Towards the end of Mark Lanegan’s engrossing memoir is a series of scenes in which he shares space with Liam Gallagher, the singer of British rock act Oasis. It is September 1996 and Lanegan’s band, Screaming Trees, is supporting Oasis on an arena tour of the US east coast.
Oasis’s star is on the ascent while the Trees are on a slow descent into obscurity, and Gallagher’s very first interaction with his American counterpart is to take the piss out of Lanegan’s band name by spitting “howling branches?!” in his face while backed by two huge, hired goons.
By this point in the book, 260-odd pages deep, we know enough about the narrator to recognise the extraordinary mistake that Gallagher has made in provoking Lanegan, who earlier had detailed his innate ability to keep people at arm’s length — and to keep the seat next to him open on a crowded, standing-room-only city bus — by mastering a dark, dead-eyed visage that once had earned him the nickname “Shark”.
“It would take more than one blowhard singer to intimidate the Trees,” writes Lanegan. “I was a veteran of violence foreign and domestic, onstage, backstage, rural countryside, big city, barroom, parking lot, pool hall, and alleyway … All I knew was that in my 31 years on Earth, I had never encountered anyone with a larger head or tinier balls. And he had chosen exactly the wrong guy to f..k with.”
This stand-off between the two rock singers is an extremely funny interlude in an otherwise painstakingly unflinching account of a troubled life further troubled by the excesses of rock ’n’ roll. History records Screaming Trees as also-rans in a Seattle alternative rock scene that bloomed in the early 1990s with multi-million-selling album releases by the likes of Nirvana and Alice in Chains.
Lanegan was close friends with the singers in those two bands — Kurt Cobain and Layne Staley respectively — and, like both of those men, he carries inside him a powerful, singular instrument, with his baritone style occupying the deepest end of the male vocal spectrum. And, like both of his friends, eventually he would become desperately mired in drug addiction.
This book chronicles about a decade in Lanegan’s life in Seattle and abroad — from the mid-80s onward — in ultra-high definition, and if you’re looking for detailed retellings of sordid scenes with some of the key characters from that highly romanticised time in popular music, there are certainly plenty of those.
About halfway through, for instance, he describes scoring dope for Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds when the Australian act passed through Washington. When the band leader arrived at Lanegan’s apartment to score heroin, the author writes: “Cave looked at my f..ked-up arms, crisscrossed like a road map of Germany with huge, deep, red-and-black abscessed tracks. ‘Damn,’ he said. ‘I guess you can’t just pop into the can for a quick hit’.”
Lanegan was a prime candidate for becoming a compulsive user, but it’s not until late in the book that we learn of the gruelling array of traumatic abuse he experienced as a boy, which explains the deep well of rage that ran through his psyche and why he was thrilled eventually to find a numbing substance that dulled his painful memories.
“My entire childhood, my mother, who, unbelievably, worked as a college lecturer of early childhood education, had been a wholly detestable, damaged witch,” he writes.
The abuse detailed in these passages is completely shocking, even more so because Lanegan detonates those bombs so late in the narrative of his 20s.
But writing a lacerating self-examination is only half the challenge for any memoirist; the other half is writing it beautifully, in a way that connects with readers whose lived experiences are distant to the author’s own. In that respect Lanegan surely succeeds, for his tone throughout Sing Backwards and Weep, the title of which is taken from a lyric from his 1999 song, Fix, is wry and knowing without ever transmitting a trace of self-pity.
With great skill, he renders long-ago memories in vivid three-dimensional scenes that perfectly capture who he was then and why he acted how he did in the moment. Only occasionally does he allow a modicum of present-tense wisdom to enter into the narrative and, when deployed economically, it becomes brutally effective.
Take this passage on page 95, which comes just as Screaming Trees are finally beginning to find a wide audience with the release of their sixth album, in the wake of Nirvana’s success with their 1991 breakthrough, Nevermind, whose rising tide lifted all boats.
