Sing Backwards and Weep Page 12

  Goldie leaned his head back and let out a loud, authentic laugh. He stuck out his hand to shake mine again and said, “I appreciate your honesty, man. If someone’s trying to keep you off of this, I promise to not let that happen. I can see this was hard for you but I thank you for bringing this to me. I hope we see each other again soon. Give my best to Pfeifer.”

  I walked away from our meeting feeling slightly better. Goldie had been a warm, welcoming guy with a sense of humor. Who knew if we’d ever see each other again, but I had genuinely liked Goldie.

  I had begun using heroin on a more regular basis, still carefully trying to not get too strung out, but I found its appeal overwhelming. It was everything that booze was not. I did not black out, get into fights, or come to with head pounding painfully in embarrassing, inexplicable situations. Heroin made me calm and relaxed and quieted my always screaming mind. I could write songs and carry on with a fairly quiet, normal life. Where my band, girlfriend, and almost everyone I encountered while drunk had loathed being in my company, everyone seemed to be happy with this new mellow version of me. But living with me day and night, my girlfriend began to get suspicious.

  “What’s up with you? You’re acting weird,” Anna would ask me in the beginning.

  I would attempt to deflect her magnifying-glass-eyed attention or guilt her into silence on the subject.

  “Nothing, I’m just tired,” I would say, or “I’m just happy. Is that a crime?”

  “What are you doing locked in the bathroom so long?”

  “I’m taking a fucking bath, trying to have some peace and quiet and a minute to myself to think!” Or when I’d wrung that line dry, “It’s the only room in the apartment where I can be alone and write.”

  My only way to deal with what I deemed an attack (and I might deem anything an attack in those days) was to attack more aggressively in return. The level of hostility in my offensive depended on my level of fear. Fear of being caught, fear of having to tell the truth, fear of being exposed as the lying, cheating fraud I was. But it was the fear of showing my true heart, at times either so full it might burst or so empty I could cry, that hounded me most viciously.

  There had been a perpetual war between myself and the costume of persona I’d donned as a youngster and then worn my entire life. Petrified that someone might discover who I really was: merely a child inside the body of an adult. A boy playacting as a man. My lifelong hard-ass exterior and, underneath that, ironclad interior were all an intricately constructed, carefully cultivated, and fiercely guarded sham. I was, in reality, driven by what I’d heard referred to in rehab all those years ago as “a thousand forms of fear.” Sadly, somewhere deep in my soul, I knew that was probably me.

  8

  NICE WARDROBE

  During the European festival season of 1992, Van Conner, Mike McCready from Pearl Jam, and I got wasted together, drinking all day long in the backstage at the Roskilde Festival in Denmark. Denmark’s football team was in the World Cup and the entire festival had been shut down halfway through the evening in order to show the game on a huge screen to the several thousand enthusiastic audience members. We were supposed to play earlier on the night but Kurt, who was fighting dopesickness, had insisted we play last, after Nirvana. I had tried to argue with him as he lay uncomfortably under a blanket on a couch, being administered to by a doctor, in his dressing room.

  “Please, brother, we can’t play after you. That will be a fucking nightmare—­nobody will stick around and everyone will be pissed off that you guys didn’t headline! Don’t do this to me, Kurt!”

  We’d had to play after Nirvana once before and were, of course, blown off the stage. In this huge setting, now that they sat atop the rock world, this was going to be much worse.

  “It will be great, Lanegan. I want everyone to see how fucking great you are. I’ve made up my mind, you’re playing last.”

  It was one of those rare situations when he stubbornly refused to listen to my wishes. Most days, he would patiently consider my viewpoint, even when it wasn’t something he wanted to hear or do. He almost always bent somewhat to my will or at least met me halfway, treating my advice like that of a respected mentor. Not this time. I knew it was because he disliked it when I was visibly drunk. He was sick and holding all the power; his word ruled the day.

  When we finally took the stage in front of the disappointed 50,000-plus concertgoers, I was beyond shitfaced. First song in, I had no monitors nor could I hear myself through the gigantic PA that blasted the music out into the audience, a singer’s nightmare scenario. I realized I was singing to nobody because my microphone wasn’t even on! I dropped it to the ground and sat down on the drum riser, pulling a huge drink off the bottle of booze I’d had our crew set there for me, as the band dutifully played on.

