by Mark Lanegan
I grabbed my jacket and headed down to Pfeifer’s hotel where I was treated to a hyperaggressive monologue and schooled in Music Business 101 as if I were a child over some disgusting scrambled eggs and toast. After I assured and reassured Bob that I fully understood the importance of whatever it was he had blasted me with, he gave me a hug and a way-harder-than-necessary slap on the back and I groggily began the long walk back up the hill to my place.
Weeks later, I ran into Jerry again. He claimed zero memory nor any responsibility for my missing porn collection.
26
SEASONS OF MADNESS
Even though Alice in Chains wanted to get him into a studio to record music that he seemed to have little interest in, Layne had started playing with Pearl Jam’s guitarist, the big-hearted and talented Mike McCready. The two of them, along with an older bass player Mike had befriended in rehab named John Baker Saunders and my drummer from the Trees, Barrett Martin, had started a band they named Mad Season. One afternoon, Layne called me up and asked me to meet him at the studio where they were working. When I arrived, none of the other band members were there. Layne promptly kicked producer Brett Eliason, my one-time tour manager and soundman, out of the control room.
“Let’s write a song. You write a line, then I’ll write one, and we’ll just do it like that.”
“Okay,” I agreed.
He played the music in the background and we began. He wrote a line, handed me the paper, then I’d write one and hand it back to him. Whatever one of us wrote informed the other of what the next line would be. It was a cool and interesting exercise. Neither of us had ever written this way.
When the lyrics were done, he hit record on the tape machine and we got it in one go. All in all, it took us forty-five minutes to write and record a song we called “Long Gone Day.” He recorded me singing on one other song and I was impressed that he knew how to run the tape machine himself. In all my years of making records, I still had zero knowledge of anything technical involved in the process. I finished my part on the second tune and then I went home. The entire time I spent working on the record was a little more than an hour.
When it came out later that year, Mad Season’s Above became a big-selling album with a bona fide hit single, “River of Deceit.” We were to do two concerts locally in Seattle as Mad Season. I remember feeling sheepish around McCready. Mike had successfully gone to rehab and kicked the drinking problem he and I had shared at my disastrous Roskilde appearance in ’92 while I was more addicted than ever.
Around six months after its release, I started getting large, totally unexpected royalty checks in the mail. To my shock, the guys had given me full royalty points on the record. Since it went gold, that meant a shitload of cash was coming my way. I couldn’t believe it. I did stuff on people’s records all the time and you were usually just doing it for friends, not expecting anything in return. What these guys had given me for less than two hours’ time (time that was spent having fun, not working) was unheard of in my world, an extremely classy and generous move. I was eternally grateful.
I found out where the checks were coming from at Sony and made sure that they kept being sent directly to me, not my accountant. That was an exceedingly stupid and foolish move, but such was my desperation for money at the time; I couldn’t bear to let the tax man have a cut. It was a decision that would come back to seriously bite me in the ass.
The rest of that year, I sporadically got together with my Screaming Trees bandmates and we began the painful process of trying to write another record. It was going to take a group of fully developed great-sounding demos before Epic would support us working again since we’d wasted time and money the last two times they’d taken a chance and booked us into a studio. Slowly, day by day, we hammered away until we had a small, raw collection of songs that showed some promise. But what had come almost effortlessly in ’92 was now once again toil. I was responsible for much of the trouble due to my giant heroin habit and the demands it made on my time and energy.
When not developing songs with the band, I continued making and selling crack. Whenever I was not working, I was spending most of my free time smoking crack and shooting heroin around the clock with Layne in his apartment. He had a roommate for a while, a really nice, normal dude named Johnny who I had at first suspected had been hired by someone to keep an eye on Layne. It became obvious after a while that Johnny was just a guy who cared for Layne, a friend and non-drug-user. Whenever we got loaded while he was home, it was in the privacy of Layne’s bedroom. Johnny seemed increasingly beat down by the futility and darkness that began to pervade the place, less happy to see me and less lighthearted every time I’d stop by. Johnny moved out after six or seven months. Unsupervised, the pair of us sank deeper into the shit. Layne called one night and frantically asked me to come over right away.
