Sing Backwards and Weep

by Mark Lanegan

  “Lanegan, check it out! A new Gun Club record!”

  The young Screaming Trees drummer shared my affection for them and waved in the air a copy of Mother Juno, their latest release.

  “And I ordered you a copy! It’s great, man!”

  He had ordered a couple copies weeks earlier from Ace Books and Records, where he had a part-time job, and withheld that info from me just for the purpose of breaking the news as a surprise when he actually had the record in hand.

  Now that we knew the band still existed, we regularly scanned all news of shows happening in Seattle for a possible Gun Club tour coming to town, but it never materialized. Pickerel found out that the band was now based in London and rarely left Europe.

  In 1989, while in Los Angeles to do some shows with the Trees, I went to the famous Whisky a Go Go on Sunset Strip to see Firehose, Mike Watt’s band who we’d gotten our first break opening for. When I saw their soundman Steve before the show I’d asked him, “Whatcha been up to, man?” He said he had been out running sound for the Gun Club. I got very excited.

  “Are you kidding me? They’re here in the States?”

  “Yeah, man. Jeffrey will be here tonight. He’s staying at his mom’s right down the street.”

  I bristled with a wild electric excitement. I could not believe the incredible providence. I made Steve promise to introduce me after the show. But while Firehose was still playing, he made eye contact with me, then nodded his head sideways. I looked over and there was Jeffrey Lee Pierce in the flesh. I didn’t wait for an introduction. In an action very out of character for me, I simply walked up to him, introduced myself, and said I was a huge fan. I couldn’t help myself. Here was the mythological hero whose music had given my life a sense of purpose, meaning, and validation, a hero I thought I’d never even see in person, much less meet. I could not let this once-in-a-lifetime chance go by.

  “That’s cool. What do you do for a living, man?” he said, looking at me through somewhat squinted eyes, as though he couldn’t quite focus them on me.

  “I’m a singer in a band from Seattle called Screaming Trees.”

  His girlfriend Romi Mori let out a little squeal of excitement.

  “Oh, I’ve heard you guys, you’re great!” she said.

  We had played the UK a few times by then and Jeffrey seemed impressed that she knew who we were.

  “Do you ever come to London?”

  “I’m gonna be there next month.”

  He wrote down his number and told me to give him a call.

  When we made it to London, I called the number he’d given me in Los Angeles. When he picked up, he asked where I was staying and I told him.

  “Fuck. That’s right around the corner. I’ll come get you when I’m done running.”

  Running? I thought. What the hell?

  Sure enough, thirty minutes later he showed up at our shitty hotel with rooms so tiny that the bottom quarter of my bed got soaked if I turned on the shower. He was dripping with sweat, dressed in a 1950s-style gray sweat suit. I had not expected him to be athletically minded, especially not a runner. But I was to learn he was a multifaceted, complicated man who I already knew held real genius. He would cook elaborate Mexican dinners for his beautiful Japanese girlfriend and bass player Romi and me whenever I was around, bemoaning the fact that “you can’t get any good Mexican food in London. All they have is fucking Taco Bell.”

  On one of my first visits to Jeffrey’s flat in Shepherd’s Bush, I asked him about lyrics in a song I was unable to discern.

  “Ah, shit!” he said. “That’s from an old folk song I heard when I was a kid. I always use lines from other songs in mine; no one ever notices and it helps me to have a starting place.”

  And with that began a master class in songwriting from my favorite musician of all time.

  “Check this out,” he said, putting on his turntable a copy of Isaac Hayes’s Hot Buttered Soul. “You hear that bass line?” he asked. “Now listen to this,” he said, putting on a copy of Mother Juno, the Gun Club’s great fourth record. The song was “Yellow Eyes.” “Check it out, man. That’s the same bass line only backwards!” he shouted as he burst into laughter. “That’s how you write a fuckin’ song!” he said, still laughing hysterically.

