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  PRAISE FOR SING BACKWARDS AND WEEP

  “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 Lamb of 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

  “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 ’80s and ’90s 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 story line into the more conventional rock memoir fabric, and the results are outstanding.”

  —TOM HANSEN, author of American Junkie and This Is What We Do

  “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 as hardcore as a shot of battery acid in the eye.”

  —JERRY STAHL, author of Permanent Midnight; I, Fatty; and Happy Mutant Baby Pills

  “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

  For Tony

  And all my other absent friends

  Contents

  Praise for Sing Backwards and Weep

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  1 Childhood of a Fiend

  2 The Fragile Kingdom

  3 Seduced, Fucked

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

  5 Meatloaf

  6 Tiny Daggers

  7 Fired, Rehired, and a Thousand Forms of Fear

  8 Nice Wardrobe

  9 Yeah, This Is the Cops!

  10 House of Pain

  11 Drinking Bloody Water

  12 Strung Out and Exhausted

  13 Enjoying the Idiot

  14 Not Bad, Young Fella

  15 Take Me to the River

  16 Jeffrey Lee Pierce

  17 Did You Call for the Night Porter?

  18 It’s Genius, Don’t You Hear It?

  19 Spanking the Monkey

  20 Parasite Child

  21 Days Gone Dark

  22 Wilderness of Horrors

  23 Go Fuck a Donkey

  24 Back to the Needle

  25 Night Out with Jerry

  26 Seasons of Madness

  27 Miss Australia 1971

  28 Payback, the Bitch

  29 The Lottery

  30 Lucky

  31 Is This Love?

  32 Family Reunion

  33 I Smoked Weed—HIV-Positive

  34 Gold for Garbage

  35 One Heavy Tear

  36 Wu Tang to Waylon

  37 Secret Death Games

  38 See You in Miami, Mate!

  39 Absence and Hardship

  40 Ice-Cold European Funhouse

  41 Cotton Fever

  42 Last Rungs

  43 Psychic Storms, Epiphany, and Rebirth

  Epilogue: The Wolf in Seal’s Clothing

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Mark Lanegan

  Copyright

  Fix

  It’s true

  It keeps raining baby

  So crystalline in my head

  Gonna watch from the balcony

  Sing backwards and weep

  PROLOGUE

  “Police.”

  At first his warning didn’t register, my mind fixated on the pinprick ending of the morning’s routine, the relief from what at this point was only a dull, aching pain.

  “Police,” the African cab driver whispered again in a thick accent while motioning with a roll of the eyes and quick hunch of his shoulders to look in the rearview mirror where, sure enough, the three young guys following in the van behind looked like undercover cops, eager to beat someone’s ass. Maybe mine.

  My six-foot-four cross-dressing drug buddy St. Louis Simon and I had just scored a bag of dope and a bag of coke, both of which I had thrown somewhat carelessly in my unbuttoned shirt pocket. I had a sack of new rigs stuffed in the front pocket of my tight pants as I hadn’t expected to encounter the authorities today. Now I felt totally exposed.

  Another ten blocks across Seattle’s Capitol Hill and it was obvious we were indeed being followed. As the car pulled up just down the street from my building I hopped out and started walking up the sidewalk, trying my best to act naturally. Simon got out the other side and, wearing a trailer-park-style denim skirt and wedge shoes that made him even taller, started to cut across the gravel lot between buildings where out the corner of my eye I saw two guys tackle him to the ground … not good. I was almost to the corner when a short, young cop in jeans and muscle shirt suddenly jumped around in front of me, held a badge in my face, and said, “Hold on a second, buddy! Where ya off to so fast, buddy?”

  Hands raised automatically, I did my best full-of-shit, bewildered, what’s-this-all-about look.

  “I’m just going home.” I pointed dumbly to my apartment building.

  “What’s this?” he asked, reaching out to squeeze the drugs through the thin cloth of my shirt.

  “What the fuck, man? I live here! What do you want?” I yelled while pulling away from him with phony indignation. In my head, I quickly calculated how sick I’d be in jail before making bail since I hadn’t done a shot yet that morning. Down the street, I could see both Simon and the cab driver sitting curbside in handcuffs, feet in the gutter, the entire backseat pulled out of the cab.

  “Okay, man, let
’s see some ID.”

  In my mind, I saw my passport upstairs on the coffee table covered in crack pipes and the huge pile of used syringes next to it. That wasn’t going to be an option.

  “I don’t have it on me. My name is Mark Lanegan.”

  The cop narrowed his eyes, took a hard look at me, then said, “Didn’t you used to be a singer?”