When I got there, I did our secret personal sequence of knocks on the door and heard him shout from down the hall, “Come in, goddamnit!” That in itself shocked me because he would never, never leave the door unlocked. I came in, locked the door, and cautiously called his name.
“Down here, man! In the bathroom!”
“Why was the door unlocked, bro?” I asked while approaching the toilet.
“So I can get out of here in a fucking hurry if I have to!” he hissed.
I entered the bathroom to the strange sight of him lying on his stomach on the floor, head behind the shitter, staring intently at a tiny hole in the wall.
“What’s going on, brother? Why would you have to get out of here?” I quietly asked, not sure I really wanted to know the answer.
“Quiet, man! They’re back there! Wait a minute and be quiet, they’ll come out again,” he forcefully whispered.
“Who are they?” I whispered back.
“The fucking spiders, man. I was asleep and when I woke up they were coming out of my arm!”
I had known some truly mentally ill people in my life. I’d spent Christmas Eve in a psych ward with a childhood friend who had been in and out of the mental hospital for years with paranoid schizophrenia. I didn’t like the look or sound of this at all.
“Hey, Layne, why don’t you get up off the floor and let’s go sit on the couch for a minute and talk.”
“Shhhh! Quiet, man. They can hear you!”
Jesus fuck, I thought, he’s fucking lost it. I stood there wracking my brain as to what my next steps should be. Whatever they were, they would have to be done with utmost care. I thought about calling Jerry Cantrell but quickly changed my mind. The Alice guys—Jerry, Sean Kinney, and bass player Mike Inez, along with producer Toby Wright—had recently enlisted me to try and get Layne out of his apartment and down to a recording studio where they wanted to start making music. He would begin by saying, “Tell them I’ll be there at nine” and I would relay the message. Nine would turn into eleven thirty, then two a.m., and finally if I asked again he would simply reject the idea out of hand, completely and with a total finality. This routine had gone on for a few days. They would probably be as helpless or more than me in this situation. At least I held a tiny bit of sway.
“Layne, man, listen to me. I don’t see any spiders back there. Just get up for a minute and let’s go talk quietly in the living room.”
After several long, long moments of silence, he suddenly slid backwards on his stomach from behind the toilet bowl, got to his feet, and grabbed me by the arm, leading me into the other room. Lifting his sleeve, he showed me the ugly abscess on his arm.
“I caught them crawling out of there, and saw one peeking out of the hole behind the toilet. I have to kill them before they take the whole place over,” he said in a choked and extremely quiet voice.
He went to put a rock into his crack pipe—a glass tube with cigarette-lighter-blackened steel-wool Chore Boy stuffed into the end.
“Hold on a second, bro,” I said, “let’s not hit the pipe right now. We need to talk about this rationally.”
It was pure crack cr
aziness that I was witnessing, a frightening level of psychosis. He was convinced there were spiders coming out of his arms, hiding behind his toilet, and taking over his house. I coaxed him to do a shot of dope instead, in hopes it would even out his mind. Then I talked him into coming over to my place with me, promising I would hire exterminators to go in and clean his place out if he wished. I was pained beyond words to see him this way, the sweetest, funniest, most magical and intelligent dude I knew, out of his tree. Such was my love for the guy, he had become like the half of me I’d always lacked.
After a couple of days, he was back to normal but occasionally he’d say something that made it clear these imaginary spiders were still somewhere in the back of his mind. I kept him at my house for a week until one day he looked at me and said, “I lost my fucking mind, didn’t I?”
I looked at him and the familiar mischievous twinkle normally in his eyes was back. I started laughing.
“Thank God you realized that. I was afraid we were going to have to hit the nuthouse!”
“I’m sorry, man.” He smiled. “Fuck, that was weird.”
“Yeah. It was, but you ain’t got nothin’ to be sorry about, brother, I’m just glad you’re back,” I responded with great relief.