At this time Lanegan had become a regular but cautious heroin user as he found its appeal overwhelming, yet he hid his use from everyone — including his girlfriend, with whom he lived — because of fear and shame of being caught:
But it was the fear of showing my true heart, at times either so full it might burst or so empty I could cry, that hounded me most viciously. […] There had been a perpetual war between myself and the costume of persona I’d donned as a youngster and then worn my entire life. Petrified that someone might discover who I really was: merely a child inside the body of an adult. A boy playacting a man. My lifelong hard-ass exterior and, underneath that, ironclad interior were all an intricately constructed, carefully cultivated, and fiercely guarded sham. I was, in reality, driven by what I’d heard referred to in rehab all those years ago as “a thousand forms of fear”. Sadly, somewhere deep in my soul, I knew that was probably me.
Is that not one of the most cuttingly honest and striking self-descriptions you’ve read?
The author writes with the ragged pen of one who has not only lived through some of the most depraved psychic and physical states that our species can endure but has wallowed in that world for years on end.
As his lucid, unguarded depictions make abundantly clear, there is absolutely nothing glamorous about heroin addiction. It is a haunted wasteland of the human soul that consumes all of one’s time and energy until the host dies — as happened with Cobain in 1994 and Staley in 2002 — or the addiction is kicked.
Lanegan eventually stumbled his way down the latter path. The very last word he writes here is what he became: clean. We are all the beneficiaries of that outcome, not only because his singular artistic voice is still with us today, and still creating and performing, but because he was able to write this extraordinary, unforgettable book. It is right up there with the very best memoirs I have read, by a musician or anyone else.
It is not often that a book’s cover blurb is worth repeating in a review but, in this case, a succinct summary of its contents could not be better expressed than what Scottish crime writer Ian Rankin came up with, and with which I wholeheartedly concur: “raw, ravaged and personal — a stoned cold classic”.
(Originally published in The Weekend Australian Review, July 4 2020: https://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts...) 0306922800 A sad, sickening and harrowing memoir. Mark Lanegan was a talented musician who couldn’t fight his demons, his talent overshadowed by his addiction to heroin. This book is unrelenting with story after story of his self abuse. The book is 90% about his time in the grips of his addiction, nothing in this memoir is softly delivered he tells it raw and real never backing off of telling the brutal and ugly truth. I wish Mark had conquered his demons earlier he pretty much squandered his own chances of capitalising on his enormous talent. Nothing mattered more than his addiction. As grim as this book was I couldn’t put it down. 0306922800 In my after-college, semi-Bohemian days, my roommates and I used to be regulars at Chicago’s Lounge Ax. We’d be there for incredible shows in a room that held no more than 250 people, seeing shows sometimes with no more than 40 or 50 others.
If we were there early, the band would often be at the bar, and my roommate Bill had a knack for winding up next to semi-famous figures not saying much. Alex and Ray were better about initiating conversations. I was always the most star-struck, so when I jumped in it was usually with just a banal “that’s cool” so I could claim, with technical correctness, that I’d been part of the conversation.
That’s how we met Alex Chilton, the Rev. Horton Heat, and Rick Miller from Southern Culture on the Skids. The idea of it – a real rock star just spilling the shit! – sounds a lot better than it was. Chilton was just hitting on women a generation younger than he was. The Reverend was an agitated, aggressive guy even off stage. (Rick Miller was cool, though.)
I digress with such memories because reading this book feels like sitting at the bar next to someone on that order of cool. I confess I didn’t know Lanegan’s music – either solo or with The Screaming Trees – before reading this, and I still don’t know it well. But he was famous-proximate from his Seattle grunge days, so I figured I’d give it a shot.
Again, better in concept than in fact.
Lanegan defines himself here – and I don’t know the alternative if there is one – as a hardcore junkie. He opens with a description of the day (or is it one of many?) when he got busted. He describes his descent into drugs, some music, occasional transactional sex, and more drugs.
This doesn’t open with a sense that he’s learned anything, and it doesn’t suggest along the way that he has either. He’s been through a lot, but we get it the way you might get it at the bar of the Lounge Ax, some touring musician running a hand through his grungy hair, pulling back on a cheap beer, and sighing out an “insider” story. “I was so high” or “I was too fucked up” or “I was thinking between my legs.” It’s a refrain, and it’s cool only from the outside.
