Sing Backwards and Weep Page 10

And with that, he pulled me up off the ground and walked me into the tiny airport. He had to do some negotiating with the ticket clerk, but eventually smooth-talking and hyperintelligent people-person Gus convinced them to let this obviously shitfaced, soaking-wet drunk on the plane. After enduring a long, drunken embrace from me, he turned to go, and I was left alone.

  I began to dangerously weave out onto the runway carrying a ridiculously large umbrella they’d given me at the gate. The gale-force wind instantly, savagely, tore it from my hand. I stood for a second and watched it fly a mile away in the blink of an eye. Pushing against the blasting wind, I traced a wandering, serpentine path toward the waiting plane. I climbed unsteadily up the stairs, fell into the first open seat I came to, and passed out. I was awakened by the pilot shaking me by the shoulders at some other airport where I was to catch my connecting flight, the last person left on the plane.

  6

  TINY DAGGERS

  In the ’90s, major labels spent sick amounts of money making videos that might never be seen by anyone, putting their bands on the road, and especially recording albums. Almost all of it was paid from recoupable advances that bands would ultimately be on the hook for, so unless you were lucky enough to have a hit and sell a shitload of records, you were simply racking up a huge debt with the company, money that would eventually come out of any royalties you might make but also money that was in most cases never recouped. Record companies spent vast amounts of dough signing a bunch of bands, only to throw them like wet dog shit against a wall and wait to see which ones stuck and which would slide to the ground, out of sight, into oblivion.

  Despite the disaster that was our first tour on Epic, we were shortly thereafter booked on another tour of the US. After six years as a band, we would have our own tour bus for the first time, an expense paid for by the record company as “tour support.” We were to meet the bus early one morning in the same Green Lake, Seattle, neighborhood where I still lived with Dylan and where, by now, nearly the entire band lived within a few blocks of each other.

  The night before leaving, I started searching through my stuff to find my sleeping bag, one thing I always took with me on the road. After scanning the place, I could find no trace of the brand-new one I’d recently bought and planned to take with me the next day. I had slept in a bag on the road for years: on the couch in our van, while forced to share a motel-room bed with a bandmate, even if I got my own room. I disliked sleeping on the suspect sheets of the shitty subpar motels we frequented, and there was no way I was sleeping on a tour bus in some cum-stained bunk where hundreds of scumbag rockers had jacked off into their socks without a sleeping bag now. When evening rolled around and I’d still not located it, I asked my roommates if anyone had seen it.

  “Oh fuck, man, I forgot to tell you. Your sister came by and grabbed some of your stuff a while ago. She said it was okay with you.”

  I straightaway hit the roof. For years, my older sister Trina had been coming by my place and simply taking whatever she pleased from my room for herself. I’d once stopped by the place where she lived with her darkly deranged husband and had been pissed off to find a lamp, an antique standing ashtray, and some of my other belongings in their front room. We’d had a violently tempestuous relationship as children, as teenagers, and into our young adulthood but had slowly become friends. By this time, I considered our relationship to be a close one. This just made me that much angrier when I found out she’d taken an item essential to my touring comfort. I called her on the phone and demanded she return it at once. To my acute vexation, she told me she didn’t have it but had taken it out to her husband’s sailboat, currently moored in the middle of a bay on Bainbridge Island, a ferry ride from Seattle. Determined to have it back, I demanded she go get it.

  “No can do, bro, I’m all tied up. Just go buy a new one.”

  I had just bought this bag and would be damned if I was gonna turn around and spend money on another one. Plus there was nowhere open that time of night to get one.

  “How do I find the boat?” I asked impatiently.

  “It’s not really easy but here’s what you do. Take the ferry to Bainbridge, drive around the island to Eagle Harbor Drive Northeast. There you take a left and will eventually come to a dirt road. Follow that to the end and you’ll come to a chain-link fence with a shed on the other side. There’s a small hole in the fence but if you can’t fit through it, just climb over. Then, next to the shed there’s an old rowboat that belongs to whoever owns the property. Take the boat, get in the water, and row out to the middle of the bay. You’re gonna need a flashlight to find our boat because it’s just one of many that are moored out there in the water. It’s white with a green roof.”