  Jeffrey’s face was such that, even when smiling or laughing, it still had the strange appearance of slightly frowning. He showed me early VHS tapes of the band where he stood onstage with a crazy bleach-blond mop of a hairdo wrapped in a headband and whipped beer bottles straight into the crowd with full velocity. Laughing again, he said, “That’s the crazy shit that got me banned.”

  He showed me tapes of their comeback when, while living in London, Mother Juno had come out to pronounced critical success. He was lean and short-haired, prowling the stage like Iggy Pop, a classic frontman who demanded your attention. I ate it all up. He told me of his struggles with alcohol and I admitted the same.

  Once I’d gotten to know him, he would honestly and openly discuss anything personal. I asked him about the songs on the first Gun Club record, Fire Of Love, that had racist lyrics. I had always felt uncomfortable with that aspect of the record and there was never another racist line throughout the next three records, records I loved with equal fervor to the first.

  “In the early days of LA punk, the cops would break up the shows, beat the shit out of people, and take kids to jail. While we were leaving a club, my friend and I got hit with batons and thrown in a cop car. On the way to the station, the black cop who was driving was giving us a bunch of shit, like, ‘So you guys wanna start trouble, huh? You wanna piss people off and be anti-establishment, huh? Why don’t you try singing a song about niggers? See where that would get ya!’ Right then I thought to myself, Fuck yes, why not? I figured people would be fucked up by the perversity of it, with those lyrics inside a blues song that I’d turned into a punk song. I just thought that I would shake shit up and do something no one had done before. I got nothing against anyone of any color, I’m half Mexican with a Japanese girlfriend! Plus, Kid’s Mexican, too!” he shouted, with more hysterical laughter and the weird smile/frown on his face.

  The “Kid” he was referring to was Kid Congo Powers, the legendary guitarist and paragon of cool who had the solid-gold distinction of not only being a founding member of the Gun Club, but also a member of the Cramps and Nick Cave’s Bad Seeds—three of underground rock’s most beloved and seminal bands—at different times during his storied career. Yeah, Kid had the greatest résumé ever of anyone in rock music.

  But when the Gun Club came to Seattle in 1993, there was very little excitement surrounding their show. They had toured almost exclusively in Europe and the UK for years; now they were finally playing in my town and Jeffrey sat on my couch in a dark mood. The audience turnout had been poor at every show up the coast and he was anticipating the same that night.

  While sitting in my living room that afternoon he bluntly said, “Give me some heroin, will ya, man?” He had known I was strung out for a long time but he’d never shown any interest in dope until that moment. I went into the closet and grabbed a clean outfit and a small piece of the sticky black tar. I then went into the kitchen and got a spoon, came out, gave it to him, and he went into the bathroom to fix. When he returned his mood was much lighter and he said, “Fuck it. I don’t give a shit if anyone shows up or not.”

  “I’m sure there will be plenty of people totally psyched to see you tonight, Jeffrey.”

  “Whatever,” he said and then turned on the TV. He silently stared at it for an hour or so before leaving for his soundcheck at some small, recently opened club directly under the monorail on Fourth Avenue.

  I arrived early at the gig, wanting to see another old pop/punk band from Orange County, Agent Orange, who were opening. The room sounded terrible, like the small, former storefront it was, not a place made for live music. My enthusiasm for Agent Orange waned quickly due to the poor acoustics in the room. It made every note seem as though it we
re being played from under a wet mattress. Not pleasing in the least. The audience turnout for the Gun Club wasn’t the worst I’d ever seen, but it was far from good. Maybe seventy-five people at the most stood in the room as they took to the tiny stage, about a half foot higher than the floor. The reaction was lukewarm as the band played songs from their most recent record, Lucky Jim.

  Jeffrey had invited me to sing background vocals on a track late one night in Haarlem, a town outside Amsterdam, while I was touring there earlier that year. Having already done a full performance for a Dutch television show, a live radio broadcast, and then a full concert at legendary Amsterdam venue the Paradiso that day, I had been exhausted when I arrived at the studio past midnight. It was their last day recording and everyone was frantic to finish. The band were wrapping up overdubs and vocals and then mixing them all on the same night. Jeffrey asked me to sing a high harmony on one of the tunes but my voice was already so fucked from three shows that day, done right in the middle of a six-week tour, I was unable to get up above his substantially higher normal range. After a couple goes, I’d said, “God damn, this has been a dream opportunity, to sing with my favorite band ever. But we both know this sounds like shit, please don’t use it.” He sadly agreed.

