Sing Backwards and Weep

by Mark Lanegan

  One day early in the tour, Josh and I were hanging out with Johnny Ramone, the groundbreaking guitar player behind their genius sound. He came across as a harmless, curmudgeonly older uncle who rarely, if ever, smiled amid his litany of complaints. As we stood listening to him gripe about this and that, from around the back of a trailer behind him came Joey Ramone. He snuck around the corner and, grinning ear to ear like a giant schoolkid, put his finger to his lips. With one eye on Johnny and one on Joey, we watched Joey pull out from behind his back a giant Super Soaker–type water rifle. He aimed it at the back of Johnny’s head and let loose a huge stream of water. As it made contact, Johnny’s hair swooshed forward. He turned around and screamed, “You motherfucker, I’ll kill you!” and took off running after Joey, now laughing uncontrollably as he sprinted off into the distance.

  Because most of these shows were in backwater areas of the US, I encountered quite a bit of difficulty in maintaining my heroin habit, often finding nowhere to score in several cities. As my methadone supply steadily dwindled, I stepped up my efforts to find dope. In every city where I had the time, I was out in the streets looking to score and still often coming up empty. One of Soundgarden’s crew guys was also strung out. He’d come to me one day for some dope, begging, promising, swearing that he had some lined up for the next day, that he would get me back with interest. Against my better judgment, I split the last of what I had at the time with him. Knowing better than to rely on the word of a junkie, I hit the streets that night in Rockford, Illinois.

  Josh always referred to my late-night street-prowling excursions as “the Walk.” Bored and looking for some excitement, this time he decided he wanted to come along. His appetite for adventure began to wane as, corner after corner, street after street, the whole city was dead. There was nothing happening here.

  Finally, we came across a sketchy-looking couple filling up their vehicle at a gas station. I approached the man and woman and asked them if they knew where to score. They looked over my shoulder at clean-cut young Josh and said, “He ain’t no cop, is he?”

  I laughed and said, “Fuck no! That’s my little brother. Except he ain’t so little no more!”

  “I can take you to a place they might have something, but it’ll cost you twenty bucks.”

  I quickly agreed to the deal and Josh and I got into the backseat of their run-down van, an empty baby seat between us. Josh looked at me with a raised eyebrow as if to say, “You best by fuck know what you’re doing.” I smiled and nodded like Don’t worry, I got this. We pulled up to a beat-up-looking two-story flophouse. The couple dropped us off and sped away. We were now in the hood and I secretly rejoiced; this was what I’d been looking for all night.

  There was an old black dude sitting on a barstool in the doorway.

  “Ten bucks,” he said. Then, while giving Josh a close look of stink-eyed inspection, he said, “Apiece.”

  I pulled out a twenty and gave it to him. We were admitted into a room with a bar a quarter-filled with some skanky women and a couple of dudes. One of the women quickly approached us.

  “Hey, boys, buy me a drink?”

  “Sorry,” I said, “we don’t have time for that, but I’ll give you twenty bucks if you can take us somewhere to score.”

  “Whatchoo looking for?” she asked somewhat suspiciously.

  “Dog food, heroin.”

  “Well, I don’t fuck with no hare-on, but I know where you can get some rock.” That was fine by me—I didn’t care what I got as long as it would change my mood. “C’mon upstairs with me.”

  We began climbing up the couple flights of stairs behind her. At the end of a long hallway, she took my twenty bucks.

  “Hang on a second,” she said, “let me check it out.”

  As we waited outside, Josh whispered in my ear.

  “Dude, these motherfuckers better not rob us.”

  “Fuck no, bro. Don’t worry, it’s all good.”

  After a minute or two the door opened, our guide stuck her head out and said, “How much you want?”

  I told her I only had enough for a twenty-dollar piece. In any strange and potentially hostile environments, I knew better than to indicate I had more than twenty bucks on me until I had sussed out the situation and tried the wares. Anything else was an invitation to get burned. Or worse.

  “C’mon in.”

  As soon as we got through the door, three dudes jumped to their feet.

  “Bitch! What the fuck you doing bringing the cops up in here?”

