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Sing Backwards and Weep
The most honest and unsparing grunge memoir ever committed to the page by one of the greatest alternative rock stars of the past thirty years.
335 pages, Paperback
First published April 28, 2020
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5158 people want to read
About the author
Mark Lanegan
17 books173 followersMark Lanegan (born November 25, 1964 in Ellensburg, Washington) was an American rock musician and songwriter. Lanegan began his music career in the 1980s. In 1985, he became the vocalist for grunge group Screaming Trees; the group broke up in 2000. Lanegan would start a low-key solo career, but in 2004 Lanegan released his big breakthrough album Bubblegum. In addition to leading the The Gutter Twins, Lanegan has also been involved in other musical projects, including hard rock band Queens of the Stone Age, longterm collaborations with Isobel Campbell; and undertaken some surprisingly eclectic collaborations, such as co-writing and providing vocals for "Black River" by the electronic outfit, Bomb the Bass. He also lent his vocal talent to the highly regarded album, "Above", by supergroup Mad Season.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 852 reviews
April 10, 2021
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*****
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*****
September 26, 2024
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 than a ballad to debauchery. It is radical 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 a 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 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 Café 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.
"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 than a ballad to debauchery. It is radical 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 a 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 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 Café 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.
January 20, 2024
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.
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.
May 16, 2020
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.
4.5 stars.
October 9, 2022
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.
December 19, 2020
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.
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.
January 20, 2021
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.
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.
April 5, 2021
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.
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.
July 5, 2020
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...)
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...)
June 20, 2020
When I first learned what this story of Mark Lanegan’s early years in music would entail, I couldn’t help but think of Bob Mould’s own autobiography, See A Little Light, and all of its recriminations and petty swipes at his ex-bandmates in Hüsker Dü. But at least I can understand Mould’s bitterness, if not accept or agree with it, because it comes from a place of passion — a band that he and his former musical compadres wanted to be in, music they wanted to make, and then life and its complication sours the milk.
From what he writes in Sing Backwards And Weep, however, it seems that passion was never really there for Lanegan. In fact, he’s seething with resentment from the get-go — for losing his shot at a career in baseball (ultimately by his own doing), for an adolescence smeared with drink and drugs and petty crime (ditto, but we’ll get back to that) and for taking a role in a band that he didn’t like, with bandmates he didn’t particularly care for at best but mostly outright loathed, seemingly for having the temerity to… not be to his exacting standards?
For sure there are many accounts of the Screaming Trees’ guitarist Gary Lee Conner of being a, well, difficult individual — those physical squabbles with his brother, bassist Van Conner, were no secret to this guy reading about the band in snippets from the ’90s music press. And Lanegan initially paints what feels like a fair picture of Gary Lee as an introverted loner, prone to the selfish tantrums of the coddled. But far from understanding that, Lanegan uses it as fuel for his self-righteous, unnecessarily savage character assassination.
For page after tedious page, Gary Lee Conner is the albatross around Lanegan’s neck; he’s a fraud obsessed with a musical bygone era, whose lyrics Lanegan is embarrassed to sing; or he’s the tyrant steering the band away from the heights only Lanegan is capable of reaching; he’s the ‘large’ or ‘huge’ — or whatever synonym for ‘fat’ he could find in the thesaurus — individual taking up valuable space that could be filled with Lanegan’s own ego.
It may not seem so to Lanegan, even though he wrote the thing (we’ll get back to that, too) but it’s pretty clear to any reader not taken in by his shtick that he’s just put out he wasn’t the boss as the frontman. He rode the Screaming Trees’ coattails to escape life in a dead-end town (which is at once universally populated by deplorable rednecks, but also has a university with lefty arts students — not the only contradiction within these pages) and, as my friend Erik Highter pointed out, he’s mad he has to share his legacy with them.
And the Screaming Trees do have a legacy; far from “terrible”, their earlier albums are treats of rough-hewn backwoods psych — even their debut Clairvoyance, which has that kind of we-made-a-record spirited naivety. It’s telling that the first record the band made that gets anything close to the Lanegan seal of approval, 1992’s Sweet Oblivion, is their most bloated and least interesting. (Lanegan wouldn’t be so gauche to admit this is the one where he finally called the shots, because that would give the game away, but it’s not hard to read between the lines that’s exactly the case.)
When he’s exhausted his tirade against the band he’s convinced locked him in chains, along come the drug bore stories. It’s an attempt at a warts-and-all confessional, but those are meant to be cathartic, part of a learning experience laid out on the page. But there’s little to learn here. Instead, there’s a nagging sense he’s enamoured with the picture he paints of himself a romantic fuck-up, taking advantage of everyone and everything in his purview for the next score of skag or whatever he’s shooting up or smoking today to “get well”; an aura of conceptual art about his almost ritual puking and shitting in the throes of withdrawal.
It detracts from any attempt he makes to recount the struggles of making his solo records, which are all excellent. (See? I’m not just bitter he hates a band I like!) This is when he gets so, so close to grasping his self, but his solipsism won’t let him; he’d rather go for faux humility, or unintentionally reveal his desperate pettiness (such as his decade-long enmity for Sub Pop’s Bruce Pavitt over an album cover photo that’s perfectly fine). It’s not funny, it’s just pathetic. (See also: his constant objectification of women, who he can only view through a prism of attractiveness, read fuckability; yet another aspect of his character he fails to grasp despite it being right there for the taking.)
When he recounts a member of another band the Trees are touring with remarking, “That idiot thinks he’s Jim Morrison!”, rather than take the opportunity for self-examination he goes on the defensive. If he’s trying to be sarcastic, it’s lost amid the seething ire that reverberates throughout the text.
And let’s talk about the text, because there’s a distinct impression this is not the unmediated expression of one Mr Mark Lanegan, but the contrived, purple prose of a ghostwriter, or an editor entrusted to massage whatever scribbles he came up with. It only reinforces the sense of dishonesty which is the book’s real admission. Even near the end, when we get the ‘big reveal’ that the source of his sheer awfulness is, by and large, his mother, who appears to be a uniquely cruel and abusive influence on his life, he resists the characterisation lest it casts him as a ‘mommy issues’ cliche. His ‘born again’ prodigal son bullshit in the final pages passes muster, but that’s too much? Quite.
From what he writes in Sing Backwards And Weep, however, it seems that passion was never really there for Lanegan. In fact, he’s seething with resentment from the get-go — for losing his shot at a career in baseball (ultimately by his own doing), for an adolescence smeared with drink and drugs and petty crime (ditto, but we’ll get back to that) and for taking a role in a band that he didn’t like, with bandmates he didn’t particularly care for at best but mostly outright loathed, seemingly for having the temerity to… not be to his exacting standards?