Reading this, it’s not clear to me that Lanegan has learned anything. Props to his punk sensibility that he doesn’t give us much of the “and then I got clean” version – though there is a strange near-final religious epiphany that he describes without exploring.
Instead, we get everything in a kind of monotone, something I experienced first-hand since I listened to this one with him reading it. Most of his stories have a wistful, “I was dumb as shit” quality, a puzzled, almost bemused sense that he was there, that he didn’t return calls that would have used his music as the soundtrack for David O. Russell’s first film, that he neglected to call Kurt Cobain back during the binge in which he killed himself, that he chose drugs over one of about six different women who could have been “the one.”
A few have a vague cruelty to them, a taking pride in kicking the shit out of someone who deserved it or a not-quite-contrite description of how he belittled someone beneath him on the ladder of rock star fame.
Lanegan seems to be working toward honesty with this, but – outside of its slow-motion car wreck quality – it’s fairly closed. Without reflection, it feels something like a journal: Day One, I did these drugs, day two I did these other ones. Again, Lanegan seems to have learned almost nothing other than the fact that he’s somehow survived the wreckage around him. If he hasn’t learned anything, he doesn’t have anything to teach.
All of that’s compounded by amateurish writing. If I’d had the guy in a class, I’d push him on some of the sentence-crafting basics. He overuses adjectives, not just larding them on but allowing them to fill in for the substance of analysis. I honestly can’t tell one of the women he almost loves from another. They’re all ‘sensitive’ and ‘soul-tingling,’ but there’s little to distinguish them beyond the adjectives.
Anyway, I did finish this, and I’m glad for the glimpse at a scene that – in Nirvana and Pearl Jam at least – produced some music I very much admire. As for the rest, maybe the show will be good, but I’m getting tired of the conversation at the bar. 0306922800 Preface: I'm a fan...a big fan...of Mark Lanegan's music. From the Screaming Trees, to his solo work, to the work with QOTSA, his duets with Isobel Campbell, the Gutter Twins, and one-offs like the Soulsavers, I have always bought and listened to his musical projects, and will continue to do so. That said: This book is absolute garbage.
Mark Lanegan hates everyone...and doesn't just hate them...he either fights them...often ending with him beating the shit out of whoever it is that looked at him funny, or he wants to fight them...or he wants to kill them. He is apparently, a very tough guy. In addition to all the ass-kicking that he hands out, there are soooo many more guys in the book that he almost beat up...but decided not to. I think the only men that he ever met and didn't fight/want to fight were Kurt Cobain (he saved Nirvana from breaking up, btw) and Layne Staley and Chris Cornell, all of whom are now dead. Lanegan (don't call him Mark!) allowed drugs and alcohol to ruin his attempt at a career in baseball. He joined a band that he hated. He hated everyone in it. He quit or threatened to quit all the time. He fought with his bandmates a lot. He hates the places he has lived...full of both rednecks and flaky college students, both of whom he hates. Most of the people around him are much dumber than him. Just ask him. Other than his mother, the women in this book serve only as sexual conquests. He literally cannot be in a room with a woman without having sex with her and then including that story in this book. Tommy Lee wrote about women in a more positive light than does Lanegan. Speaking of writing: Lanegan is not good at it. The book is full of clunky sentences, weird timeline shifts, and clearly-fabricated conversations (nobody talks like that.) Of course, there is a ton of ink spilled about heroin and other drugs, which was to be expected, and very little ink spilled about the making of any music. I got the impression that Lanegan enjoys bragging about his junkiedom, rather than regretting any of it. His book is written as a rambling mess of junkie stories...by a guy who is still using. I've read a lot of rock and roll memoirs. I've read a lot of books written by people with drug problems. This book was written to settle scores, both real and fabricated, and to remind the world that they are not as cool as Lanegan...and is easily one of the worst of its genre that I've ever read. 0306922800 This was not an easy memoir to get through. I decided to listen to this as an audio book. I figured it would be great to hear Mark Lanegan's story in his own words. It might've been easier to read it as a book. His biography is grueling, to say the least.
