Screaming Trees’ Gary Lee Conner talks unearthed 1991 ‘live’ LP, ‘Singles’ soundtrack & more (BV interview)

Among this year’s Record Store Day Black Friday exclusive releases is Screaming Trees‘ Wrong Turn at Jahannam: Live at Egg Studio 1991. The album captures the band during a happy accident. Gearing up for their tour of their just-released major label debut, Uncle Anesthesia, frontman Mark Lanegan and guitarist Gary Lee Conner had just welcomed back bassist and Gary’s brother Van Conner, who had left the Trees in 1988 and had been playing in Dinosaur Jr, along with drummer Dan Peters who was on loan from Mudhoney. They were officially at Seattle’s Egg Studio to record b-sides but, feeling the vibe, Lanegan suggested they run through their whole set and record it.

Featuring a number of then-new Uncle Anesthesia songs as well as plenty from their years on SST Records, this album may have been recorded without an audience but you can feel the electricity from the opening moments of “Orange Airplane” through “End of the Universe.” It’s raw but that is not a criticism; Lanegan sounds great, the synergy between the Conners is palpable, and Peters gives everything a kick.

Just ahead of the album’s release, I talked to Gary Lee Conner (who remains a prolific solo artist) via Zoom about the album, which is dedicated to Lanegan (who died in 2022) and Van (who died in January of this year), and about what other music from the Screaming Trees archive might next see the light of day. We also talked about the Singles soundtrack, touring with Soul Asylum and The Spin Doctors on the 1993 MTV Alternative Nation Tour, and more. Read read our conversation below.

Set the scene for this if you would. This was not long after Uncle Anesthesia had come out in January of 1991?

Gary Lee Conner: Yeah, 1990 was a pretty transitionary year for Screaming Trees. We’d been doing stuff for years on SST and we got signed to Epic in 1990 but our drummer Mark Pickerel quit after recording the album, which he had told us he was going to do. We didn’t have another drummer lined up. We’d toured quite a bit in fall 1990 with Social Distortion and had Sean Hollister on drums. But in 1991, when our record came out, everything was still in flux. My brother, Van, he always had money problems because he had a family, a kid. That’s why he quit the band in 1988, he needed steady money, so in 1990 he got a “job” playing bass in Dinosaur Jr.

This was right around the time Lou Barlow quit / got fired or whatever.

Right. So me and Lanegan were like “Are we just gonna keep going on with other people?” We’d lined up Donna Dresch again to play bass and gotten a friend of hers to play drums. It was weird but that was our plan. I really wanted Van to come back, though, and I think he wanted to come back — he wasn’t making that much money with Dinosaur Jr (laughs) — and that’s when I got the idea to ask Mudhoney’s Dan Peters to play drums. He had been playing with Nirvana for a while and Mudhoney were in flux as well, so he agreed to play with us. When I told Van that, he agreed to come back. So that worked out, and we were either about to tour or had just started in the spring — I can’t remember — and we went to Egg Studios to record some b-sides. While we were there, we decided to run through our set and tape it, more as a rehearsal than anything else. Conrad Uno owned the studio and was also the engineer.

So was this recording something that you’d always wanted to release or something you’d forgotten about?

It sat there for 20-some years without any of us thinking about it or remembering it existed. At some point, I don’t know how he uncovered it, but he said to me “There’s this tape from Egg Studios…” He had started this record label, Strange Earth Records, 10 years ago and put out a few other Pacific Northwest bands on it and one of my albums, Ether Trippers, in 2016. Anyway, that was going to be his big project, this live Screaming Trees album. Live in the studio, no crowd, but running through the whole set without stopping, like a real show. Strange Earth Records sorta petered out and then he died in January. After Mark died last year, we’d made plans for some releases, re-releases, and this was to be the first of those.

What shape was the recording in? You still had the original multitrack tape?

Yeah it was recorded on six tracks so everything was pretty much isolated. There was some bleed, as we were playing in the same room, and there were a couple of room mics, but the vocals were nice and clear. We could work with it but it didn’t need to be EQ’d too much to make it sound good. We had rough mixes. Jack Endino, who had produced early Screaming Trees albums, mixed and mastered it last year.

As a big Young Fresh Fellows fan I know of Conrad Uno and Egg Studios but, where did it fit within the Seattle scene at the time? How big was it?

I think it was up by University of Washington but it was in the basement of his house, just a residential house. It was on a hill, so the basement was basically underground. I don’t think it sounded very loud from the outside, but bands didn’t record that much at night. My memory is fuzzy. There was a pink door that said “EGG STUDIO” on it. It was not very big. We did a few other sessions there besides this one, two or three times, maybe demos, b-sides. It was unusual. There were a few like that in Seattle, actually.

What do you remember most about this session?

How small it was. Not that we weren’t used to playing in small, dark places. We must’ve been in a pretty good mood for Mark to suggest we record a set. (Laughs) Usually he wanted to get the heck out of there as fast as he could. We had a good time that day. You can hear on the recording that we played it like an actual live show from the early days. In the ’80s, even if we were playing to two people, we tried to make it as energetic a set as possible. At Egg, we were doing it for ourselves. The guitar wasn’t always in tune but the energy was there. It was completely raw.

And you weren’t thinking “Hey let’s release this at some point”…

Not at all. We totally forgot about it. Who knows how much stuff, recorded by us or others, are forgotten, lost forever.

Do you have a favorite song from this?

