Sing Backwards and Weep

by Mark Lanegan

  The producer wanted me to come sit on the couch next to Leno’s desk along with the guest who’d been on before us to close the show.

  As I was led up to the stage, Leno looked over at me and winked like a carnival huckster.

  “That was okay, right? Sell a few records, right?” he chirped.

  I nodded yes in fake agreement.

  They sat me down right next to James Garner of The Rockford Files. Garner reached out, grabbed my hand, and with a tightly gripped handshake, in a large booming voice said, “How you doing, young fella? I’m Jim. That wasn’t bad, young fella. It coulda been a lot worse!”

  With his kindhearted greeting, my humiliation was complete.

  15

  TAKE ME TO THE RIVER

  After another headlining club tour of Europe, our touring cycle for the record had run its course and we headed home. Back in Seattle, Anna had endured enough of my lies and using. She moved out. Although it made me unhappy, a part of me was relieved to be able to use drugs freely in my apartment and no longer have to keep up the sad pretense of being clean.

  I began working on my second Sub Pop solo album again. The combination of the drugs and my obsession with finally making a great record began to lead me down a dark, twisted tunnel through a nocturnal animal den. I lost myself in the minutiae of various songs, sequences, lyrics, and mixes. After trying to finish it with several different Seattle producers and engineers, including both Terry Date and Jack Endino, I was at the fuck-end of a blind alley.

  While trying to mix at a studio in Woodinville, Washington, called Bear Creek, I lost my shit. At my insistence, Jack Endino had spent two days trying to figure out why a certain song didn’t have the forward propulsion I had sworn was there in the roughs. I had him strip the mix down to its barest bones a couple times and painstakingly build it back up, track by track, trying to find the missing component. Loaded throughout the sessions, I nonetheless stood at his shoulder the entire time, talking maniacally nonstop while he patiently tried to work out the solution to a problem only I could perceive. At the end of a couple days he turned to me and said with exasperation, “Mark, I don’t think the track you are looking for exists.” I took this to mean that he thought I had somehow imagined it. I silently turned and began to collect all the cans holding the spools of analog tape for the entire record.

  “What are you doing? Lanegan? What’s going on?” Jack asked with a worried, confused, and truly curious voice.

  I did not answer. I continued to stack the large, round canisters holding two years’ worth of work until I had compiled a huge mountain. Picking them up, I struggled to open the back door of the control room, which led to a lovely pastoral scene outside, green fields with a large creek running through the middle of them. Jack looked worried.

  “Okay, hold on, man. What the fuck are you doing? Where are you going with those?”

  I walked through the field toward the water, hardly able to carry the heavy metal containers of tape. I continued stubbornly forward, staggering single-mindedly in a zigzagging path, intent on dumping these now-hated recordings into the creek, so angry and sleep deprived I only wanted to be done with it. As it finally occurred to Jack what my intention was, he ran yelling out the door after me.

  “Hey, Lanegan, hold up, buddy! Mark! Stop right now, goddamnit!”

  “Fuck that, Jack!” I yelled. “Fuck this piece-of-shit record. I’ve had it, I’m drowning this thing!”

  Endino ran around in front of me, physically blocking my progress to the water.

  “Hey, mister, I can’t let you do that. There is a beautiful record here and I won’t let you destroy it. C’mon back inside. We’ll go through it again and I swear I’ll get to the bottom of this and fix it.”

  An overwhelming exhaustion came over me. I’d been sleeping on the couch in the control room, staying there 24/7, leaving only to do periodic shots of heroin in the bathroom every few hours to stay well. I had hardly eaten in days or showered in a couple weeks. This frustrating, unsuccessful mix had beaten me down and I could conjure no more manic energy to see it through. I handed the tapes back over to Jack. As we went back inside and he put the song on once again, I lay down on the couch and fell into a black, battle-scarred sleep, hearing the tune play endlessly on repeat through the fog of my dreams.

  Jack woke me up a few hours later. He had found the problem.