For sure there are many accounts of the Screaming Trees’ guitarist Gary Lee Conner of being a, well, difficult individual — those physical squabbles with his brother, bassist Van Conner, were no secret to this guy reading about the band in snippets from the ’90s music press. And Lanegan initially paints what feels like a fair picture of Gary Lee as an introverted loner, prone to the selfish tantrums of the coddled. But far from understanding that, Lanegan uses it as fuel for his self-righteous, unnecessarily savage character assassination.
For page after tedious page, Gary Lee Conner is the albatross around Lanegan’s neck; he’s a fraud obsessed with a musical bygone era, whose lyrics Lanegan is embarrassed to sing; or he’s the tyrant steering the band away from the heights only Lanegan is capable of reaching; he’s the ‘large’ or ‘huge’ — or whatever synonym for ‘fat’ he could find in the thesaurus — individual taking up valuable space that could be filled with Lanegan’s own ego.
It may not seem so to Lanegan, even though he wrote the thing (we’ll get back to that, too) but it’s pretty clear to any reader not taken in by his shtick that he’s just put out he wasn’t the boss as the frontman. He rode the Screaming Trees’ coattails to escape life in a dead-end town (which is at once universally populated by deplorable rednecks, but also has a university with lefty arts students — not the only contradiction within these pages) and, as my friend Erik Highter pointed out, he’s mad he has to share his legacy with them.
And the Screaming Trees do have a legacy; far from “terrible”, their earlier albums are treats of rough-hewn backwoods psych — even their debut Clairvoyance, which has that kind of we-made-a-record spirited naivety. It’s telling that the first record the band made that gets anything close to the Lanegan seal of approval, 1992’s Sweet Oblivion, is their most bloated and least interesting. (Lanegan wouldn’t be so gauche to admit this is the one where he finally called the shots, because that would give the game away, but it’s not hard to read between the lines that’s exactly the case.)
When he’s exhausted his tirade against the band he’s convinced locked him in chains, along come the drug bore stories. It’s an attempt at a warts-and-all confessional, but those are meant to be cathartic, part of a learning experience laid out on the page. But there’s little to learn here. Instead, there’s a nagging sense he’s enamoured with the picture he paints of himself a romantic fuck-up, taking advantage of everyone and everything in his purview for the next score of skag or whatever he’s shooting up or smoking today to “get well”; an aura of conceptual art about his almost ritual puking and shitting in the throes of withdrawal.
It detracts from any attempt he makes to recount the struggles of making his solo records, which are all excellent. (See? I’m not just bitter he hates a band I like!) This is when he gets so, so close to grasping his self, but his solipsism won’t let him; he’d rather go for faux humility, or unintentionally reveal his desperate pettiness (such as his decade-long enmity for Sub Pop’s Bruce Pavitt over an album cover photo that’s perfectly fine). It’s not funny, it’s just pathetic. (See also: his constant objectification of women, who he can only view through a prism of attractiveness, read fuckability; yet another aspect of his character he fails to grasp despite it being right there for the taking.)
When he recounts a member of another band the Trees are touring with remarking, “That idiot thinks he’s Jim Morrison!”, rather than take the opportunity for self-examination he goes on the defensive. If he’s trying to be sarcastic, it’s lost amid the seething ire that reverberates throughout the text.
And let’s talk about the text, because there’s a distinct impression this is not the unmediated expression of one Mr Mark Lanegan, but the contrived, purple prose of a ghostwriter, or an editor entrusted to massage whatever scribbles he came up with. It only reinforces the sense of dishonesty which is the book’s real admission. Even near the end, when we get the ‘big reveal’ that the source of his sheer awfulness is, by and large, his mother, who appears to be a uniquely cruel and abusive influence on his life, he resists the characterisation lest it casts him as a ‘mommy issues’ cliche. His ‘born again’ prodigal son bullshit in the final pages passes muster, but that’s too much? Quite.
May 7, 2020
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"
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"
October 18, 2022
Mark Lanegan was best known as the singer of Screaming Trees, a band not exactly from Seattle but from what Lanegan calls "the wrong side of the Cascades", specifically a town in central Washington called Ellensburg. That geographical distinction didn't matter much in the Seattlemania of the early 90s. True, the Trees never achieved anything close to the fame that the bands of Lanegan's friends Kurt Cobain and Layne Staley did, and never became a staple of rock radio (at least not where I lived); but they were swept along by the popularity of Seattle's Big Four to some relative success, at their peak playing Letterman and Leno, and landing their single "Nearly Lost You" (from the 1992 album Sweet Oblivion) on the soundtrack of the movie Singles, which Lanegan says he never watched: "The poster, plastered all over town, told me more than I ever cared to know about the subject." The closest he ever came to involvement with the film might have been when he saw the actor Matt Dillon in a bar in New York, and dropped a lit cigarette into Dillon's jacket pocket while walking past him (it's too bad however that Lanegan never caught Dillon as a genuinely Lanegan-ish character in '89's Drugstore Cowboy). Whether or not the story is true, it'd be fair to say that Lanegan (like Cobain) had some ambivalence about the commercial success of Seattle and Seattle-adjacent music, while his feelings about the Trees themselves are closer to open contempt. I can imagine that being disconcerting for people who come to this book as big fans of the band. But Lanegan not only despised the early music they made- he felt they were finally getting somewhere with Sweet Oblivion- he makes being on the road with this group sound fairly awful. Live shows would degenerate into the two profoundly large Connor brothers (Lee and Van, guitar and bass, both over 6 feet and 300 pounds) physically fighting each other, for reasons that remained unclear to me (and maybe to them, as well). Then again, between black-out drinking and constantly getting into fights himself, young Lanegan doesn't sound like the easiest person in the world to get along with, either. Still, why didn't he just quit? Well, I think he sensed the danger in going back to his hometown after having been lucky enough to punch a ticket out. He didn't want to end up working manual labor and back in the orbit of a pretty fucked-up family, so he held on to the Trees for dear life.
The memoir reveals its essential character about a third of the way through, though it can't come as much of a surprise to anyone acquainted with the grunge era. Still, it's been a while since I've read such a detailed and sustained account of the daily routine of heroin addiction; and something that struck me this time was that, for a drug that makes you nod off and lie in a room quietly, it sounds damn exhausting. The constant hustling, that is, to stave off a sickness at least as bad as some forms of torture. Lanegan had connections at home (he would also sometimes go out and buy heroin for Cobain, who'd become too famous to do it himself), as I would guess most habitual users do; but every time the band went out on tour, he found himself playing Russian roulette- or maybe a better metaphor would be crawling across one of those ladders they use to bridge crevasses on Everest- and setting off from the hotel in a taxi to the worst part of whatever city they happened to be playing.
