Sing Backwards and Weep Page 5

  “I wish I could tell you that was chew juice, Matty, but that’s piss,” I whispered back to him. It took all the strength of will I had not to erupt in uncontrollable, hysterical laughter.

  It turned out that our tour manager/soundman Rod Doak had sought in vain to find a place to relieve himself and right before the show filled an empty can to overflowing with his piss and put it back in the tray.

  A short time later we pulled over at a roadside Dunkin’ Donuts where I silently watched with delight as the acne-faced teenager behind the counter repeatedly stuck his fingers through the foam and down into the liquid of the cup of Diet Coke Lee Conner was buying, presumably to see if it was full yet. I roared with laughter at the sight of him drinking it, as I always did whenever he accidentally gave himself the shit end of the stick, and also marveled humorously at Matt Varnum’s deep, dark, glassy red eyes and completely stoned countenance, a natural by-­product of his weed-eating, piss-drinking episode an hour earlier. It was a comedic double feature, and moments like these were a welcome break from the mostly silent days and months of travel and put the rare smile on my face.

  SST sent us on a European tour, headlining small clubs. One of our first shows there ended almost immediately after it began when thirty seconds into the first tune, singing with my eyes closed, my microphone was smashed into my mouth, bloodying my lips. By then, I had been flattened so many times by Lee Conner rampaging across the stage, knocking anyone or anything out of his way with his three-hundred-plus-pound bulk, that we had a rule: if anyone so much as touched another band member onstage, it meant an immediate fistfight. We were playing on a floor the same level as the audience but with a barrier between us so I knew it hadn’t been a fan who’d knocked the mic into my mouth. A minute later, metal again smashed into my teeth and I opened my eyes in time to see Lee prancing away with his back to me, obviously having knocked my microphone stand with his guitar and punched the mic into my face. Infuriated, I picked up the old-school stand with its heavy, round, ten-pound base and swung it like a baseball bat with every ounce of power I had. It connected directly with the middle of his back and he crashed face first into his stack of amplifiers, taking them all to the floor along with him as he went down. A home run.

  I walked off the stage, show over as far as I was concerned, less than two songs in. A few moments later, Lee came limping into the dressing room, having badly fucked up his knee from his much-deserved tumble. Van and Pickerel stayed onstage and the German singer from the opening band joined them for an hour of German drinking songs and Ramones covers, much to the crowd’s delight. Lee and I sat silently backstage. I was still enraged and he didn’t say a word about what had taken place because he knew it was his own doing.

  Crossing the Alps headed to Zurich, someone pulled out a pipe full of weed and started passing it around. Though I hadn’t smoked for years, my running joke at the time was to snatch the pipe and pretend I was about to take a hit. The worried looks on everyone’s faces at the prospect of my addiction being unleashed always made me laugh. This time, out of sheer boredom, I lit the pipe and filled my lungs with smoke. It went straight to my head and I thought, Welcome back, old friend. God, how I’ve missed you. By the time we got to the club, I was good and stoned for the first time in three years, laughing and carrying on like a kid experiencing his first high.

  As we left the dressing room to take the stage, I accidentally broke one of the lightbulbs that framed the Hollywood mirror, leaving it still screwed in but with the filament freed from its glass case and sticking out into the air. I thought nothing of it and we proceeded to play what for me was a fun show, high as hell and Lee only able to play seated in a chair since I’d fucked up his knee. It was the rare occasion where I enjoyed myself. After a couple of wild encores, I left the stage and quickly made my way to the dressing room where I took a seat and put an ice-cold towel across the back of my neck in an attempt to cool down. Minutes later, Lee came slowly limping in and threw his huge body into a chair.

  I could not believe my incredible luck as I watched him heave his bulk backwards in his seat and lean his giant, soaking-wet, bare upper arm directly against the bulb I’d broken earlier. He flopped like a fish on a line and I saw blue light coming out of the wall as he electrocuted himself on the open filament. That it was happening because of my actions made it so much more unbearably hysterical.

  As he tried to break free of his electrocution, I howled with maniacal glee. The marijuana, his pain as result of my doing, and the sight of it was all too much to take. He finally managed after several seconds to break free of the unexpected shock and screamed in anger.

  “You think that’s funny, Lanegan? I’ll fucking kill you!”

  It was a threat I’d heard him make a million times to his own dad, his go-to line. I stood up and backed out of the door, yelling, tears of joy in my eyes.

  “Oh yeah? C’mon, shithead! I’ll fucking annihilate you, you fucking prick!”

  Watching him struggle to get up and chase me with his fucked-up leg just made me laugh harder and double down on my taunts. Like a wounded rhino, he burst through the door, out into the narrow hallway lined with some radio-contest winners who had secured the dubious honor of meeting the band personally post-show. He knocked out of his way several kids, their parents, and the always-present weird older men with their stacks of records and photos to sign as he determinedly raged down the hall while I continued to ridicule and threaten him. Needless to say, the meet-and-greet was a disaster, but for me it was one of the funniest chain of events I could have ever been witness to. And again, knowing it was me, myself, who’d set it in motion made it so much sweeter.

