Sing Backwards and Weep Page 7

  A few weeks after figuring out that neither Kurt nor I were interested in continuing our Lead Belly experiment, I got a call from Jonathan Poneman, co-owner of Sub Pop Records. He had a proposition: Would I like to make a solo album for them? His offer was a three-record deal, $13,000 for the first with substantial advances for the second and third.

  I had never picked up an instrument in my life. My only contribution to Screaming Trees songwriting had been attempting to change the most egregious of Lee Conner’s lyrics to something less embarrassing to sing. But every record the Trees had made for SST had come with a strict $1,000 advance. I could probably make a solo record for three grand at the most and pocket the rest. Ten thousand dollars. By far the most money I had ever had in my life. I took the deal.

  I carried in my head two different musical inspirations for this first record. The Trees had recently played in San Francisco opening up for Henry Rollins. Van Conner had once again punched Lee out onstage, and Lee played the last fifteen minutes of the set with a nosebleed, the front of his white shirt quickly soaked in blood. Afterward, while waiting for my ride, I watched with strange admiration for Rollins’s high-­testosterone intensity and huge balls as he did one-armed push-ups next to the stage in full view of the audience before going on. Donna Dresch was now living in SF and picked me up and drove me across town in time to catch a band from Boston, Galaxie 500, playing their encore. It was stunning. A room packed with people were silently intent on this band playing slow, quiet, beautiful music. At the end of each tune, the crowd erupted in enthusiastic cheering, then became stone silent again as soon as the band delicately began their next song.

  It was an epiphany for me to witness. Trees played at top volume nightly. Head throbbing from the terrible-sounding high-pitched guitar amp pointed straight at me and the pounding of the cymbals directly behind on the tiny stages we most often played, I was being deafened every show. It had never occurred to me that it was possible to play quietly in a rock club and people would enjoy it.

  My other musical inspiration was Straight Ahead, the largely acoustic solo record of Northwest legend Greg Sage of Portland band the Wipers. Despite his now-obvious deception and his somewhat comical, desperate attempt to intimidate me at our last meeting, I nonetheless remained a huge fan of his music. His solo record pointed me in the direction I wanted my record to take: quiet yet powerful dark tunes.

  I bought a cheap used piece-of-shit acoustic guitar and a Mel Bay guitar chord book. I began to learn the simplest chords, began to try to teach myself how to write.

  Every day at my warehouse job, I would start making up a melody and some words in my head. When I came upon a combination I liked, I would memorize it through silent mental repetition all the way home on the bus. As soon as I got home, I’d get the guitar and book and search until I found the chords that fit under my melody and vocal part, almost always the same three or four chords. Dylan Carlson also showed me a chord that was useful, the B. I’ve probably employed it on every song I’ve written since. I came to realize much later that my caveman style of songwriting was the complete reverse of what’s normal. Most songwriters write music first, then find the vocal part to go with it.

  Paranoid that Sub Pop would realize they had made a mistake and void our deal, I wrote with a maniacal urgency, my eye ever-focused on my huge upcoming payday. My virgin fingers raw from the thick strings that had probably never been changed on the instrument, I managed in my primitive, idiosyncratic way to put together a group of songs to record in just over a couple weeks. I enlisted the help of my friend Mike Johnson, who played guitar in a Eugene, Oregon, band called Snakepit, to come to Seattle and play on the record. He put intros, middle sections, and outros on all the songs since I wasn’t proficient or savvy enough to do it myself. It was then that I discovered that my simplistic guitar parts were actually maddening for real guitarists to play due to the awkward way I would jump from chord to chord, following the vocal part instead of doing it in a normal way with natural timing. It was at the outer range of my musical knowledge just to find the chords that fit under my singing.