27
MISS AUSTRALIA 1971
In January of ’95, the Trees went to Australia to take part in the Big Day Out festival, something akin to Lollapalooza in the States. It was a huge traveling circus that hit every major city in Australia: tons of bands from several different countries playing on a bunch of different stages at every show. Somehow, we got booked on the main stage.
At the very beginning of the very first show, a huge outdoor affair in Melbourne, I got hit in the eye with something hard. It swelled shut instantly. Enraged, I looked around the stage with my good eye until I found the projectile, a thick, heavy one-dollar Australian coin. While the band continued to play, oblivious to my rage, I started talking through the mic to the crowd, holding up the coin and daring the asshole who had thrown it to make himself known. On the huge, high stage with a good ten-foot security pit between it and a fence that held back the thousands of audience members, I stalked back and forth, determined to identify the fuckhead who’d hit me and get some retribution. Suddenly, I saw a huge, blond, shirtless muscle-bound giant pointing at me, then at himself, then flipping me off with both hands. His gestures, his demeanor, everything clearly said, “It was me! C’mon, shithead, let’s go!”
My extreme anger boiled over. I tried to get off the stage and into the no-man’s-land between it and the crowd to throw punches at this physically huge fuck taunting me from just on the other side of the fence, but the multitude of security guys in front of the stage would not let me get down. Still being egged on by the blond steroid specimen, I searched the stage for something to throw. All I could find was a large, full, unopened oblong bottle of Evian water. I had been a quarterback and I had been a closer on my baseball team, but the shape and weight of this bottle, as well as the fact that I could only see through one eye, made hurling it into a crowd packed with women, children, and innocent concertgoers a tricky proposition. If I was to catch a child or a woman in the face or, Christ, anyone other than this blond musclehead, it would be all over for me. But as the source of my rage continued to egg me on, my intense anger could not be controlled.
I walked to the edge of the stage while the band still continued to jam, at this point five minutes into a vocal-less tune. I stood ten feet from where this son of a bitch stood, still flipping me off with both hands. Fuck it, I thought. I threw the heavy and weirdly shaped bottle with everything I had, maybe fifty miles an hour. It caught him horizontally right across the middle of the face. The audience roared with approval.
Intending to finish him off, I ran and leapt over the outstretched hands of the equally giant security guards hell-bent on keeping me on the stage. I landed directly on the other side of the fence from my now-wounded target. The instant I hit the ground, the excruciating pain in my heel told me that I’d broken my foot. For a brief moment, I was eye to eye with my adversary. His face was covered with blood as he tried to pull himself to his feet. On the opposite side of the fence, I had my hand on top of his, trying to do the same thing. His mug looked like shit, but I’m sure mine was equally contorted with pain. Security grabbed me and threw me back onstage. I finished the set seated on the drum riser, unable to walk.
I had not yet scored that day and instead got drunk. Hole was also on the festival, and in a shuttle van headed from the stage to the artists’ area, Courtney rode along with me, whispering in my ear that she and Al Jourgensen of the band Ministry had scared something up.
Later on that shitty first day of the tour, I was busted by members of Q Prime, my management team, when they walked into a backstage tent right as I was administering a shot of heroin to Courtney. To make matters worse, Q Prime had just begun representing Courtney and Hole.
“Lanegan! What in the fuck are you doing?”
“Tell me you two are not shooting heroin or by God, Peter and Cliff are going to hear about it!”
“Lanegan, for a guy who never makes us any money, you are a complete time-wasting ass! What in the serious fuck do you think you’re doing?”
“Jesus Christ! I cannot believe this! Honestly! Do you have a brain in your fucking head?”
And so on. Hardly a promising start to the tour. Now forced to hobble around with a cane and play each show seated on a stool, I turned my attention to scoring heroin, not getting busted, and staying well.
