Keep even the most cursory eye out and the name Barrett Martin is bound to appear somewhere in the liner notes to albums from countless artists across dozens of genres spanning three decades. Best known as the drummer in Screaming Trees and the grunge era supergroup Mad Season, the Seattle multi-instrumentalist has played on recordings by everyone from R.E.M. to Victoria Williams to Delta blues legend CeDell Davis to Queens of the Stone Age.
It’s a list that’s mind-boggling in length and one that makes the average person wonder just how much can be packed into a single lifetime. Add in how Martin has immersed himself into cultures around the world to study their native music as an ethnomusicologist, produced several acts and written a handful of books, and it’s no wonder he drew a packed house to his one man show at Boston’s City Winery over Thanksgiving weekend. Oh, and it needs to be mentioned that despite the show having a noon start on a Sunday, it still saw healthy, raucous audience participation and scads of laughter.
“I drank a lot of coffee – I was ready to go,” Martin says, noting that he was coming off a seven-and-a-half-hour drive from Baltimore, blasting The Cult’s Electric album for fuel. “But we have a saying in the studio world, nothing good happens before 12 noon.”
The tour, which wraps up Sunday (December 10) in Denver, is dubbed Singing Earth and sees Martin playing music, showing films and telling stories from his time often at the epicenter of popular music from the ‘90s through present day. He’s also just released a new book about his time in Screaming Trees, with a title that would make Fiona Apple jealous. The Greatest Band That Ever Wasn’t: The Story of the Roughest, Toughest, Most Hell-Raising Band to Ever Come Out of the Pacific Northwest, The Screaming Trees can be viewed as sort of a companion tome to Sing Backwards and Weep: A Memoir by his Trees and Mad Season bandmate, the late Mark Lanegan.
A few days after the Boston show, Vanyaland sat down with Martin for the lengthiest 617 Q&A (Six Questions; One Recommendation; Seven Somethings) to date. Whether it’s sailing up to Alaska with the Green Berets, pondering the heartbreaking losses of friends and musical comrades like Lanegan, Layne Staley, and Van Conner, or waxing on how he almost became a member of R.E.M., he’s a veritable fountain of adventure, information and expertise that spills forth effortlessly.
:: SIX QUESTIONS
Michael Christopher: I don’t think I’ve ever spoken with someone as deeply woven into the fabric of so many kinds of music, if not across the last 30 years, then at the very least in my own personal record collection. What does it take for you to say “yes” to a project?
Barrett Martin: You say yes to everything, and you can’t always do everything, but if you say “yes,” an opportunity presents itself and you have more options to choose from. So, I’ve kind of been saying “yes” for a long time and, I mean for me, I’m obviously interested in anything involving music. But for example, I was invited to be on this sailing team of their Green Berets, U.S. Army Special Forces, and I’m friends with one of the guys, Jason Everman. He used to play in Nirvana – and Soundgarden; he’s the only guy that played in both bands, and after all that, he joined the Army and became a member of the Special Forces, and he invited me to be on the sailing team.
I had a bit of sailing experience, and we ended up doing this incredible race to Alaska. It was about a thousand-mile race where you can only sail or row and you can’t have an engine in the boat. You have to actually take the engine out of your sailboat before they inspect you for the race. And we thought it might take a week or 10 days, and it ended up taking a month. But yet we had this incredible experience and we went to the OrcaLab, which is on an island in Northern British Columbia, way north of Vancouver Island, and you can hear the songs of the whales that they’ve been recording for the last 50 years. We ended up having this amazing adventure, and we saw a lot of whales when we were sailing and when we were out in the Pacific, we could hear them echoing in the hull of the boat. You could hear the humpback whales, those big deep sounds, they echo in the hull of the sailboat.
So, I said yes to the sailing adventure, and it ended up being so cool, and I was filming a lot of it with my handheld camera. We were making it into an episode for my music show because it’s an adventure about the environment, but it’s also about music coming from the earth, and the show is called Singing Earth.
That’s just one example. I just said, “Yes, let’s do it.” I had no idea how much time and work it would entail because we also had to prepare the boat before we even did the trip, which Jason and I did most of that, just the two of us. And so saying yes to that created all of this other opportunity and just magical experience that I wouldn’t have even anticipated if I had said, “I’m kind of busy. I don’t know if I can really do that.” I made the time to do it, and it ended up being this incredible adventure. So as long as it sounds interesting and original and maybe an insight into something I haven’t experienced, then I’ll probably say “yes.”