  After running through the songs with Mike for a few days at my house, we entered Jack Endino’s Reciprocal studios to begin recording. Jack was an enthusiastic, eccentric guy who had produced almost all of Sub Pop’s records as well as the previous Screaming Trees album. He and I shared a love for the music of the British trio the Groundhogs and wasted a lot of valuable studio time chattering like teenagers about our favorite records of theirs. We began with Mike laying down guitar, playing along to a click track. I would then lay down a scratch vocal. Jack recorded all the bass parts, then finally Mark Pickerel would overdub the drums. It was a backwards way of recording but necessary due to the nature of my weirdly constructed tunes and the limitations of the ancient eight-track recorder. Sub Pop’s records had all been loud, raw rock and I started to have serious misgivings about making a quiet acoustic record, but Jack and Mike kept reassuring me that what we were doing was great.

  After I had tracked all the vocals one night, Steve Fisk dropped by the studio to say hello and to put some minimal piano parts on a track or two. Steve had recorded all the early Trees records at a studio in Ellensburg. He and I had had a minorly contentious relationship from the beginning of our association, as he was always irritated by my paranoid, suspicious questioning of his every creative decision, but that night I greeted him as an old friend. He started messing around on an organ and I quickly wrote what I thought was a funny little song to his organ riff. Because of the sad and serious tone of the record, I felt like it needed some comic relief at the end. Jack rolled his eyes and Johnson outright hated it: “Why make a beautiful record and then shit on it?” I included it on the album anyway. “Juarez” may be the only song in history to mention crack, heroin, blow jobs, and diapers, all in a minute and a half. Kurt came in and sang on “Down in the Dark,” a more electric tune. We also ended up using a recording of one of the heavier songs from our aborted Lead Belly record, “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?,” an acoustic tune Kurt had electrified, which had compelled me to take my performance into the familiar rock territory of the Trees, doubling my voice to harmonize with myself and singing the last couple of verses in the very utmost registers of my limited vocal range, as though Lee Conner himself had written the part.

  With the record done, I did the first of what were to be many photo sessions with Sub Pop house photographer Charles Peterson. They were mostly shots of me walking around the rubble of what had been the Western State Hospital, the psychiatric hospital hellhole that had once housed the famous actress Frances Farmer in the 1940s. My own grandmother had been a patient there during World War Two when my father was a young boy. During that time he had lived alone with his father, an older man who was working in the shipyards to assist the war effort, having already fought in the trenches in France during World War One.

  Back in Seattle, Sub Pop co-owner Bruce Pavitt insisted I sit for some close-up portrait-type shots. I was reluctant. After much back and forth, I only agreed when he said, “If you don’t like them, I promise not to use them for anything.”

  A few weeks later, Pavitt and Poneman scheduled a meeting so we could review the contact sheets from the photo sessions together. I arrived after working hours to meet Jon and Bruce in the Sub Pop stockroom. As I approached the door, I could hear the two of them in a heated discussion.

  “Goddamnit!” Pavitt said. “Is Nirvana the only band we have that is ever going to sell any records?”

  By this time, Nirvana had started to become an underground sensation, taking the English and European rock press by storm. All the UK music rags were going crazy for them and so were the kids. I shook my head as I recalled how little they’d esteemed Kurt’s band just a couple years previously. As it turned out, it was a good thing Nirvana stayed with Sub Pop. The two label bosses turned out to be genius marketers. The way they promoted the label turned it and all their bands into an underground phenomenon
with Nirvana as the brightest star in their universe. Not that Kurt had been wrong about how Sub Pop tried to control their artists. “Watch out, they will fuck you if they can,” he had warned me.

  At that meeting where we looked at the contact sheets of possible cover photos, Pavitt quickly became enamored with one of the portrait shots he had insisted upon. I hated it. To my punk rock sensibilities, it screamed PRETENTIOUS. There was no way I would agree to let him use it. After a lot of hemming and hawing, he finally said we could use one of the photos I deemed acceptable for the cover if he could use the portrait shot for promotion. I begrudgingly agreed to that deal, relieved it wouldn’t be the cover shot but still mortified it would be seen at all. Shortly thereafter, the Trees went on tour. My record, which I had titled The Winding Sheet, was to be released a couple days before we returned.

