by Mark Lanegan
George urged me to hang tight with Benmont because he had been sober for many years. He took me to a couple meetings in Hollywood but I always felt out of place at these large, loud meetings where you’d often see some famous actor or musician in the crowd. Besides, I’d already made up my mind that I was going to ride or die with dope. There was no going back now.
I had long since ceased to enjoy the ever-changing dynamic of life with my bandmates. I had reconciled with the knowledge that all of us were troubled, damaged people, myself the most criminal example, each with our own cross to bear, but I knew in the back of my head that these songs would be the last I’d ever sing for this band. Still, despite my exhaustion with the entire parade, I couldn’t help but admire and appreciate the way Lee and Van Conner, Barrett Martin, and George had worked so diligently to create this last-chance record. They had allowed me the time and space to get clean in solitude and I’d repaid them by quickly relapsing, now only able to participate in an impaired fashion.
I started the tortured and torturous process of laying down the vocal tracks, still writing lyrics for the songs even as I stood in the vocal booth to record. Drakoulias worked me hard. I’d sing a verse as forcefully as I possibly could. Then on the talkback microphone from the mixing board, I would hear his voice in my headphones say simply, “No.” I would then do it again, and again, sometimes taking an entire night just to get a couple of verses he deemed good enough. My voice was definitely not its strongest while on drugs, but it wasn’t as though I was completely powerless in the singing department. I had made other records and toured for years while strung out. But George was a strict taskmaster and I willingly did whatever he asked of me, knowing how long and hard he’d fought to help me get clean the previous year and how angry and disappointed he’d been at my fall.
In a recording studio one block off Hollywood Boulevard, I was put through the paces daily, strung out and straining to finish this final handful of songs. The physical and emotional drain of the demands of my drug habit combined with the hours of singing under the critical ears of Drakoulias took a toll. The lyrics I was writing now were probably the most world-weary, hopeless, and death-focused I’d written, even if I was the only one aware of their meaning. After singing for hours and then spending hours more comping vocal tracks—a process that involved going line by line through numerous vocal takes to find a word here, a line there, and putting the best of these performances together to form one cohesive vocal track to then be used on the record … the magic of studio mixing—I would hear the final patched-together takes and be crestfallen when I realized my singing sounded like shit to me. I would inevitably then beg George to let me sing it again, which would start the painful carousel turning once more. In the end it was I, not George, who could not live with the results. What I had originally perceived as his disapproval had, in fact, been my own self-inflicted wounded psyche that agonizingly prolonged the sessions.
I grew to think of Dust as not an attempt for commercial success but as only the second unique effort in our catalog of scores of records, all the early ones almost identical in sound and song type. It ended up being a very different kind of album than its predecessor, something I considered more a piece of art than any of our previous albums. Everyone involved had suffered and felt pain in its frustrating creation, and I was proud of it. Yet I knew its chances for failure with the general music-listening public were near to 100 percent. I grimly anticipated its release as the beginning of the death throes the band must ultimately endure. And waited for the day Screaming Trees were to end ignominiously, silent and beaten, sometime in the near future.
My guitarist roommate had been busted for selling dope outside my apartment and when he got out of jail I was preparing to leave LA. For some furtive, unknown reason, he tried to talk me into staying just a couple more days but never really had any real excuse for wanting me to stick around. We were anything but close, the rent had been paid up until the end of the month, and that meant he had three more weeks before he’d have to pay it himself or get out. One day while he was gone, his bass player gave me a warning.
“I think old boy might be setting you up to get busted. I think he talked the cops into thinking that since this place is in your name, you’re the dope dealer, not him. I think that’s why they let him out so soon. He sure as hell didn’t have money for bail. I’d get out if I were you.”
I’d had the same feeling myself, that something shady was up with this always obviously shady dude. Leaving all the shit behind that he had not already stolen, I took a cab to the Burbank airport and left California behind for the familiar confines and rainy doom and gloom of the Pacific Northwest.
A few months later, while playing before powerhouse labelmates Rage Against the Machine on a festival date, I ran into Selene. Still incredibly kind to me, she quietly informed me she had been dating Brad Wilk, the drummer for Rage. The news stung a little. I had always found him to be a very nice guy whenever I’d been around him. I wished her the best, silently chastising myself for taking this beautiful, kind, intuitive, and caring woman for granted and for ultimately choosing dope over any potentially good thing in life. They eventually married. For a long time after that, whenever she crossed my mind, I felt a dull emptiness inside. I considered my letting her go after our brief affair as one of the more glaring mistakes in a lifetime filled with them. The fabled “one that got away.” But I was an expert at trading gold for garbage.
35
ONE HEAVY TEAR
As soon as I got back to Seattle, I went through the multitude of messages on my answering machine, over a month’s worth of boring shit I mostly erased as soon as I heard who was calling. Then I heard the voice of Jeffrey Lee Pierce, sounding manic and weird. I listened closely to the message but I could not understand one thing he was trying to say. It was a crazed, rambling monologue that made not one bit of sense.
