This interview originally appeared in the Record Store Day edition of the BrooklynVegan Digital Magazine. Subscribe for free and read all back issues here.
“For years, every Record Store Day would go past with nothing from the Trees,” Screaming Trees guitarist Gary Lee Conner told us last year, lamenting that while his band had tons of previously unreleased material in their archives, none of it was seeing the light of day. With the passing of both frontman Mark Lanegan in early 2022 and Gary’s brother, Trees’ bassist Van Conner, a year later, a sense of urgency hit him and they have made up for lost time, having put out two different RSD releases in the last six months.
Record Store Black Friday 2023 saw the release of Wrong Turn at Jahannam: Live at Egg Studio 1991, a recording of a tour rehearsal from the time of Screaming Trees’ major label debut, Uncle Anesthesia; for Record Store Day 2024 the band released Weird Things Happening (Ellensburg Demos 1986-1988) which is even more exciting as none of these 10 songs ever made it to a proper studio.
You’ve now got another chance to pick up Weird Things Happening as we’ve now got a new exclusive edition of the album. It’s pressed to blue vinyl, and limited to 500 copies. Order yours HERE and listen to it below.
“I have a million old cassettes of demos, like at least a few hundred,” Gary says. “I used to write tons of songs back then.” This was from the days when The Screaming Trees were still based in Ellensburg, WA, a college town about two hours southeast of Seattle and their home base was the unused back room of the video store Gary and Van’s family owned, New World Video. These demos were recorded on a four-track cassette Portastudio and had Gary playing almost all instruments himself (sometimes backed by a drum machine) with Lanegan’s distinctive smoky croon/howl at the center.
For Weird Things Happening, the original four-track recordings were remixed by the legendary Jack Endino — who worked on Nirvana’s Bleach, Mudhoney’s Superfuzz Bigmuff, and Screaming Trees’ Buzz Factory to name three — and while decidedly lo-fi, they sound surprisingly great. A number of the songs on Weird Things Happening, if they had made it to a studio album, would’ve been among the catchiest, poppiest they had released yet and you could imagine them being on the band’s 1992 breakthrough, Sweet Oblivion. These 10 tracks hold together as an album and make you wonder what other amazing uncut gems are hiding on those tapes.
We talked to Gary Lee Conner about Weird Things Happening, getting signed to SST, the video store where they recorded, and more. Read that below.
The Screaming Trees archives are now really open! Tell us about Weird Things Happening — none of these songs ever made it to the studio, right?
Gary: Yeah. This is from right about the time we got signed to SST, and so these are all like demos that were done for the first two SST records, Even If and Especially When and Invisible Lantern. The song “Weird Thing Happening,” which is the title track for this — though the song is “Thing” and the album is “Things” — it was going to be the title track for what became Invisible Lantern. That was our plan, at least for a while, like some time in late 1987, early 1988, when we started working on the record that was Invisible Lantern. And yeah, the title was going to be Weird Things Happening. We always did things like that, like have the song “Even If” on Invisible Lantern, like from Even If and Especially When. Old bands used to do stuff like that, you know? Like Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy, the song with that title was on their next record, Physical Graffiti. So, the album and song titles are a little different.
So we had all these old demos. Mark was, before he died, talking about putting all the SST stuff out but when we [didn’t have] the SST stuff ready to go, we decided, “Well, let’s do some of the demos from it, because that would be cool for people to be able to hear them.” When I first made rough mixes of it, everyone’s kind of like, “Oh, I don’t know…” But we had Jack Endino work on it and make the best mixes he could. And I think we did pretty well. It doesn’t sound like a pristine modern recording, but it’s not supposed to.
I was going to say that there are Oh Sees and Ty Segall records that are gnarlier sounding than this.
Ha, probably. Actually doing a release from four-track, this isn’t the first. The 1988 Screaming Trees / Beat Happening split EP was done on the same four-track. We actually had two four-tracks, Van had one and I had one. And at some point, about 10 years ago, mine wasn’t working hardly at all so I had him send his to me. And I kind of cannibalized them and got it to work. That’s the problem with four-tracks, they degrade, just the rubber and all the parts and stuff. And even if you find a brand new four-track from like the ’80s that’s unopened in a box, it may not work. But it’s really cool to be able to do something that’s on the four-track, too, to hear what other ideas were going around at the time of Even If and Especially When and Invisible Lantern. We just had so many songs, there’s no way we could’ve recorded them all, and these were never done in the studio.
So what was your setup on these demos?
Most of the stuff is me playing all the instruments, including the drums. I had this thing where I did a drum machine first, and then I’d play like a snare and maybe a tom or a cymbal or something like that, and recorded over that. So, you can hear a little bit of drum machine here and there. Most of it’s me, and I don’t know how to play drums at all, but that’s what I did [laughs]. And of course, Mark singing. “What’s Never Been,” though, that’s the full band recorded live with Mark Pickerel on drums and Van on bass. “When it Comes Around” is a song of Van’s and he probably played guitar or bass or something on it. The others are mostly me, apart from Mark singing.
I was really struck by “What’s Never Been” and “Now or Never” — they’re hits! Really poppy.
“What’s Never Been,” especially, is really interesting. It almost sounds like U2 or something in some spots.[Laughs] I don’t know. I can’t even remember if that was my song originally, or if we just all wrote it together but it’s definitely kind of a different song. It doesn’t really sound like the typical Screaming Trees song. But that’s the thing with all these, they’re different from what ended up on the SST records. That’s what’s really interesting about it.
