Sing Backwards And Weep, Chapters 1 and 2

I like the idea of being a Mark Lanegan fan.  I've tried to be one as few times.  Rarely came away from any of his music unintrigued, but rarely ever fell in love either.  My thing when I don't totally understand something and want to know it better is to write at ridiculous length about it, so I decided that this would be a great opportunity to try a track-by-track dissection of an artist I don't click with as much, and pick apart what does and doesn't appeal.  In a moment of temporary insanity (and not realizing at the time that the book would only cover through the late '90s), I then decided to get to know where the music was coming from too, and read Sing Backwards And Weep: A Memoir.  Plus, who the hell else has a parallel book and music blog?  This is a new experience and I don't know how it'll go, but go it does.  

I have read the book already, so consider this a second reading.  Here are my comments on the first few chapters:

Prologue

I've never totally understood the fixation with starting a memoir with a middle-of book scene rather than, you know, telling a story chronologically from the beginning.  I mean, theoretically I "understand" that an attention-getting opener can give a bite-sized taste of what the reader is in for and set the tone.  When it's a device that everyone who has ever memoired uses, it gets old, quickly.

Anyway, we start with a cop search scene with Lanegan almost getting caught with a bag each of dope and coke that's as unmemorable as it is brief.  It seems to exist mostly to set up the non-punchline "didn't you used to be a singer?" except that then it keeps going for another few sentences.  In theory, we thus learn that this will be a book about theoretically engaging highs of a life high and the transition from art to dope.  I absorbed none of that on first reading and was mostly left with a total nothing of an intro.

1:  "Childhood Of A Fiend"

I have a theory that "unflinching" memorists tend to be just really judgemental people, and they just cover by casting shade on themselves as well as others.  This chapter sort of supports that.  Lanegan* immediately starts looking down on people with his lineage of "hillbilles of the roughest, most ignorant sort," inexplicably ranting about their backwoods first names as though being named Lance Lanegan would have been a horror.

This is one of the book's long chapters, doing a mostly good job of presenting young Lanegan's view of the world by way of Ellensburg, WA.  Specifically, as he sees it during the years discussed, he was born angry and uncontrollable, a product of a cycle of abuse that soon leads him to move in with a father who has little ability or interest in controlling him.  From there, "by age twelve, I was a compulsive gambler, a fledgling alcoholic, a thief, a porno fiend."  

Sometimes the connections aren't quite as clear as the book wants us to be.  Stuck into a rather moving passage about his simple plain-spoken dad making one serious attempt to reach out to him is a description of a neer-do-well uncle's life and early death that ends with him sending postcards, "each one ended exactly the same.  Every single one of them sent to his monther."  Um, okay?  Were we supposed to draw more from that?  Is it some kind of koan?  

In the big picture, too, Lanegan will often transition from one obsession to another, abruptly introducing his discovery of punk rock from a local record store owner at the tail end of the part about his childhood of crime.  I think to his way of thinking, it's all one: his hatred of school and the rules, his early commitment to a life of fighting ("as a kid, my friend taught me to throw a punch the minute anyone attempted to bully you.  As a loner with few friends... that lesson served me well"), in stealing/scamming, porn, tattoos, and smoking/injecting everything he can get his hands on.  I guess I'm not buying that someone is inherently predestined to end up a junkie because he likes playing quarters.

Lanegan isn't a popular kid despite being a high school QB, with no interest in engaging with either his studies of his peers - "I could not fathom their concern for the grade point averages, cheerleader girlfriends, and school functions... for that, I was treated with a mixture of curiosity, dislike, and fear."  There's a fun anecdote about his father's nonchalant response to a football coach bullying, and a more telling anecdote about how his baseball career ends due to learning that in order to do the one thing he actually enjoys, he'll have to retake/pass a class run by a teacher who has it in for him.  This could be the setup for a "trying to succeed in a hostile school environment" setup that's a winning formula for a novel, but Lanegan's response is to immediately conclude that the teacher had agreed to give him this one more chance "not to help me, but to inflict pain,  And to make it impossible for me to comply."  So he walks away immediately, baseball career over.  Although he's not really explicit about it, the book is all framed around this sense of learned helplessness, like he's destined to be a ne'er-do-well and fuckup and that ever trying to change is a waste of time.  I feel like he brushes against the edges of understanding that, but it seems to be a defining trait of his life.** 

The compelling part of this lengthy chapter, the part that does mostly work, is the ending section about the formation of Screaming Trees.  It's been set up by the picture he paints of maybe getting free of his addictions during a respite of sobriety, but seeming destined never to get free of his angry dead-end life in Ellensburg, until an opportunity to join a band falls into his lap.  

So, Lanegan details his reconnecting with a childhood acquaintance, Van Conner, which first leads to a repo-man job and more violence stories, but then to seeing Van and brother (Gary) Lee's garage band, leading to Van trying to recruit Lanegan (as a drummer!) during the first of a series of attempts to ditch Lee.  A chance encounter leads him to discover Lee's passion for home-recorded demos.  Here Lanegan sells the hope he feels in hearing this fellow loner make promising, engaging retro-leaning aggressive music that's "pretty cool, something with rugged potential."   They write a song together, with Lanegan falling into the role of singer.  It thus makes total sense when, in a move that he'll alternate celebrate and regret for the next decade, he convinces Van and drummer Mark Pickerel that they need to not only keep Lee in the band, but that they need to build it around Lee's originals rather than punk covers.

