometime in August - a clear night with millions of stars. "We saw this giant ship come up over the ridge and hover right above the trees, silently. It had three big spotlights shooting down in the shape of a triangle. It was moving really slowly and you could see the spotlights moving through the trees. Then it went down behind the ridge and came up a second time and did the same manoeuvre, totally silent. Then it did it a third time and continued to hover in plain sight for several seconds. "It was big - the size of a football field - but this was not a plane, it was not a blimp, it was not a helicopter, it was no known ship that we have on this planet. It was a giant disc and it hovered there silently and then PSHEW! It took off into the horizon and was gone like that [snap fingers]. "A couple of seconds later, there was a giant strobe light that lit up the entire sky for a split second, then there was an ionisation in the air and everybody's hair was standing on end with static charge." Why do you think you're prone to such visitations? "Some people maybe have a little bit more of an awareness or perception of... I wouldn't call it the supernatural because all this stuff is natural," he says. "There are aliens out there and they've been coming to this planet and they're just as natural as you and I. It's just advanced nature and we're several millenniums behind it. "Just because you can't explain it, don't mean it's not real. They're just discovering that the pyramids are probably more like 10,000 years old and there's all kinds of correlations with pyramids in South America. Where did these civilisations spring from and where did they get their technology? I wouldn't be surprised if they've been coming here for thousands of years, watching us and guiding us at certain times. "God, 500 years ago we thought we were the centre of the universe." But then, the Screaming Trees are a band plagued with spooky occurrences. Even when they're not on drugs. Lee, for instance, is regularly visited by an unnatural trouser spirit onstage, devilishly making sure that his breeks end up around his ankles on far more occasions than is strictly natural. As for Lanegan, well, some researchers might say he's a prime subject for alien abduction. "I've had this sleep paralysis at times," he mutters. "It's like where you're falling asleep, but you're not asleep yet. You can't move and you feel like you're being dragged down. It happens when I'm in a certain position and a certain physical state - like I'm hungover or worn out or something. I have to fight to move something and eventually I'll be able to kick my leg or something and bring myself out of it. "Now, I've heard that there was a doctor who was documenting all these cases of extra-terrestrial abduction, and there was another doctor who was saying that these people were just experience sleep paralysis. Then I started thinking: 'Does this mean I'll be visited by extra-terrestrials if I let myself go into this thing? Are they gonna come popping into my room and take me away?' "But then I called the bullshit on him because I've had sleep paralysis and I wasn't being abducted and probed by aliens." And yet, at the core of Screaming Trees is calm, peace and defiant knowledge of their own mortality. They drink when they feel like it, party when they can be bothered, live while they're alive and probably won't be very surprised when they're dead. Indeed for all its classic rock power and highbrow dynamics, the sweeping strings and tender touches of 'Dust' exude a feeling of redemption - as if the dark and dangerous days are gone, the booze haze has evaporated and they've got a second chance at this 'life' malarkey after all. "Just the process of making music is optimistic and uplifting in a sense," Mark explains. "It gives me purpose, whatever that is. I can't write songs if I'm unhappy. I've got to have a certain amount of stability and peace of mind to actually be able to sit down and write a song." Have you never felt any guilt over your hellraising antics? There's a pause... "I never killed anybody or anything like that. I've forgiven myself and that's enough. I try not to feel guilty about things I've done. If it was a particularly painful experience for me or someone I cared about, whatever it is that I'd done, I'd try to learn from it and hopefully not repeat it. "It's not always easy. We're real frail fucked-up human beings, y'know, we make the same mistakes over and over. It's tough, but I think it's natural." What's the most important lesson you've learned? "The only thing I've learned is that on a very cold winter day, don't stick your tongue on a metal post." Wise words indeed. Prepare then, children, for the most *politely* explosive night of your life... [more articles]