  “Hey, man, is this what you were looking for?” he asked, and soloed up a previously unheard track of kick drum. When put into the mix, it was rhythmically intrinsic to the forward motion of the tune, indeed the component I’d known was there.

  “I found it on an unnamed track,” Jack said. “Jesus Christ, these tapes are a mess. Whoever’s been working on this has been doing an unprofessional job of keeping track of shit.”

  That was beyond obvious, and that person was me. I’d had so many different local engineers and producers trying to help me finish that it had become a hodgepodge of half-finished tracks, half-assed ideas, and unfinished songs spread across acres of analog tape. I was only keeping track of shit in my head, hence my knowledge of the hidden kick drum and inability to locate it.

  My addiction had become the all-encompassing feature of my life. It had to be fed before anything else could happen. I would normally do one to two grams of heroin a day at a cost of $150 to $200 depending on where or who I scored from. For the first couple years as a regular user, I saved a shot every night to have as my wake-up. After that, I’d buy enough to last me the day. My accountants had put a strict $200-a-day limit on my ATM card and I withdrew the totality of that amount daily, nearly every cent going toward my habit. I used what was left of my substantial advance from Sub Pop for paying my rent and the endless studio bills as my obsession to complete my “masterpiece” spiraled out of control. I continuously wrote, rewrote, recorded, rerecorded, mixed, remixed, sequenced, and resequenced a growing mountain of tunes for my second solo album.

  My guitar player and musical partner Mike Johnson was not a drug user. In my drinking days, he and I would often stay up all night downing alcohol while playing records, laughing, smoking, and talking so loud that my girlfriend would make several appearances throughout the night. She would first ask nicely but eventually plead, beg, and finally order us to shut the fuck up so she could get some sleep before her early-­morning college classes and then day of work. We were great friends and our shared affection for the music we made together and the music that inspired it was the glue our bond was made of.

  Mike also had a full-time gig playing bass for my old friend J Mascis’s band Dinosaur Jr. As I descended into addiction and self-­centered psychosis regarding the record, things became strained between us. Finally, I booked yet another session in a studio somewhere and he simply declined to show up. Working with or even hanging out with me had long since ceased to be pleasurable for him. He wouldn’t even answer the phone when I called. He was finished with me, as a musician and as a friend. I was on my own.

  Although Sweet Oblivion hadn’t been a hit, it had sold enough to warrant Epic giving Screaming Trees another try, and they exercised their option for one more record. Time was of the essence if we wanted to take advantage of our modest success. We needed to get new material together quickly. The same team that had worked on our last album was again tapped to lead this new endeavor. I insisted the recording take place in Seattle as I didn’t want to get too far from my regular sources of dope. Don Fleming and John Agnello came to town and sat in on a rehearsal session to evaluate the songs we’d generated and gauge our readiness for the studio.

  I’d taken an active role in the creation of Sweet Oblivion. Since we had established a new collaborative way of working, one that had taken us to previously unknown heights, I was now expected to do my part again. The rest of the band as well as our always over-the-top A&R man Bob Pfeifer looked to me for some creative leadership, but now I was too strung out and mentally unstable to contribute at the same level. My dope habit was no longer a
secret. Although everyone from my managers at Q Prime to the band to Don Fleming himself had tried to gently talk to me about getting some help, my denial was fierce. Nobody was going to get in between me and my beloved heroin. Nobody.

  When it was brought up, I argued back intensely that I was able to do anything required of me, that my personal life was no one’s business but my own. Whenever someone so much as hinted at it, I immediately attacked with such ferocity that I disarmed my well-meaning adversaries before they could get their pistols out of their holsters. I had always had the innate ability to keep people at arm’s length, had always had the talent to keep the seat next to me open on a crowded, standing-room-only city bus. I’d mastered a dark, dead-eyed visage, a countenance that said “stay away or get hurt.” It had earned me the nickname “Shark” from my sister’s basketball-star boyfriend in high school. I projected the vibe of someone not to be fucked with, and I used this tactic to its full effect whenever I felt my drug use threatened. My heroin was to be preserved at all cost. There was zero chance of anyone getting me to stop now that I had found my one true love, the only peace of mind I’d ever had.

