The Benja-man Is Verbose

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, perso...

We haven't even gotten to all of the slagging the Screaming Trees' indie records get in Lanegan's book.  The next chapters of Sing Backwards And Weep , that I haven't written about yet, just keep piling on the abuse.  Besides continuing to go out of his way to emphasize that his "only contribution to Screaming Trees songwriting had been attempting to change the most egregious of Lee Conner's lyrics to something less embarrassing to sing," he has a few more digs at how his perception that their work was second rate shaped everything that he did at this point.  He describes mortification every time he hears one of their songs in the wild, hammering on his involvement in this band as a source of humiliation.  Pretty strong stuff.  This is what he's reacting against when talking about trying to make something that was authentically his with  The Winding Sheet .  So given that Lanegan himself is almost violently dismissive of his own breakthr...

1986 is the "year" in question; all of their output on that label, such as it was, was from 1986.  By the time I got to listening to the Trees' first couple of releases, I'd recalibrated my expectations from viewing them as key steps in the evolution of Mr. M. Lanegan's songwriting to knowing that by his report, he had no creative hand in them beyond being the guy who sings.  It was still interesting to first listen to Other Worlds and realize that, at least at his point in their life, Screaming Trees are not about the vocal performance.  Like, at all.  Anyone could be the singer on a song like "Like I Said," and it really wouldn't matter very much.   At this point Lee presumably didn't know the kind of tool he had in his singer when he put these tracks together.  Honestly, even after he figured it out, knowing that the guy in question was constantly threatening to quit, it still might have still made sense to keep his songs from getting too voc...

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 c...