When he’d returned to England after the Gun Club’s disappointing West Coast tour, he’d begun to call me long-distance from London at least twice a week, often in tears. His girlfriend Romi Mori had left him for his own drummer. Apparently they’d been having an affair for some time and finally decided to quit the band to be together, leaving Jeffrey devastated. I had patiently listened to his agonized heartache every time he called. He was, after all, my favorite singer, the reason I’d become a singer myself, and I loved and idolized the guy.
During one phone call, he’d told me of his vision for a new band: he and some other badass-but-as-yet-unknown guitar player, drummer, and bass player would form a band like Television, Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd’s great two-virtuoso-guitarists band from the ’70s.
“Here’s the best part, Lanegan—you will be the singer!”
I was silent for a moment. There was no way I was going to be the singer in a band with the guy I considered the greatest singer of all time. How could I do that? It was just wrong.
“Jeffrey, I can’t possibly sing in a band with you, you’re my favorite singer ever. Nobody can touch you in that department. I like your idea for a new direction, but you’ve got to be the singer. You have got to be the singer!”
I was flattered by my idol’s plan to have me sing in his band, but I knew it was inherently flawed. You don’t take the most original, powerful, and genius singer of my generation and relegate him to playing guitar solos. No way. But this call had been the only call in weeks where he’d shown any enthusiasm for music, much less living. Still heartbroken and betrayed, he was deeply unhappy.
Right before I’d begun my Buprenex treatments in the fall, he and I had gotten together with the intention of writing some songs at his mom’s place in Hollywood, a couple of blocks from Johnny Depp’s infamous Viper Room, the small club outside of which, years earlier, young actor River Phoenix had collapsed and died. I’d run a cassette recorder as Jeffrey’d shown me a part of a song and told me to finish it. In the very warm Los Angeles October weather, I was still feeling the chill of withdrawals. The
cassette recorder captured our conversation.
“Hey, man, can you close that door? You know I’m kicking,” I’d asked, the sliding glass door wide open.
“Yeah, I know. What else is new?” he’d answered with a truthful yet smart-ass response.
After spending the day writing with him, it was time for me to go back to my apartment. Jeffrey was leaving for Japan the next morning to hang out with friends there and, I secretly suspected, to look for women. While he’d been with Romi in London, every time we went out she’d brought a gang of beautiful Asian girls with her. The first time I’d been out with them in such a situation, I’d literally been mobbed by a group of these women, all vying for my attention. I quickly learned that they were women looking for sugar-daddy boyfriends. Their interest in me quickly waned.
When I listened at least a half dozen times to the message he’d left on my answering machine, I could tell he was not drunk or on drugs. With alarm bells of worry clanging in my head, I recognized his gibberish as something else I’d heard before: mental illness. Something had happened in the time since we’d sat together in his mom’s kitchen that had damaged his psyche.
I called my ex-manager Kim White, someone I was no longer friendly with. Even though I did not want to talk to her, I knew she loved Jeffrey as much as I did; we were two of a group of people in Los Angeles who cared deeply for and appreciated Jeffrey’s genius.
“Jeffrey is really sick,” she said, “and nobody knows what to do. He was drinking while in Japan and suffered liver failure.”
I knew it was from years of heavy alcohol abuse, hepatitis C, and his HIV-positive status. The insanity of the message he’d left on my phone, the result of the dementia caused as the poison from his damaged liver spread through his body to his brain.
Keith Morris was the former singer of both the Circle Jerks and Black Flag, two of the most famous of all LA punk bands. Kim told me he had tried to check Jeffrey into rehab but they’d turned him away, Jeffrey being too far gone to help.
“Can you come to LA right away?” she said.
I knew Keith a little bit, a very friendly, talkative, smart, and sort of eccentric dude, not a guy who gave up easily. If there was nothing they could do for him, his situation deemed hopeless, I was sure Keith had exhausted all avenues. Between my roommate’s warning to avoid the cops by leaving California and the apparent death sentence Jeffrey had already been handed, I decided to stay put.
“He’s going to die, Mark,” Kim said.
“We are, too, someday, Kim,” I replied. That ended our conversation.
Almost exactly a week later, my phone rang. I picked it up as soon as I heard Jeffrey’s voice on the machine.
“Dude!” I spoke quickly and giddily into the phone. “Where are you? How are you? I’ve been hearing some crazy shit!”
“I’m staying at my dad’s in Salt Lake City. I’m fine.”
Indeed, he did sound as sane as the day I’d met him, none of the crazed, nonsensical, manic speech from his earlier message. He sounded perfectly normal again.
“What kind of crazy shit have you heard?” he asked.
“Well … everyone is saying you’re about to die, for starters.”
He burst into a fit of long, loud laughter.
“They always fucking say that, man! Don’t believe a word those assholes say, it’s all for show, total bullshit!”
We talked and laughed for an hour until he said he had to go but would call again soon. We said our so-longs. I hung up and went back to my mindless task of cooking up crack.
Exactly one week later, Kim White called again.
“Mark, we’ve lost Jeffrey.”
“What? I just fucking talked to him. He was laughing and said he was fine!”