  As far as I was concerned, heroin had lifted me up from the grave. It had kept me from dying from the horrors of my severe alcoholism, against which I had been a lowly pissant attempting to stop a freight train. It had quieted the cyclone storm of my own voice in my head, constantly tearing me down, telling me what a shit heap I was. Most importantly, heroin erased the myriad collection of endless worries that had kept me awake all night most of my life. It had freed me from feeling anything: loss, heartbreak, regret, grief, resentment, as well as the burning hatred and disgust I felt not only for myself but also for other people I thought had wronged me, real or imagined. When dope enveloped me in its golden glow, all that melted away like springtime snow. The world became black and white, boiled down to just getting enough drugs each day to keep the dogs of withdrawals off my heels. I felt as though heroin had saved me from a life of misery, and I was prepared to go to any lengths to make sure I would always have it. Heroin was my number one, and anything else—everything else—was such a far-distant second place as to be virtually unseen on the radar screen of my life’s importance.

  The Trees and I managed to put some songs together. Even though I knew most of it was crap, we hit the studio to try to make a follow-up to Sweet Oblivion. I spent most of every day locked in the greenroom of the studio, shooting heroin into the veins of my feet. I had already burned through most of my reliable sources in my arms when Layne and I would go on nightlong cocaine binges, silently locked in the bathroom at one of our apartments, doing shot after endless shot of coke. With heroin, I might do three shots total in a day, but on these coke runs, we would do one right after another, all night until the bag was gone. Even though it wasn’t really my thing, I was a garbage can and would do any drug put in front of me. When it came to heroin, though, I was a purist. I almost never did speedballs where I shot both drugs together, yet I became a fiend shooting coke by itself. Both Layne and I demanded absolute silence while performing this ritual. The explosion as the coke hit our brains was what we craved and the slightest outside noise would ruin it for us. The cocaine had robbed me of my veins, one by one, until now I was down to the daily torture of hitting in my feet, a painful and painstaking routine that took precision, patience, and focus. Using the smallest-gauge, thinnest needle available, I would spend hours looking until I hit where most people would not even attempt. Between my fingers and toes, in the tiny veins running down the sides of my fingers, in my armpits at an angle that made it impossible, even with a mirror, to see if I had hit the vein or the nearby artery. The angle was so tight that I was unable to discern the fluorescent, neon arterial blood if I missed, and on a couple of bad days, I accidentally shot into the artery, causing an instant nightmare when the dope ran the wrong way through my body. Once, the shot went straight down my arm and up my neck. My face and hand both inflated like balloons. I barely had time to rip all the rings from my fingers before they’d have surely cut off all blood flow as my hand bulged to twice its normal size, narrowly avoiding an emergency trip to the hospital to have my fingers amputated. On those few occasions it had happened, I’d not only received none of the benefits of the dope (no high, no getting well) but also had to spend hours holding my arm above my head until the numbness and agonizing pain subsided. But for the most part, I had a talent for finding veins. I was the guy usually asked to give somebody a shot when they were either too green or too far out to pasture to do it themselves. It was most often girls who’d need to be injected. Whenever I was with Kurt and his wife Courtney Love, she’d have me find her vein and hit her, a task made more difficult by her nonstop talking, storytelling, or complaining.

  After a couple of unproductive weeks in the studio in Seattle, the decision was made by the powers that be to pull the plug, go back to the drawing board, and generate some good material before reconvening in New York City later in the year to try again. I took this opportunity to further indulge my obsessive drive to complete my solo album, which by this point was all I really cared about. I was glad the Trees had finally made a record that I considered worthy but my real goal now was to create an album along the lines of Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, Tim Buckley’s Starsailor, or Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica. An undeniable classic, a wholly original piece of music that could not be compared to anything other than itself. I was, of course, shooting for an unattainable paradigm, as those records were, it seemed, created with some magical alchemy I was not privy to. Made by geniuses whose mystical talents seemed to come out of the ether itself or directed by the hand of some god I’d never met. I was still toiling with blind, dogged, childlike curiosity and primitive, homemade tools, trying to discover how to make fire. I had also hogtied myself to a dope habit that increasingly took all my time, energy, and resources to maintain.

