Screaming Trees “Sweet Oblivion” 1992. A “spin” in honor of Screaming Trees vocalist Mark Lanegan who died yesterday (b. 1964, d. 2022). Sweet Oblivion, the band’s 6th LP, is one of my most-played albums of the early 90’s and I have a huge emotional attachment to it (I only have it on CD because I wasn’t buying vinyl back then).

(A reminder here that this music blog is “subjective and autobiographical”) I love Sweet Oblivion from start to finish and listened to it non-stop during the spring of 1993 when I was in my last semester of college at UW-Madison. I saw them perform at the Barrymore Theater in Madison that May and it was an epic evening, one of those nights that is unforgettable almost 30 years later. My roommate, Amy, invited 5 guys that I didn’t know (and she may have been dating one, or possibly two, of them – haha, this was not out of character for her) to go out with us prior to the concert. We headed to the Crystal Corner bar to shoot some pool and have some drinks. I am not a great pool player at all but I enjoy playing and sometimes do alright. That night everything was perfect: I had consumed the magic 1-1/2 beers that makes everything golden and on my first turn at the cue shot 5 balls in a row into their pockets. The dudes could. not. believe it, jokingly accused me of being a shark, and I wasn’t about to tell them that I usually was mediocre at best. Anyway, I think they bought me a few drinks before we headed to the show – and it was one of the wildest, loudest concerts I attended that year for sure and ranks up there in the “of all-time” list. We were really close to the stage, standing right in front of the first row of seats. The crowd was a mass of surging sweaty bodies and we were repeatedly pushed and swayed while we danced. I didn’t realize it til the next day but I was pressed so hard and so often into those seats that I had a four inch tall, six inch wide strip of black and blue bruises across the back of my thighs that were there for weeks. Didn’t regret a second of it.

Back to Sweet Oblivion: it was Screaming Trees’ best-selling album, hitting #4 on the “Heatseeker” album chart and going to #141 on the Billboard album chart. I have no objectivity to this record whatsoever and love every single track. That said, the ones that hit closest to my heart include the single “Nearly Lost You” which went to #5 on the US alternative chart and to #50 in the UK (it was also on the Singles soundtrack), the nearly perfect “Butterfly,” the opener “Shadow of the Season,” “For Celebrations Past” and the crashing grungy album closer “Julie Paradise.”