There were moments that I found funny, though I don't know that most people will. On the night before the Letterman appearance in '92, for example, the Trees stayed in a hotel in "the dying tourist town of Asbury Park, NJ." Lanegan remembers walking along the boardwalk looking to score, passing through an empty cavernous building (probably the convention center or the old casino), and concluding that the place is an absolute tomb. At a certain point he notices that not one but two used condoms have hitched a ride on his shoe, and he decides to go back to the hotel. Well, it's funny to me because I grew up in Asbury Park, and I take some perverse pride in the idea that it was the one place even a seasoned dope fiend like Lanegan felt creeped out by- generally the only sort of pride that being from New Jersey affords. In another chapter, he describes how he would always have his morning fix while listening to the Way of Life album by Suicide, a band that was in heavy rotation in the kitchen of an off-campus house where I lived for a couple of years during college.
I loved them [Suicide] and that album in particular always got me jacked up. There were many days I would take my first shot of heroin with Alan Vega's creepily affected voice saying, "Yeah, this is the cops, yeah, she's wild in blue" over a propulsive industrial electronic beat...I've never done heroin, but it was done in that house by others, and I guess I've always known deep down that songs like "Frankie Teardrop", "Harlem" and "Mr. Ray" composed an ideal soundtrack for shooting up.
But most of it is less amusing. We all know about Cobain, but Lanegan was also close with Hole bassist Kristen Pfaff, who OD'd in '94, and Layne Staley's girlfriend Demri, who developed endocarditis from heroin use and died in '96. Staley himself died in '02, the culmination of what I remember someone in the oral history Everyone Loves Our Town describing as a slow-motion suicide. Alice in Chains had easily the most menacing sound of Seattle's Big Four, and Staley's voice was an essential part of that, but Lanegan's recollections leave the impression of a shy and soft-spoken guy with a great sense of humor, who was also very vulnerable. The thought occurs to you that if someone had been plotting to destroy early 90s alternative rock, they couldn't have done any better than to introduce heroin to the pacific northwest.
Accurately reconstructing dialogue, incident and motivation from decades in the past is in most cases probably impossible, so objections along those lines (made by a few other readers here) seem irrelevant to me. Lanegan's writing voice is pretty consistently that of a blunt, profane, violent, northwestern hillbilly (and I mean that in a good way); so when he remembers saying something in '93 and puts it in quotations, it may very well be that he didn't use those exact words, but they seem to reflect the truth of his personality and way of speaking. That works for me. If in fact he were a more elegant writer, I think something might have been lost. His bluntness is perfect for describing this series of personal apocalypses. And it's been a while since I've read any Burroughs, but a few of Lanegan's passages have to be up there with some of the more vivid and harrowing descriptions of dopesickness in literature. You can almost feel the dread of approaching withdrawal, the desperation to score by any means necessary, and the horror of not making it to a dealer in time. The climactic chapter here, "Ice-Cold European Funhouse", describes such an absolute rock-bottom that I just had to laugh. We all know that this stuff gets you not just mentally and spiritually but physically, and that those categories are not mutually exclusive, but Lanegan reminds you of what that means. And as bad as it is when he finds himself simultaneously puking and shitting "black liquid" on the side of a street in Amsterdam, the memoir also tracks something subtler- his steady drift from the pretense that his life is dedicated to music, or to anything other than heroin. If ever there were a good memoir that made you less inclined to explore the music, this would have to be up there in that category, as well. "I spent most of the time shooting dope and smoking crack, and made up the lyrics while recording in the studio", after all, isn't exactly a ringing endorsement of the Trees' final album, Dust (1996).
I listened to it anyway, though. To put my cards on the table, I've never dug the Trees' music all that much myself, and thought their status as a second-tier grunge band was probably deserved. Well, I haven't exactly changed my opinion, but I do like a number of the songs on Dust. Like this one. And this one. And this one. I spent a lot of this reading experience morbidly fascinated by the guy, but he really was a bit of a poet. Some beautiful lyrics in these songs. I read an article earlier this year that described Lanegan's gravely and soulful voice as the band's "secret weapon", and I can hear that, too. He sounds archetypically of the early 90s, and that has a nostalgic effect on me. Either way, maybe second-tier status is an acceptable price to pay to keep breathing a while longer. The end of the memoir features a deus ex machina from an unexpected and distinctly non-divine source . I gather Lanegan still had a few relapses, but he eventually got clean and lived long enough to have a solo career, which included a pretty gorgeous song called "Strange Religion" that plays in an episode Anthony Bourdain made about Seattle. He died in Ireland this year at 57, two days before Russia invaded Ukraine.
November 13, 2020
A funny and brutally-candid rock memoir classic to put alongside Neil Young's Waging Heavy Peace and Peter Hook's Unknown Pleasures/Substance, among others. Uncompromising, gruelling, harrowing and yet, finally, hopeful.
--
'One day in early April of ’94, I was lying on my tattered, cigarette-burned sofa, chain-smoking and watching stupid soap operas on TV with the sound off, when my phone rang. As was my normal routine, I let the answering machine pick it up and waited to see if whoever called would leave a message.
“Hey, man, it’s Kurt. I’m back in town. What’re you doing? C’mon over and listen to records with me.”
I thought about it for a minute. Though I loved Kurt, I knew I wasn’t calling back today—(a) I had quite a bit of cash at the moment and plenty of dope so the thought of possibly running out to score for him was a drag, and (b) I assumed Courtney would be there. I had become conditioned to steer clear of their house because every time I had been there in recent months, some kind of drama would erupt between the two of them. It unfolded like some dreary sitcom joke: Courtney would be uncomfortably friendly to me in front of Kurt till she finally triggered an outburst from him. So I blew Kurt off because I didn’t feel like playing the pawn in a fucked-up chess game that particular day.
He called twice more over the next couple hours. Despite the gnawing feeling that I was the world’s shittiest friend, I never picked up, just continued to lie around the place in dirty boxers and the stained robe a stripper girlfriend had left in my bedroom, imagining myself a modern-day Oscar Wilde. Listening to a Stranglers record and staring mindlessly at the silent TV screen, I was oblivious to the gathering storm headed in my direction.
Late in the afternoon, I got a call from the entertainment lawyer I shared with Kurt, Rosemary Carroll, an extremely smart, no-nonsense woman who happened to be the ex-wife of celebrated writer/musician Jim Carroll.
“Mark, if you know where Kurt is, you need to tell me now.”
A couple minutes later, another message. “If he is at your apartment and you’re not telling me, we’re going to have a problem.” I called her back to assure her I wasn’t hiding him.
“Mark,” she said, “I don’t think you realize what’s going on. He checked himself out of rehab yesterday, flew back to Seattle today, and now nobody can get in touch with him.”