  When I got home, there was a box of albums waiting for me. When I opened the box, there on the front cover of my first solo effort was the fucking photo Pavitt had been in love with, the one he had sworn to me would not be used. I was incredulous, then livid. No one in my music career had ever fucked me like that. I could not believe he’d had the balls to do it. I couldn’t look at it without feeling humiliated and violently pissed off at the same time.

  Just home from tour and exhausted, I borrowed my roommate’s car and drove down to Sub Pop, overcome with murderous anger, fully intending to beat Bruce unconscious. When I burst through the office door, the secretary stood up and then, gauging how dark my mood was, sat right back down.

  I walked straight into Pavitt’s office where he sat behind his desk, talking to someone on the phone. I crossed the room in a couple of long, fast strides and came directly at him, fists clenched. He dropped the phone and threw himself to the floor behind his desk, his arms up over his face.

  “Mark! Wait a second! Please wait a second!”

  I stood over him as he cowered on the ground, barely resisting the urge to kick him in the face.

  “I know you’re angry and you have every right to be! I’m sorry about the cover, I should not have done it.”

  “Fucking A right, you shouldn’t have done it! We had a deal, mother­fucker. Who the fuck do you think you are? And who do you think you’re dealing with? Some Seattle-band pussy? Where I’m from, people end up in a ditch somewhere for shit like this. I should kick your fucking head in.”

  “Please wait a minute and hear me out,” he whined. “I thought I was doing what was best for you and the record. And the label.”

  “Yeah. I know. We had that discussion the day you promised not to use that photo. Dude, not only have you shit on our deal, fucked me, and lied to my face, but now I have to live with this terrible embarrassing album cover for the rest of my life. I’m gonna have my lawyer sue your ass and keep you from ever releasing this piece of shit.”

  “We’ve already shipped out a couple thousand copies,” he said in a hoarse, choking whisper.

  “Then I’ll have them pulled off the fucking shelves, I don’t give a fuck.” Finally exhausting my blinding rage, I turned to go with a final “Eat shit, Bruce. You don’t know how lucky you just got.”

  With him still on the floor of his office, I turned and left, mute and dazed with shock that he’d really done it. Although I was loyal to the few close friends I had, in those days I would have freely lied and screwed anyone else over to get what I wanted, and now here I was, totally enraged that someone had done it to me. I was furious at myself for falling for his con before I was in a position to con him.

  I had vowed to myself early on in life to fuck anyone before they had the chance to fuck me, and I had walked backwards right into this fucking. I made a mental note to pay this son of a bitch back if ever given the opportunity, swallowed what felt like a mountain of shit, and filed his betrayal away in the back of my mind. I was prepared to wait as long as I had to until the opportunity came someday when it would be my turn to force the shoe onto his foot and see how it fit him. At least I had the $13,000 for a balm. If there’s nothing else handy, money is always a sufficient lubricant.

  4

  IF YOU START AGAIN, IT WILL BE AS THOUGH YOU’D NEVER STOPPED

  I refused to do any press or shows to promote The Winding Sheet but it nonetheless received a decent response and quite a few positive reviews. Spin magazine (the biggest music magazine in the States besides Rolling Stone at the time) could not be bothered to ever write about the Trees but they gave The Winding Sheet a good notice. I was privately relieved it didn’t get slaughtered in the press.

  Now willfully estranged from Sub Pop, I turned my attention back to the Screaming Trees. Our manager Susan Silver had miraculously secured us a major label deal with Epic Records. I had initially been put off by the over-the-top manner of their extroverted A&R man Bob Pfeifer. When Susan picked me up after I’d met Bob for the first time, we rode in silence for five minutes before she finally asked how it went. I said, “If I’m ever alone with that guy again, I will kill him or myself.” Though Bob and I were almost complete opposites personality-wise, I came to trust and value him as a friend and advisor and the two of us formed a tight bond. He and the rest of the band, not so much. Lee couldn’t bear to acknowledge the contributions of anyone but himself and was completely, childishly deaf to any sort of constructive criticism. Susan sadly confessed to me much later on that only one other major had been slightly interested in signing us … under the condition that we “lose one of the big guys.”