  I was so pissed off that I hung up the phone before she was even done talking, but I had scribbled down her vague directions. If I wanted to get over there and back before the last ferry of the night, I had to leave now. My girlfriend Anna had planned on spending a final romantic evening with her touring, ne’er-do-well boyfriend. She grumbled but eventually agreed to join me in my quest to retrieve the sleeping bag.

  After exiting the ferry, we followed my sister’s directions all the way to the fence. The hole was so small neither one of us could fit through, so I hoisted Anna to the top of the fence and then followed her up and over. Not knowing who or what we might encounter, I quietly searched for the rowboat we had been instructed to “borrow.” We slipped it into the water and began rowing for what seemed like forever out toward the shadowy figures of these hulking vessels in the middle of the bay. With only the wholly insufficient illumination from the tiny flashlight we’d found in the glove compartment of Anna’s car, we finally came upon a large, decrepit sailboat that, judging from the peeling white-and-green paint job, I figured must be my sister’s boat. After rowing completely around the outside of it, we finally found a way up to the deck and after tying the rowboat to the ladder, climbed aboard.

  I brought the flashlight down into the dank, terrible-smelling cabin and there on the floor, covered in the hair of my sister’s Great Dane and soaked in some kind of foul-smelling boat motor oil, was my previously pristine sleeping bag. Had they been there, I would have murdered my sister and her creepy husband both and hoped for a manslaughter charge.

  Back on deck, as I ranted in psychotic detail about the revenge I planned for my sister, Anna tried to calm me down.

  “Hey, baby, sit down for a minute and check out the lights. It’s a beautiful view.”

  I sat beside her on the roof of the sailboat’s cabin. Determined as I was to not allow anything to puncture my murderous anger, I had to admit that the view was nice. Across the water, the lights of downtown Seattle glimmered and pulsed. We sat quietly for a few minutes before I took a pipe out of my pocket and filled it with weed. We shared it, silently enjoying the still beauty of the water, the lights, and the night. At some point, we began to make out. My pants came down, she got on top of me, and we began to have sex. She knew from much experience that that was the quickest, easiest way to divert my attention from anything that irritated me. I loved being with her as I was so completely hooked on her body and her ability to quickly reason through things that sent me off on an angry tangent. I loved her talent to quiet my mind.

  After fucking, we realized it had gotten late. We got back in the rowboat and I began to work with some power to get us back to the car and then to the ferry before it quit running for the night. I noticed some heat and slight discomfort in my ass cheeks and thighs—maybe just the action of my ass against the seat on the rowboat? By the time we reached shore, it had become acute irritation. Halfway to the ferry, my ass and legs were burning. By the time we got off the boat in Seattle, I was in screaming agony, my ass totally in flames, itching and burning intensely, just the weight of my jeans bringing extreme pain.

  I called Poison Control as soon as I got home, sure I’d sat in industrial solvent or some such irritant. I explained in detail to the woman on the phone exactly what had
taken place directly preceding this excruciating episode.

  “Well, I don’t know how else to say this,” she said, “so here goes. What I’m understanding is that you rubbed your bare butt fairly hard back and forth on an unfinished fiberglass surface for twenty minutes. You’re going to have to go to the emergency room where they will remove as many of the microscopic slivers as they can. But it’s likely you’re going to be in some pretty major discomfort for at least a week or more.”

  It was two a.m. and we were meeting the bus at six thirty. There was no possible way I was going to the emergency room for several hours of fiberglass removal. I threw away the jeans I’d been wearing, then soaked in the bathtub until six a.m. Then I grabbed my suitcase and walked gingerly the two blocks up the street to the waiting bus.

  By the end of that first week, my entire ass was covered in a huge painful scab. I felt it every step, every minute of every hour of every day of that uncomfortable tour as the tiny slivers of fiberglass worked their way to the apex and out of my skin. I was able to get a script for some Percocet 10s at a clinic somewhere along the way, but the bottle of ninety was gone in a couple days. They didn’t do much for the pain in my ass, but I did enjoy the way a handful made my head feel.