There were plenty of addicts on the tour. Besides myself, my close friend and the Trees’ longtime soundman Brian “Rat” Benjamin was also strung out. I’d quickly become acquainted with Al Jourgensen, Ministry’s notorious singer. He, Courtney, and I were the three most obvious dope fiends on tour. From appearances, Bobby Gillespie and Throb, the stars of British band Primal Scream, my favorite band on the tour, were also getting loaded daily and hell-raising nonstop, presumably with different drugs of choice than us. It was a continuous party.
Al’s road manager was an old Scottish road manager of mine from the early ’90s, Michael “Curly” Jobson, a man rumored to have a dark and mysterious past. He and I had become instantly friendly, getting along famously during the time he was employed by my band until one day in Germany. I had spent the night at the apartment of a beautiful friend of mine named Petra Hammerer who was not cool with my drug use. She had said I could come over as long as I left my heroin in my hotel. I had given it to Hicks. After an enjoyable night at Petra’s, my first stop was Hicks’s room to get my dope and do a shot. He opened the door with a look that told me something was very, very wrong.
“Mark, I don’t know how to tell you this but Curly broke in here last night and took your dope.”
I hit the roof.
“What in the fuck do you mean, took my dope? Why in the fuck did you let him have it? How’d he know you had it? And where the fuck is he?”
Hicks went into a highly animated, lengthy explanation, playing both himself and Curly, bouncing between an imitation of Jobson’s threatening Scottish brogue and back into his own heavy Southern accent.
“He knocked on the door and then shoved me out of the way and forced his way in. He said, ‘Where is it? Where is it, John? I’ll break your nose and tear this room apart unless you give it to me now!’ ‘But Curly,’ I said to him, ‘Mark will kill me if I give it to you!’ ‘I’m gonna kill you right now if you don’t!’”
I was becoming more and more agitated by the moment.
“Where is he, Hicks?” I demanded, a furious fire welling up inside.
“That’s the worst part. He got on a plane to head back to England. He took your dope and quit.”
Not only had he stolen my dope but he’d also just quit in the middle of a tour and left us to fend for ourselves? I was in shock. I called Kim, our hapless manager who’d hooked us up with him in the first place. I told her either she fixed it or she was
fired but that this was on her.
Our soundman at the time, Rod Doak, had also been our tour manager in the past and he took over. A week later, Curly showed up out of the blue, full of apology and excuses, ready to finish the job. I found out the entire fiasco had been brought on by a long-distance fight between Curly and his wife. He’d freaked out and gone home to fix it, but not before stealing my heroin and leaving me high and dry.
Now, years later, Curly was no longer a drug-stealing dirtbag. He was clean and dressed impeccably in a suit or nice sweater to perform his job of looking after one of rock’s most notorious addicts, Jourgensen. Al began to grate on my nerves right away. Curly woke me up early one morning, asking me for something to get Al well.
Brian Rat and I always made sure we were covered. That meant hitting the streets, working the local crews and any other potential sources of dope. Every day, Brian and I hit the ATM with his card, drew out max dough, and set out to score before anything else. Before I’d left Seattle, I had bought a large bottle of “pain cocktail” from a guy in my neighborhood with advanced AIDS. It contained methadone, Dilaudid, liquid morphine, and who knew what all else. All I knew was that it didn’t just keep you well, it also got you loaded. I guarded it carefully at all times. It was my backup, not my party drug, only there to keep me well if I were unable to score.
Al, on the other hand, was the entitled variety of junkie, always one to want in on something he’d put zero energy into getting. He expected to be catered to. I gave Curly a small amount of my pain cocktail and told him it was the last time I was giving Al anything for free.
After our show in Sydney, I met two attractive, slightly older women, one blond, the other brunette, probably in their mid- to late thirties. They were funny and sexy and insisted on taking me out on the town. As we went from bar to bar, getting drunker and drunker, I became aware at some point that the brunette was the ex-wife of Chris Bailey, the legendary singer of the Saints, one of my favorite bands of all time. I couldn’t help thinking as we laughed and partied in a corner booth of a dark, crowded bar that if this wildwoman were my wife, I’d hang on to her.