I've been into the music of Screaming Trees for years. They were definitely my favorite Washington band of the 90s. I owned albums by Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Alice In Chains, Mother Love Bone, etc--but Screaming Trees were the band that I took to the most from that state. I'm not entirely sure why. Until just recently, I wasn't even aware that the guitar player Gary Lee Conner had been the main song writer for the majority of their existence. I always did like the overall mood of the music though. They seemed to shirk the stereotypical formula of a lot of so-called Alternative bands. They had a strong 60s Psychedelic vibe, but an equally strong 80s Post-Punk vibe as well. Lanegan's voice and lyrics have always resonated with me. I have had their songs show up in my dreams more than once. Not too terribly long ago, I awoke with the song Shadow Of The Season in my head. Now I realize that song was really about Lanegan's substance abuse. This book details how bad that abuse was.
Lanegan's descent into addiction can only be described as hellish. He doesn't glamorize the rockstar life in the slightest. I remember reading about his arrest for crack possession in the 90s. Even at the time I was amazed that he could allow himself to fall that far, but I wasn't aware until hearing his memoir that his decline was more horrid than even that arrest could intimate. He was often penniless, homeless and selling drugs for other people to support his habit while being a notable vocalist in a famous band. The details have to be either read or listened to in his own words to fully appreciate.
Lanegan does recount other aspects of his life in the Screaming Trees and his early solo career. He was good friends with Kurt Cobain and Layne Staley. He often supplied them with drugs. He also supplied Courtney Love. Some of the more humorous aspects of his memoir was his runins with Al Jourgensen of Ministry and Liam Gallagher of Oasis. Lanegan almost pummeled both of them--and they clearly would have deserved it. Unlike the typical stereotype of the brooding non-confrontational artist, Lanegan is a big dude and was a scrapper from very early on in his life. Often a turbulent home life contributes to that kind of disposition. Lanegan's relationship with his mother makes it clear why he had a bit of a chip on his shoulder.
He doesn't totally go into detail about his strained relationship with Gary Lee Conner from the Trees but that he hated his lyrics and didn't like his guitar playing is obvious. He also paints him as a moody and silent tyrant during their tenure at SST records and even for their first album Uncle Anesthesia for Epic. Lee Conner did back off with his control of songwriting for Sweet Oblivion and Dust though. Still, Lanegan has very little good to say about him, nor about the Screaming Trees in general. I honestly do not understand his disdain for the Screaming Trees records though. He implies it in interviews and does so here as well. I don't think he is able to be entirely objective on Screaming Trees' music. Their music was well respected by his peers for good reason. I also happen to like a lot of the songs from the SST period and most of the songs from their Epic years. I also don't agree with his overall disdain for Gary Lee Conner's songwriting. Like I said, he has a lot of animosity towards Lee Conner. And the fact that he mentions that Lee's brother Van, who was the bass player for Screaming Trees, also regularly had physical altercations with him does make it apparent that Lee was difficult to get along with.
Very good memoir. It was often difficult to listen to. It also put me in a rather dark mood after hearing some of it. It was good to know what was going on behind the scenes during this tumultuous period. There was a lot I didn't know. With how dark the subject matter was, I am glad it turned out well in the end; and I am glad to have gotten through the memoir. I'm very sensitive to hearing about human suffering and I can only tolerate so much before it really starts to affect me. This memoir was starting to do that and I am relieved to be done with it.
It might be poignant to end this review with a set of lyrics from the Screaming Trees' song For Celebrations Past that I had in my mind when I awoke one morning a number of years ago:
This is for footsteps approaching the night
They keep themselves moving and do what is right
Now watch what you gather and hold in your hand
Numbers are many who misunderstand 0306922800
A gritty, gripping memoir by the singer Mark Lanegan (Screaming Trees, Queens of the Stone Age, Soulsavers), chronicling his years as a singer and drug addict in Seattle in the '80s and '90s.
Mark Lanegan-primitive, brutal, and apocalyptic. What's not to love?
-Nick Cave, author of The Sick Bag Song and The Death of Bunny Munro
When Mark Lanegan first arrived in Seattle in the mid-1980s, he was just an arrogant, self-loathing redneck waster seeking transformation through rock 'n' roll. Little did he know that within less than a decade, he would rise to fame as the front man of the Screaming Trees, then fall from grace as a low-level crack dealer and a homeless heroin addict, all the while watching some of his closest friends rocket to the forefront of popular music.
