In 1992, on a tour bus heading to Canada, the American singer Mark Lanegan felt a tightness in the crook of his arm. By the time he reached Quebec, his arm had swollen to twice its normal size. Already an alcoholic, Lanegan – known to friends as “Old Scratch”, the pseudonym for the devil – had developed a ferocious heroin habit and would regularly share needles. In hospital he was diagnosed with a blood infection and given intravenous antibiotics. Using a pen, a doctor drew a line around the inflamed area which stretched from his shoulder to his wrist and told him: “I’m gonna come back in 12 hours. If the redness has gone outside the line, I’m afraid we’re going to have to amputate your arm at the shoulder.” Eight torturous days later, the swelling had subsided and Lanegan was discharged, his arm still intact. “Not for one moment did it cross my mind that I had done this to myself,” he writes in Sing Backwards and Weep. And so the next day he resumed shooting up.
Rock memoirs are traditionally full of myth-building and depravity, but Lanegan’s account of his tenure in the proto-grunge quartet Screaming Trees sidesteps the myth-building and rushes headlong into grand guignol scenes of degradation and self-abuse. Rare in its rawness and candour, the book is a brutal chronicle of addiction that began aged 12 when Lanegan was “reviled as a town drunk before I could even legally drink”, and continued into his 20s when he branched out into heroin and crack.
The book sprints through Lanegan’s early life as the child of an abusive mother and alcoholic father in small-town Ellensburg, Washington – a period on which he would clearly rather not dwell. Formed with a bunch of old schoolmates in 1985, Screaming Trees were his passport to a new life. Given his contempt for the band’s songwriter, Gary Lee Conner, with whom he would regularly get into fistfights, he never expected it to last. But following a move to Seattle, he was soon on a merry-go-round of touring, recording albums and buying and selling drugs that would continue for the next 16 years.
In this memoir, as the band lurch chaotically from one tour to the next, we find Lanegan variously blacking out; picking fights; robbing and being robbed; and shooting up in dressing rooms, tour buses, hotels and aeroplane toilets. He makes no attempt to disguise or justify his behaviour, which includes habitually lying and cheating those close to him out of money, though his openness about his basest moments is disarming. There are epic stories of attempts to score drugs in strange cities while in painful states of withdrawal; on one such occasion, he ends up in London’s King’s Cross during early-morning rush hour, falling over and “spasm[ing] like a jellyfish on my side upon the hard concrete sidewalk, puking uncontrollably, tears streaming from my eyes”. As he lies there, a group of schoolchildren pick their way around him, whispering, giggling and pointing at “the pitiful scene of my public shame and sickness”.
Friends die along the way, among them Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain, the Gun Club’s Jeffrey Lee Pierce, Hole bassist Kristen Pfaff, and Demri Parrott, partner of the Alice in Chains singer Layne Staley, who himself died of an overdose in 2002. Cobain’s suicide in 1994 hits Lanegan particularly hard – the pair had been close and Lanegan remembers him affectionately as “a sensitive, non-social, and thoughtful, quiet guy, highly intelligent with a wicked, biting, and sometimes caustic sense of humour”. Hours before his death, Cobain had called and asked him to come over. Comfortable at home doing drugs and watching soap operas, Lanegan let the answering machine pick up the calls. When Cobain’s body was found two days later, he “burst into tears of remorse, self-hatred and mountainous grief. I knew I would never get over his death.”
Despite the tragedies, an arch humour characterises a lot of the writing, which is at its most withering when he recalls a beef with Liam Gallagher, singer of Oasis, who Screaming Trees supported on their 1996 US tour. The pair first met when Gallagher, flanked by two minders, shouted “Howling Branches!” at the notoriously short-tempered Lanegan while he was eating lunch, prompting an exchange of insults. Later, as Lanegan and his bandmates played their set, Gallagher stood at the side of the stage pulling disapproving faces in full view of the audience. Exasperated, the Trees bass player, Van Conner, walked up and clubbed Gallagher in the face with the head of his Fender Precision. No one emerges from the spat smelling of roses. Nonetheless, Lanegan’s recollections of Gallagher as “reckless, witless, despotic” and an “unbearable minor-league dictator … In my thirty-one years on earth, I had never encountered anyone with a larger head or tinier balls” make for bracing reading.
The book ends in 1997 as he enters rehab, organised and paid for by Cobain’s wife, Courtney Love, and shortly before the start of a new musical chapter that would see him collaborate with Queens of the Stone Age, the Afghan Whigs’s Greg Dulli and Belle and Sebastian’s Isobel Campbell, and make more albums as a solo artist. Bloody-minded to the last, he opts to keep the details of his path to sobriety to himself, though an epiphany of sorts arrives as he sits in the hospital gardens in the early stages of treatment, alternately laughing and sobbing. “In order to survive,” he writes, “I would have to change every single fucking sorry thing about myself. I would have to start over again clean.”
• Sing Backwards and Weep by Mark Lanegan is published by White Rabbit (£20). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15