“He’s probably fine, Rosemary. Don’t worry, I’m sure he’ll check in soon.” In fact, I had not known what was going on: a highly publicized overdose earlier had been posed to both Dylan Carlson and me as accidental and only much later was it revealed to us as a suicide attempt. I had also not known he’d left rehab and come home on the same day he called me. I called Kurt: no answer. I called our mutual friends but no one had heard from him. I began to wonder if something was really wrong. I chastised myself for not answering the phone earlier, but I told myself, How could I know? How could I know what was really going on? How could I have known Courtney wasn’t even there? How, how, how …
The next day someone in the Nirvana camp asked if I would go with Dylan to some Capitol Hill dope houses to see if Kurt was hanging out at any of them. A private investigator Courtney had hired named Tom Grant picked us up. With money he supplied, we went from place to place, buying drugs and looking for Kurt to no avail: he couldn’t be found. After we had gone to the spot of every last dealer we could think of, Grant drove us to Kurt’s house near Lake Washington. We went from room to room calling his name but there was no answer. I went outside to smoke a cigarette and stood at the bottom of a flight of stairs that led to a small room above his garage.
For a moment, I thought about going up and taking a look. Just then Dylan and Grant walked out, ready to leave. I knocked the cherry off my half-finished smoke and put the rest in my coat pocket. For a brief second, I had a terrible premonition, but I shook it off and got in the car, eager just to get home and do my share of the heroin we had bought.
A day or two later, Rosemary called me, her voice shaking with emotion, and delivered the news. Kurt’s body had been found in the small room above his garage—the same room at which I had stood at the foot of earlier—the victim of an apparent suicide. A medical examiner judged his death to have taken place the same day we were at the house looking for him.
I hung up the phone and burst into tears of remorse, self-hatred, and mountainous grief. I knew I would never get over his death. It would shadow me until the day I died.'
--
'One day in early April of ’94, I was lying on my tattered, cigarette-burned sofa, chain-smoking and watching stupid soap operas on TV with the sound off, when my phone rang. As was my normal routine, I let the answering machine pick it up and waited to see if whoever called would leave a message.
“Hey, man, it’s Kurt. I’m back in town. What’re you doing? C’mon over and listen to records with me.”
I thought about it for a minute. Though I loved Kurt, I knew I wasn’t calling back today—(a) I had quite a bit of cash at the moment and plenty of dope so the thought of possibly running out to score for him was a drag, and (b) I assumed Courtney would be there. I had become conditioned to steer clear of their house because every time I had been there in recent months, some kind of drama would erupt between the two of them. It unfolded like some dreary sitcom joke: Courtney would be uncomfortably friendly to me in front of Kurt till she finally triggered an outburst from him. So I blew Kurt off because I didn’t feel like playing the pawn in a fucked-up chess game that particular day.
He called twice more over the next couple hours. Despite the gnawing feeling that I was the world’s shittiest friend, I never picked up, just continued to lie around the place in dirty boxers and the stained robe a stripper girlfriend had left in my bedroom, imagining myself a modern-day Oscar Wilde. Listening to a Stranglers record and staring mindlessly at the silent TV screen, I was oblivious to the gathering storm headed in my direction.
Late in the afternoon, I got a call from the entertainment lawyer I shared with Kurt, Rosemary Carroll, an extremely smart, no-nonsense woman who happened to be the ex-wife of celebrated writer/musician Jim Carroll.
“Mark, if you know where Kurt is, you need to tell me now.”
A couple minutes later, another message. “If he is at your apartment and you’re not telling me, we’re going to have a problem.” I called her back to assure her I wasn’t hiding him.
“Mark,” she said, “I don’t think you realize what’s going on. He checked himself out of rehab yesterday, flew back to Seattle today, and now nobody can get in touch with him.”
“He’s probably fine, Rosemary. Don’t worry, I’m sure he’ll check in soon.” In fact, I had not known what was going on: a highly publicized overdose earlier had been posed to both Dylan Carlson and me as accidental and only much later was it revealed to us as a suicide attempt. I had also not known he’d left rehab and come home on the same day he called me. I called Kurt: no answer. I called our mutual friends but no one had heard from him. I began to wonder if something was really wrong. I chastised myself for not answering the phone earlier, but I told myself, How could I know? How could I know what was really going on? How could I have known Courtney wasn’t even there? How, how, how …
The next day someone in the Nirvana camp asked if I would go with Dylan to some Capitol Hill dope houses to see if Kurt was hanging out at any of them. A private investigator Courtney had hired named Tom Grant picked us up. With money he supplied, we went from place to place, buying drugs and looking for Kurt to no avail: he couldn’t be found. After we had gone to the spot of every last dealer we could think of, Grant drove us to Kurt’s house near Lake Washington. We went from room to room calling his name but there was no answer. I went outside to smoke a cigarette and stood at the bottom of a flight of stairs that led to a small room above his garage.
For a moment, I thought about going up and taking a look. Just then Dylan and Grant walked out, ready to leave. I knocked the cherry off my half-finished smoke and put the rest in my coat pocket. For a brief second, I had a terrible premonition, but I shook it off and got in the car, eager just to get home and do my share of the heroin we had bought.
A day or two later, Rosemary called me, her voice shaking with emotion, and delivered the news. Kurt’s body had been found in the small room above his garage—the same room at which I had stood at the foot of earlier—the victim of an apparent suicide. A medical examiner judged his death to have taken place the same day we were at the house looking for him.
I hung up the phone and burst into tears of remorse, self-hatred, and mountainous grief. I knew I would never get over his death. It would shadow me until the day I died.'
October 16, 2022
The life of an addict is monotonous and horrible, and Mark Lanegan takes you there. This book is raw and painfully honest (or as honest as an addict's memory can be.) I find it shocking that people (Josh Homme, Courtney Love, Mike McCready, Duff McKagen and many others famous, non-famous and infamous) so often helped him. It is hard to imagine why they felt like there was something worth working to save. I am so glad they saw that spark. Their generosity of spirit helped ensure he did not end up dead from addiction like most of his closest friends, including Kurt Cobain and Layne Staley.
I am a Mark Lanegan fan, he was spectacularly talented with a voice like no other. For those people only familiar with his work with the consistently mediocre Screaming Trees I urge you to check out the great work he did on his own and in collaboration with other artists from PJ Harvey to Nick Cave to Johnny Cash. (FWiW my favorite albums are Whiskey for the Holy Ghost, Bubblegum, and the gorgeous Hawk - a collab with Isobel Campbell from Belle and Sebastian.) Like his music this memoir has a raw, gritty, untrained urgency. It drags in parts, but for those interested in addiction memoirs, it is one of the best I have read. When Lanegan died this year (maybe from Covid - he had a bad case and it appears he never fully recovered though no cause of death was released) he had been clean for over a decade and was living in Ireland where was apparently happily married and was putting out a lot of music. I truly hope those ten years were happy ones.
A 3.5, rounded up because I am sitting here listening to Come Undone and it is making me love him enough to round up instead of down.