Listening to those songs, somehow it never occurred to me before, but did you guys feel any sort of kinship to the Paisley Underground scene that was happening in LA around the same time?
Oh, yeah. The thing is with the band, I was the psychedelic guy. You can tell that from looking at the early pictures. But even Lanegan, he was way into the Leaving Trains and some of the other stuff like that. I was into everything, The Three O’Clock, and The Long Ryders, Rain Parade, the whole thing. That was one of my main influences, the Paisley Underground stuff, and of course, the stuff they were influenced by, too, as well. So, yeah, it was kind of like a third generation thing. One of the coolest things that ever happened, back in 2005 they released the Children of Nuggets compilation that was a sequel to the classic Nuggets comp with bands influenced by it. When that came out, wow, one of my proudest achievements was [our song] “Transfiguration” making the Children of Nuggets album.
There’s another song on Weird Things Happening, I can’t remember which one it is, maybe it was one of the ones with the drum machine. But it reminded me of the first Echo & the Bunnymen album.
Oh, yeah, maybe that was “When it Comes Around,” which had more drum machine. Echo & the Bunnymen, me and Van both were totally into them. Also The Teardrop Explodes and all that kind of psychedelic English stuff. We were listening to that several years before the band started. Besides being into punk rock and new wave and stuff, that was one of the biggest influences, the English psychedelic stuff. And the LA Paisley Underground, definitely.
Reading the little blurb about the album that’s on the Record Store Day website, the most interesting thing for me was that you recorded all that in the back of your parents’ video store.
That was our headquarters. Originally we rehearsed in my bedroom with my pre-Trees groups. In 1985, when we started getting together with Lanegan and playing some covers, we practiced there. But we had just opened the video store like a few months before, and we realized, like, “Hey, man, we can go in the back room of the video store.” It was probably like 50 feet by 30 feet, it was huge. And empty, like a giant empty room. So we went back there and sort of hung curtains and put all our stuff in there, and kind of made little rooms. We moved around all the time, like we’d have a practice room in this corner, and a practice room in another corner. Yeah, and that was our headquarters for the whole time until, I think it was late ’88 when Lanegan finally moved over to Seattle. But for ’86, ’87, and ’88…we’d rehearse back there, and people would come in the video store and they’d hear us back there. And because it was downtown you could play all night long there, and no one could hear it because there were no houses around, we’d do that all the time, play late at night. And it was a really, really great place to rehearse, and to do four-tracks, too. So, occasionally we’d set it up and record the whole band, like with “What’s Never Been.” But most of the time, it was just me doing the drum machine and then playing the tom and snare overtop..
So, you would rehearse when the store was open?
Sometimes, yeah. And these people would… I don’t know how loud it would be out there, because I never was out there to hear how loud it was. [Laughs] Our parents were really supportive. Eventually, people were like, “Oh, wow, I can hear the Screaming Trees playing back there,” it was kind of a thing and became kind of legendary, I guess, in Ellensburg. Years later, after we didn’t record there, the video store was open till the late ’90s, and people would still come in and be like, “Oh my God, the Screaming Trees lived here,” or practiced here or whatever. It was right on Main Street, so people coming to town, if they had heard of the store, they could go in and take a look.
Oh that’s cool.
After we left, my brother Patrick, some of their bands practiced back there. So, it was still, probably even until the last years of the store in the late ’90s, there was stuff going on. I remember even in 1995, when I stayed in Ellensburg for a while, I recorded some demos back there. Yeah, so, quite the place for the Screaming Trees.
What kind of store was it? Was it like a typical, small-town video store or did you have ‘psychotronic” cult movies too?
Yeah, we did. We had all sorts of shit like that. Because we had the typical stuff, but then we also had all the weird… We had a full The Prisoner series, and my mom was really into psychotronic films. She had the Rat Pfink A Boo Boo, movies like that, You know those RE/Search books? There was the one about the psychotronic films. And we managed to find those and stock them. So it was definitely different from any other store in town, because you could get weird, weird movies.
Did you work there?
The whole band worked there. In the morning, we would just sit there and listen to records, usually, because it was pretty slow in the morning. And the first year, I was sort of the manager. But then I kind of got tired of that when the band got going. Mark Lanegan worked there, Pickerel worked there, and Van, and me. Everybody. And it was like the place where we hung out. And that’s where we found out we got signed on SST, we were in the video room where all the VHS tapes were, and we got the call from Greg Ginn. And Lanegan was there, and he answered the phone, and we’re sitting there listening to him talk to Greg Ginn.
Amazing.
And Mark’s like [cups the receiver] “Well, Ginn’s kind of beating around the bush about stuff.” And finally, Mark said to him, “What, you want to sign us to your label?” He’s like, “Yeah, I guess so,” something like that. That was one of the most memorable moments of my life. And so, yeah, everything about the video store is Screaming Trees lore.
Do you have a favorite song from Weird Things Happening?
Probably “Weird Thing Happening.” I think it could’ve been a great song on Invisible Lantern. That one kind of fits with that kind of vibe of that record. In fact, we even had an idea for the cover — we all still had long hair at the time, we were going to take a picture of everyone’s hair clumped together, and that was going to be the cover. But it was not to be.
—
Grab our exclusive blue vinyl variant of Weird Things Happening here.
Read our interview with Gary Lee Conner about Screaming Trees’ Live at Egg Studio.