  I watched as our longtime tech Jim Vincent scrambled to set up another mic stand. He then came over and shouted in my ear, “It’s fixed! You can sing now!” Now in a nearly complete blackout after the ten or twelve hours of drinking leading up to this fiasco, I wobbled back up to the mic and began singing the second song of our set. Again, nothing. No voice in the monitors and if it was coming through the mains, I sure as fuck couldn’t hear it. Are you fucking kidding me? This was such large-scale embarrassment that I started to lose my shit.

  In a drunken fury, I tried to shove the heavy monitor in front of me off the stage. The stage crew tried to stop me but every time they came close, I lamely squared off as if to fight, looking like some phony boxer from an old silent movie. I finally succeeded in rolling one off the stage into the pit full of photographers, destroying thousands of dollars’ worth of television cameras in the process. While I tried to push another monitor off the stage, the rest of the band began to ritualistically lay waste to their equipment, as much in anger toward my drunken antics as to the futility of our attempt to just play our fucking set. Lee Conner smashed his guitar to pieces on the stage and Barrett Martin did the same to his drum kit. It was carnage. Only Van, who had joined in and encouraged my and McCready’s all-day drunk, stood holding his bass with eyes open wide. I recognized that he was on guard, looking to protect me should the burly stage crew actually get their hands on me.

  The whole scene onstage resembled an episode of Tom and Jerry, a total cartoon, but the damage I caused was real. Just as the crew was about to take me down en masse, out the corner of my eye I saw Krist Novoselic rush onto the stage to intervene. He and Van Conner kept me from getting crushed, Seattle watching out for its own.

  Kim White was our manager at the time, someone I’d hired on the advice of Bob Pfeifer. I trusted Bob implicitly by that point. He had taught me a shit-ton of valuable lessons about the music business, songwriting, and basically just living as an adult. Even though Kim had zero experience in management, she had been employed by major labels and had worked with some big-name “troublesome” bands in that capacity, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and others. I had parted company with Susan Silver, our first manager, at the insistence of the rest of the band who felt she didn’t “understand” us. Whenever it came time to bite the bullet and do what no one else wanted to, it fell to me. Now nobody was happy as Kim continuously dropped the ball, needlessly spending band money to follow us all over the world only to do … virtually nothing. Too emotionally caught up in our personal problems and running vainly around trying to clean up our trail of garbage to do any real managerial work, she was out of her depth. She had, however, managed to capture that whole Roskilde debacle on a video camera. Watching the footage later, I felt mounting shame. It was a pitiful comedy of errors, brought on by the hours of hard liquor Van, Mike, and I had indulged in, and it got us banned from the rest of the festivals that season.

  Nirvana was headlining the legendary Reading Festival in the UK later that summer. Kurt said they would not play unless Screaming Trees were allowed back on the bill, so we were grudgingly restored to the lineup. I made myself scarce around the stage crew, who were the same as in Denmark. All of
them would have loved to have beaten my head into the ground. I would certainly have deserved it.

  We went on early, one of the first acts on the main stage, right after our Washington state cohorts the Melvins. The wind was blowing crazily and my ridiculously long hair flew in a circle around my head, stinging like a whip whenever it hit me in the face. All the bands onstage early that day were pelted with shit thrown by the crowd. At one point during our show, Lee Conner stood alone at the edge of the stage, windmilling his guitar a la Pete Townshend, when a roll of toilet paper came flying toward him from the audience. As it descended, he kicked it perfectly out of the air mid-windmill without missing a beat, sending it far back into the crowd to where it had come from. The British, obsessed with football, let out the biggest cheer we ever received in appreciation of the athletic dexterity of our three-hundred-pound guitarist.

  The rain hit shortly after we finished. Now the bands had to dodge baseball-sized hunks of mud flung from the crowd. When LA band L7 were being hit with mud balls, I watched from sidestage as badass singer Donita Sparks pulled out her tampon onstage and threw it at the audience, one of the best responses to rowdy crowd behavior I’d ever seen.