And what you’re doing now is the one man show, the Singing Earth Tour, which is sort of a precursor to your upcoming Singing Earth with Barrett Martin Vevo series. What can you tell me about that?
I’ve had this ongoing deal with Sony Music for my record label, and now for this music series, which will go through the Vevo network. You can watch it on your big screen TV, or you can watch it on your phone. Season one goes up in February. It’s already filmed, and the final editing is being done right now. It’s six episodes.
The first episode we kind of did North and South America, so we start in the Peruvian Amazon with the Shipibo Shamans. Then we go to Brazil. And in the Brazil episode, Peter Buck came with me from R.E.M. We worked with a renowned singer/songwriter named Nando Reis and recorded in the studio with him. Then we went to Rio de Janeiro and worked with a really talented female singer named Silvia Machete. And Peter wrote an original song with her, and we filmed that, and I got to interview Gilberto Gil, the great legendary, probably the most famous living musician in Brazil, and just an incredible interview with him. Then we go to the Mississippi Delta, and it’s a lot of older footage, because I’ve been there many times over the last 20 years.
So, it’s footage from Mississippi and Seattle with CeDell Davis, the last living blues singer. And I had him in the studio in Seattle with Mike McCready [Pearl Jam, Mad Season] and Duff McKagan [Guns N’ Roses] and Peter Buck and all these incredible Seattle rock and jazz musicians. And we filmed everything. So, it’s all these studio sessions, and then I interview all the Seattle musicians about, I mean, it’s a little bit about Seattle history, but it’s more about what they’re doing in the contemporary. So, Matt Cameron [Pearl Jam, Soundgarden] and Kim Thayil [Soundgarden] and Jason Everman and a few other people are interviewed for the Seattle episode. Then we have the sailboat trip [to Alaska].
***
And these are just 10-minute episodes because that’s the time limit for longform video. But you can tell a lot. You can tell a good story and give people a lot of music in 10 minutes. It also is great because you maybe can’t get somebody to watch a half hour or hour-long episode, but you can get people to watch 10 minutes of something really good, really powerful content, and you can tell that story in 10 minutes. It’s not only a teaching tool, but it’s really entertaining when you see all of this stuff happen in a 10-minute block. It’s pretty great.
Why did you decide now was the time to focus on Screaming Trees in The Greatest Band That Ever Wasn’t?
I have been working on those stories since about 2015 when I was writing my first book, The Singing Earth, which is kind of the template for the TV show. But I had three chapters that were about the Seattle music scene; Skin Yard, The Screaming Trees, and Mad Season. But I wrote more stories about Screaming Trees because I was in that band – not just the 10 years that we were a band – but there was another 10 years where we were doing catalog stuff and releasing unreleased material. It was kind of 20 years of life connected to The Screaming Trees. And I’d written all these stories, but just kind of had ’em saved on a hard drive because I couldn’t put that many in a book that was about music around the world. I had to keep it condensed.
Then when Mark was writing his memoir, he would call me from time to time to ask me what I remembered. And we laughed our asses off at what we could remember and what we couldn’t remember, and who remembered what in what context. And so, he wrote his book, but he also said, “Dude, you should write the comedic story,” because that’s kind of more my personality anyway. Then when Van [Conner, Trees bassist] passed away, I was like, “You know what? I got to just get this thing done.” I had several stories already started, and some of them, I posted short versions of them after Mark passed away.
I want people to really understand that this was a great band of incredible talent, and we did have our own self-destructive individually and collectively, we made some bad decisions and kind of torpedoed the boat, so to speak. But there’s also a lot of beautiful wisdom that came from all of that. I wanted to show how talented each guy in the band was, and really some of the funny things that, I mean, really, some of it is I think hilariously funny, but also, what the fuck? How could that possibly happen? Well, if you do this, this and this, that will happen, which is kind of what Mark said too in his own way. So, I would say mine is the comedic companion to Mark’s book – if you want to frame it like that – a more lighthearted approach to the band also, because when Mark and I talked about this, I said, “My experience with the Trees, I was young, and it was just kind of this fun, kind of a joyride.” And yes, there was some gnarly stuff that happened, but I don’t really have a bad memory of it. It’s really different. My experience is different. But Mark was battling addiction most of the time. So, his experiences [were] from that perspective.
Did part of you feel like with the passing of Van and Mark that the story had reached its ultimate conclusion? Like, there can never be a Screaming Trees reunion. There can’t be another record or a tour.