  “Hold on, man! We ain’t fucking cops, I’m just looking for a twenty-­dollar piece, bro!” I said in as firm and believable a tone as I could muster.

  “Oh hell no! Maybe you ain’t, motherfucker, but he sure as fuck is!”

  He was pointing at Josh. At that moment I realized my folly in bringing a tall, young, strong-looking kid along. Now that I considered it, he did look somewhat like a rookie cop fresh out of the academy. I then saw Josh, who was standing slightly in front and to the left of me, slipping his left hand into his back pocket, reaching for the switchblade he always carried there. If the knife came out, this wasn’t going to end well. I softly put my hand on his right shoulder. He was so electrified and put on guard by this confrontational scene that I felt him instantly tense up as though I’d touched him with a cattle prod.

  “Sorry, guys, my mistake. We’re leaving.”

  “Yeah, get the fuck outta here, you fucking narc! And take your motherfucking cop with you! Don’t you ever come back up in here or I’ll kill you, nigger!”

  We slowly backed out of the room, then picked up the pace as we quickly descended the staircase and burst out into the street. Josh was livid.

  “Goddamn it, Scratch! What the fuck did you take me into?”

  Old Scratch was the lifelong nickname my close friends referred to me as, an arcane nom de plume of Lucifer himself.

  “I’m sorry, bro, I didn’t think about your look. I always get away with this shit because no one has ever thought I was a cop. Obviously, they think you are. Fuck it, let’s get back to the hotel.”

  Trudging up the street, I realized that we had no idea where we were or how to return to the hotel. We were deep in the hood. Now every other doorway we passed held a couple people standing there who would whisper to one another as we walked by. A catcall from across the street—“White boys in the hood!”—didn’t put Josh at ease. Frankly, even though I now saw opportunity after opportunity to score, I wanted the fuck out of there, too.

  We came upon some tract homes and I saw some dudes across the way who looked to be obvious dealers. Suddenly, I was not yet totally willing to give up the ghost in my quest for drugs. I told Josh, “Wait here, just one second, bro.” He glared menacingly at me but stayed put between a couple buildings as I prepared to approach these guys. I had not taken two steps when I heard the unmistakable sound of someone cocking a shotgun and a deep voice behind me.

  “Get lost, cop.”

  I had left Josh directly in front of a darkened doorway neither of us had seen. Once again, he’d been mistaken for a fucking cop.

  We finally made our way out of the shit and onto a main road. Hoping to catch a cab, I looked behind me at every car coming up the street while Josh walked silently next to me, obviously furious that I’d put him into such compromising, potentially deadly situations. I heard yet another car racing by. When I turned to look, the barrel of a gun came out the window, pointed directly at me. I was too shocked to move. In slow motion, I watched some stranger’s trigger finger squeezing—was this it?

  I was shot full in the face with a huge stream of water much like Johnny Ramone had been, the front of my clothes soaked through and through. After the momentary shock of thinking we were about to be hit with real ammunition, Josh and I laughed ourselves to tears at my expense, but he was still angry. We caught a cab back to the hotel, but after I’d given four or five different sources dough to point me toward drugs, I was broke. Josh grudgingly paid the fare
, and as the cab pulled away, he said to me, “If you ever do that to me again, I’ll kill you.”

  From his tone of voice and demeanor, I did not doubt for a second that he meant it. I paused for a moment. Realizing I had indeed recklessly endangered my new young partner in crime, I nodded my head in agreement.

  “Fair enough.”

  I lay down in my wet clothes and fell asleep, exhausted. Our road manager woke me around eleven a.m.: time to go down to the fairgrounds where the concert was held and get ready to do our usual early-­afternoon slot. As soon as I arrived, I sought out the Soundgarden bus and specifically bassist Ben Shepherd. Ben was one of my only really close friends who was not a drug user; instead he was naturally crazed. A balls-out, 150 percent, fully committed antisocial music fiend. He was the most real-life “punk rock” of anyone I’d ever met. Without looking or acting anything like the stereotypical punk rocker, Ben lived his life with the most strictly-adhered-to sense of what was cool and what was lame. If you were lame, you’d best stay the fuck out of his face. Ben was big, tough as nails, and had zero qualms about taking anyone on and fucking them up. He was a gifted and extremely serious musician. He was like the Captain Beefheart or Ornette Coleman of Seattle musicians, an extraordinary and original thinker and player. He was one of my favorite people and closest friends, loyal and generous almost to a fault. Once you were friends with Ben, you had a friend for life, one who always had your back. I knocked on the door of their bus and asked for him and in a couple minutes he came to the door. “Hey, man, where’s Randy?” Randy was Ben’s tech and I wanted the dope he owed me.