In Sing Backwards and Weep, Lanegan takes readers back to the sinister, needle-ridden streets of Seattle, to an alternative music scene that was simultaneously bursting with creativity and dripping with drugs. He tracks the tumultuous rise and fall of the Screaming Trees, from a brawling, acid-rock bar band to world-famous festival favorites that scored a hit #5 single on Billboard's Alternative charts and landed a notorious performance on David Letterman, where Lanegan appeared sporting a fresh black eye from a brawl the night before. This book also dives into Lanegan's personal struggles with addiction, culminating in homelessness, petty crime, and the tragic deaths of his closest friends. From the back of the van to the front of the bar, from the hotel room to the emergency room, onstage, backstage, and everywhere in between, Sing Backwards and Weep reveals the abrasive underlining beneath one of the most romanticized decades in rock history-from a survivor who lived to tell the tale.
Gritty, gripping, and unflinchingly raw, Sing Backwards and Weep is a book about more than just an extraordinary singer who watched his dreams catch fire and incinerate the ground beneath his feet. Instead, it's about a man who learned how to drag himself from the wreckage, dust off the ashes, and keep living and creating. Sing Backwards and Weep: A Memoir
Rest in peace, Mark (1964-2022). You will be missed.
My original review is below:
-----
It's amazing that Mark Lanegan is still alive. Forget warts and all: this is truly an all-warts memoir of the pioneering grunge singer.
Mark Lanegan takes us on a journey from his troubled childhood to the drug-filled streets of Seattle in the early days of grunge.
Mark was lead singer of the Screaming Trees, a second-tier grunge band that was perpetually in the shadows of other more popular bands like Nirvana and Alice in Chains. Mark was close friends with the lead singers of these bands--Kurt Cobain and Layne Staley. All three were terrible drug fiends. Somehow Mark is the only survivor.
Mark's daily life essentially consisted of (a) making drugs, (b) taking drugs, and (c) selling drugs. His drug habit was all-consuming. From this memoir, it's clear that his musical career was just a side hobby meant to support his main focus on drug, drugs, and more drugs.
The memoir stops abruptly when Mark was finally able to overcome his drug addiction, which he attributes to divine intervention: My extreme, retrograde sickness had cut me open and left me eviscerated. I had asked to be changed and now, in a second, I was changed. Maybe not by anybody else's God but by some very real force that intervened in the life of one sad piece of human roadkill the moment it was asked to.
Unforuntately, we don't learn anything about what happens next: Mark's highly successful solo career, his three excellent duet albums with Isobel Campbell, or his collaborations with Greg Dulli (The Gutter Twins) or Duke Garwood. I would have liked to learn more about his life and career after his recovery.
Instead, Sing Backwards and Weep focuses on the very dark years of Mark Lanegan's struggles and addictions, his life on the streets as a junkie and a dealer, an improbable survivor in the Seattle grunge scene that claimed the lives of many of his peers. 0306922800 Dark, gritty, and brutally honest, this is one of the most eye-opening memoirs I’ve read.
Mark Lanegan is digging up some serious skeletons in his new memoir Sing Backwards and Weep. He spews it all, sharing parts of his childhood upbringing, the rise to fame with Screaming Trees, and his descent into drugs and homelessness. The truth is the truth, but I can see some people mentioned in this book becoming irate with the all-out divulging of the past.
In retrospect, this book is Mark’s hard knock life throughout. This doesn’t feel like an autobiography in any sense—it does begin that way, but quickly turns into scenes of Mark’s tumultuous life beginning in childhood with the mental beat-downs from his mother, all the way up to somewhere around the death of Alice in Chain’s vocalist Layne Staley.
High points for me were the stories about Mark’s friendships with Kurt, Layne, and others. There were even a few comical tidbits including one with Chris Cornell that made me smile.
I had a terrible cold one day and Cornell insisted I allow him to lick my bare eyeball to test his invented-on-the-spot theory of virus transmission. I was, of course, delighted to take part in the experiment. Chris never got sick. I can’t recall if this proved or disproved his theory, but it was an effective way of making me laugh.