I am a Mark Lanegan fan, he was spectacularly talented with a voice like no other. For those people only familiar with his work with the consistently mediocre Screaming Trees I urge you to check out the great work he did on his own and in collaboration with other artists from PJ Harvey to Nick Cave to Johnny Cash. (FWiW my favorite albums are Whiskey for the Holy Ghost, Bubblegum, and the gorgeous Hawk - a collab with Isobel Campbell from Belle and Sebastian.) Like his music this memoir has a raw, gritty, untrained urgency. It drags in parts, but for those interested in addiction memoirs, it is one of the best I have read. When Lanegan died this year (maybe from Covid - he had a bad case and it appears he never fully recovered though no cause of death was released) he had been clean for over a decade and was living in Ireland where was apparently happily married and was putting out a lot of music. I truly hope those ten years were happy ones.
A 3.5, rounded up because I am sitting here listening to Come Undone and it is making me love him enough to round up instead of down.
January 29, 2021
Update 1/29/21: I just finished listening to the audiobook. I read the hard copy when it came out but I wanted to hear it read by Lanegan himself. I was struck again by how visceral a reaction Lanegan was able to evoke—I really felt like I was experiencing his agony while he read.
Wow. Lanegan did not spare himself in this memoir—he bared all and it was ugly. Felt like I was right there with him going through every harrowing bit. I adore his singing and am grateful I had the opportunity to delve into his past life like this.
Wow. Lanegan did not spare himself in this memoir—he bared all and it was ugly. Felt like I was right there with him going through every harrowing bit. I adore his singing and am grateful I had the opportunity to delve into his past life like this.
May 23, 2025
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.
Brutal, painfully honest history of Lanegan's early career and long struggle with heroin addiction. Highly recommended for anyone with an interest in music, the '90s Seattle scene, and the ugly realities of music as a business and rock "stardom." Also a treasure trove of references to pioneering musicians and bands you likely have never heard of but will enjoy if you're human rather than a marketing ghoul. Forward written by my buddy, Hooky.
Helpful recipe for a Hillbilly Speedball on pp. 261-2, followed by a hilarious encounter with Liam Gallagher, the clown who had stumbled into the high life, courtesy of his talented older brother. It goes brutally on: His manner was strongly reminiscent of a child ruined with indulgence, but one with an unpredictable predilection for cruelty and an ocean-sized, burning black-hole need for attention. I could see him as a kid in short pants, on a bright, sunny day, gleefully jacking his miniscule dick while frying ants under a magnifying glass.
Brutal, painfully honest history of Lanegan's early career and long struggle with heroin addiction. Highly recommended for anyone with an interest in music, the '90s Seattle scene, and the ugly realities of music as a business and rock "stardom." Also a treasure trove of references to pioneering musicians and bands you likely have never heard of but will enjoy if you're human rather than a marketing ghoul. Forward written by my buddy, Hooky.
Helpful recipe for a Hillbilly Speedball on pp. 261-2, followed by a hilarious encounter with Liam Gallagher, the clown who had stumbled into the high life, courtesy of his talented older brother. It goes brutally on: His manner was strongly reminiscent of a child ruined with indulgence, but one with an unpredictable predilection for cruelty and an ocean-sized, burning black-hole need for attention. I could see him as a kid in short pants, on a bright, sunny day, gleefully jacking his miniscule dick while frying ants under a magnifying glass.
Read
May 9, 2020Ovo je, ukratko, nastrana pornografija užasa zavisnosti.
Počne nezavidnim detinjstvom i onda bez prestanka tone u nova dna ljudskog ponašanja. Čitaoca ne štedi brutalnih opisa telesnog i mentalnog horora alkoholizma i narkomanije, posledica nebrige za sebe i druge, izrabljivanja svih oko sebe i neverovatnih napora da se po svaku cenu dođe do droge. Urođena telesna otpornost, visoka diploma škole ulice, harizma i prihodi muzičke zvezde osrednjeg kalibra, sve se spojilo da ta agonija traje neverovatno dugo. Veći uspeh ili neuspeh bi ga verovatno ranije šutnuli na dno.
Lanegan se na rečima uredno stidi i kaje, ali čini mi se istovremeno i ponosi ekstremima sranja koja je pravio. Utisak mi je da baš pokušava da me navuče na priču i proda mi ... nešto. Sebe?
Prosvetljenje, skidanje s droge i pranje od prošlog života dolazi u jednom šturom poglavlju, ne njegovom željom i namerom već bežanjem od većih problema, u situaciji da se u potpunosti predaje dobroj volji poznanika koje jeste ili nije zajebao do koske ili stranaca koji ga poštuju kao umetnika. Lanegan je toga svestan i prihvata to ali na nihilističan način, kao lutriju sudbine, ni po čemu bolju ili lošiju od anonimne smrti u jarku. Ovog puta izgleda ima pameti da ne grize ruku koja ga hrani. Knjiga se završava pre vaskrsnuća karijere, a to je deo njegovog života koji me više zanima, tako da se nadam nastavku.
Kompoziciono, izlaganje je haotično i malo nabacano. Stilski pati od neke potrebe da se uz sve nalepe jeftine odrednice i metafore. Uz sve to knjiga ostaje upečatljiv, zanimljiv i nadasve mučan iskaz o nečijem životu.
Počne nezavidnim detinjstvom i onda bez prestanka tone u nova dna ljudskog ponašanja. Čitaoca ne štedi brutalnih opisa telesnog i mentalnog horora alkoholizma i narkomanije, posledica nebrige za sebe i druge, izrabljivanja svih oko sebe i neverovatnih napora da se po svaku cenu dođe do droge. Urođena telesna otpornost, visoka diploma škole ulice, harizma i prihodi muzičke zvezde osrednjeg kalibra, sve se spojilo da ta agonija traje neverovatno dugo. Veći uspeh ili neuspeh bi ga verovatno ranije šutnuli na dno.
Lanegan se na rečima uredno stidi i kaje, ali čini mi se istovremeno i ponosi ekstremima sranja koja je pravio. Utisak mi je da baš pokušava da me navuče na priču i proda mi ... nešto. Sebe?
Prosvetljenje, skidanje s droge i pranje od prošlog života dolazi u jednom šturom poglavlju, ne njegovom željom i namerom već bežanjem od većih problema, u situaciji da se u potpunosti predaje dobroj volji poznanika koje jeste ili nije zajebao do koske ili stranaca koji ga poštuju kao umetnika. Lanegan je toga svestan i prihvata to ali na nihilističan način, kao lutriju sudbine, ni po čemu bolju ili lošiju od anonimne smrti u jarku. Ovog puta izgleda ima pameti da ne grize ruku koja ga hrani. Knjiga se završava pre vaskrsnuća karijere, a to je deo njegovog života koji me više zanima, tako da se nadam nastavku.
Kompoziciono, izlaganje je haotično i malo nabacano. Stilski pati od neke potrebe da se uz sve nalepe jeftine odrednice i metafore. Uz sve to knjiga ostaje upečatljiv, zanimljiv i nadasve mučan iskaz o nečijem životu.
