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In the 1980s, the only thing in America worse than its politics was its radio. Having emerged from the horrifying disco years, commercial radio settled on bloat rather than redemption, playing nothing but oldies, heavy metal and bubble-gum reprise acts like New Kids on the Block . The present time excepted,
While Top-40 radio was playing Poison , Whitesnake
Demand for DIY recordings was considerable—testament to the degree to which American kids were turned off by the culture that claimed to have nurtured them. Eventually, I would track down my favorite of the grunge bands, Screaming Trees , and see from its experience how considerable that demand was, and what a powerful alternative it offered aspiring serious musicians in the 1980s.
The four original Trees (the band would change drummers in 1991) grew up in Ellensburg , 90 minutes east of Seattle, on the other side of the Cascade Mountains , playing and listening voraciously to music from early grade-school on. Their high-school years consisted largely of “always, like, driving somewhere to buy records all the time,” in bass guitarist/songwriter Van Conner ’s words, and fooling around with the idea of forming a band. When the youngest members—Conner and lead singer/songwriter Mark Lanegan —were high-school juniors, they contacted a local record producer, Steve Fisk , who had founded a studio, named Velvetone , after graduating from college in Ellensburg . After Fisk heard the Screaming Trees play once, he asked if he could make a recording of their music.
This proposition was greeted with some surprise by the band. “We never realized we could just put something out ourselves,” Conner told me later. “But then we started finding out about cassettes, how people would just put them out and distribute them themselves, and we had a couple hundred bucks, so we went in and recorded five or six songs, called it ‘ Other Worlds ,’ and put it out.” After making that cassette, the band borrowed money from friends and parents and made a vinyl record entitled Clairvoyance . It promptly sold 2,500 copies, which struck both Fisk —who originally pressed only 1,000 discs—and the band members as astounding. Fisk put together a west coast “tour” in which the band members traveled by van to a succession of clubs, dives, and college-kid apartments along the west coast, culminating in a series of performances in Los Angeles , where they were heard by an SST Records executive who offered them a recording contract.
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