I mean, that wasn’t a plot point for me. But I suppose, yes, with the death of Mark and Van, I mean, you couldn’t do [a reunion] anyway. But to answer the question, it wasn’t something I was thinking about. It was just more like I kind of wanted to get those stories out while I’m still alive, while Lee’s (Conner, Screaming Trees guitarist) still alive because Lee manages the estate essentially, or the legacy of the band.
***
How close did a Screaming Trees reunion actually come to happening, either when you were putting out the 2011 set Last Words: The Final Recordings or a few years later?
Well, we didn’t want to do a reunion tour in 2011, also because one of Mark’s solo records came out right after that. We had to time the release of the Screaming Trees album to be, like, six months before Mark’s solo album came out. So, there was no talk of us doing a reunion tour. We were just putting the album out and that’s it. And then the 2016 tour, I mean, I wrote a whole chapter about it. Our booking agent had booked or had holds on all these festivals in Europe in the United States for a couple of months in the summer of 2016. It would’ve been a two or three-month kind of “do the festival circuit,” but it was never finalized. It kind of came down to literally the day we have to say yes or no. And Mark was like, “You know what? I don’t want to do it.” And it was a let down because it was Mark’s idea, because the offers had been coming to his booking agent. Mark called me to say, “Hey, we just got offered a hundred thousand dollars to play for one hour, should we consider this?” And I was like, “That’s pretty good. That’s about 10 times more than we ever made.” And then when the booking agent put the word out that we were considering offers, we got a whole bunch of offers from festivals all over the world. It could have been a very lucrative and pretty big tour, but ultimately, in the light of history, I think it’s kind of cool. We didn’t do it. Everybody else has done the legacy reunion tour and we didn’t, which is par for the course for the Screaming Trees to do the exact opposite.
Is it disappointing that Mad Season didn’t go as far as it could as a group? Because there was talk of tour dates outside of Seattle and playing Saturday Night Live. And of course, you had worked up demos for a full second record and then some. It had to be frustrating knowing that you had such an amazing connection and a great debut album to begin with, and then it kind of stopped there.
Well, yes to all of the above, but I don’t have any regrets about that band because, to put it in context, when we made the album, we knew that it was a side project, and we had a limited amount of time to do it because there were tours that our regular bands were going to be going back on tour. Pearl Jam and Alice in Chains had stuff lined up. And I think The Screaming Trees, we were getting ready to record the Dust album. We knew that [Mad Season] could only really do the album, and even just playing a handful of shows in Seattle was a lot for us to be able to do. And I do remember that there were offers, [to] do the TV shows and we could have gone out and probably done any tour and played almost any venue we wanted to.
It was just that our lives were so busy that that was all we could do. I do wish that we could have finished that second album because we tracked about, it was like 17 or 18 basic tracks that were really good, but Layne and Mark just never came down to sing on ’em because they fell back into their addictions. And so it was… just couldn’t get ’em to come do the songs. And it wasn’t until we did the box set in 2013 that Mark finished three of those songs, which are the bonus tracks. Those were songs recorded during that second album session.
So, what happens with the other 14 tracks that were recorded?
I mean, they’re just in the vault. I think they’re at the Pearl Jam headquarters because kind of where we keep all of our master tapes. So, they’re just on two inch tape in the vault.
Do you think they’ll ever see the light of day?
I don’t think so. I mean, to be honest with you, they’re not that interesting to listen to just when you just hear drums, bass and guitar and some whatever overdubs we did, it’s not the same as when they’re finished with lyrics and vocals and everything is perfected. I think when you have finished songs that are outtakes… I think that’s kind of cool to release that so that people can hear that, but I don’t think there’s anything really interesting. And artistically, I don’t feel anything by releasing a rhythm track of a song that was never finished. It’s just not really that good and think it deflates the balloon a little bit.
***
Those are the two bands you’re most closely associated with, Screaming Trees and Mad Season, and they can never be again. There’s more members who have passed away than who are still alive. Does that loss ever strike you on a different, more emotional level?
Totally. Because Matt Season did that one reunion concert in 2015, and we had Duff McKagan play bass, and I invited Mark to do that concert, but he was going to Australia to do his own stuff, so he couldn’t do it. But we got all these other singers, and one of ’em was Chris Cornell. He sang three of those Mad Season songs, and we also had the Seattle Symphony backing us up. So not only did we lose Layne and Baker (Saunders, Mad Season bassist) and Mark and Chris Cornell, but all the other people from Seattle. Ben, the singer from Skin Yard, passed away. I mean, that was many years ago now, but every band I was in lost somebody. And it was either because of drugs or ill health that could have been attributed to long-term drug use. I mean, in some cases, you don’t really know.