  After walking me back down the street to the surveillance van, he took a small black-and-white photo off the dashboard: a guy they wanted for auto theft and who looked something like me. He had me sign it with a ballpoint pen, then let us be on our way.

  1

  CHILDHOOD OF A FIEND

  With the umbilical cord wrapped around my neck, I was born by C-section in November 1964 and then came up on the wrong side of the Cascade Mountains in the small, eastern Washington town of Ellensburg. My family were from a long line of coal miners, loggers, bootleggers, South Dakotan dirt farmers, criminals, convicts, and hill­billies of the roughest, most ignorant sort. They came from Ireland, Scotland, other parts of the UK. My grandmother on my mother’s side had been born in Wales to Welsh parents. The names of my parents, uncles, aunts, and grandparents came straight out of the Appalachians to the deserts of eastern Washington and every trailer park in between. Names like: Marshall and Floyd, my grandfathers; Ella and Emma, my grandmothers. Roy and Marvin and Virgil, my uncles. Margie, Donna, and Laverne, my aunts. Dale, my father. Floy, my mother. My older sister was given the name Trina. I was the only one who escaped with a non-­backwoods white-bread name, a name I hated but thanked God for when I found out my mother had intended to name me Lance. Lance Lanegan. I couldn’t think of anything more ridiculous or humiliating and I thanked my father for not allowing it. After that, I could live with Mark. But I always preferred to simply be called by my surname, Lanegan. If I were introducing myself to a stranger, I would always use my middle name, William. As if by telepathy, though, that was how most of my teachers, coaches, and acquaintances referred to me: Lanegan.

  Both of my parents came from backgrounds of extreme poverty and cruel deprivation. Both of their lives had been transformed by tragedy when they were young. Both of my parents were the first members of their large families to go to college. Both became schoolteachers. School was something I just could not do.

  Caged behind a desk, I never tried to pay attention to what was being taught. I was often lost in daydreams about my first love: baseball. After school, I’d spend hours playing game after game in a makeshift field on a neighbor’s property until it was too dark to see. Finally, I’d shuffle slowly home to endure the inevitable torrent of verbal abuse from my mother. The main focus of her rage (although there were many brutal angles to her attacks) was the fact that I was never home. She herself was the reason I stayed away. To avoid her corrosive mental beat-downs, both my older sister Trina and I looked for any excuse to be elsewhere. From my earliest memories, Trina and I were also at each other’s throats. Since my father was hardly ever home, it meant I was at both females’ mercies at all times. The only thing that ever seemed to give my mother pleasure was bullying and ridiculing me and anything I showed interest in. One of her favorite rote sayings as she slapped me in the face was “You’re not my son!” How I wished that were true. As a six-year-old child, she had witnessed her father being murdered on the front lawn of her family home, then had been raised in all-male logging camps where her mother worked as a cook, and had grown into a toxic adult. “A piece of work,” as my father would say.

  When my parents split, I gladly opted to remain with my father. Though he’d always projected a deep, quiet sadness around him, he was a good-hearted and caring man who meant well. But from the time I was very young, he could not control me.

  I shoplifted Snickers, Three Musketeers, Milky Way, and Almond Joy candy bars from the Vail’s grocery store across the street from my school and sold them to my classmates at a discount. I became obsessed with playing Quarters, a game where the participants tossed coins off a wall. Whoever landed closest to the wall won all the money. I spent every spare minute rounding up kids to play and would get pissed when the bell rang to return to class. A close friend’s father was a gambling-­device salesman who traveled to bars and taverns around the state, selling punchboards and other amusements for the drunks to waste their dollars on. One weekend, I stayed at my friend’s while his parents were gone.

  “Hey, Matt, let’s get in and check out your dad’s stuff.”

  That was all it took. We climbed through a window into the barn where his dad kept his merchandise. I grabbed a few punchboards from his stash and took them home. Even then, I was plagued with this devilish obsessive focus, and whenever I saw an opportunity to get over, it kicked in hard. With nothing but time on my hands, I went to work. Over the next few days, I painstakingly split the boards open with a flat-edge screwdriver, extremely careful to not leave any obvious marks of damage. I then spent hours carefully unrolling the tiny pieces of paper inside, removing the ones with $20, $50, and $100 winning numbers, replacing the $1, $2, and $5 winners and other nonwinners back into their slots. Then I carefully glued both halves of the board back together. My handiwork was so tidy that you couldn’t tell anything had been done. I carried the boards in my gym bag from class to class all day and sold punches to kids for a dollar a shot. No one ever won the big money, of course, since I had already removed all those slips, much to my friend Matt’s amusement.