  That was my life in a nutshell: a stolen moment of desperate pleasure, an assful of tiny daggers, then an eternity of agony. That theme had repeated itself over and over again, a constant throughout my entire time on earth. As quickly as my mind jumped from one scheme to another, I was, at the end of the day, a slow learner, an extremely slow learner afflicted with the lack of self-awareness to even realize it. I always thought I knew it all, but I was only ever motivated into action by one of two things: pleasure or pain.

  7

  FIRED, REHIRED, AND A THOUSAND FORMS OF FEAR

  When I returned from tour, Anna and I moved into our own place, an apartment one block from Harborview Medical Center, a major emergency trauma hospital on Seattle’s First Hill (or Pill Hill as it was commonly known due to the multitude of hospitals in a relatively small area). With Harborview one block to the west, Swedish Hospital three blocks to the east, and Virginia Mason about five blocks to the north, we were surrounded by the sounds of ambulance sirens and all manner of other activity on all sides. Desperate to mitigate the damage from my uncontrollable drinking, I had begun secretly dabbling in heroin. My alcoholism had become so raw that I would have tried anything to save me from its expanding horrors. Heroin neatly disappeared my need to drink while I was using it, and I picked up a small habit pretty quickly.

  While I was walking through the shadowy yard of a Capitol Hill dope house one night intending to score some heroin, I chanced upon Layne Staley, the charismatic and switchblade-quick singer of Alice in Chains, the first Seattle band to hit it big. Though we’d never formally met, we knew each other by sight so we quietly shook hands. Layne shot me a sly smile.

  “Are you here for what I’m here for?”

  “Yeah, I am, but my girl can’t know about it,” I said because Layne’s girlfriend, Demri, was an acquaintance of Anna’s. We entered the stairwell together but when I headed up, Layne turned to head down.

  “There’s better shit down here. And cheaper,” he said over his shoulder.

  So Layne hooked me up with a new, better connection in the same building where I’d already been scoring. It was, as they say, the beginning of a beautiful friendship. He was one of the most naturally hilarious, magical, mischievous, and intelligent people I’d ever met. At times, he had a mystical, otherworldly aura. We spent days and nights on end together, making each other laugh until we lost our voices. Then he would fall into elaborate comedic pantomimes, eliciting more painful laughter. Once, while we mindlessly watched a late-night rerun of Jerry Springer, I began to howl at the fucked-up, totally bizarre expression on the face of one of the guests. Layne, who had been sitting on the floor in front of me, suddenly turned around. He had the exact same seemingly impossible-to-imitate expression himself. I lost my mind in hysterics. His perspective on life, love, and everything else had a profound influence on me. He was the first friend I’d ever had with the ability to calmly change my mind and patiently show me there was more than one way to view every situation. Before Layne, I saw everything in strict black and white. He was every beautiful shade of color on the wheel, as well as many that had never been seen before. It often felt that he was not of this earth but instead some spiritual being from elsewhere. After a while, Layne felt like the brother I’d never had.

  I no longer needed Screaming Trees. As things had worked out, shortly after returning from our last tour on our first disc for Epic, Sub Pop had reached out to me and we had repaired our fractured partnership. I’d begun making another record for them with a substantially bigger advance than what I’d received for the first. Not having to split it with three other guys nor being forced to spend it all on an expensive producer and studio, I knew I was gonna be fine.

  But halfway through making my second album for Sub Pop, Bruce and Jon invited me for lunch and, curiously, arrived carrying the canned spools of analog tape from the recording sessions I’d been working on, not a great sign. Without ordering any food or even being seated, they dropped the tapes on the table.

  “Mark, we don’t want you on the label any longer. You can have your tapes and do whatever you want with them, but we’re finished and we’re not paying you the rest of the advance.”