It’s just the person… just their body just gave out. It was their time to go. I don’t have lamentations about it, and I don’t stew and fret about it, but it makes me sad that those guys aren’t still around because I wonder what kind of music they would’ve created as they got older and became wiser and more evolved in their musical ideas. What might they have created? I mean, when we can say that about everybody that came out of Seattle, Kurt Cobain, of course, and all the other lesser known, but also equally talented peoples, that all happened to be in the Pacific Northwest at that time. And it’s somewhat of an impossible situation. It’s just like they’re not here anymore, but we are. So, we just keep going with what we have
:: ONE RECOMMENDATION
Barrett Martin: An incredible artist from Cuba, his name is Héctor Téllez Jr. His father was also a famous Cuban singer, and he’s the senior. His son, I think he’s about 30 years old, I produced his album in Nashville. This kid is so talented, I couldn’t even believe it. He’s an incredible singer, beautiful voice, sometimes even sounds like Jeff Buckley a little bit, but not exactly, but touches of that, a shredding guitar player and an amazing songwriter. I produced the whole thing and I played drums, and I got Krist Novoselic from Nirvana to play bass on it because he just was the perfect bass player for these songs. And Peter Buck actually plays on about half the album doing acoustic guitar and mandolin and sometimes electric guitar, kind of a little bit of everything. Some of the songs are in Spanish, some are in English. But it is just a really good album, and not because I produced it, but because the guy’s an incredible talent and really, really great songwriter. It’s his debut album. It took him 30 years to get out of Cuba and make this thing. The album is called The Great Unknown and you’ll love it. That’s all I can say.
***
:: SEVEN OF SOMETHING
I’m going to name seven artists you’ve worked with through the years and want you to give me an anecdote or a particular memory you have of your time in the studio with them.
Let’s start with a band that isn’t technically from Boston but is Boston adjacent in Luna. You played on a couple of tracks on their fourth album, Pup Tent.
I love Luna. I love the way Dean (Wareham) and Sean (Eden) blended their guitars and created those beautiful tapestries. I mean, just a great band when they opened for The Screaming Trees on our first big U.S. tour for Sweet Oblivion in ‘92. So that’s how we met them. I was playing a lot of marimba and vibraphone, they invited me to play on, I think I played on two songs on that album. But I loved all of their songs. I mean, I thought they were fantastic, and I saw them play multiple times where I just went as a fan and just stood in the audience to see them when they’d play in Seattle. Dean’s a really great songwriter, beautiful lyricist and, because of that relationship, I got to start the Tuatara band with Justin, their [former] bass player.
You’ve mentioned Peter Buck a few times, and I just got the new vinyl pressing of Up, which I think is so overlooked. Tell me about working with R.E.M.
I started playing with R.E.M. when Bill [Berry] was still in the band. I played percussion on New Adventures in Hi-Fi. Then we did demos for the Up album, and I was playing upright bass and vibes and marimba and all kinds of percussion with Bill playing drums. And so, I thought, “Oh, this can be cool. I’ll be the percussionist and Bill’s going to be the drummer, and that’s going to be this new configuration of R.E.M.”
But then Bill decided to quit the band right after we made those demos. And so, it fell on me and Joey Waronker to kind of fill in playing some drums with drum machines, and the band decided to really change their sound. And it really happened in that process where suddenly we don’t have Bill, but we have all these drum machines and those guys are programming them. And sometimes I would play drums to the drum machine, and sometimes Joey would, and then Mike Mills would be like, “Why don’t you play bass on this?” He’s playing piano. And so, I played bass, and I really loved playing vibes and marimba and all that stuff because it just put this shimmer on things. So that was my role in Up, as a multi-instrumentalist, percussionist, occasional drummer, just kind of helping to supplement and make the songs as beautiful as they could be. It may not be their most commercially successful record, but it is a beautiful record.
Walking Papers. I think one of the most underrated acts to come out of Seattle with Jeff Angell, who is just a fantastic singer.
Well, I saw Jeff play in Missionary Position, the band before Walking Papers. And I thought, “Man, this guy’s a great songwriter. I would love to work with him.” And so, I approached him and I said, “Hey, man, if you ever want to do something, even just write a song together or whatever. I love the way you write.” He’s a beautiful lyricist, really, really great songwriter. And so it turned into Walking Papers, which was originally just me and him.
