At last weekend's celebration for the grand opening of the Experience Music Project in Seattle, the Screaming Trees, one of the signal bands of the Seattle grunge movement, played what appears to be their final concert.
And it was,
according to Sonicnet, a fairly rote performance. The band--singer Mark Lanegan, guitarist Gary Lee Conner, bassist Van Conner and drummer Barrett Martin--was "notably dispassionate, not communicating with each other or the lively crowd."
The lackluster nature of the performance can be chalked up to the fact that the Trees had broken up several months ago: this show took place only because of the significant sum offered to the band by the Experience Music Project. "This is the last show we're ever playing," said Lanegan during the show. "We've only played five shows in the last three years. We're not really a band. A couple of the guys have families, a couple of the guys are doing other things."
Statements by the Conner brothers did not echo the finality of Lanegan's statement. "We never broke up," Gary Lee Conner said. "Yeah, we never officially said, 'We're not doing this anymore,'" Van Conner said. "We were all just doing our own stuff." And in fact, the Trees had often broken up in one fashion or another many times since the band's 1983 inception.
Brian Klein, the Trees manager, was also a bit more rosy regarding the band's future "It doesn't look like it's an active band at the moment, but you never know," Klein said, exhibiting an optimism useful to rock managers. He says that the first new song in four years, "One Way Conversation," by the band will be released as a free download at musicblitz.com.
That a new song even exists indicates that the Trees had been working on new material, and had been shopping demos around to various labels earlier this year. "It's going to take a certain amount of time and money to put together a great record," Klein said. "We just didn't have the resources."
Complicating matters is the fact that the band is no longer geographically centralized: Van Conner lives in Seattle, Gary Lee Conner lives in New York, Lanegan lives in Los Angeles, and Martin, splits his time between Los Angeles and Seattle. Lanegan has released several solo albums, the latest of which was entitled I'll Take Care of You, and is working on another. Martin has often recorded and toured with R.E.M., as well as Peter Buck's sideband Tuatara. Gary Lee Conner has been in school, and Van Conner has been active in producing Seattle bands.
Whatever their status, the Screaming Trees have been one of the most highly regarded Seattle acts ever since the release of Clairvoyance on the Sub Pop label in 1986. In 1992, the Trees released Sweet Oblivion, which featured the band's best known song "Nearly Lost You," for Epic. The next Trees album, and perhaps their last, was 1996's Dust.
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