January 3, 2025
Did you know Mark Lanegan is a junkie? Did you know he is, like, really tough? He'll beat your ass. Did you know Gary Lee Conner isn't really that talented, and anything good The Screaming Trees did was because Mark Lanegan was behind it? He couldn't stand his band mates. I'm sure it was their fault and not because Mark Lanegan is an asshole. Oh, he was good friends with Kurt Cobain and Layne Staley. He wants you to know how deep and cool they were. Maybe Kurt wouldn't have died if Mark Lanegan had answered his phone, but darn it, heroin again. Sure, he loved heroin more than anything or anyone, but he was a totally a sensitive junkie, and so he even mentions a few women. He probably could have banged Courtney Love, and he was totally going to bang Kristen Pfaff before she died, man. Bummer. These are the things Mark Lanegan will tell you, in addition to all of the STDs he contracted along the way. You probably won't understand since you're not as much of a tough, junkie rebel as Mark Lanegan.
May 24, 2022
Gray goes black
Ik verdiep me zelden in het leven van muzikanten, ik beluister hun muziek en meer interesseert me niet. Uiteraard besef ik dat alcohol en drugs een grote rol spelen in het muzikale wereldje, maar dit boek was toch wel een eye opener.
Wat een junk was Mark Lanegan. Nietsontziend beschrijft hij zijn verslaving, de mensen die hij teleurgesteld heeft, de kansen die hij heeft laten gaan. De situaties zijn soms zodanig absurd dat het je tot in je diepste grijpt: hoe kan een mens met zoveel talent zo laag zinken?
Days go by remember that
Hoewel vrij onderkoeld beschreven, is het een zeer aangrijpend boek. Misschien wel omdat Mark Lanegan alles vertelt, zelfs de meest pijnlijke momenten die iemand anders liever zou verzwijgen. Er zit zoveel spijt en schuld in zijn verhaal, vriendschappen die niet zijn gelopen zoals ze moesten lopen. Zoals met Kurt Cobain, een van de meest confronterende momenten in het boek.
Gray goes black
Hoewel ik nu meer weet over Mark Lanegan, blijft hij tegelijkertijd een enigma. Het beeld dat hij hier van zichzelf schept (kort lontje), valt moeilijk te combineren met zijn onbeweeglijke presence op een podium (als hij kon, stond hij buiten de spotlights).
Hij heeft zo mooie muziek gemaakt, zo goede nummers, het is vreemd dat we hem nooit meer zullen horen of zien.
Sing backwards and weep.
Ik verdiep me zelden in het leven van muzikanten, ik beluister hun muziek en meer interesseert me niet. Uiteraard besef ik dat alcohol en drugs een grote rol spelen in het muzikale wereldje, maar dit boek was toch wel een eye opener.
Wat een junk was Mark Lanegan. Nietsontziend beschrijft hij zijn verslaving, de mensen die hij teleurgesteld heeft, de kansen die hij heeft laten gaan. De situaties zijn soms zodanig absurd dat het je tot in je diepste grijpt: hoe kan een mens met zoveel talent zo laag zinken?
Days go by remember that
Hoewel vrij onderkoeld beschreven, is het een zeer aangrijpend boek. Misschien wel omdat Mark Lanegan alles vertelt, zelfs de meest pijnlijke momenten die iemand anders liever zou verzwijgen. Er zit zoveel spijt en schuld in zijn verhaal, vriendschappen die niet zijn gelopen zoals ze moesten lopen. Zoals met Kurt Cobain, een van de meest confronterende momenten in het boek.
Gray goes black
Hoewel ik nu meer weet over Mark Lanegan, blijft hij tegelijkertijd een enigma. Het beeld dat hij hier van zichzelf schept (kort lontje), valt moeilijk te combineren met zijn onbeweeglijke presence op een podium (als hij kon, stond hij buiten de spotlights).
Hij heeft zo mooie muziek gemaakt, zo goede nummers, het is vreemd dat we hem nooit meer zullen horen of zien.
Sing backwards and weep.
May 18, 2021
I’ve loved Mark Lanegan since I heard his 2004 album Bubblegum. The dark, grime-covered beauty of that album spoke to me in a big way, and became the soundtrack to the troubled state I was in at that time. After discovering Bubblegum I went back through his entire solo catalog, and he became a top artist for me--an iconic musical mastermind, a haunted poet. Lanegan is a relic from the Seattle scene, the last surviving godfather of that dark, mystical era of music that burst onto the radio in the 90s. Alice in Chains, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden—that was my time, and those were my bands. Unfortunately a lot of it remains shrouded in mystery. But slowly, with new memoirs and biographies emerging, additional windows are opening to this iconic period in music, and Lanegan’s new book is a crucial connective piece following Patty Schemel’s Hit So Hard.
Sing Backwards and Weep is a raw, sad, painful, and often hilarious account of Mark Lanegan’s time as a singer for Screaming Trees, detailing his difficult upbringing, his rise to fame, and his various interactions with other icons of the Seattle scene as they collectively battle substance abuse, each other, and general rock and roll debauchery. Lanegan holds nothing back here, and makes no excuses for his behavior. He tells it like it is, and if he’s raw about something he doesn’t hide it. Like dropping a lit cigarette in actor Matt Dillon's coat pocket simply because he hated the movie Singles, and for not getting a dime for the hit song on its soundtrack. There’s a lot of hard truth here, and it’s incredibly detailed and beautifully written. Hopefully he writes a second book detailing his later solo career. Highly recommended to those who grew up with grunge and alternative music as the soundtrack of their youth. It’s still my favorite era of music, and these are still my favorite bands.
Sing Backwards and Weep is a raw, sad, painful, and often hilarious account of Mark Lanegan’s time as a singer for Screaming Trees, detailing his difficult upbringing, his rise to fame, and his various interactions with other icons of the Seattle scene as they collectively battle substance abuse, each other, and general rock and roll debauchery. Lanegan holds nothing back here, and makes no excuses for his behavior. He tells it like it is, and if he’s raw about something he doesn’t hide it. Like dropping a lit cigarette in actor Matt Dillon's coat pocket simply because he hated the movie Singles, and for not getting a dime for the hit song on its soundtrack. There’s a lot of hard truth here, and it’s incredibly detailed and beautifully written. Hopefully he writes a second book detailing his later solo career. Highly recommended to those who grew up with grunge and alternative music as the soundtrack of their youth. It’s still my favorite era of music, and these are still my favorite bands.