  My obsessive hustling consumed my every day, every action, every thought. It was the first thing on my mind upon waking and the last before sleep. It made me an unpopular figure among some of the other students, who were overwhelmed by my aggressiveness, my willingness to take their money. It never mattered how much or how little money I had. I only came alive with the inventing of ways to get it, and the action of getting it. It would get worse.

  While in junior high, I began stealing a few cans of beer from my old man’s endless supply and started smuggling them to school in my gym bag. He was also a carpenter and had built a full-size bar and a room to play cards with his cronies in next to my bedroom in our basement. He’d built them out of old wood he’d gotten for free by doing demolition of barns in the area. I drank the purloined beers in an unused janitor’s closet between classes or behind some tall bushes on school grounds at recess. I began smoking weed, only one of three junior high kids in my small rural town who did. I became a petty thief. Each class period, I asked to use the restroom and then quickly made my way through our small school, down to the gym locker room. I would rifle through the pants pockets of those kids who didn’t lock up their stuff. Change, paper money, whatever was there, I took. The only period of the day I didn’t steal was during my own gym class. I was never caught.

  My father spent scant time trying to parent me. Due to his own prodigious drinking schedule and his lifelong interest in playing cards all night with his pals and chasing women, he quickly gave up trying to enforce any kind of control. That happily left me to run feral in the streets. After the unpleasant years under my mother’s thumb, I loved my father for this new freedom to explore my current compulsions, my wild fascinations, my burgeoning perverse fetishes. I felt like the luckiest kid I knew, no rules, no curfew, no nothing. By age twelve, I was a compulsive gambler, a fledgling alcoholic, a thief, a porno fiend. My porn magazine collection was massive. I’d found most of it by spending hours going through the dumpsters near student housing on the college campus. I had trouble finding a place to conceal it all in the large split-level house I shared with just my father and a couple of dogs.

  Hiding anything I wanted kept private had become a necessity when my folks were still together. When I was nine, my mother had discovered a box of unused condoms I’d fished out of a garbage can and she’d hit the roof. Shortly before my folks split up, she’d found a pot pipe in my room and insisted I see a psychologist. He told me, “I think it’s your mother that needs counseling, not you.” Still, the only thing my dad would not abide was his th
irteen-year-old son smoking marijuana. I sometimes hid my weed and smoking apparatus—bongs, papers, and whatnot—in the doghouse under our carport. Several times I discovered my shit not disappeared but destroyed, either stomped by boot or smashed by hammer. I wised up and got the message and found new hiding places.

  My dad believed actions spoke louder than words. I could probably count all the conversations of deep importance we ever had on one and a half hands. One evening, he called me upstairs.

  “Mark, c’mon up here. We need to talk.”

  I assumed the cops had come looking for me again, told him what they thought I’d done, and had given him a time frame in which to bring me into the station.

  “Sure, Dad. What’s up?”

  “Well,” he said, “I am a teacher and my classes are made of kids who don’t have half the opportunities or skills or drive that you have. Every year, one or two new students arrive and I get an overwhelming feeling that they will one day end up in county lockup, prison, or in an early grave. You’d be surprised at how often it comes true.

  “Son, I get this same feeling watching you make your way through life just … however you please. You think the rules that apply to the rest of us people don’t apply to you. I’m talking to you tonight because I have come to the conclusion that even though you’ve already learned a few tough lessons, you have many more coming. You are going to have to learn them a very hard and painful way. You are exactly like your uncle Virgil. He had nothing but pain, turmoil, and trouble from the day he was born until the day he died.”

  My uncle Virgil had died of terminal alcoholism in an old folks’ home at age forty-three. He had crisscrossed the country for years, hitching rides on hundreds of trains, an actual hobo. As a college student, my dad had been burdened with the task of traveling all around the Northwest to pay my uncle’s bail. He’d had to get Virgil out of jail so often that he’d obviously developed some resentments. Virgil rode the rails until one night he fell under a train, drunk, and it cut both his legs off. My father told me he had been in his brother’s hospital room when Virgil came to and realized his legs were gone. “What did he say?” I had asked him. With his typical spare language, my father had replied, “Well, he wasn’t too goddamn happy.” While cleaning out my grandmother’s house after she died so it could be demolished, my father and I had found a shoebox full of postcards Virgil had written from every part of the US. Each one started the same, telling where he was writing from, then what menial job he was working. Each one ended exactly the same. Every single one of them sent to his mother.