  16

  JEFFREY LEE PIERCE

  As a nineteen-year-old, I had spent a couple of winter months living in my dad’s storage unit. I had with me all my worldly belongings: one suitcase full of clothes, a turntable and speakers, three boxes of records. I slept on my father’s old couch in a sleeping bag and read from a box of books by the light of our old living room lamp during the cold nights. I used a space heater to warm the large, quarter-full room with rugless cement floor and a metal roller door at the front.

  One day, I took a Greyhound bus to Seattle in order to get tattooed. One of my arms was adorned in crude, homemade tattoos I’d started giving myself at age fourteen and I had begun getting them covered up with professional ones. After stepping off the bus, I walked to the large Tower Records store near the Space Needle, looking through the bins and stopping to mindlessly stare at album covers that caught my eye. Artwork, name of band, name of record, etc. I bought one just out of curiosity with no prior knowledge of the group or music: Fire of Love by the Gun Club.

  After walking down to Pike Place Market and getting some generic, off-the-wall flash tattoo in the large shop there, I took the long bus ride back home. When I got to Ellensburg, I walked up to the government-­funded apartment house of three older mental patients I sold weed to in order to get one of them to give me a ride to my lush digs out on the edge of town. After unlocking the padlock, rolling up the door, and stooping inside, I plugged the turntable into the power strip that also powered heat and light and put my new record on.

  From the moment the needle jumped onto the first track, I was totally engaged. I had begun unwrapping my fresh tattoo but I stopped what I was doing and just stared at the record as it revolved, as though it were a living thing, the sounds from the speaker seeming to give it a life of its own. An instant chill had run up my spine the moment the man started singing, an exotic, balls-out wail like I’d never heard before, with the intensity of punk but something different, something wholly unique to me. I thought this was what Creedence Clearwater Revival would’ve sounded like had they played Delta blues in
the style of punk rock. I was completely floored by what I was hearing. By the third song, I’d completely forgotten about taking the plastic off my new ink. This man was the most convincingly real, crazed, and intense singer I’d ever heard; you knew beyond all doubt that this motherfucker meant it. A thought ran through my head: finally, here was the music made specifically for a person like me. Serial-killer music, music for a lost, deviant, fucked-up soul like mine! For the first time ever, I thought, I want to do this, too, be a singer like this dude, he’s as fucked as I am. And with that sudden, life-altering epiphany in a cold, weakly lit storage unit in winter began my lifelong love affair with the music of and idolization of one Jeffrey Lee Pierce.

  I discovered that there was already a second record out by the Gun Club, Miami, and I quickly returned to Seattle in order to track that one down. I played it immediately upon my return home and found its pull on me even more irresistible than the first record. It was just as dark and unhinged as Fire of Love but with a smoldering, black beauty and a depth of intelligence and emotion I’d not discerned on that record. The sense of pain and loss was visceral, a deep-rooted, aching chasm that fit me like a latex medical glove. They’d even covered a Creedence tune on it, confirming my earliest sense of the faint ghost of John Fogerty haunting Fire of Love.

  In the spring of the next year came a third record, The Las Vegas Story, and this trio of albums, all of which I’d been exposed to in the span of just a few months, became my bible. Living in Ellensburg, it was tough to get information about any underground band, much less one like the Gun Club. Literally nobody I knew had heard of the Gun Club until I force-fed it to them. After not hearing anything about them for a long time, I assumed they had broken up or simply disappeared.

  A few years later in 1987, I was pursuing my decision to become a singer. One day, my bandmate Mark Pickerel came to band practice with a big smile on his face.