Sing Backwards And Weep, chapter 3

3:  "Seduced, Fucked"

In what seems to be a clearer assocation in his mind than it is to this reader, Lanegan starts this chapter about getting fucked over in the music industry machine by talking about sex a lot.  Here it's nice that he favors vignettes rather than limiting himself to just generalities about his life as a low-wage grunt in a tense relationship, and then living in squalor due to need to get out of said relationship.  

Notwithstanding some somewhat freewheeling anecdotes about the formation of the band Earth, and going out of his way to shit-talk one of (future collaborator) Dylan Carlson's friends and contradict some ancient allegations about him that nobody has ever heard or cared about to begin with, we get a fair amount of detail, by this book's standards, about the creation and release of solo debut The Winding Sheet.  That story really begins with Lanegan's surprising chill warehouse job and his discovery of "mainly acoustic, personal, and confessional music" by the likes of Nick Drake and Leonard Cohen.  Lanegan stumbled into being a rock singer because of the crowds and record stores he ran with as a teen, but it sounds like on some level his "voice" as an adult is and always has been this quiet mournful stuff.  By the time he gets to actually recording, he's been inspired by Greg Sage's ongoing work (despite his personal feelings about the guy, he makes it clear that he separates art from artist), and had a life-changing experience seeing a rock crowd entranced by quiet music (played by indie-rockers Galaxie 500); the short paragraph about the latter is one of the best written sections of the chapter, clearly written by a music fan for music fans.  

In a bit of a dead end, he and Kurt Cobain try to record a set of Lead Belly covers but their "respect for one another turn[s] it into an oddly unproductive exercise."  An interesting thing that comes out here is one of a few brief mentions of himself as a studio tyrant on Screaming Trees records, through what he calls force of personality - despite all his claims to not care about the Trees' music, he seemed to care about getting it recorded and played, although I'm sure he'd attribute that to his mercenary attitude to getting paid, etc.  Lanegan's in-retrospect theory as to why collaborating with Kurt didn't work is that he couldn't recognize that he was being looked up to due to his cognitive dissonance with how much he hated his own work.  He continues to insist that the Trees' early work is "swill;" to me, the book as a whole reads to me like the work of a guy who's never going to be satisfied with his work.*  

After Sub Pop offers him a record deal - with significant money involved that he's paranoid about losing out on - we hear about his writing process, starting with a vocal melody with the amateurish guitar parts relegated to a clearly supporting role.  Mike Johnson, who comes in as the "real guitarist" tasked with finishing the songs, gets a surprisingly perfunctory mention given how large he'll end up looming in Lanegan's solo career.  Trees producer (and occasional keyboardist) Steve Fisk, hitherto unmentioned, comes in to lay down some parts, and Lanegan drops the intriguing tidbit that their relationship had been "mildly contentious" as "he was always irritated by my paranoid, suspicious questioning of his every creative decision."  In the end, he emerges with what he characterizes as a quiet acoustic record, even taking a moment to explain his thinking in including oddball novelty track "Juarez."  

I feel like it says something or other that recording TWS gets less page time than does a fight with Bruce Pavitt, a co-owner of Sub Pop who first gets a begrudging mention as a genius marketer.  This is over a potential cover photo for the record that Lanegan hates but with which the latter is enamored.  Lanegan returns from a tour to see his most personal work to date marred with a picture that screams pretension to him, and more to the point, one that he'd taken a man at his word that it wouldn't be used in this specific way.  My first reaction was to roll my eyes at his melodramtic account of this "fucking," even though intellectually I get it - as an artist, his integrity is on the line if something with his name is presented in any way to which he didn't agree.  I guess I sort of expect that the music industry does this to everyone - he got off easy if they let him make exactly the record he wanted and the album sleeve isn't to his liking.  In his writing, he clearly hasn't let go of the level of anger he felt over a photograph, though.  Although the accounting of the final confrontation here is self-serving, with its writer portraying himself as a badass and the weasely record exec cowering on the ground, the more I think about this section, the more I think it works, in the way it undercuts itself.  Lanegan-the-writer is actually quite effective in communicating the shock of having the rug pulled out from under him, running into a situation for the first time in which threatening to kick someone's ass is a completely impotent tool in the face of the big soulless industry (even on an "indie" label).  As he puts it, he's angry, but he's more mostly "mute and dazed with shock that [Bruce had] really done it."  And part of the reason he feels so diminished is that he "would have freely lied and screwed anyone else over to get what I wanted, and now here I was, totally enraged that someone had done it to me."  I don't know that he was prepared for how diminished he'd feel to have someone lie to him in a way that affected the art.  And that's why, given his personality, his main memory from finally releasing a well regarded record that does reflect him is that of having been fucked over.

Again, I'm not feeling the link between that and with literal sex, but girlfriend "Anna," who will be a major background character over the next few chapters, is introduced here, along with her ability to make him happy.  I guess that'll establish a baseline so that she can be portrayed as something other than the nagging girlfriend from whom he needs to hide his drug use... but we're not quite there yet, even with Lanegan having already released what will end up being considered one of his seminal works. 

 

 

TO BE CONTINUED!

But first, thoughts on The Winding Sheet, whenever I get around to it!

 

 

*Sure enough, I believe that in a later chapter he makes the suggestion that the songs from The Winding Sheet aren't the best.