Just to set the scene, for those not in the know, Mark Lanegan was the lead singer of the band Screaming Trees, usually grouped under the grunge banner as they were a rock band based in Seattle in the early 1990s. He later had an extensive solo career and was a prolific collaborator in a variety of styles. But hey, that stuff is literally what the book is about, along with a bunch of other non-music-related stuff.
Lanegan was born in 1964 in Ellensburg, smack in the middle of Washington state. "Smack" is appropriate here too (and later, too, as it happens, in a different context) because his upbringing was harsh, his mother in particular favouring the spare-the-rod approach to child-rearing. As a consequence the young Lanegan jumped at the opportunity to go and live with his father after their marriage ended, but certain habits had become ingrained by this time, or perhaps were just hard-wired regardless of circumstances - a general distaste for being told what to do, an instinct for petty theft, an early drink habit (mirroring his father's) and a general misanthropy, and mistrust of other people.
Ellensburg was not the most promising place for a bright but wild and directionless teenager and the young Lanegan built up an impressive rap sheet of petty crime, mostly fuelled by drink and drugs. Salvation of a sort arrived in the larger-than-life figure of Van Conner, whose parents ran a TV/VCR store and gave Lanegan a job. Van and his older brother Lee had a band in which Van played the bass and Lee played the guitar and wrote most of the material; Lanegan was soon on board, initially as drummer, and, later, once his minimal drumming skills had become apparent, as lead singer.
Screaming Trees signed to SST Records in the late 1980s and released a few albums to fairly lukewarm interest, before being signed to Epic at the start of the grunge boom and releasing their major-label debut Uncle Anaesthesia; everything up to and including Uncle Anaesthesia is now disowned by Lanegan, who only started making music he felt comfortable with when he insisted on being involved in the songwriting process and constructing songs that suited his vocal range. So in his mind Screaming Trees' legacy rests on their last two albums, 1993's Sweet Oblivion and 1996's Dust. And in this he is almost certainly correct. During this time he was constructing a body of solo work as well, starting with 1990's The Winding Sheet.
One of his collaborators on that album was a young Kurt Cobain, and the other thing that both Lanegan and Cobain were both doing around this time was really getting into heroin in a big way. By the time of Dust Cobain, like many of Lanegan's friends, was dead and Lanegan was a full-time junkie, cooking up crack in his squalid apartment, scouring the streets for heroin, getting arrested and beaten up on a regular basis. After enduring an utterly miserable time on Screaming Trees' late-1996 European tour in support of Dust, schlepping from city to city desperately trying to score enough gear to be able to function for the next show, more and more haggard and emaciated, Lanegan returned to the USA and eventually accepted an offer of a place in a rehab centre courtesy of, of all people, Courtney Love. The book ends with his lengthy stint in rehab and an offer of work and accommodation on his release from - again, slightly bizarrely - Duff McKagan of Guns'n'Roses.
The overwhelming sense you get from the sections of Sing Backwards And Weep devoted to unsparing descriptions of the business of heroin addiction (and a lot of the second half of the book is devoted to it) is how utterly, grindingly miserable it all is. I've never dabbled, but by jiminy the highs must be pretty amazing for people to endure the downsides. Those more well-versed in the nature of addiction than me would no doubt say, well, that's the whole point, isn't it; it doesn't start like that, but once you're in you can't get out, and I expect they're right. The other thing that comes across is what an ox-like constitution Lanegan must have had to survive what he subjected himself to, still less be able to function as a rock singer, even if only intermittently, but simultaneously how extraordinarily lucky he was to survive when so many of his friends - Cobain, Jeffrey Lee Pierce of The Gun Club, Layne Staley of Alice In Chains, Kristen Pfaff of Hole - did not.
The book, despite being published in 2020, ends around the turn of the millennium when Lanegan was completing the process of getting clean, and therefore omits some of the really interesting bits of the second, post-Trees, half of his career, including his stint with Queens Of The Stone Age and his early-2000s albums Field Songs and Bubblegum which are my favourites of his solo work. Perhaps a second volume covering that period was intended, but what we got instead was a brief memoir of Lanegan's brush with death during the COVID-19 pandemic, Devil In A Coma, before his actual death at the age of 57 in 2022.
It's quite interesting, having read the book, to revisit some of the video material available in the light of knowledge of when Lanegan was clean, or not: for instance compare the fit-looking, animated (by his own laconic standards anyway) Lanegan from this interview with Josh Homme in 2001 with the cadaverous, unshaven, black-eyed, emaciated junkie who you can almost smell through the screen from Screaming Trees' appearance on Later With Jools Holland in 1996.
Anyway, the book is excellent, if unsparing and harrowing. The whole point, though, as interesting as the details of Lanegan's life are, is the music, and there is an exceptionally wide and varied body of work to get into, Lanegan's raspy baritone being just about the only common factor. Sweet Oblivion and Dust are essential, obviously, and the Last Words compilation of stuff that would have gone onto a subsequent Trees album had they been able to find a label to release it is quite interesting. Field Songs and Bubblegum are my favourites from his solo material (though I certainly haven't heard all of it), though some of the more electronic/industrial stuff on the later albums like Blues Funeral is interesting too. The collaborative stuff is too varied to do justice to here: I quite liked the first album he did with Isobel Campbell, but one was probably enough (they eventually did three) and I very much liked the Black Pudding album he did with guitarist Duke Garwood. I haven't listened in full to the pair of albums he did with Soulsavers, but the two cover versions I have heard off the second album (Broken) - Gene Clark's Some Misunderstanding and Will Oldham's You Will Miss Me When I Burn - are excellent.
No comments:
Post a Comment