I heard that Lanegan may have later thought that he went too hard on Lee during the book.  It's possible.  He's certainly especially mean to him in the writing.  Anyway, his perspective is that he and Lee are incompatible, he can't get along with this self-obsessed near-mute rage monster, and that he has no creative input in the Trees' early work and is embarrassed by the lyrics that he has to sing... but the band might be his ticket out of town, and he's taking it.  

2:  "The Fragile Kingdom"

One of the most engaging chapters in the book, because it's about music more than drugs.  Mostly covering the Screaming Trees' indie years, a few things jump out here.  One is just how eager Lanegan is to dismiss half of the group's discography.  Full-length debut Clairvoyance is the only one of the first four studio records that even gets a mention by name.  By which I mean a single mention, in which it's described as "perhaps even shittier than our first [Other Worlds] recording."  In my head Screaming Trees always loomed large as Lanegan's "main" project.  In his telling, throughout the indie years it was all Lee's songs, and they were all shitty unimaginative '60s garage throwbacks.  The only thing he seems to take much pride in is the energy of their gigs, admitting being blown away by Lee's histrionic performances.  Or, to quote the book, while a band like Nirvana had a core identity, "three records in, we still didn't know what the fuck we were.  We had no identity beyond our notoriety for our unhinged live show."  Towards the end of the chapter he has some sustained kind words for the way their short lived recruitment of (then pre-Team Dresch) bassist Donna Dresch further elevated their live show to the point that he admits to enjoying playing with the Trees "just because she kicked so much ass."  The excitement comes through in those sections.  Otherwise, the author himself seems hard pressed to explain his own band's ongoing rising star.

But part of the unhinged energy is the level of dysfunction that, at least from his perspective, was baked into the endeavor.  Despite having mostly good things to say about Gary and Pix (drummer Mark Pickerel), most of the stories are about various blowups involving Lee, with violence always on the cusp of breaking out.  Lanegan seems determined never to be satisfied with anything in general, but it's striking when he describes a gig that he performed stoned with Lee confined to a chair as "the rare occasion where I enjoyed myself."  Lanegan can't seem to quit Trees despite it making him miserable on a minute to minute basis.  

"The Fragile Kingdom" does lean hard into how mean and ugly Lanegan's writing can be.  He has a clear idea of who the bad guys are, sometimes including himself in that group and sometimes not.  One of the toughest parts to read is the paragraphs of how Lee is a weirdo and also a sick guy wanting to be like the singer.  Our antihero is constantly getting laid, our villain is always alone and envious.  The writing breaks down into generalities, telling without showing - "Lee was completely inept socially and expected the world to come to him... he comported himself like a fucking prima donna, a hillbilly diva who considered himself a genius... he was a stone prick and we were constantly at odds..." and so on and so on.  When he tells the stories of inter-band fights, there's no doubt he still, writing about it thirty-plus years later, considers himself on the side of the angels.  Langean alwats has the good of the band in mind, whereas anything that makes Lee jealous is a threat to his titular fraglie kingdom.  On the other hand, when it's people that he likes the narratives also have a particular role for their writer.  Lanegan describes seeing a Nirvana gig in Ellensburg and in his telling, he selflessly passes up a chance to recruit Krist Novelelec and instead convinces him to stick with Kurt Cobain, having immediately had the insight that even Kurt's bandmaters and record label don't, to immediately recognize that Nirvana are something special.  He's not quite overtly being an egomaniac - he seems convincingly sheepish about and bewhildered by the idea that Kurt may have looked up to him either as a singer or an individual - but the stories certainly do seem tailored to fit his narrative.

This is getting really long but I feel like I have to mention the memorable portrayal of Wipers frontman Greg Sage, an early musical hero of Lanegan's, as a bit of a predator - both locking bands into exploitative contracts, and his attempt to "groom" young guys who catch his interest.  Such as Pix.  It seems like a loaded accusation, a big revelation about someone.  I think the reason the alleged attempts to pick up Pix read as wrong as creepy, despite them both being consenting adults, is how heavily the writing emphasizes the age and experience gap - Sage as the deceptive older guy, clueless naive and young Pix as the devout Christian who doesn't even see the effect his looks have on the girls and boys around him.  The effect definitely makes the whole thing seem unsavory, if it's true.

So at this point I'm finding the book to be a captivating if irritating read. The author's ego is a necessary in to see an interesting arc of a band on the rise to the confusion of those in it.  But how am I going to fulfill my plan to dive deep into the music in parallel with the book, if all of the Screaming Trees music through the end of the SST years is something Lanegan didn't write at all, and of which he wants no ownership, an endless source of shame?  I still have to at least try to listen to some of it and have something to say about it, right?

TO BE CONTINUED!  

But first, Clairvoyance, and maybe other early Trees, whenever I get around to it!

*For some reason I never feel like I'm on a first name basis with this "complicated" artists like Zevon and Lanegan the way I am with others about whom I blog.  Nice that he prefers, as he says here, to go by his last name.

 

**You can even sort of tie in his habit of always being hooked on something to that.  Problems with weed lead to him "submit[ting] wholly to alcoholism." Not being hooked on something or other seems to rarely be an option.  Not universal, though; after all, he spends most of the rest of the '80s sober except for occasional weed.