  “May I ask why?” I inquired, but I knew I had given them a million reasons. I was a pain in their ass, I was never willing to toe the company line, I had never toured to support my first album, and I’d become accustomed to raiding the Sub Pop warehouse on a regular basis and then taking the records I’d snagged to local used record stores and selling them for drug money. Most glaringly, I’d never mended the fence from when I’d threatened and humiliated Bruce in his office. (He had told Dylan Carlson that he was sure there were bodies buried under my house, to which Dylan had replied, “Well, that would be my house, too, so . . .”) I came to find out that the real reason was that the company was broke: I was just the first deadweight to be jettisoned.

  “Your records don’t sell and, frankly, we can’t pour any more money into your projects,” Jon replied.

  I noticed a slight smirk from Bruce, as he was obviously enjoying springing this unwelcome surprise on me. They turned and exited the place and left me sitting there with a pile of tapes in metal canisters, slightly confused, slightly bummed, but immediately formulating my next move. I estimated it would take $2,000 to complete the nearly finished record, so I began to search for an independent label willing to give me that small pittance. It was fruitless. None of the connections I’d cultivated through the years were willing to sign me, to license my record, nothing. My prospects were dim enough that I began to hope that Epic would pick up the option for another Trees record, something I’d previously dreaded.

  Early one morning around six a.m., my phone woke me up and I groggily answered it. It was a poor connection and I nearly hung up before I heard a faint, unfamiliar, and obviously English voice on the other end of the line.

  “Hello, is this Mark Lanegan?”

  “Who’s calling?” I asked gruffly, irritated at being awakened in this way.

  “Hi, Mark, it’s Ivo Watts-Russell here from 4AD Records. I was wondering if you’d be willing to have a conversation with me. I’ve not called too early, I hope?”

  I was instantaneously wide-ass awake. 4AD was a highly respected UK label, a much cooler British version of what Sub Pop was in the States. All of their bands had a dark, moody beauty, and each of their records had unique packaging that somehow adhered to a singular aesthetic. To me, 4AD was the gold standard of indie record companies. I also felt like the quiet music I’d been working on had more in common with 4AD’s roster than it did with anyone on Sub Pop. My mind raced. What was the genius owner and architect of this label doing calling me at six in the morning? Could it be possible he was interested in signi
ng me?

  “Hey! Of course not! What can I do for you, sir?” I asked in my most sincere ass-kissing voice.

  “Well, Mark, first off I’ve called to tell you that I and everyone here at 4AD are huge fans of The Winding Sheet. It’s the most beautiful, real recording. I simply adore it.”

  “Oh, thank you, man, that means so much to me. I’m a huge fan of your label, your bands, and all your records,” I gushed. Could my luck really be this good? Was this guy going to actually step in and offer me a deal right at the moment I had exhausted every angle to put together a lousy two grand and find someone to release my album? No way! It couldn’t be possible … but it happened before …

  “Now, the reason I’ve called is I wondered if you’d mind talking to me a bit about how you achieved this beautiful record? How was it recorded? How did you get the wonderful space and wonderful sounds?”

  If he wanted to know how the sound was achieved, he was talking to the wrong guy. Only Mike Johnson and Jack Endino could tell him the specifics; I had just been along for the ride. But I nonetheless imparted what I could about the instrumentation, recording process, and analog equipment we used.

  “If you don’t mind, why are you so curious about this stuff?”

  “Well, Mark, we have an artist on 4AD named Brendan Perry—you might know him as one of the singers from Dead Can Dance. We’re preparing to record his first solo record and I’d very much like to use The Winding Sheet as a sort of blueprint for how I’d like it to sound.”

  Motherfucker wakes me up at six in the morning to grill me about how to rip me off? I was bummed yet undeterred. I had to pitch him my current record, only because I was out of options at that point.

  “That’s very flattering. I love Dead Can Dance and Brendan’s voice. What an incredible singer; I can’t wait to hear it when it’s finished. By the way, since I’ve got you on the line, I wonder if I could send you a cassette of what I’ve been working on for a second record. It’s nearly finished, I’m just trying to scrape together a couple thousand dollars and find someone to release it. If you like The Winding Sheet, then I’m pretty sure you’ll enjoy this one. I think it’s so much better.”