Sing Backwards and Weep: A Memoir

by Mark Lanegan

Overview

This gritty bestselling memoir by the singer Mark Lanegan of Screaming Trees, Queens of the Stone Age, and Soulsavers documents his years as a singer and drug addict in Seattle in the '80s and '90s.

When Mark Lanegan first arrived in Seattle in the mid-1980s, he was just "an arrogant, self-loathing redneck waster seeking transformation through rock 'n' roll." Little did he know that within less than a decade he would rise to fame as the frontman of the Screaming Trees and then fall from grace as a low-level crack dealer and a homeless heroin addict, all the while watching some of his closest friends rocket to the forefront of popular music.

In Sing Backwards and Weep, Lanegan takes readers back to the sinister, needle-ridden streets of Seattle, to an alternative music scene that was simultaneously bursting with creativity and dripping with drugs. He tracks the tumultuous rise and fall of the Screaming Trees, from a brawling, acid-rock bar band to world-famous festival favorites that scored a hit number five single on Billboard's alternative charts and landed a notorious performance on Late Night with David Letterman, where Lanegan appeared sporting a fresh black eye from a brawl the night before. This book also dives into Lanegan's personal struggles with addiction, culminating in homelessness, petty crime, and the tragic deaths of his closest friends. From the back of the van to the front of the bar, from the hotel room to the emergency room, onstage, backstage, and everywhere in between, Sing Backwards and Weep reveals the abrasive underlining beneath one of the most romanticized decades in rock history-from a survivor who lived to tell the tale.

Gritty, gripping, and unflinchingly raw, Sing Backwards and Weep is a book about more thanjust an extraordinary singer who watched hisdreams catch fire and incinerate the groundbeneath his feet. It's about a man who learnedhow to drag himself from the wreckage, dust offthe ashes, and keep living and creating.

"Mark Lanegan—primitive, brutal, and apocalyptic. What's not to love?" —Nick Cave, author of The Sick Bag Song and The Death of Bunny Munro

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780306922787
Publisher:	Hachette Books
Publication date:	04/27/2021
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	16,574
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Mark Lanegan released his first solo album, The Winding Sheet, in 1990. His most recent album is Straight Songs ofSorrow. His singular body of work encompasses dozens of albums both solo and collaborative. He lives in Los Angeles.