  “Oh fuck, man, Randy went to the hospital today. He was really sick, puking and shitting at the same time.”

  I, of course, knew what his malady was. I was furious that he’d lied, then punked out and gone to a fucking hospital because he was dopesick. Minutes later, I got onstage in my still-wet-from-the-night-­before clothes, starting to feel the uncomfortable beginnings of my own withdrawals that would shortly hit me full force. As I stood uneasily, furious, sick, and wet, singing these songs I had grown to detest, I began to lose it. Suddenly unable to stand the sensation of wet clothes on my skin, I sat down on the drum riser midsong and pulled off my boots. One after the other, I threw them as far into the crowd as I could, to the delight of the sparse audience. I pulled off my shirt, balled it up, and threw it. I pulled out my empty chained trucker’s wallet and whipped it into the crowd, followed quickly by my jeans. I finished the show in a pair of wet boxer shorts, finally free of the irritating clothes.

  Later that day, Cheap Trick, originally from Rockford, played on the main stage. As a teenager, I’d gone to see them at the Yakima Speedway racetrack near my hometown. Some friends and I had rented a motel room to party in before and after the show. Hours before the concert, I had walked down a deserted stretch of street from our motel, looking for a store. I looked up and saw some guys coming toward me in a car, yelling and gesturing in my direction. The small central Washington city of Yakima, population around 100,000, had one of the highest crime rates per capita in the entire nation at the time and could be a dangerous place. I thought for a moment that I was about to be targeted for some kind of attack but then realized they were pointing and yelling at some other guy who was jogging up the otherwise empty sidewalk toward me. As he got closer, I realized in a flash of teenaged excitement that the jogger was Rick Nielsen, the legendary guitarist and songwriter of Cheap Trick. As he ran by me, I said, “Hey, Rick!” He’d put up his hand and high-fived me as he went by. I was beyond thrilled. Of course, when I breathlessly returned to our room and poured out my story, none of my friends believed me.

  There were some unforgettable moments on the tour. I watched from the side of the stage, fully engaged, as the Wu Tang Clan took over the stage and captivated the crowd during their short run of shows with the tour. There seemed to be fifteen or twenty of them onstage at once. When their devastating shows were done, the stage was completely covered with the empty forty-ouncers they’d consumed in a half hour of stage time. James Hetfield of Metallica went out of his way to introduce himself and in a genuinely friendly and down-to-earth manner engage me in conversation the few times we ran into each other, something he would go on to do whenever we by chance met in subsequent years. Marky Ramone and C. J. Ramone, their newest bassist, an ex-Marine filled with enthusiastic goodwill, were also two guys who went out of their way to be friendly, converse, and hang out.

  Two songs into our show somewhere outside Syracuse, New York, I was hit straight in the forehead with a tennis ball. I shook it off and kept playing. A song later, I was nailed by an entire sub sandwich that caught me horizontally straight in my chest with a huge thud, loud enough that it reverberated through my microphone. Luckily, it was tightly wrapped in cellophane so I’d not been covered with a disgusting mess, but in my already shitty mood, I just dropped the microphone to the stage and walked the fuck off, directly to the back lounge of our bus, show over.

  We stayed in DC the night before a show in the countryside somewhere in Virginia, and I spent the entire night in the infamous Dupont Circle, smoking crack with a large group of pipe-hitting black dudes. When the sun came up, one of the guys and I went walking to a crack house to score some more. Halfway there, I felt a strange feeling in the middle of my chest. Suddenly, it felt like my heart was missing every other beat. I leaned down, out of breath with my hands on my knees, waiting for the heart attack I was sure was coming. When my heartbeat finally steadied itself, I continued on and scored more crack.

