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120 REASONS TO LIVE

120 Reasons To Live: Screaming Trees

Nothing did more to further the cause of Alternative Nation-building than 120 Minutes, MTV’s Sunday-night video showcase of non-mainstream acts. For nearly two decades, the program spanned musical eras from ’80s college rock to ’00s indie, with grunge, Britpop, punk, industrial, electronica and more in between. MAGNET raids the vaults to resurrect our 120 favorite and unjustly forgotten videos from the show’s classic era.

#51: Screaming Trees “Nearly Lost You”

At various points over the last 18 years, MAGNET has said just about all there is to say about Mark Lanegan and Screaming Trees, and most of the essential details can be read here. More germane to a discussion of 1992’s “Nearly Lost You” video is how well it capitalized—intentionally or not—on the rock ‘n’ roll world’s growing fascination with the Pacific Northwest scene. Screaming Trees represented core grunge values such as outsiderdom and loserdom better than any of their contemporaries—even Mudhoney, with their drunken Monkees shtick. Lanegan and Co. weren’t from Seattle but rather Ellensburg, Wash. (that’s the Ellensburg Rodeo in the video); the band featured actual fat people (brothers Gary Lee and Van Conner, appearing here in a video at a time when MTV generally did not acknowledge the existence of fat people); and maybe the construction vehicles and logging over-convey “blue collar,” but it all made sense somehow. Nirvana’s “Smell Like Teen Spirit” video showed the band playing to a moshing gym full of high-school students, and Screaming Trees’ “Nearly Lost You” has them performing to an empty rodeo in the middle of nowhere. Seems about right.