by Mark Lanegan
Trees A&R man Bob Pfeifer was in Los Angeles at the time, staying at his place not far from the former home of disgraced and exiled film director Roman Polanski, the house where Polanski’s wife, actress Sharon Tate, and several other people had been brutally butchered by members of the Manson Family in 1969. Bob called me in my room to tell me how psyched he was that the band was gonna be on The Tonight Show.
“This is great for the band. I want you guys to kick ass, like on Letterman.”
Bob had heartily approved of my refusal to allow Letterman’s makeup department to conceal my black eye and had been delighted by the melee at the show’s close. Bob was an old punk rocker at heart and he had perceived our drunken performance as rebellious and cool.
“Okay, Bob,” I said. “What should I do, punch Leno in the jaw? I’m pretty sure I could hit that target no matter how loaded I was.”
“Hey, goddamnit! I didn’t say anything about being loaded! Keep your shit under control, do you hear me?”
“Yes, Bob. Just kidding. I promise we will kick ass.”
“Good. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
I ordered some room service on the record company’s dime, then proceeded to cook myself up a large shot of the dope that a Hollywood dealer named Maria had delivered to my room. She was my main connection in Los Angeles for several years and was happy to bring the dope to me, which I greatly appreciated. Unlike Seattle, where you couldn’t bribe a dealer to come to you, Maria would always deliver.
After midnight, I couldn’t really catch a nod or fall asleep, so I did a bigger shot. This time I managed to catch a nod but came out of it around three thirty a.m. to the sound of the TV blaring. I got up and turned off the sound, but before going back to bed I decided to cook up the largest shot yet. I’d be damned if I was gonna be awake all night and then go do this all-day wank-off TV affair tomorrow.
I had always quickly developed a huge tolerance for any drug I was using. I’d had to do nearly twice the amount of anyone else I knew just to get close to the same results they enjoyed. It was never easy for me to cop a buzz of any sort, such was my mammoth-sized tolerance. Yes, I’d get blackout drunk, but only after drinking copious quantities of hard liquor nonstop for several hours. It took determination.
In my chichi West Hollywood hotel room, I prepared a huge hit. I was expecting diminishing returns as I’d already done quite a bit already, so I decided to augment my high with a couple Klonopins, a sedative antianxiety drug in the same general category as Valium, Xanax, or Ativan. I lay back down on the bed with my feet where my head should’ve gone, lying flat on my stomach, drowsily watching TV with the sound muted. As I started to drift off, I turned over on my back and, with no pillow under my head, finally fell asleep.
I came awake with a start and shot straight up. My lungs were on fire. I’d been lying flat on my back but somehow in my sleep I’d moved and my head had been hanging off the end of the bed. I began to try to cough up whatever was in my lungs and throat, burning so intensely I was barely able to breathe. I ran to the sink and poured a glass of cold water. It felt like hot lava going down and didn’t provide even the most meager bit of respite. Just the opposite—it intensified the burn. I coughed and spat and cleared my throat again and again but the fiery nightmare would not abate. It felt like the worst case of heartburn but in my throat and down into my lungs. After fifteen minutes of this hopeless routine, all I’d done was make myself so light-headed I thought I might pass out.
I realized what must have happened. As I lay there sleeping with my head hanging off the bed, some stomach acid had come up into my throat and I had breathed it into my lungs. The effect had been instantaneous and brutal, a painful burning that I could not relieve and a sudden inability to get sufficient oxygen into my lungs. I sat there for two hours just coughing, retching, trying to clear my throat of this insane burning, but there was nothing I could do to relieve the torment of this malign malady.