We played club shows in Seattle where it was just him playing guitar and singing and me playing drums. We didn’t have any other musicians with us. And then we decided to record them and make an album. And at that point, we invited Duff McKagan and Ben (Anderson). And we made those two records… and they’re really great records. I’m really proud of ’em. And we toured pretty relentlessly, but to be honest, we just could not get that band up to a level that could sustain it. And I was just getting physically exhausted, and so was Duff, and we’re not young guns anymore, and we’re still in good, I mean, I’m in good shape. I take care of my health, but I couldn’t tour like that just relentlessly on the road. And Duff also had the opportunity to go back to play in Guns N’ Roses, and I was like, “Dude, you totally have to do that. You can’t say no to that.” I told Jeff and Ben, I said, “Listen, I love playing with you guys, but I’m tired. I kind of want to do this other stuff.”
Stone Temple Pilots, you worked the No. 4 record.
They wanted me to do a marimba solo on that final song, “Atlanta,” which I mean, that kind of is my favorite Stone Temple Pilots song – it’s a gorgeous song, and I just happened to play on it, which isn’t why it’s my favorite song. It’s just a beautiful song. And Brendan O’Brien was a producer, and I brought this whole bag of percussion with me, and he was like, “I kind of changed my mind. I don’t think we really need any more hand percussion, but can you play a marimba solo on the tail of this song?” And the DeLeo brothers were in the room. Scott [Weiland] wasn’t there. I was like, “You mean just solo solo or, and they’re like, “Yeah, just play.” I think I did two or three passes of just playing a solo. And then they were like, “That is perfect.” And I don’t even know which solo they picked. It could have been the first one. It might’ve been the last one. I’m not really sure. But they absolutely loved it. And then it is the end of the album, so it’s a really cool way to take the album.
Queens of the Stone Age, you played on their breakthrough album, Rated R, and did that distinctive vibraphone on “The Lost Art of Keeping a Secret.”
That’s right. And actually, I played drums on the early demos that Josh [Homme] wrote. The Queens have a totally unique sound that nobody sounds like that, except everybody tries to copy it now. And so he called me to come back in when they did the second album, and he was like, “Listen, I’ve got a drummer, and all the basic tracks are done, but I want you to just bring all that cool, crazy sounding percussion, the vibes and just whatever.” So, I brought vibes, steel, drums, gamelans – basically all this stuff made out of metal and a bunch of shakers and some hand drums and stuff like that.
And yeah, it was really fun. It was about three days in the studio that I got to just do percussion. And one of those days was when Rob Halford, because he was making a solo record in the studio in the same complex, and he came over and did the backing vocals for “Feel Good Hit of the Summer.” And so we stopped doing percussion for an afternoon while they did those backup vocals. And it was really awesome to just sit there and watch Rob Halford do the backing vocals on that song.
Therapy?
Are they British or Welsh? I haven’t seen them or talked to them in years, but yeah, they’re a heavy… oh, they’re Irish. Okay. Well, forgive me. I knew it was leaning into the Celtic. Okay, so they were Irish and yeah, super heavy. They were in Seattle and Jack Endino was producing and because they knew that me and Jack were friends, they probably said, “Can he come down and play percussion?” So, I remember, I can’t remember exactly what I played, but I remember, I think I played one of my giant gongs. That seems to stand out in my memory.
Finally, one of my favorites, you worked on The Twilight Singers self-titled debut which, at the time, was Greg Dulli’s Afghan Whigs side project.
Oh, yeah. I love Greg. That was when Greg was living in Seattle, and he had set up a recording studio at his house, and he had a schedule of… he liked to record just at night, all night. I would go and he kind of had the songs mapped out. I do remember I played sitar on a song, like an actual acoustic sitar, and I have absolutely no training in sitar, except I studied a little bit of Indian music and I could play tablas, but I figured out how to tune it and how I could do kind of these cool drones with it – I just self-taught myself. And so I played sitar and a lot of percussion on that record because again, I think the drum tracks were already done. He kind of had the basic tracks in shape before I showed up. But I would just go over to his house at midnight and he’d be just getting started, and I’d bring over whatever instruments I had, and we would just set up and record in his living room. And Greg is another immensely talented songwriter; he just writes all the time.
BARRETT MARTIN’S SINGING EARTH TOUR :: Through December 10 :: BARRETTMARTIN.COM