  Later that day, we played in yet another dirt field that passed for a concert ground. After our show, my heart was again acting strange. I lay on the floor of the back lounge of the bus in a freezing-cold sweat, waiting to die. Again, to my surprise and relief, it didn’t happen.

  At some point during our set in Indianapolis, Lee Conner inexplicably took his microphone off of its stand and began whipping it around on the end of its cord. It had suddenly come loose, flown across the stage, and struck me like a fifty-pound barbell directly in the spine. The pain was excruciating but my anger was even larger. I furiously walked off the stage to seek some pain relief I had stashed on the bus. After fixing a shot, I prowled, brooding and lost in furious misery, through the huge lot the busses were parked in for the night. I was considering beating Lee’s head in, quitting the band, flying home, and, lastly, dying. I honestly didn’t know how much more of this self-inflicted torture and humiliation I could take.

  As I paced up and down between the long row of tour busses, someone came up behind me, gently put their arm around my shoulder, and spoke in a heavy Texan’s drawl.

  “Son, you look like you ain’t having too good a day. I know how that feels, I’ve had a few of those myself.”

  I looked to my side and, to my shock, the man who had his arm around me was country music legend Waylon Jennings. He had been on the tour for a short run of the shows. He gave me a sad-eyed smile, as though he really did understand my angst, felt sorry for me, and understood exactly how I felt. I looked over his shoulder and there was a producer friend of mine from Houston, Randall Jamail, with a huge sheepish grin. He had obviously seen how unhappy I was and asked Waylon to say something to me, knowing I was a huge fan and that it would be a thrill. I remained in awe of Waylon’s kindness toward me from that day forward. He had been everywhere and seen all there was to see yet took the time to make a simple, beautiful gesture that a sad, hardcore addict would carry with him in gratitude for his entire life.

  Later that same day, Josh burst into the back lounge right as I exhaled a huge cloud of crack smoke. He fanned it out of his face and sat down. He was slightly worked up and excitedly had something to tell me.

  “Dude! I just saw the most incredible girl. Jesus Christ, I can’t believe it! What a fucking smile!”

  “Who is she?”

  “I’m not sure but I think she might be Tim Armstrong’s girlfriend or something.”

  Tim Armstrong
was a member of the band Rancid, a group of staunch antidrug AA Nazis. An old friend of mine in Los Angeles had told me to get to know these guys because they held private meetings every day and would let me join them. I hadn’t the heart to tell my friend that was an idea I was emphatically opposed to. One afternoon early on in the tour, I had been walking alone up a wide cement sidewalk in the backstage area when I came face-to-face with the entire Rancid band. On either side of the walkway was deep, wet, muddy ground. Even though there was enough room on the cement to drive a Mack truck through, they had stepped off en masse into the ankle-deep mud instead of walking by me. I instantly recognized it for what it was: they had clearly made me for an active junkie and their gesture said they’d rather walk through shit than to have to share the sidewalk with me. I had thought, It’s a good thing I don’t give a fuck about your meetings. Fuck you guys, and stored the slight away in the back of my head.

  Now, hearing from Josh that one of them was with a woman he desired, I jumped right in.

  “Oh yeah? Fuck that guy, you should go after her, bro. She probably hates that sour-apple son of a bitch. Those Clash rip-offs are a bunch of fucking pricks; I’m sure she can’t stand that preachy fuck.”

  I was always one to hold on to a grudge. I went out of my way to encourage young Josh to make a move on this guy’s girl simply because they had rudely gone out of their way to avoid me.

  Later that day, I caught sight of the young woman in question. She was an extremely beautiful young Australian woman named Brody with an unnameable quality that hit me like a tractor beam. I instantly saw how Josh’s infatuation was born. It turned out to be her first ever day in the US. She was there to see if her budding romance with Tim was going anywhere, never realizing she was actually there to find Josh. He never stopped thinking about her or talking to me about her. Seven years later, they met again by chance, began a deep, life-changing romance, and were eventually married and raised a family together. She was, in fact, the true love of his life.