The phone rang: my wake-up call. I’d given myself an hour to get dressed, do a morning shot, and then head down to the lobby to join the band and crew for a ride to the Tonight Show studio. Fuck all that now; I’d been fighting for two hours just to get a proper breath. With tears pouring out of my eyes, and sweat pouring off my forehead into them, I could barely even see. I stuck my head under the tap in the bathroom sink, running water over my head and face. I dried my hair with a towel for ten seconds, put on my clothes, and stood on the balcony to try once more to cough this shit out of my lungs and airway. I could not believe my chest was melting down only fifteen minutes before we were to head over to perform on one of the biggest national TV shows. Forget about my usual morning cigarette and shot of dope. I weighed my options and realized I had only one. I had to go downstairs and get in the car.
When I got down to the lobby, our guitar tech Danny Baird stopped in his tracks.
“Jesus Christ, Lanegan, what have you been doing all night?” he said, assuming I’d been out on the town carousing, judging from my bright red eyes and swollen red face.
“Don’t ask,” I was able to squeeze out between bouts of unmitigated coughing and wheezing.
I got in a car with Van Conner and our road manager. My incessant loud, grotesque-sounding attempts to clear my throat immediately elicited stares in the rearview mirror from the driver.
“What the fuck’s wrong with you, man?” Van said.
“I was sleeping with my head hanging off the bed and I must have breathed in some stomach bile or something. Fuck, man, this is insane.”
I rolled down the window and spat again and again out of the car, feeling shaky, light-headed, and impaired in a way I’d never experienced before. Did I need to go to a hospital? Was I going to be permanently damaged? Was I going to fall out? Would I ever be able to sing again? My anxiety began to spiral out of control.
About a year after I had managed to quit drinking in 1983, I had begun to have these frightening episodes. Out of the clear blue, I would suddenly be gripped by the terrifying sensation that I could not breathe. Try as much as I could, it was impossible to get a deep breath. The more I tried, the harder it became to get a breath at all. Then my heart would seem to start beating crazily, and in a few seconds, I was sure death was right around the corner. Stroke, heart attack, brain hemorrhage? The first couple times, I rushed to the emergency room only to find that the medical technicians couldn’t find one thing wrong with me. I saw doctor after doctor, blew hundreds of dollars and went heavy into debt: nothing. A frustrating, baffling year later, I was lying on the couch with my eyes closed and the TV on when an ad for an upcoming episode of the show 20/20 made me sit up and pay attention. “America’s secret plague! Panic attacks! Tonight on 20/20!” I’d stopped having them by then because a girlfriend had begged me to see her uncle, a doctor fresh out of Johns Hopkins medical college who was starting his own practice. No way I wanted to see yet another doctor only to hear there was nothing wrong with me, but since it was free, I went, mainly to please her. After listening to a detailed account of what had plagued me the past year—feeling like death was seconds away twenty to fifty times a day till my life was completely held hostage to my attacks—the first thing he asked me was, “Are you depressed, Mark?” I thought about it for a moment. The word depression had never crossed my mind, never in relation to what I’d been going through, and, in fact, never at all in my entire life. It was not something in my limited categories of feelings, nor was it a characterization I’d have ascribed to myself.
“I’m only depressed because no one can tell me what’s wrong with me.”
“I’d like you to try this new medication. It’s an antidepressant. You’ll take it each night before going to bed for two weeks, and then I want you to give me a call to tell me how you’re feeling.”
I agreed and took the bottle of huge arcane pills home with me. I felt the medication the first time I took it. I had always had a hardcore insomnia that plagued me hand in hand with the anxiety. Almost straightaway after
taking my first pill, an unmistakable grogginess came over me. It wasn’t a pleasant feeling, but it knocked me out and I slept through the night. That first dose was the only time it felt bad, however, and within a short time the attacks had ceased.
Now, on my way to an all-day drag of rehearsals and camera-angle buttfuckery for our Tonight Show appearance with this unceasing burning in my lungs making it impossible to take a normal painless breath, I felt that long-ago sensation of terror gestating in my mind. It was the beginning of a panic attack the likes of which I’d not experienced since the early ’80s.