September 8, 2022
Το youtube μου πρότεινε κάποια αποσπάσματα από το συγκεκριμένο audiobook και ακούγοντάς τα μου άρεσαν αρκετά ώστε να το αγοράσω ολόκληρο και καλά έκανα όπως φάνηκε γιατί ο Mark Lanegan, μεταξύ άλλων, αποδείχτηκε εξαιρετικός αφηγητής. Τον ήξερα κατ όνομα, χωρίς όμως να γνωρίζω ιδιαίτερα τη μουσική του. Ολοκληρώνοντας το βιβλίο πάλι μπορώ να πω ότι δε ξέρω πολλά για τη μουσική του (πέρα ότι δεν πήγαινε τον κιθαρίστα του και εγκέφαλο των Screaming Trees Gary Lee Conner), αφού η αφήγηση του περιστρέφεται κυρίως γύρω από τις ναρκωπεριπέτειες του, παρέα ενίοτε με τον Kurt Cobain ή τον Lane Staley. Αλκοολικός από τα 12, χρήστης ουσιών από τα 18, αφήνει την μίζερη επαρχιακή πόλη και την προβληματική οικογένεια του για το Σιάτλ, συνεχίζει κάνοντας τον μικροέμπορο για να εξασφαλίζει την ικανοποίηση της έξης του, καταλήγει απένταρος, άστεγος και αναζητούμενος από αστυνομία και εμπόρους που φέσωσε, παρότι μέχρι πριν λίγους μήνες έπαιζε σε ένα συγκρότημα από τη χρυσή εποχή της σκηνής του Seattle που έκανε παγκόσμιες περιοδείες και ηχογραφούσε για πολυεθνική. Η αφήγηση των περιπετειών του στο παγωμένο νυχτερινό Λονδίνο και Άμστερνταμ σε αναζήτηση μια δόσης, αγωνιώντας να προλάβει τα επερχόμενα στερητικά είναι κωμική και τραγική ταυτόχρονα, αλλά μπορώ να πω και γεμάτη σασπένς. Η χείρα βοηθείας που οδηγεί στη σωτηρία και απεξάρτηση του τελικά έρχεται αναπάντεχα. Δεν θα με πείραζε να ακούσω και για τις περιπέτειές του κατά τα επόμενα χρόνια της ζωής του.
May 5, 2020
Raw, brutal honesty by my favorite singer-songwriter of his years of addiction. Five stars for the harrowing audiobook featuring his deep, gravelly-voiced narration.
May 10, 2020
Regardless of your familiarity with Mark Lanegan this is a must read book. It’s both an entertaining history of the Screaming Trees, the beginnings of Mark Lanegans solo career, and an often hilarious personal journey through the Seattle music scene, AND a masterpiece of literary writing and an absolutely harrowing journey into the degradation of drug addiction. There were so many moments that were absolutely heartbreaking to read for me; as someone who has loved and looked up to and been inspired by this man for my whole life, I was horrified and upset to see some of the truly awful things he’s done in his life, in the grip of a disease that wouldn’t let him go. You are pulled through the ringer, and Lanegan holds nothing back. He gives his truthful honest opinions on everyone from the people he adored to the scumbags he will hate for the rest of his life. But of all them, the most critical eye he turns is to himself. This book is stunningly authentic and incredibly introspective and honest. It’s one of the great creative pursuits of his whole career, an exhausting read that is insanely wild, hilarious, fun, but also goes to the most earth shatteringly awful moments of his whole life, the moments of existential and nihilistic despair that will always be in his soul. This should be a new high bar for memoir writing and for the often tedious genre of rock autobiography. Compulsively readable and compelling, Sing Backwards and Weep comes with the highest recommendation.
December 28, 2024
Two important things i have learnt and/or confirmed from reading this memoir.
1: Happy, well-adjusted people don't make great art. Misfits, addicts, manic depressives make great art but happy people never do. Take that as gospel.
2: Drugs are the enemy of art. Screaming Trees were forever relegated to being "also-rans" in the Seattle scene largely because of the addiction issues of Mark Lanegan. You want to make great art? Stay clean and sober.
All in all this was a good, if often tragic, read from someone whose music shaped my youth.
1: Happy, well-adjusted people don't make great art. Misfits, addicts, manic depressives make great art but happy people never do. Take that as gospel.
2: Drugs are the enemy of art. Screaming Trees were forever relegated to being "also-rans" in the Seattle scene largely because of the addiction issues of Mark Lanegan. You want to make great art? Stay clean and sober.
All in all this was a good, if often tragic, read from someone whose music shaped my youth.
February 23, 2021
It's tough to get through this memoir of self-destruction. I've always been a fan of The Screaming Trees, from their pseudo-psychedelic mid-80's origins to their more successful 1990's grunge years. Lanegan dismisses most of these records and his bandmates, openly despises most of the people in the Seattle scene (some of whom are my friends), and really only cares about dope. It's sad, boring, and ultimately pointless.
March 20, 2024
Kdybych chtěl knihu jednoduše popsat a půjčit si k tomu parafrázi hlášky od Cimrmana, tak to shrnu do: první polovina: chlast, fet, chlast, fet, chlast, fet, a tam vzadu to je výjimka, tam je jen spousta héra. Druhá polovina knihy se už točí pouze jen o fetu, konkrétně o tom heroinu. A pro lepší čtenářský zážitek je tam přidána slušná dávka sexu a primitivního násilí.
-- Ale abych knihu neomezil jen na to fetování tak musím vysvětlit, že kniha je vzpomínkami zpěváka poměrně známé grungové kapely Screaming Trees na většinu jeho života. Mark se narodil na americkém venkově a už hodně brzy začal s alkoholem a před nudou maloměsta unikl pomocí svého působení v rockové skupině Screaming Trees. Brzy se přestěhuje do Seattlu a zažije celý vzestup kapel z labelu Sub Pop a hvězdné Nirvany.
-- Pokud jste zažili devadesátky a v té době poslouchali nezávislou hudbu, tak si připočítejte minimálně jednu hvězdičku. Mark v knize líčí své shledání se spoustou vašich hudebních hrdinů. Jen pro představu vyjmenuji pár jmen, na které si vzpomínám: Wu Tang Clan, Circle Jers, Alice In the Chains, L7, Pearl Jam a spoustu dalších. Skvělá je historka, jak bydlel s členy kapely Earth. Té kapely, která vytvořila drone metal a která opravdu otestuje vaše reproduktury.
-- Závěrečná třetina knihy je několik vyprávění, jak autor shání drogy v nějakém prdelákově nebo během šílené zimy a vždy podniká takovou složitou odyseu, která se vyrovná téměř legendárnímu putování společenstva prstenu. Myslím, že líčení těchto eskapád a abstinenčních stavů docela může působit dost jako prevence pro zneužívání drog a alkoholu. Ale pokud vám nevadí tyhle špinavé záležitosti a počítáte s tím, že většina knihy je hodně depresivní, tak se kniha čte dobře a na někoho, kdo není spisovatel je to dost dobré. Doporučuji.
-- Ale abych knihu neomezil jen na to fetování tak musím vysvětlit, že kniha je vzpomínkami zpěváka poměrně známé grungové kapely Screaming Trees na většinu jeho života. Mark se narodil na americkém venkově a už hodně brzy začal s alkoholem a před nudou maloměsta unikl pomocí svého působení v rockové skupině Screaming Trees. Brzy se přestěhuje do Seattlu a zažije celý vzestup kapel z labelu Sub Pop a hvězdné Nirvany.