  “This is the song I really wanted you on but it was getting late and we mixed it already.”

  He had the engineer put on the mix of the song he’d originally planned for me to sing on. It was the title track, “Lucky Jim.” I was completely blown away and inwardly angry as hell I’d not arrived in time. It was simply one of the greatest songs he’d ever written and the recording was pristine, the words completely evocative. As I realized the missed opportunity, I was crushed.

  Now, hearing the band run through this tune in Seattle, I was again captivated by it, and again felt the sting of regret. Opportunities like that didn’t come knocking every day.

  The crowd excitement rose to a slightly higher level than the sort of typically bored, show-us-something, hipster disinterest just three times during the set, when Jeffrey had busted out the beloved punk/blues classics from the first Gun Club record. “For the Love of Ivy,” “She’s Like Heroin to Me,” and especially “Sex Beat” brought loud cheering and singing along from the small, previously tepid crowd. It was as if I were watching Chubby Checker on an oldies tour and he finally played “The Twist.” With an extensive back catalog of brilliant, beautiful, straight-to-the-head, -heart, and -genitalia songs, albums, and performances to his credit, still hardly anyone seemed to give a damn about my idol-turned-friend, except when he was playing the most obvious “hits.”

  17

  DID YOU CALL FOR THE NIGHT PORTER?

  One way I kept the dreaded beast of withdrawals off my back was to become a willing conduit for people who wanted drugs but had no access to them. Such people were often traveling musicians coming through town on tour, or young people I met through friends or customers, just taking their first steps into the dangerous exploration of the unknown. Much like my old London connection Craig Pike, the guy I was certain I’d never end up like, I had gained a name as a person not hard to find. I was sought out now due to my reputation as a junkie and guy who knew where the drugs were. I was also called into action by some of my rich and successful friends who could not be bothered to go out in public and score. Almost no relatively small-time dealer in Seattle during those times would deliver, just the bigger fish who supplied them.

  The only person we knew who delivered was Tommy Hansen. He would drive his muscle car all day, dropping off dope, but he was done working as soon as the sun went down and would head back to his place in far north Seattle, not to come out again until the following morning. I would sometimes ride along with him on his delivery route, dropping stuff off for addicts of all stripes. Some were other Seattle musicians, a few of them guys I recognized as members of semipopular local bands, others just grinding it out trying to establish some modest success and acquire gigs for themselves. Then you had the strippers, waitresses, baristas, shop clerks, and other normal people with dope habits. Some successful businesspeople, some on the downward slide, hell-bent on finding the bottom of heroin’s bottomless cavern.

  Sometimes Tommy would deliver some dope to me and stay to hang out for a while. We had similar tastes in music, movies, and literature. Often, toward the end of his working day, I would send him a page and he’d call back.

  “Hey, Tommy, I know it’s a pain in the ass but I’ve burned through what I got today. Is there any way you can make another delivery tonight?”

  “You know that stack of books on your dining room table? Look inside the fourth book in the stack, I left some dope in there for you.”