Once we arrived, I discovered it would be a couple hours before we were needed to start running through our song. We had been asked to play “Nearly Lost You” again, even though it was no longer our current single. I had been bummed that in our only two major television appearances in the United States, we were playing the same song twice, but with this fucked-up physical ailment that showed no signs of letting me loose, I couldn’t give a damn about that. In my current state of vocal distress, “Nearly Lost You” would actually be easier to pull off than our current single, a song called “Dollar Bill” that required a bit of nuance from my performance.
I found a corner of the dressing room and lay down on the floor behind a large chair. I wrapped myself up in the heavy coat I’d worn, a corduroy stadium coat I’d bought for ten pounds from a used clothing store in Glasgow. I tried to fall asleep, hoping I would wake up and this nightmare would be over. I began trembling and then shaking, the pit of flames in my lungs refusing to die down to embers. Still coughing, still unable to catch my breath, I kept trying to clear my throat and lungs but they would not cooperate. I finally fished three Klonopins from my pocket, hoping they’d at least calm me down a bit. I chewed them up and swallowed them without water, not wanting the liquid to kick the pain into overdrive like it had that morning. At some point, I fell into a half-awake, half-asleep dream state. Every now and then, I would physically convulse as if waking from a nightmare, painfully attempt to take a deep breath, and, failing that, fall back under.
I slept uneasily on the floor for an hour or more and woke up to the gentle shaking of my shoulder by our road manager.
“Hey, man, time to wake up. Lanegan, let’s go, time for rehearsal.”
I slowly got up off the floor and, still wearing my heavy coat, followed him into the studio where the show was recorded. As we set up to run through the tune, someone from the show approached me.
“Are you going to wear that coat during the performance tonight?”
It was March and unseasonably cool in Los Angeles, maybe high fifties or low sixties, but it was quite warm inside the television studio.
“I don’t know,” I replied. “But I’m wearing it now.”
I had not done a shot of heroin yet that day, but instead of feeling any withdrawals, all of my senses were focused on my lungs and throat and the continued burning within. I painfully croaked my way through several takes of the song, my throat getting increasingly rawer, while the camera operators and sound technicians took a very long time to get their shit together.
Our only other television experiences up until that point consisted of the Letterman show and a British program called The Late Show, a predecessor of the extremely popular Later … with Jools Holland. We had performed “Dollar Bill” alone in an audience-less studio that was so cold I had worn this exact same dingy corduroy coat during taping. Hungover and freezing on a cold February morning, we’d played that show almost exactly one month before this present fiasco in the making. Neither of those dubious spectacles had taken an eighth of the time that these people took to set up their shit and shoot. The Tonight Show crew were either incompetent or hypervigilant, I didn’t know which, but due to my unceasing lung and throat pain, I began to get irritated at the amount of takes they required of us. Finally, when they announced we had to run through it for what was probably the tenth time, I asked one of our crew to stand at my microphone in my stead since by that point we’d been told the sound guys were cool and now it was just more camera-positioning bullshit to be done.
An hour later, the rest of the band came trudging unhappily into our private greenroom where I was again trying to sleep on the floor.
“What the fuck, man?” said Van, who was obviously as perturbed as I had been by the multitude of takes. “This is fucking bullshit!”
I pulled my long coat over my head to try and block out the loud, unwelcome sound of my bandmate’s venting. I took this as a sign I’d be getting no more rest this day and got up off the floor to attempt to drink some warm chamomile tea with honey to see how that was gonna treat me. I’d not had a drop of fluids since my shockingly painful drink of water at six a.m. I cautiously took a tiny sip of the lukewarm, room-temperature tea and found it thankfully soothing.
Another hour passed and we were once more told we needed to run through it again, so we walked back out into the studio, every one of us now pissed off. After one last take, we were finally let off the hook and released back into our depressing jail cell of a dressing room to wait another four or five hours until the actual show began. I went into the private restroom and cooked up and did a shot of dope. It helped settle me down a bit, although my voice was still very rough from the acidic beating it had taken all day long.