  As the day went on, the rain poured down relentlessly. While heading to the beer tent that night with legendary Sub Pop in-house photographer Charles Peterson, I tripped on one of the heavy ropes holding down the tents in the artists’ area and went face first into the mud. I came up completely covered head to foot in the thick black shit, my face encased as if in a mask at a beauty spa. As I looked up from the ground, I saw Charles frantically clutching for the camera always worn on a strap around his neck. For some reason, he had left it inside the tent where Mudhoney had their backstage room.

  “Goddamnit!” he yelled. “Of all the times to not have my fucking camera!”

  “If you took a picture of me like this,” I said, “I’d kill you.”

  Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds and Nirvana played historic sets. After drinking all day, I wound up in a bar late that night with Mudhoney singer Mark Arm and some other Seattle guys. A girl walked into the bar wearing the most outlandishly garish, neon flower-covered jumpsuit and we all fell into hysterical laughter. When I walked past a table where sat former Vaselines singer Eugene Kelly, the band Teenage Fanclub, and several other Scottish musicians, I heard some guy make a wisecrack regarding my mud-covered clothes. Never one to take the high road, especially when drunk, I pulled up short.

  “You got something to say to me, fuckhead?”

  “Yeah, I do,” he replied, “nice wardrobe.”

  “Why don’t you come on outside with me so you can get a better look at it while I beat the fuck out of you, wise guy?” I said, that familiar angry fire igniting in my head.

  “Sure, hold on a second,” he said.

  I watched as, to my horror, he struggled to get to his feet from behind the table, crutches with handholds on his arms. He was obviously disabled—­not injured, but afflicted with something he’d been born with, like polio. I immediately felt the burn of humiliation on the back of my neck. I’d fallen into a trap and painted a picture of myself as an ugly thug for everyone there.

  “Hey, man, it’s cool. Please have a seat and accept my apology,” I said gently, trying to put a stop to this embarrassing scene.

  “Oh no, man, I’m coming outside so you can beat me up,” he replied, obviously hell-bent on shaming me. Now I started to get pissed off all over again at this shithead who was using his disability to full advantage in a confrontation that he’d actually begun by talking shit in the first place.

  “Okay, dude, everyone has seen that I’m the fucking bully, point made. Take a fucking seat, I’m going back to the bar.” With that, I turned and went back to my seat at the bar with the Mudhoney gang.

  After a couple more drinks, I saw Mark Arm reacting to something he saw over my shoulder. He burst into laughter, spitting out his beer and almost hitting me in the face with it. I turned to see what was so funny and nearly spit out my own drink. Mudhoney road manager and well-known ballbuster Bob Whittaker had come walking through the door dressed in the same crazy outfit the girl had been sporting earlier. He obviously had convinced the girl to give him her clothes and it was an outrageous and hilarious sight.

  Whittaker, long ensconced in the Seattle music community, was known as a local comedian. He was also a bit of a celebrity. Named after Robert Kennedy, a close friend of his dad Jim Whittaker, the first American to scale Mount Everest. He was also someone I always did my damnedest to avoid. Otherwise, I’d have to endure a meaningless conversation with someone whose entire purpose was seemingly to irritate me. Whenever I was trapped in his presence, he unfailingly gave me what appeared on the surface to be good-natured ribbing, but always with an underlying edge. He never gave me sufficient fire to justify a legitimate ass-­kicking, but he’d gone right up to the edge with backhanded compliments and sarcastic, smart-ass comments so often that violence had naturally crossed my mind several times over the years. Bob was a king of passive aggression; he had the comic insulter’s instinct and fearful intelligence as to where the line he dare not cross lay.

  After the laughter died down, we continued to drink until the place closed. I found myself outside with Mark Arm, the sun coming up, the last two men standing, the still-bitter wind blowing a mini-twister of garbage, paper tickets, and all other manner of shit around our heads. Since my band and crew had headed to our London hotel several miles away hours earlier, I had few options.

  “C’mon, man, we have a room nearby, you can crash there,” Mark offered. As the almost twenty-four hours of drinking had me exhausted, I took him up on it.