Table of Contents

Prologue 1

1 Childhood of a Fiend 3

2 The Fragile Kingdom 25

3 Seduced, Fucked 43

4 If You Start Again, It Will Be as Though You'd Never Stopped 56

5 Meatloaf 68

6 Tiny Daggers 77

7 Fired, Rehired, and a Thousand Forms of Fear 82

8 Nice Wardrobe 96

9 Yeah, This Is the Cops! 102

10 House of Pain 107

11 Drinking Bloody Water 113

12 Strung Out and Exhausted 119

13 Enjoying the Idiot 124

14 Not Bad, Young Fella 132

15 Take Me to the River 141

16 Jeffrey Lee Pierce 148

17 Did You Call for the Night Porter? 155

18 It's Genius, Don't You Hear It? 158

19 Spanking the Monkey 163

20 Parasite Child 166

21 Days Gone Dark 171

22 Wilderness of Horrors 175

23 Go Fuck a Donkey 179

24 Back to the Needle 181

25 Night Out with Jerry 184

26 Seasons of Madness 187

27 Miss Australia 1971 192

28 Payback, the Bitch 200

29 The Lottery 205

30 Lucky 210

31 Is This Love? 217

32 Family Reunion 220

33 I Smoked Weed-HIV-Positive 231

34 Gold for Garbage 239

35 One Heavy Tear 244

36 Wu Tang to Waylon 248

37 Secret Death Games 259

38 See You in Miami, Mate! 263

39 Absence and Hardship 275

40 Ice-Cold European Funhouse 283

41 Cotton Fever 311

42 Last Rungs 321

43 Psychic Storms, Epiphany, and Rebirth 327

Epilogue: The Wolf in Seal's Clothing 331

Acknowledgments 333

Editorial Reviews

"The artist's journey to find one's true voice can travel some very dark roads; addiction, violence, poverty, and soul-crushing alienation have taken the last breath of many I have called friend. Mark Lanegan dragged his scuffed boots down all of those bleak byways for years, managed to survive, and in the process created an astonishing body of work. Sing Backwards and Weep exquisitely details that harrowing trip into the heart of his particular darkness. Brutally honest, yet written without a molecule of self-pity, Lanegan paints an introspective picture of genius birthing itself on the razor's edge between beauty and annihilation. Like a Monet stabbed with a rusty switchblade, Sing Backwards and Weep is breathtaking to behold but hurts to see. I could not put this book down."—D. Randall Blythe, author of Dark Days and lead vocalist of Lambof God

"If you ever wondered how Mark Lanegan's music came to blossom, here's a taste of the dark dirt that fertilized it. But saying that, or something like it, feels irresponsible, almost like saying 'If you want to make great, soul-shattering art, traumatize yourself to the limit and beyond' ... Sing Backwards and Weep is gnarly, naked, and true."—Michael C. Hall of Dexter and Six Feet Under

"Harrowing, edgy, tense, and hypnotic. A very truthful, sobering account of what it's like in the throes of addiction, with shades of Bukowski, Burroughs, and Hunter S. Thompson."—Gerard Johnson, director and writer of Tony, Hyena, and Muscle

"Some books amuse you, some intrigue you, and some-they don't come along often-like Mark Lanegan's Sing Backwards and Weep, squeeze you by the throat and drag you down the back stairs of the author's soul and blast you till you see what he's seen and feel what he's felt. Mark Lanegan spares no detail of the toxic and maniacal things he's done and had done to him, nor of the glorious, weird beauty he walked out with on the other side. You can't look and you can't look away. This is my kind of book. Fucked-up, full of heart, and hard-core as a shot of battery acid in the eye."—Jerry Stahl, author of Permanent Midnight, I, Fatty,and Happy Mutant Baby Pills

"A no holds barred memoir of uncompromising honesty. All of the usual suspects are here-sex, drugs, rock and roll-and if that were all, it would be compelling enough on the strength of Lanegan's writing and the setting of 80's and 90's Seattle, a near mythical time and place in music history. But what elevates Sing Backwards and Weep above the pack is the window into Lanegan's development as an artist, from his first musical influences to the singular singer and songwriter we see today. He seamlessly weaves that storyline into the more conventional rock memoir fabric and the results are outstanding."—Tom Hansen, author of AmericanJunkie and This Is What We Do

"Sing Backwards and Weep is powerfully written and brutally, frighteningly honest. First thought that came to my mind was, 'Mark Lanegan gives the term bad boy a whole new meaning.' These are gritty, wild tales of hardcore drugs, sex, and grunge. But this is also the story of a soulful artist who refused the darkness when it tried to swallow him whole. And who found redemption through grace and the power of his unique and brilliant music. Finally, the song becomes truth. And the truth becomes song."—Lucinda Williams

"A stunning tally of the sacrifices that sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll demand of its mortal instruments."—Kirkus Reviews

"It's a hell of a read. All-consuming, even. Be warned."—Louder Than War

"In a gritty new memoir, Sing Backwards and Weep, Lanegan offers an unflinching look at his shadowy past, stretching from childhood up until the death of his friend Staley in 2002. The book reads like a debauched Bukowski novel, as Lanegan drifts from sin to sin, cursing those who held him back from music, drugs, and hookups, and recounting grisly tales about his famous friends."—Rolling Stone

"A dark, gripping and compelling piece of work."—Guerrilla Candy

"Rather astonishing... [it] reads kind of like the grunge-scene Andy Warhol Diaries: check the index, and there's probably a great story about your favorite artist."—Minnesota Public Radio, "The Current"

"MARK LANEGAN'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY IS THE MOST RAW AND BRUTAL ROCK MEMOIR EVER WRITTEN... [This book is] one of the most unflinching memoirs in the history of music writing."—Kerrang!