-- Pokud jste zažili devadesátky a v té době poslouchali nezávislou hudbu, tak si připočítejte minimálně jednu hvězdičku. Mark v knize líčí své shledání se spoustou vašich hudebních hrdinů. Jen pro představu vyjmenuji pár jmen, na které si vzpomínám: Wu Tang Clan, Circle Jers, Alice In the Chains, L7, Pearl Jam a spoustu dalších. Skvělá je historka, jak bydlel s členy kapely Earth. Té kapely, která vytvořila drone metal a která opravdu otestuje vaše reproduktury.
-- Závěrečná třetina knihy je několik vyprávění, jak autor shání drogy v nějakém prdelákově nebo během šílené zimy a vždy podniká takovou složitou odyseu, která se vyrovná téměř legendárnímu putování společenstva prstenu. Myslím, že líčení těchto eskapád a abstinenčních stavů docela může působit dost jako prevence pro zneužívání drog a alkoholu. Ale pokud vám nevadí tyhle špinavé záležitosti a počítáte s tím, že většina knihy je hodně depresivní, tak se kniha čte dobře a na někoho, kdo není spisovatel je to dost dobré. Doporučuji.
November 12, 2022
I was stunned how raw, non-sugar coated and bluntly honest the book was. Written as if your talking to him.
True emotional roller-coaster from the feelings of embarrassment, disgust, laughter and shock of how Mark Lanegan lived. We make our own decisions in life. That's for sure.
A contradiction on the expectations of how 'rockstars' live.
A story to identify how troubled childhood... What was put in from your parents... Bad or good... Manifests into adult lives.
Interesting how Mark described his running out patience of embarrassment he experienced on stage with the Trees... Yet inflicted the embarrassment to himself everyday on the streets.
The last few pages gives an insight on what happened next in his life... Almost as if the whole significance, story ended with rehab. Maybe that's a sign for a second book? Or maybe... That's his highlight and it ended there. Too much about drugs, sex and drama. Might as well be the whole book. It comes across as if he constantly tries to prove his power, worth and macho man image through fighting and aggression. Wants everyone know he's a total 'man'.
What a character he is. After reading this book, you can definitely at least to an extent, understand who he is. One thing is for sure, he is proud of fighting and is reckless. Makes you feel sorry for what he went through but also not, as those were his own decisions. You don't know whether you should dislike or like the protagonist.
All shows that he is brutally honest in his writing, at least makes the reader believe so.
One thing is for sure, talent is born. And he's one hell of a musician. 🤘🏻 But man... This one was soo captivating to read regardless.
True emotional roller-coaster from the feelings of embarrassment, disgust, laughter and shock of how Mark Lanegan lived. We make our own decisions in life. That's for sure.
A contradiction on the expectations of how 'rockstars' live.
A story to identify how troubled childhood... What was put in from your parents... Bad or good... Manifests into adult lives.
Interesting how Mark described his running out patience of embarrassment he experienced on stage with the Trees... Yet inflicted the embarrassment to himself everyday on the streets.
The last few pages gives an insight on what happened next in his life... Almost as if the whole significance, story ended with rehab. Maybe that's a sign for a second book? Or maybe... That's his highlight and it ended there. Too much about drugs, sex and drama. Might as well be the whole book. It comes across as if he constantly tries to prove his power, worth and macho man image through fighting and aggression. Wants everyone know he's a total 'man'.
What a character he is. After reading this book, you can definitely at least to an extent, understand who he is. One thing is for sure, he is proud of fighting and is reckless. Makes you feel sorry for what he went through but also not, as those were his own decisions. You don't know whether you should dislike or like the protagonist.
All shows that he is brutally honest in his writing, at least makes the reader believe so.
One thing is for sure, talent is born. And he's one hell of a musician. 🤘🏻 But man... This one was soo captivating to read regardless.
November 15, 2024
La impresionante crónica de juventud de Mark Lanegan, un libro durísimo y crudo donde expone sin tapujos su viaje al infierno de la droga escapando de un pueblo rural y de una família disfuncional.
Es un libro donde el cantante se desnuda sentimentalmente y vivimos de primera mano como es la vida de un yonki. Especialmente trágicos los capítulos donde vemos como otros cantantes y amigos famosos como Kurt Kobain o Layne Stanley van muriendo mientras Lanegan se queda solo dentro de la espiral de droga que lo empuja cada vez más hacia abajo. El final del libro con un Lanegan deambulando por Londres, enfermo y estafado por camellos de baja estofa o durmiendo con vagabundos es especialmente dramático. Menos mal que al final pudo escapar de todo eso y entregarnos unos discos fantásticos. Un superviviente que regresa del infierno.
Me hubiese gustado que se hablase más de música en el libro. Los capítulos donde dispara sin piedad contra Van Conner y los screaming trees no me gustaron porque me encanta la música que hicieron y me hubiese fascinado saber más sobre la composición de esas joyas que son Dust y Sweet Oblivion.
Eso sí, el libro me ha durado una semana porque es muy adictivo y está bien escrito.
A ver si se anima con una segunda parte.
Es un libro donde el cantante se desnuda sentimentalmente y vivimos de primera mano como es la vida de un yonki. Especialmente trágicos los capítulos donde vemos como otros cantantes y amigos famosos como Kurt Kobain o Layne Stanley van muriendo mientras Lanegan se queda solo dentro de la espiral de droga que lo empuja cada vez más hacia abajo. El final del libro con un Lanegan deambulando por Londres, enfermo y estafado por camellos de baja estofa o durmiendo con vagabundos es especialmente dramático. Menos mal que al final pudo escapar de todo eso y entregarnos unos discos fantásticos. Un superviviente que regresa del infierno.
Me hubiese gustado que se hablase más de música en el libro. Los capítulos donde dispara sin piedad contra Van Conner y los screaming trees no me gustaron porque me encanta la música que hicieron y me hubiese fascinado saber más sobre la composición de esas joyas que son Dust y Sweet Oblivion.
Eso sí, el libro me ha durado una semana porque es muy adictivo y está bien escrito.
A ver si se anima con una segunda parte.
May 13, 2020
A quasi-thug turned into a sensitive artist (or vice-versa), Lanegan's autobiography/memoirs are a more than captivating read!
The parts on Kurt's and Layne's deaths are beyond heart-rending and there's plenty of stuff in the book regarding their friendships that I didn't know (which are not necessarily sad).
Other than that, I just wish he'd knocked Liam Gallagher out cold back in 96! :P
The parts on Kurt's and Layne's deaths are beyond heart-rending and there's plenty of stuff in the book regarding their friendships that I didn't know (which are not necessarily sad).
Other than that, I just wish he'd knocked Liam Gallagher out cold back in 96! :P
July 19, 2020
Dark, brutal, gross. Don’t do heroin, kids.
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