By Van’s admission, it opened him up to music completely.īy contrast, Mark Lanegan was a high-school quarterback who fancied himself as a future sports star, even if his background suggested otherwise: by the time he was 18 he had been arrested several times for various misdemeanours, including public drunkenness, shoplifting and – prophetically – drug possession (the last time he was arrested, he dodged jail only by agreeing to spend a year in a treatment program). It was like nothing else they’d ever heard. On a shopping trip in 1981, while still in high school, they picked up a copy of Black Flag’s pummelling Damage. The young Conner brothers spent every spare cent they had on records. Today, Van Conner remembers the town as a refuge for under-achievers for Lanegan it was a place where if you weren’t working a shitty job, then you were drinking or listening to music. A small logging town 107 miles east of Seattle, it was home to Gary Lee Conner and his younger brother Van, as well as Mark Lanegan. Things were quiet in Ellensburg, Washington in the late 70s and early 80s. “We didn’t have a damn thing in common except insanity,” Mark Lanegan said later. That they never made it was down to any number of things: drink, drugs, in-fighting, image, bad timing or bad luck.
Between 1985 and their split in 2000 they released seven albums, at least two of which should have made them as big as their more celebrated Seattle peers. The Letterman appearance encapsulates the Screaming Trees’ proven ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Van Conner having a slightly quieter time of it in New Jersey in 1993 (Image credit: Getty Images)
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