"[Sing Backwards and Weep] unflinchingly tells the musician's hardscrabble story."—SPIN

"[A]n extraordinary snapshot of the reality lower down the totem pole.... one of the most compelling accounts of squalor and misery ever committed to paper. In comparison, Bukowski at his most fevered reads like Somerset Maugham."—New Statesman

"[A] fearsome and brutal new autobiography."—Washington Post

From the Publisher

01/27/2020

This overwrought debut memoir from the frontman of the proto-grunge band Screaming Trees is packed with rage, guilt, and the seamy details of a life nearly flushed down the drain. Hating his dead-end upbringing in a Washington logging town, Lanegan became a high school alcoholic with a rock-star attitude who cared only about baseball, “punk rock and getting loaded and laid.” His band Screaming Trees gained some success in the Pacific Northwest scene of the late 1980s, garnering accolades from Lanegan’s friends (Kurt Cobain among them), and scoring success with singles including “Nearly Lost You” as the grunge scene exploded. Nevertheless, Lanegan hated being in the band—calling the group “sick, violent, depressing, destructive, and dangerous.” After a few years clean he fell into a spiral of drinking, drug use, and violence. Even while Lanegan’s raspy, soulful, Tom Waits–like solo output, as in Whiskey for the Holy Ghost, racked up acclaim, he was too busy shooting up, he writes, to enjoy it, and by the mid-1990s, he was dealing heroin and crack to support his growing habits. This dark and engaging epic of destruction is at times undone by Lanegan’s obnoxious cockiness, yet it does serve as a raw look at the grunge music scene. Lanegan’s fans will wince and delight in this gritty narrative. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

03/01/2020

The most shocking aspect of Lanegan's memoir is that he has lived to tell it at all. In the early 1990s, as the lead singer of Seattle grunge band Screaming Trees, with his own promising solo career on the side, Lanegan, like many of his Seattle friends, was poised to enjoy the rock-and-roll limelight. But music took a backseat to his addiction to alcohol, heroin, and crack cocaine and his attempts to fuel his drug habit through illicit means. Lanegan's desperation is palpable; lucid anecdotes take readers from the stages of huge rock festivals to inside decrepit crack houses. Just when he seemed to reach rock bottom, he fell further still, finally getting sober with the encouragement of one of his former drug buddies, Hole lead singer Courtney Love. VERDICT Told in a distinctively heavy voice, this warts-and-all account of addiction's effect on one's body and self-worth comes with heft and hits like a ton of bricks.—Amanda Westfall, Emmet O'Neal P.L., Mountain Brook, AL

Library Journal

2020-01-21
The frontman of the Screaming Trees gives a bloody, brawling, dope-fueled tour of his personal battlefields.

By any reckoning, Lanegan should be long dead alongside beloved friends like Kurt Cobain of Nirvana, Kristen Pfaff of Hole, and Layne Stanley of Alice in Chains. By either miracle or stamina, the author is still alive to offer a blisteringly raw self-portrait of life not just as an excessively self-indulgent rock star, but also a victim of his own hubris. It’s hard to remember in this age of social media, semiclean living, and legalized marijuana, but Seattle circa 1990 was practically a combat zone, thrust into the zeitgeist by the success of grunge rock, especially Nirvana, Soundgarden, and other bands on the Sub Pop label. Lanegan recounts the formation of the Screaming Trees with drummer Mark Pickerel and brothers Gary Lee and Van Conner in the late 1980s, and while their stardom was sudden, the author clearly hasn’t forgotten long, brutal tours in a fetid van, featuring stories that recall Henry Rollins’ Black Flag diary, Get in the Van (1994). There’s plenty of friction behind the music, but the narrative’s primal thread is addiction, from Lanegan’s early alcoholism to a heroin and crack addiction that would later find him dealing to junkies from his Seattle crash pad. His temper would also find him contemplating murdering Courtney Love and beating Liam Gallagher to death backstage. Elsewhere, the missed opportunities are tragic—blowing a gig on the Tonight Show, turning down an invitation to play Nirvana’s fabled MTV Unplugged episode, and ignoring a chance to score a movie. This isn’t just a warts-and-all admission; it’s a blackout- and overdose-rich confessional marked by guilt and shame. It’s also not a redemption song, but like any other train wreck, it’s impossible to look away.

A stunning tally of the sacrifices that sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll demand of its mortal instruments.

Kirkus Reviews