“I’m sorry. He’s gone.”
No, not Jeffrey. Denial hit me hard. No, not my only legitimate hero. Not the artist who’d selflessly taught me his personal methods of songwriting and had actively encouraged me to use the same, the only friend who showed up to see me sing every single time I played London. Not the genius whose crazed, forcefully real music and distinctly unique and powerful voice had been the spark that lit the fuse that had changed me, pointed me in the direction of my authentic life. Not the lover who’d had his heart broken in such a harsh, humiliating way that he wept in anguish as I sat there night in and night out, listening to him helplessly. Not the wildman who filled the room with maniacal laughter while telling a fucked-up story of one of his numerous misdeeds. Not the big brother who had taken me in and right away made himself an open book that he’d happily let me devour, the only relationship of that kind I’d ever had. Not Jeffrey, please. I thought I would choke on my heart.
“They found him dead at his dad’s house yesterday. They think it was a brain hemorrhage.”
I told her I would not be able to come to Los Angeles for his wake and tribute parties. Then I hung up the phone and stared out the window. I knew he was not well, but he was only thirty-six years old. After a few seconds, I felt the largest, lone tear I’d ever produced run burning from one of my eyes down my face. As I reached up to wipe it away, it fell off the end of my chin, splashing down onto the hardwood of my apartment floor, leaving a small pool, proof of my salty devastation. I did not want to fall into clinical despair. I did everything I could to get a grip. But after the dam cracked, I cried off and on for hours.
Every time Jeffrey crossed my mind for days to come, I had to consciously fight the urge to start crying again. I already had hardly any friends. Lately, they had been dropping like flies. I couldn’t handle losing yet another friend, any one of my few friends, but especially not this one. I had worshipped his music. I had idolized him. It felt so unreal, I literally could not believe that he was gone. This felt like a loss I might never recover from. Like I’d finally been broken for good.
36
WU TANG TO WAYLON
Two days after the release of what was to be Screaming Trees’ last record, Dust, we played our first show on the 1996 Lollapalooza tour. We were the second band on the main stage each day, most often playing while people were still slowly trickling into the venues, mainly just large dirt fields off the beaten path from major American cities. Headlining were wildly popular band Metallica, who we shared management with, hence our inclusion on the tour. Since they could fill much bigger venues on their own, Lollapalooza was mainly relegated to second- and third-market cities as they could make a mint headlining the major markets by themselves. Our band had hired a young kid to play second guitar, an acquaintance of Van Conner’s named Josh Homme. I had not even been at the rehearsal when they first played with him, but when I heard he had been the guitarist in the band Kyuss, I wholeheartedly endorsed their decision without ever having met him. I was a big fan of the Kyuss records and knew we were getting a steal.
None of us old-timers enjoyed each other’s company any longer. I spent almost every second on the tour bus alone in the back lounge, smoking crack and shooting the occasional shot of dope. Josh had a youngster’s passing interest in snorting cocaine and liked the occasional drink but my brand of “partying” was something he had little experience with. Through sheer boredom and curiosity, he began to hang in the back with me, not doing drugs, just watching me do them and talking. He impressed me right off the bat. Not only was he a far superior guitarist to Lee, he was highly intelligent and, even at his young age, already a seasoned veteran. I found him to be the kind of thoughtful, steadying influence the band never had before, as well as a natural comedian with a hilarious, quick sense of humor. Despite our difference in age and experience, we had much in common. Josh quickly found the rest of the guys to be dullards who weren’t interested in working to their full potential. They loathed being in my presence, rightly blamed me for the difficulties writing and recording our long-delayed follow up to Sweet Oblivion, and were by now just going through the motions. Josh intimated that until the offer to play with us had come, he had planned to quit music altogether and th
e reason he’d been in Seattle was to attend college. Despite my glaring addictions, his take on things was that I was the only one who cared enough to try to do my best when it came to my job, singing. I, in turn, quickly accepted him as an equal, the only guy I considered as such by then and we became close friends and conspiratorial allies.
We were both embarrassed to get onstage every day, Lee Conner’s routine just a shtick at that point. Yet we both still did our best to play as well as we could and perform like professionals. Josh could have played the simplistic guitar parts in his sleep and I jokingly asked him how he managed to stay awake while doing it. I turned him on to some classic underground rock he’d not heard before and he eagerly sought out stuff I’d tell him about. He wanted to be original, he wanted to be great. After playing so long with guys who seemed to not give two fucks about originality or greatness, I found his attitude more than refreshing. It was clear to me from the get-go that he had more talent and creativity in him than the rest of the band combined. He confided in me that he found the heavy dysfunction he witnessed daily and the band’s lack of musical proficiency amusing and confounding. I said, “You and me both, brother.” His presence was my saving grace from that moment until the eventual end of the band. I thanked God I finally had someone to relate to and confide in.
As monotonous and boring as the tour was, still there were some great performances. Josh and I watched the Ramones every day. Every day, they killed it. The thrill of being on the same tour as these punk rock gods made it almost worthwhile.