I was hoping Mark would expand on these relationships surrounding him, but what’s here is a huge helping of what seems like (has to be) the darkest times in Mark’s life. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed the book and loved the writing; I literally dissected this book; there was just so much hope in me for a more in-depth accounting of these relationships. It’s always been hard for me to stay interested in stories where there’s constant animosity between people, in this case: band mates, drug dealers, friends, and family. Writing that shares a lot of physical fighting and getting back at one another can feel like a total drag. For that, maybe this book won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but it sure kept me hypnotized regardless of what I felt the book didn't share.
The book ends after Mark’s rehab, and then with Layne’s death in 2002. I sat speechless for some time after because this memoir left me with an empty feeling. It was such an unexpected ending even with already knowing Layne’s outcome, and there isn’t much included on Mark’s collaboration with Queens of the Stone Age. The short epilogue was much appreciated, but what about all the other years? What’s been happening since Layne’s death? How has Mark coped? All I can do now is hope that Mark will write and share another memoir, and if he does, I’ll be first in line to read it.
5***** 0306922800 I came home from work a couple of weeks ago, sat down on the sofa in my partner's studio where he was painting and listening to Mark Lanegan, kicked off my shoes. Scratching behind the dog's ears, nuzzling her soft head, I expressed surprise that my sweetie was listening to Mark's music. He typically paints in silence. He said, I wondered if you'd heard.
Heard what? I asked.
Mark died today.
The bottom dropped out of my heart. Tears were instantaneous, even as disbelief had me shaking my head, whispering, No. I always thought I'd have a chance to see another show, to capture a remember me? moment, a laugh and a hug.
You'll wonder, reading Sing Backwards and Weep, how Mark lived as long as he did. By all rights, he could have, should have, died several times over. But he survived decades of substance abuse and addiction, poverty and homelessness, carving out just enough sanity to remain a musician and poet. That he died sober, in a loving marriage, with a solid and prolific recording and publishing career, is the motherfucking rawest deal. The cause of his death is not yet known, but he'd been deathly ill with Covid early last year, taxing an already ravaged body. No matter the cause, the loss of this artist at just 57 is heartbreaking.
Sing Backwards and Weep is like being locked a squat toilet at some random truck stop in southern Europe in the middle of August. A true nightmare. I avoided it when it was published in 2020 because that year was already desperate enough — I needed escape and uplift, not a reminder of how shitty life can be. Not that the winter of 2022 is much of an improvement, but I craved the connection. It's a misery memoir, to be sure, but brilliantly written. I've read enough execrably-penned rock and roll tell-alls. This is on a different plane entirely: Mark is a gifted writer and storyteller.
He holds nothing back, not his contempt for Screaming Trees bandmate Lee Connor or Ministry's ego-tripped Al Jourgensen, nor his grief over so many friends lost to heroin, including Kurt Cobain, whose calls to Mark shortly before his suicide went unanswered, nor his self-loathing. He recounts his love-hate relationship with heroin and crack in brutal, precise detail. This is less an ode to the music that shaped him and which he created in the late 80s and 90s and more a ballad to debauchery. It is radical, painful honesty, with real regret expressed for opportunities wasted, relationships blown to hell, and a self-effacing sense of humor that leavens a heavy, heavy read.
Have I scared you away? Don't let that be: if the 90s Seattle music scene moved you, this is the Genesis of its Bible. A Seattle that no longer exists, for good in some regards, but deeply awful in others. I'm glad I knew it when and left before the city became what it is now. You will meet nearly everyone from that bygone era here, in grand and tragic style. Mark's stories are gritty, arch, fascinating and not a punch is pulled.
Mark fled Seattle for Los Angeles after double-crossing a drug dealer. Courtney Love, with whom he'd had many a troubled moment and implies here that Kurt's depressed state was due at least in part to his unhappy marriage, held out a hand to Mark, paid for his rehab and supported him until he got back on his feet, sober. The memoir ends with the 2002 overdose death of musician and best friend Layne Staley of Alice in Chains.