“Orange Airplane,” which opens the album and set. Dan is just amazing on that one, he just kicked it over the top. It was also the first song on our first album [1986’s Clairvoyance] and it shows how much the live shows and energy over the years shaped it. I’m not sure how much we played it the year before with Pickerel on drums but we played it a lot on the spring 1991 tour. I think this album is indicative of the sets we played then.

Around that time were you already working on songs that would end up on Sweet Oblivion?

At the end of that tour, we had a few songs we recorded demos for at Avast Studios, including “No One Knows.” The thing with Sweet Oblivion is, once we got [drummer] Barrett Martin in the band we uncharacteristically started writing songs more as a group. For years, it would be me writing stuff and giving the tapes to Lanegan who would decide which songs he liked and would be like “I’m going to change these lyrics” or “the title is way too psychedelic,” or something. We collaborated, just not in the same room. I’ve been going through old four-tracks recently and I found a bunch of songs that me and Mark wrote together, where he wrote the initial melody and the lyrics. He didn’t really do that before and they are amazing songs. A few times he did, like on “Dollar Bill,” but that was the exception to the rule, at least till his first solo album. I was there when he and Van worked on that one. I should’ve taken a songwriting credit but we were always a bit confused as to how that worked back then. With me, Mark and Van, if we didn’t give one of us credit and suddenly something was really big…but we never thought we’d make any money anyway. And we really didn’t until later. “Nearly Lost You” does the best now and that was written by the three of us. Van did most of it, I worked on the verse, Mark added lyrics. We split it evenly. Back when we were on SST, it was more like we were paying them, basically, but being on a major label it was a carrot in front of the horse situation.

The Singles soundtrack sold really well though, right?

Two million or something. We also only recently found out how much Sweet Oblivion sold, which was like 420,000. That was almost gold! (Laughs) If someone had told us in 1990 we’ve have a record that sold that well, we’d be like “holy crap, what happened!?!”

I think “Nearly Lost You” is in the running with “Would?” by Alice in Chains as the best song on the Singles soundtrack.

That’s a good soundtrack. The movie is not so good. The problem is that it’s a romatic comedy but all the bands are portrayed as kind of dumb. There were so many smart people in that community! They made all the bands out to be like Matt Dillon’s character. But the soundtrack is a classic.

It’s a moment in time for sure. Speaking of, this year was the 30th anniversary of the MTV Alternative Nation Tour that had you out with labelmates Soul Asylum and The Spin Doctors. What do remember or think of from that tour?

It was long, like 60 shows! A lot of stuff happened during that tour. I got married, that was fun. We had a week off and had a wedding in Seattle. Love Battery played. My biggest memories (laughs) were Jagermeister and vodka, we got that on the rider. I didn’t actually drink that much but one night I did where I made a cocktail of Diet Dr Pepper, Jager and vodka and we called it “2000 Flushes.” (Laughter) I threw up on the bus in New Orleans the next day, I still remember the horrible smell of vomit and New Orleans. We weren’t really into the Spin Doctors but Soul Asylum were cool. That was the Grave Dancers Union tour for them and my wife had been a huge fan but that one didn’t do it for her. They loved to play with cliches and usually just on the right side of them, but they may have stepped over the line with that one. As to Spin Doctors, I will say “Two Princes” is a good song and at one show Barret played congas with them on it, but I never got the jam band thing.

I was looking at the Variety review of the Vegas show — last date of the tour — which mentioned that during “Julie Paradise” you worked in some of that novelty hit “The Curly Shuffle.”

(Laughs) Did we? That sounds like something Van would’ve come up with. I do remember that show. Soul Asylum did almost all covers. It was at the Aladdin.

I know it’s been a rough couple years for you and the world of Screaming Trees but it must be nice putting out something that sounds this great that fans have never heard.

That’s the main thing. For years, every Record Store Day would go past with nothing from the Trees, and we all thought this would be a good one to do. It’s just been real sad. Mark, I hadn’t talked to [him] all that much for 20 years, but Van, I talked to him all the time. Sometimes we spent eight hours on the phone talking. We were still very close, so it’s been tough especially having to work on this without him. On the other hand, it’s energizing to get this stuff out that he wanted to do. There’s a dedication to Van and Mark on the album.

Are their other things in the archives that might see a release?

We had some other things in mind, including the SST stuff and we’re working on trying to find the tapes. We’ve got a few leads. Otherwise I’ve got two or three records worth of interesting recordings, demos from different time periods. Especially with Dust. We wrote hundreds of songs for it — I found a list of all of them, and between me and Van we wrote over 200 songs, and only 10 are on the album. There’s at least another pretty solid record of demos. There’s also the “lost Sony album” that was intended as Sweet Oblivion‘s follow-up. Two songs, “Washed by the Blues” and “Paperback Bible,” ended up on the 2005 compilation Ocean of Confusion. We’ve been talking to Sony about that.

When exactly was that lost album recorded?

Recorded in 1993 and 1994 so that’s why it took four years between Sweet Oblivion and Dust. We toured for a year solid but when we went to make a new album, Mark was getting heavily into drugs, unfortunately, so it was pretty much me and Van trying to do stuff. Also before Sweet Oblivion, I wrote songs for fun, but that time it was like “You have to have songs ready in two months.” So when we went into the studio, we recorded in Seattle at Bad Animals which was owned by the Heart sisters. It just didn’t work out. Then we recorded in New York and from that there are nine songs with Lanegan singing on them, one with Van singing, one with me. We’re trying to locate the master tapes for all that, so possible in the next couple years that could see the light of day. We’ll see.

Pick up “Live At Egg Studio” on fried egg vinyl at a record store near you on Records Store Day Black Friday. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.