Screaming Trees Talk Life as Grunge’s Underdogs and Memories of Kurt Cobain
Mark Lanegan is standing in his flannel boxer shorts and dirty socks, wearing a tattered gray tuxedo jacket with tails, looking into a cracked full-length mirror in the middle of a musty warehouse costume shop in Seattle’s Capitol Hill district. Balancing a cigarette and cup of coffee in one hand, the Screaming Trees’ singer stretches his arms out to see if the coat fits.
“What do you think?” he asks a young female clerk lurking nearby.
“Pretty good, but it’d look better if you put your pants on,” she answers in a tone that sounds like she’d be offended if she weren’t so charmed. Lanegan has that effect on people: He can be surly or disarmingly sweet, often both in the space of a few minutes.
Lanegan is shopping for clothes to wear onstage during the Screaming Trees’ performances at Lollapalooza — what Lanegan calls the “hairy-balls, he-man circle-jerk tour.” The rangy, 6-foot-3-inch former high school quarterback has been wandering through thrift stores, looking for duds that will give his band a “more gentlemanly vibe” than tour mates Metallica, Soundgarden or Rancid.
The Trees — who also include guitarist Gary Lee Conner, his bass-playing younger brother Van and drummer Barrett Martin — will be doing songs from their new album, Dust, a dark and soulful blend of hard rock and psychedelic pop that is the band’s most confident and adventurous outing yet. The product of three volatile years in and out of the studio, Dust burns with explosive tension and a relentless groove. Produced by George Drakoulias (Black Crowes, Jayhawks), the album’s richly melodic songs vary from the layered harmonies of “All I Know” to the galloping, sitar-driven “Halo of Ashes” and the moodier “Gospel Plow.”
As he walks around Capitol Hill on this warm, bright summer morning, the 31-year-old Lanegan chain-smokes Lucky Strikes and moves with an awkward stride that’s somewhere between a stumble and a strut. The years wear hard on Lanegan, who by his own account has spent too many of them in a drug- and alcohol-induced haze. Lanegan says he hasn’t had a drink in two years, but memories of past misadventures seem to greet him all over town. “That’s one of the last places I got drunk,” he says, pointing to a hole-in-the-wall bar. “I had a hangover for a week.” Farther up Broadway, he points to another bar on a corner. “That’s the last place I saw Kurt [Cobain] — at least the last place I saw him alive.”
Lanegan and Cobain were good friends, and the Nirvana singer’s death still weighs heavily on Lanegan. “The day before he disappeared, he left a message on my answering machine,” he says. “He said he wanted to see me; he wanted me to come over and play some music. By the time I called back, he was gone.” Cobain had backed the Trees’ singer on a rendition of Leadbelly’s “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” that appeared on Lanegan’s 1990 solo debut, The Winding Sheet. A few months before Cobain died, Nirvana did their own haunted rendition of the song on MTV’s Unplugged.
“His version of that song is the definitive version — it blows mine away,” Lanegan says later, sitting on a ratty couch in his cramped apartment near downtown. The place smells like a mixture of mildew and incense. Stacks of records, books and videotapes — including an almost complete collection of John Cassavetes films — are strewn across the floor, and the 13th Floor Elevators are playing on the stereo. “One of the coolest things that ever came from hanging with Kurt was just sitting in his shed and hearing him play acoustic guitar and singing,” Lanegan says. “To me it sounded like what I imagined it would be like if I was sitting in the room with Skip James or Lightnin’ Hopkins. It was so soulful and real, it gave me the chills.”