"You Just Want to See a Couple of Fat Guys Wrestle!"

RIP, Screaming Trees bassist Van Conner

From about 1989 to 1992, the Screaming Trees were my favorite band in the world.

They were exactly what I wanted at that time — a muscular, hard-rocking band with a heavy garage/psych influence (though not worn so obviously as to render them eye-rollingly “retro”), DIY punk rock attitude, a penchant for tightly-written songs brimming with hooks and riffs galore, and a lead singer who could channel Jim Morrison’s haunted baritone without ever lapsing into any “electric shaman” clownery.

Much has been written over the years about how the Trees both benefited and suffered from being lumped in with Seattle’s “grunge” scene (they were actually from Ellensburg, nearly two hours away to the southeast), and how they might have been much bigger if only they’d been as good-looking (or as skinny) as the guys in Soundgarden or Mudhoney or Nirvana. All I know is that while I never tried to imitate or steal from any of those three bands (okay, maybe Mudhoney a little bit) during my own time in the alt-rock trenches, I definitely tried to sing like Mark Lanegan at some points, and to this day I have never stopped copping riffs and licks from guitarist Gary Lee Conner.

And while we can talk ad nauseam about the unfairness of the music business, far more unfair is the fact that Screaming Trees bassist Van Conner, Gary Lee’s younger brother, has passed away — making him the second Tree (after Lanegan) to fall. My deepest condolences to any of his family or friends who may be reading this, because 55 is just too damn young.

What I’ll always remember about Van, aside from his nimbly pile-driving bass playing, is his cherubic grin and gleaming eyes, which were on prominent display during the two Screaming Trees concerts I got to attend. One of those was easily among the best performances I’ve ever seen any band deliver, and the other was easily among the worst. Van grinned delightedly all the way through both of them.

The first one — the brilliant one — was November 8, 1989 at Chicago’s Cabaret Metro. (I’d misremembered it for decades as early ‘90, but the above clip from the Nov 5, 1989 Chicago Tribune confirms otherwise.) The band was out promoting Buzz Factory, the first record of theirs that I’d discovered. It was a Wednesday night show with a mere $4 cover, and yet it was so sparsely attended that I just strolled right up to the front as the band took the stage. Though the exact set list is nowhere to be found on ye olde internet, this one from Maxwell’s four nights earlier looks pretty close to what I remember:

1. Change Has Come

2. Feathered Fish (The Sons of Adam cover)

3. Lines & Circles

4. Too Far Away

5. Wish Bringer

6. Transfiguration

7. Smokerings

8. Flower Web

9. Ivy

10. End of the Universe

11. What Goes On (Velvet Underground cover)

12. Cold Rain

13. Tales of Brave Ulysses (Cream cover)

14. Orange Airplane

I vividly remember them hitting us with the Sons of Adam/Arthur Lee cover early on, a choice which confirmed to me that this band and I were very much on the same wavelength — “Feathered Fish” had been a mainstay of both my college radio show and just about every mixtape I’d made over the previous two or three years. But what impressed me even more than their choice of material was the full-contact approach they took to every song that night. Sonically, it was like standing in front of a jet engine; visually, it was as if they were hellbent on trashing somebody’s basement at a hostile keg party. Lanegan never relaxed his grip on the mic stand, constantly looking right and left like he was trying to spot where the next punch or bottle was going to be coming from. Gary Lee hurled his massive frame about the stage, rolling and somersaulting and even falling into the audience a couple of times, while the equally massive Van remained upright and spinning like a top. Up on the drum riser, Mark Pickerel looked like he was riding a perpetual motion machine — was he playing the drums, or were the drums playing him? By the time they closed with “Tales of Brave Ulysses” (we didn’t get “Orange Airplane” that night), I was completely thrilled and exhausted, and more of a Trees fan than ever.

By the time they came around again to headline Chicago’s Cubby Bear Lounge on April 19, 1991, some changes had occurred. On the downside, Pickerel was no longer in the band; on the up, they had just released their major label debut, Uncle Anesthesia, which projected Buzz Factory’s lysergic aesthetic onto a much wider screen. It’s the record that might have put them over the top if a) Epic had known how to promote it, b) they’d waited another six months to release it, thereby allowing them to catch the tailwind of Nirvana’s Nevermind, and c) if the band hadn’t been so damned determined to shoot themselves in the foot at every opportunity.

In the year and a half since their Metro performance, I had been relentlessly evangelical about the Trees, and there were at least ten people at the Cubby Bear that night who’d come specifically because of my insistence that they absolutely had to see these guys live. We would all witness an unforgettable performance, though not in the way any of us were expecting. In his memoir Sing Backwards and Weep, Lanegan actually describes the show, though his details don’t exactly jibe with my memories of it. (Nor, for that matter, do the notes on the show at Setlist.fm.) Here’s what I recall:

The band sounded great from the get-go, but Lanegan decidedly did not; it wasn’t clear as to whether he was having throat trouble, difficulty hearing himself, or both, but he was obviously fighting his way through the first few songs of the set. I had planted myself at the foot of the stage, right in front of Gary Lee, in hopes that I could scope out his guitar effects situation. (For the record, he was using a Morley Fuzz Wah, a pedal which I had never seen before that night.) But I almost immediately regretted my positioning, because Lanegan was just a few feet away and radiating some of the most virulently bad/angry vibes I had ever felt coming off a stage. I seriously thought that he might hit me if I made any eye contact with him.

Six songs into the set, Lanegan finally gave up during the first verse of “The Story of Her Fate,” and angrily stormed off the stage. The band tried to keep it going for a bit without him, first with a crowd singalong of “Yard Trip #7,” and then with a Gary Lee-sung rendition of “Too Far Away,” which might have been solid enough if he’d been able to remember most of the words. When it became clear that Lanegan was not going to reemerge, the members of opening act Das Damen were called to the stage, and the two bands joined forces for an interminable jam on The Stooges’ “I Wanna Be Your Dog.” When that dubious experiment finally clattered to an end, Van reached for the mic.

“I know what you guys really want,” he grinned. “You just want to see a couple of fat guys wrestle, don’t you?” The remaining crowd whooped with delight.

And for the next 10 or 15 minutes, the Conner brothers did just that — demonstrating various wrestling holds and techniques on each other while tossing their massive bodies around the stage and completely trashing whatever guitars, amps, drums and sound equipment had the misfortune to lie in their path. Then, once the stage was completely laid to waste, they staggered backstage together laughing hysterically.

The evening was still young, so my friends and I headed out to Clark Street to figure out our next move. “That’s the band you like so much?” an ex-girlfriend razzed me on my way to the exit. “Well, yeah,” I shrugged. And while I never bonded with subsequent Screaming Trees records with the same ardent intensity that I felt for their incredible three album run of 1988’s Invisible Lantern, Buzz Factory and Uncle Anesthesia, I never stopped liking them, either. They were just too damn good for me to ignore, even when the rest of the world chose to do just that.

Thank you, Van, for the music… and the laughs.

---