  At that point things became a blur. I remember entering an empty room, Mark falling onto one bed and me onto another.

  I came to I don’t know how many hours later to the uncomfortable sensation of someone rubbing something hard against my ass, through my mud-encrusted jeans. I groggily opened my eyes. As they began to focus, I discovered I was looking at Arm, facing me a few feet away on another bed, passed out. I then noticed I had someone’s arm around me. I was being spooned by some unknown person behind me. I threw the arm off me, wriggled out of this mystery person’s grasp, and sat up on the edge of the bed, my alcohol-tortured head splitting in agony as though I’d been axed in the face. I finally looked over my shoulder to see who my bed partner was.

  There lay Bob Whittaker, still dressed in the girl’s comically festooned jumpsuit. I couldn’t help but smile painfully at the sight of him in the outlandish costume, still dry humping the air in his sleep, my ass no longer within reach of his dick. As I silently sat there, wiped the fuck out and totally hungover to the verge of nearly puking, Arm opened his eyes. He looked at me and slightly shook his head with an expression that spoke of momentary horror and regret, as though he couldn’t believe how damaged he was and what we’d done to ourselves. He turned over and went back to sleep. I stumbled outside, found a shuttle going into London, got in, and passed out.

  I woke up at some fancy hotel in the city, got a cab, and rode over to the dump of a bed-and-breakfast in Shepherd’s Bush where we always stayed. I had arrived with just enough time to change my clothes before catching a ride to the airport with the rest of my bandmates, then onto a flight headed back to Seattle.

  9

  YEAH, THIS IS THE COPS!

  As I was leaving a well-known heroin dealer’s place late one rainy afternoon, I came face-to-face with one of Anna’s friends, a coworker at her Mexican restaurant job, on her way into the house. A friend who, although there to buy the drug herself, was predisposed to disliking me for my increasingly public indiscretions, my sleeping around, my staying out all night, my thoughtless and rude treatment of Anna. Now she had me cold. If she was willing to give herself up to my girl as a junkie, I knew I was going to feel some pain from this brief encounter. Sure enough, a couple days later I came home to find Anna sitting on the couch, arms crossed and as visibly upset as I’d ever seen
her. On the coffee table sat a couple of used rigs, a blackened-bottomed spoon, and a small amount of dope I’d stashed inside a small canvas sack under the insole of a shoe inside my closet. My feeble ruse was clearly done, dragged out into the sadistic light of day. I had been busted with fire-red hands, and I instinctively went straight to the front lines.

  “What the fuck are you doing searching through my shit? That’s totally fucked!”

  “Don’t put this back on me, you son of a bitch! You’ve been lying to me for months. You made me into somebody who has to search to get to the fucking truth, liar!”

  My praise for heroin’s calming effects on my mind and the positive role it was playing in quelling my urge to drink fell on entirely deaf ears.

  “If you can’t quit drinking, you go to AA, you don’t become a fucking junkie! What is wrong with you? Your thinking is so incredibly messed up.”

  “You’re right, baby. The last thing I need right now is to get strung out on dope,” I finally confessed.

  What I did not confess, however, was the fact that I was already strung out. Not with a huge habit yet, but if I ever attempted to take a day or two off from using, I definitely felt it in an unpleasant way. I could control it. I was sure I could control it. I told myself I could control it.

  Sweet Oblivion came out in the fall of ’92, two months after the Singles soundtrack that had been such a big deal to Pfeifer, and apparently to everyone else at Sony. Our first single, “Nearly Lost You,” became the only song of ours to ever make the charts, as well as the only video we ever had in MTV’s regular rotation. Not only had I grudgingly gotten it included on the hugely successful soundtrack, “Nearly Lost You” became one of the most popular singles from it. It was a double-­edged sword. Our song, in heavy rotation on MTV, spurred sales of the soundtrack, but by the time our record came out, it was already old news. I later learned that all the bands on it had also gotten hefty paydays for their tunes. Mudhoney received twenty grand for the use of their song but we had been forced to waive our sync fee for the fucking “privilege” of being included at all. In other words, we’d given them a hit single for absolutely nothing.