  He’d anticipated this common scenario of mine and hid some to tide me over while my back was turned. But Tommy was the shining exception, certainly not the rule, in ’90s Seattle. It made no difference how famous or rich you were, heroin addicts were so prevalent that any dealer would have around-the-clock business just staying home and letting people come to them had they so chosen. Not only was I willing to deliver, I had to do it in order to supplement my small stash of dope and feed my giant habit. I had also become someone who could score any time of day or night. Most dealers closed up shop pretty early in the evening, but through my connections at the Yesler Terrace housing projects near my apartment, a place some people were hesitant to go even in daytime, I could score drugs 24/7. I would buy from a guy named Val and then deliver them to your doorstep. I also sometimes used a repulsive goon of a guy with horrible-smelling, never-washed, dreaded hair that put off a nearly vomit-inducing stench that filled his studio apartment. With his terrible homemade white-­supremacist prison tattoos and grotesque, shit-encased personality, we called him “Big Ugly Ben,” but his official self-created nickname was “Spanky.” He used to make some of his meekest customers clean his place while he held court from a bed that he lay on all day and night, bossing people around like a tyrant while ridiculing them. Big Ugly Ben was a supreme dickhead. He worked late hours out in the U District but I despised him so much I’d only go there if it was absolutely necessary. During a particularly low period in our lives, Dylan Carlson and I sometimes spent two or more hours in his place daily. He used our presence to show off to his unfortunate regular customers that he had “rock star” friends. We’d sit together on a couch and bite our lips as he treated everyone who came through the door to an extended period of humiliation, meant to exhibit to Dylan and me the power he wielded over the peons who came to him for dope. Right when we were about to lose our minds, he would slip us each a couple of balloons on the sly, gratis. It was for this free dope he gave us as payment for hanging out that we endured the sick embarrassment of it all. One night as we silently walked away from his place together with our free drugs, Dylan turned to me and said, “Fuck, we have known some winners, but that shithead takes the cake.” I instantly agreed.

  When I was not in such dire circumstances, I had a string of my own customers and was given cash or dope for being the messenger man, often both. Naturally, I both overcharged and took what I felt I could get away with unnoticed out of the bag long before I returned with the goods. Kurt had once jokingly referred to me as “the Night Porter” when I’d shown up with a late-night package for him. He had watched me transform from someone whose main concerns were music and women into a different beast entirely. With the same obsessive drive I’d always had but turned in another direction, I’d become someone who made himself available anytime, day or night, rain or shine, to go out, get drugs, and carry them up to your room. For a piece of the action, of course.

  While I was pissing at a urinal in a restroom after a gig we’d played in Seattle opening up for Alice in Chains, a young kid came up and introduced himself as “a good friend of your ex-girlfriend Anna.” That introduction earned him a faceful of my spit and a rattling bang of his head against the tiled toilet wall. Then I grabbed him by the front of his shirt and lifted him off the ground.

 
; “I don’t give a damn who you know but it sure as fuck isn’t me. You’re lucky I don’t break your nose, you fucking idiot. You ever come up on me like that again and I’ll put you in the hospital. Do you get me?”

  The quicksilver burst of ferocity this naïve boy brought on was, of course, clearly unwarranted. But that was a chance anyone took if they approached me while I was drunk, especially if they brought her up. My jealousy and bitter resentment over the painful, self-inflicted loss of my former love brought out a negative, sometimes violent reaction. My loss of Anna was still very much a raw, open wound.

  18

  IT’S GENIUS, DON’T YOU HEAR IT?

  I had read somewhere that Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks had been made in four days and I had originally planned to do the same. Three years later, my intended magnum opus was still unfinished and I had already burned through most of my substantial advance. Not on drugs, unbelievably, but on the record itself. I was obsessed with making a classic, one-of-a-kind record, unlike anything else, something that would define an artist, a truly great, self-contained piece of art like the records I was so enamored of.

  In the same way I had fanatically obsessed over Astral Weeks, I had read Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian several times and it became my favorite book of all time. The recording I’d been toiling and sweating over was heavily influenced by a collision of these two completely different works of art: the bleak, descriptive lyrics by Blood Meridian and the ephemeral music by Astral Weeks. The lyrical narrative of the individual songs was rooted in my day-to-day experience: pain, loss, the inner world and trials of someone strung out and struggling. Without comfort or love, searching for what, who knew? But it was something if ever found, might be located on a spiritual plane, not in the physical world. I had given John Agnello, the recording engineer on the Trees’ previous record as well as the aborted follow-up, a cassette of what I thought at the time was only the half-finished record. His reaction was one of enthusiasm and excitement.