A friend of mine put together an excellent Mark Lanegan tribute playlist on Spotify that's been on heavy rotation as I discover much that I had left untouched these past decades. He left a legacy of soulful, brooding solo albums and collaborations, in addition to the psychedelic hard rock of Screaming Trees and Queens of the Stone Age. Although he relapsed into drug addiction in the 2000s, his final decade-sober, married-was his most prolific. Solo albums and collaborations abounded, as well as several books, including two memoirs and a poetry collection. The world is smaller and sadder and more bitter without you, Mark. I hope you are truly at peace.
I met Mark in the summer of 1986, when I was sixteen and he was twenty-one. I had just moved back to Ellensburg from Olympia, where I spent my junior year of high school. I fell back into the same small circle of friends I had before I left town—the weird new age/punk kids who were aspiring musicians or just wanted to hang around them. Some of those friends were in a new band, Screaming Trees, and their lead singer was an older local guy I'd heard about but never met: Mark Lanegan. Mark and I drank endless cups of coffee at the Valley Cafe and went for long drives into the arid hills surrounding the Kittitas Valley, talking books and poetry (well, he talked, I nodded sagely). Mark gave me his copies of Richard Brautigan's The Abortion and Trout Fishing in America to read. I devoured them, because I was so very in thrall to this soulful, sad, angry, sweet and beautiful man-boy with long auburn hair and eyes like tallow honey. Then I turned seventeen, started my senior year of high school and by the end of September I was dating a boy my age who looked just like Axl Rose.
It was October 1986 (not 1988 as Mark states in the book, but I'll forgive this oversight- I get that the details became hazy in the intervening years), when a group of local bands played at the Hal Holmes Center, attached to the Ellensburg Public Library. My boyfriend's band, King Krab, was the opener. Their final song was Bauhaus's Bella Lugosi's Dead and the band laid down on the stage, playing their instruments on their backs. So goth. The last band playing that night was a group from Aberdeen. They had a cool name –Nirvana — and a magnetic front man with floppy blond hair and pretty blue eyes: Kurt Cobain. That was also the night Mark and Kurt met.
By the time so-called grunge hit mainstream, I was living abroad, and then married, overseas again, then graduate school, and I just lost the thread of those days, those friends. This was years before Facebook, so I was only tangentially aware of albums, the European tours, hit single from the movie Singles. The bewilderment and grief of Cobain's suicide was felt alone, in Ohio, strangely detached from the plaid, the boots, the rain and drear of the Pacific Northwest.
When I knew Mark, he was sober, an in-between time of calm. I will remember him this way and hold those memories close to keep the regrets at bay, singing backwards and weeping. 0306922800 MARK MELROSE
I take no joy in stating this, being no stranger to addiction myself... and Mark Lanegan having been a hero of mine since 1992... a position he no longer occupies, for a couple of reasons.
(1) This book. What's the difference between Lanegan's memoir and the tabloids? I appreciate his honesty, I guess. But do we need to know absolutely EVERYTHING? The more you learn about the author's journey, the less you care... until his epiphany on the very final pages of the book. That was great! What happened next? In general, though, addiction tales are a drag — unless the author is Hubert Selby Jr himself — and Cubby Lanegan is not. You just get sick of this dude. And there's way too much macho business here, considering the progressive pose that the author has taken in public recently. Tell me, sir, WHO is the bully?
(2) His career. Sing Backwards and Weep is better than Lanegan's lame music and cliche-pumped lyrics of late, but Lord knows that isn't much. This memoir isn't as tedious as the junkie adventures of Patrick Melrose, but it comes pretty damn close.
I had been a rank nihilist, Lanegan sums up his story. Several hundred pages of that is too much.
Sorry, bro: I'm waiting for the next installment. 0306922800 Mark Lanegan is an artist I've enjoyed seeing live and have loved the shit out of his solo records, yet I didn't know much about his personal background, other than the Screaming Trees and his friendships with Kurt Cobain and Josh Homme. Most rock memoirs are garbage but this one was everything Gritty, cathartic, bitchy and tender, my only complaint is that I'm left yearning to read about the next 20 years of his life, how he's staying clean, and his collaborations with what feels like just about everyone.
4.5 stars. 0306922800
