Recently Mark Lanegan passed away at the age of 57, from some sort of health complications. He had lived through a long history of drug use before he had gotten clean, and then lived through a bout with COVID and wrote about that experience in another memoir. I was looking forward to catching up with his past by reading this book, and it goes back from his childhood through the formation and dissolution of the Screaming Trees, and finally ends with him starting to get back on his feet after a critical intervention from an old friend.
I’ve been a Screaming Trees fan for a long time, and some of the songs on their Uncle Anesthesia album got me through middle school. I’ve seen them live a few times. Once at a mainly empty show in San Francisco we exchanged a nod in the middle of a song – mostly he sang the whole night with his eyes closed and leaning heavily on the microphone stand. I didn’t really know much about the members of the band, but I knew I liked his voice and the guitar heavy sound they played.
This book drops right into the story, and the story is mainly about his struggles with alcohol, drugs, and a seriously fucked-up view of the world as his to do with as he wishes. They say “don’t meet your heroes” and I think this is a prime example – I could tell right away that I wouldn’t have liked this guy at all. And it was not just me – Lanegan is an asshole to just about everyone, and as his alcohol and drug addictions get worse, so does he.
This would be a sort of standard “drugs are bad/fall of the rock star” story if it weren’t for his tone of total honesty here. He tells his story without hiding the disturbing stuff (or maybe there is more disturbing stuff than this – not sure) and he also tells about the highlights. His highlights were often just having sex with a lot of cute girls or meeting musicians that he admires, but we have to remember that he was just in his early 20’s when these events happened.
Throughout the book he explains how he and his band mates wrote songs, came up with lyrics, and were otherwise inspired to make their music. Suitably as he slides deeper into addiction the book starts to focus on just getting his next fix – the shows he was playing or the albums they were recording were just ways to get more money to get more drugs.
There isn’t a lot of pity, and only towards the end there is a little bit of self-reflection about his behavior. He often uses self-deprecation in these stories from the road, and I think that shows that he understood afterwards how awful his behavior was, and for me that was enough to kind of forgive all the heartbreaking things he did.
With the combination of Mark Lanegan’s passing and my reading of this book I think I’ll be diving into his music again to give it more listening time. Luckily he left around 10 solo albums, many of which I haven’t heard, so there are other ways to remember him.
Next I’m re-reading Eaters of the Dead by Michael Crichton.