  We settled on big-time Northwest producer Terry Date for our first major label recording. Since we’d made several terrible-sounding records on rusty old eight-track machines, I was eager to make a great-­sounding album in a big professional studio. Even so, I was leery of losing our edge, desperately afraid that we’d end up sounding like one of the terrible hair-metal bands I despised, the current kings of popular music. Because of my reticence, Soundgarden singer Chris Cornell, who I liked and respected, was brought on board as coproducer to basically hang out with me, function as a go-between for Terry and me, and generally assuage my fears about the process.

  Like all of our recordings, it became a musically challenging head-fuck, but it was ultimately a pleasurable experience for me simply because I hit it off with Terry and loved hanging out with Chris. Chris was a solitary creature and presented a quiet, thoughtful, and serious front to the world but had a sly, somewhat perverse sense of humor not unlike my own, with a gift for making me laugh. He was highly intelligent, wise beyond his years, and possessed zero fear. He was always up for anything, silently focused and fiercely competitive. I had a terrible cold one day and Cornell insisted I allow him to lick my bare eyeball to test his invented-on-the-spot theory of virus transmission. I was, of course, delighted to take part in the experiment. Chris never got sick. I can’t recall if this proved or disproved his theory, but it was an effective way of making me laugh.

  On another occasion, Chris played me some home demos he’d done, just acoustic guitar and singing. I was blown away hearing the earliest, raw version of “Say Hello 2 Heaven.” He had an extremely powerful voice and was technically the most gifted singer I’d ever heard. He laughed when I said in complete seriousness, “That’s a fucking hit, man!”

  Every day, Terry cajoled Van and me into playing two-on-two basketball against him and Chris, a game they hardly, if ever, won. With Van at six foot four and nearly three hundred pounds and me at six foot two and a hundred and eighty-five, we had a serious size advantage. Chris was slightly shorter than me and Terry several inches shorter than Chris. Every time we had the ball, Van would simply set an unmovable pick on whoever was guarding me. I drove around them to an easy lay-up or pulled up to hit a jump shot or passed it to Van for an easy close-to-the-hoop shot as he rolled to the basket after the pick. As the recording session went on, each day their intensity raised incrementally as they stubbornly attempted to beat us. Van and I would get up from our seats in the studio and slowly walk out to the court where, playing in our heavy boo
ts, we would inevitably kick their asses yet again.

  Terry tried hard to make me comfortable, and to help us make a Trees record I’d be proud of. I was so conditioned to being horrified by the finished results of our previous recordings that not being ashamed of one was the best I could hope for. I had never enjoyed any of the records we’d made because, despite being the dominant personality in the band, from the very beginning my creative role was limited to merely singing the songs written and arranged by the prolific, controlling, obsessive guitar player Lee Conner. With no friends, relationships, or social life of any kind, Lee churned out as many as three or four demos of songs a day, complete with lyrics and singing. He was a machine. I was overwhelmed by the sheer mountain of material. It was much catchier and more “rock” than anything I’d written, so there was never a question of using any songs but his—that was all we’d ever done. It was a constant battle just to keep him from soloing from start to finish through every song and then demanding his shrill, atonal, uninteresting playing be the loudest thing in the mix. It often seemed like the bulk of the band’s creative energy was devoted solely to tamping down Lee’s worst narcissistic impulses.

  I privately thought of Lee as a copycat revisionist of the cheesiest kind, his entire persona and songwriting style a cornball expression of the terrible ’60s-garage-band revival briefly popular in the ’80s. He was a slave to the Nuggets collection, a compilation of obscure ’60s garage and psychedelic music curated by Patti Smith’s guitar player Lenny Kaye. I could not relate to the fakeness of it all, it had no connection to my experience, but Lee worshiped at that altar. He tie-dyed his own pants and shirts, wore square, purple-lensed sunglasses indoors, and wrote literally hundreds of songs with bullshit faux-psychedelic lyrics about tripping on LSD. The great irony in all of that was that he had never once in his life taken acid or even smoked pot. He was most definitely a casualty, but not from acid. That had been my experience, not his.