Finally, in the late afternoon, they began taping the actual program. I watched disinterestedly on the TV in the greenroom, my lungs and throat still raw as hell from the morning’s rude awakening. The only minor boon to this hurry-up-and-wait bullshit was that one of the other guests was actor James Garner, who I’d loved as a kid in the character of private detective Jim Rockford on the popular show The Rockford Files.
We were to be the final guests on the show that evening. As the show dragged on, it started to become apparent that after the extensive sound and camera rehearsals we had been forced to endure the entire day, there was a chance that we may get scratched, bumped off the show due to earlier segments running longer than scheduled.
As the clock ticked closer to the end of the program, suddenly one of the show’s producers came into the greenroom.
“Hey, guys, good news,” the producer said. “You’re going to make it on the show! But instead of ‘Nearly Lost You,’ we would like you to play your current single, ‘Dollar . . .’ I’m sorry I don’t recall the name of it . . .”
“‘Dollar Bill,’” Van said in a clearly annoyed voice.
“Yes, ‘Dollar Bill,’” the guy parroted.
I was instantly pissed off. For one, that was the song I had originally thought we should play. Second, the endless all-day camera rehearsals were now made a worthless waste of time, since none of the camera guys had any knowledge of the tune. Nor did the soundman have any idea of how it went. On top of all that, with my fucked-up voice, I now had to sing a song that was much more difficult to pull off. I was furious. We had rehearsed a different song all day long and now, at the last minute, we were asked to play another one. A sadistic curveball had been tossed at us and we had no choice other than to swing.
“After the next break, you guys are on. I’ll come and get you and you’ll set up during the break. When we go back to air, Jay will announce you and then you’re on,” said the producer.
We got ready to go out and make asses of ourselves on national television, all of us seriously unhappy with the way this was going down. I took a second to look in the mirror and get into character. It wasn’t difficult to look serious, because I was … seriously pissed off. This entire fucking reach-around was a goddamn mistake and I couldn’t have picked a more inopportune time to breathe stomach acid into my lungs than that particular morning. A couple minutes later, we were led out into the studio.
What you see on your TV screen is much different than the reality of a television program. What seems like a giant audience and huge stage when you are watching from home is actually a small group of people and an even smaller area in which the band has to operate. The two other time
s we’d played a TV show it had also been much quieter onstage than we were used to, the PA and monitors more like something you’d expect to hear being used at a karaoke bar or a country square dance. Tonight was no different. There was even a large, clear plastic baffle surrounding the entire drum kit, like something you’d see in a recording studio to contain the volume of the drums and prevent them from bleeding into the microphones of the other instruments. Sound-wise, it was a joke. The entire thing nothing more than a false front, the “magic” of television.
Leno announced us and plugged our new record. We launched into “Dollar Bill,” a song we’d not played all day but luckily knew by heart. As soon as I began singing, it was clear that my ravaged throat was not going to cooperate. The burn I’d experienced for hours, combined with the shit sound in the room, made it damn near impossible for me to sing. I broke out in a river of sweat, pouring off my brow and into my eyes, stinging them so badly I couldn’t keep them open, forcing them closed for almost the entire performance. I struggled mightily for the three and a half minutes of music, straining to hit the notes and stay in tune. From the first second of the song to the last, I was acutely aware that I sucked, my voice a lame caricature of its normal self, my stressing and straining to stay in key plainly obvious not only to the very few people probably watching who knew the song, but to the laymen as well. Anyone could hear how shitty my voice and my singing sounded.
As soon as we finished, the show went to break again. Covered in sweat and angry with shame, I headed for the doorway out of the studio. I felt weak and worn out and meant to grab my shit and catch a cab back to the hotel.
Before I could reach the door, the producer grabbed me by the arm.
“Jay wants you on the panel to end the show.”