Screaming Trees Wrong Turn to Jahannam Live 1991 LP Vinyl NEW Sealed RSD 2023

$

85

Screaming Trees - Wrong Turn to Jahannam Recorded live in 1991 at Egg Studios Previously unreleased material LP Record Brand new, sealed.
2023 Screaming Trees Legacy (Sony Music Publishing) Records 2023 Record Store Day exclusive release. Limited edition, 1 of 5,000 copies White Vinyl

SIDE A
Orange Airplane
Uncle Anesthesia
Alice Said
Ivy
Caught Between
Bed Of Roses

SIDE B
Don’t Look Down
Beyond This Horizon
Change Has Come
Ocean Of Confusion
End Of The Universe

Some excerpts from a recent interview with Gary Lee Conner from Screaming Trees about this Record Store Day release of Wrong Turn to Jahannam...

Set the scene for this if you would. This was not long after Uncle Anesthesia had come out in January of 1991?

Gary Lee Conner: Yeah, 1990 was a pretty transitionary year for Screaming Trees. We’d been doing stuff for years on SST and we got signed to Epic in 1990 but our drummer Mark Pickerel quit after recording the album, which he had told us he was going to do. We didn’t have another drummer lined up. We’d toured quite a bit in fall 1990 with Social Distortion and had Sean Hollister on drums. But in 1991, when our record came out, everything was still in flux. My brother, Van, he always had money problems because he had a family, a kid. That’s why he quit the band in 1988, he needed steady money, so in 1990 he got a “job” playing bass in Dinosaur Jr.

This was right around the time Lou Barlow quit / got fired or whatever.

Right. So me and Lanegan were like “Are we just gonna keep going on with other people?” We’d lined up Donna Dresch again to play bass and gotten a friend of hers to play drums. It was weird but that was our plan. I really wanted Van to come back, though, and I think he wanted to come back — he wasn’t making that much money with Dinosaur Jr (laughs) — and that’s when I got the idea to ask Mudhoney’s Dan Peters to play drums. He had been playing with Nirvana for a while and Mudhoney were in flux as well, so he agreed to play with us. When I told Van that, he agreed to come back. So that worked out, and we were either about to tour or had just started in the spring — I can’t remember — and we went to Egg Studios to record some b-sides. While we were there, we decided to run through our set and tape it, more as a rehearsal than anything else. Conrad Uno owned the studio and was also the engineer.

So was this recording something that you’d always wanted to release or something you’d forgotten about?

It sat there for 20-some years without any of us thinking about it or remembering it existed. At some point, I don’t know how he uncovered it, but he said to me “There’s this tape from Egg Studios…” He had started this record label, Strange Earth Records, 10 years ago and put out a few other Pacific Northwest bands on it and one of my albums, Ether Trippers, in 2016. Anyway, that was going to be his big project, this live Screaming Trees album. Live in the studio, no crowd, but running through the whole set without stopping, like a real show. Strange Earth Records sorta petered out and then he died in January. After Mark died last year, we’d made plans for some releases, re-releases, and this was to be the first of those.

What shape was the recording in? You still had the original multitrack tape?

Yeah it was recorded on six tracks so everything was pretty much isolated. There was some bleed, as we were playing in the same room, and there were a couple of room mics, but the vocals were nice and clear. We could work with it but it didn’t need to be EQ’d too much to make it sound good. We had rough mixes. Jack Endino, who had produced early Screaming Trees albums, mixed and mastered it last year.

As a big Young Fresh Fellows fan I know of Conrad Uno and Egg Studios but, where did it fit within the Seattle scene at the time? How big was it?

I think it was up by University of Washington but it was in the basement of his house, just a residential house. It was on a hill, so the basement was basically underground. I don’t think it sounded very loud from the outside, but bands didn’t record that much at night. My memory is fuzzy. There was a pink door that said “EGG STUDIO” on it. It was not very big. We did a few other sessions there besides this one, two or three times, maybe demos, b-sides. It was unusual. There were a few like that in Seattle, actually.

What do you remember most about this session?

How small it was. Not that we weren’t used to playing in small, dark places. We must’ve been in a pretty good mood for Mark to suggest we record a set. (Laughs) Usually he wanted to get the heck out of there as fast as he could. We had a good time that day. You can hear on the recording that we played it like an actual live show from the early days. In the ’80s, even if we were playing to two people, we tried to make it as energetic a set as possible. At Egg, we were doing it for ourselves. The guitar wasn’t always in tune but the energy was there. It was completely raw.

And you weren’t thinking “Hey let’s release this at some point”…

Not at all. We totally forgot about it. Who knows how much stuff, recorded by us or others, are forgotten, lost forever.

Do you have a favorite song from this?

“Orange Airplane,” which opens the album and set. Dan is just amazing on that one, he just kicked it over the top. It was also the first song on our first album [1986’s Clairvoyance] and it shows how much the live shows and energy over the years shaped it. I’m not sure how much we played it the year before with Pickerel on drums but we played it a lot on the spring 1991 tour. I think this album is indicative of the sets we played then.

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