  Van’s jovial, good-natured, yet huge and rebellious personality, and especially crazed sense of humor, was my saving grace throughout my time in the group. In backstage dressing rooms all around the world, with every wall commonly covered with the ugly graffiti and band names of the hundreds of groups who had been there before, the Trees never wrote a thing. Except for the one drawing that Van put on a wall everywhere we played. It was an uncannily accurate picture of his brother, pants down and fucking some kind of unknown animal, maybe a dog? A goat? Was it a llama? I would never be able to discern what group of species the beast was of, but the drawing of Lee was unmistakable, and him fucking it from behind was the only calling card we ever left anywhere. Anyone who ever knew him, or had seen him, could instantly tell it was Lee pictured doing the deed. I loved Van for that.

  Van quit the band. After marrying his pregnant sixteen-year-old girlfriend, he took exception to the new band rule that no girls were allowed to ride in our van to gigs. He took it personally, of course, because it was personal: no one else in the band even had a girlfriend. But his wife was unbearable. At every show, she would stand directly in front of Van and scream at the top of her lungs throughout and in between every song as though we were the Beatles at Yankee Stadium. Van made no attempt to control her behavior, so we instituted the new rule. And with that, my lone ally in the band was gone.

  I got a phone call from a friend, a guitar player I knew, Dylan Carlson. I’d met him a couple years earlier at an outdoor show near a lake in Olympia. The heat was unbearable that day and not knowing his band at all, I had asked them if I could get in their air-conditioned car to escape the oven-hot sun. I quickly became enamored with his mellow, offbeat, contrary slant on life and his sharp, dry sense of humor. The singer in his band was an over-the-top motormouth named Slim Moon. He was dressed like Olivia Newton-John in her “Physical” video: pink sweat suit, pink headband, the whole nine. I remember being impressed that Slim rhymed stupider with Jupiter in one of their songs. But what struck me most was Dylan’s guitar playing. He was on another plane.

  Dylan’s best friend was in a band that was booked to play a show in the Ellensburg Public Library with some local bands opening and he asked if I would go down to meet the singer as he was a fan of my band Screaming Trees. Knowing the very small scene of bands playing ori
ginal music in my town and the very likely miniscule turnout for such a show, combined with my current state of deep, clinical unhappiness, it didn’t sound like much fun but I agreed, thinking I was doing a friend a favor.

  At the time I was living in a seventy-five-dollar-a-week, one-room studio pad with no kitchen, one bare lightbulb that came straight out of the wall, and a terrible ’70s-style shag carpet permeated with the stench of the previous tenant’s pet ferrets. A grim, mold-covered shared bathroom down the hall had the only sink in the place. In other words, a complete fucking outhouse toilet hole. My only piece of furniture was a couch that was also my bed. The only door to the outside from my room led into an alley at the end of which was the elaborate two-story house where my most recent ex-girlfriend stayed with her new man. Half the time I left my place, the first thing I’d see was the two of them making out on the swinging chair on his decorative, pillared front porch. My only respite from my pseudo-suicidal/homicidal preoccupations came from near-constant masturbation and my used Radio Shack cassette player and the lone tape I owned: Neil Young’s After the Gold Rush. I played it around the clock, morning till night.

  The evening of the band’s show, I skipped the openers and instead spent a few minutes guiltily jacking off while watching my ex through an uncurtained window of their house fucking her boyfriend in a brightly lit room. I might have missed the last band, too, if I hadn’t seen a cop car crawl around the corner a couple blocks away. I hid in the bushes for an agonizing moment, then furtively screwed off to the library and showed up just as the band were going on.

  As they took the stage, I was immediately struck by the bass player, a six-foot-seven-inches-tall giant with a fierce intensity obvious before even playing a note. He looked pissed off and I was instantly drawn to him. I admired his openly angry countenance since that was how I felt every time I was onstage, like I was going into battle.

  Upon seeing this enormous guy tuning up, my first thought was here’s my bass player. Because of the unique physicality of the Trees, it would take a supersized person with a special charisma to retain the visual balance and fill Van’s shoes. This guy had all that in spades. I began to formulate a plan to steal him away from this band I’d not even heard yet.

  Once the three-piece group began playing, however, the wall of noise, the raw catchiness of the songs, and the voice of the left-handed guitar-­playing singer made me realize I was witnessing something special. Perhaps one of the best bands I’d ever seen, in the fucking Ellensburg Public Library no less. The show was shut down after only three or four tunes due to a typical small-town curfew and timing fuck-up and the giant bass player stood there throwing his bass all the way up to the high ceiling, catching it with one hand and angrily tossing it back up, over and over again until the lights in the room were finally turned off.

  Leaving the library, I was approached by the singer.

  “Hey, man, thanks so much for coming out to the show.”

  “Dude, you guys are great! What a fucking drag that these idiots shut you down. But that’s Ellensburg for you.”

  “I want to tell you, I’m a huge fan of yours. If you ever need an opener or want to do something musical together, please give me a call.”

  We exchanged phone numbers, ballpoint pen on the back of a flyer for the show.

  “Definitely,” I said, “I’ll take you up on that. Seriously, I was completely blown away in there.”

  “Thank you so much. And please, give me a call whenever you want.”

  “I’ll do that,” I said. For once, I meant it. I looked down at the scrap of paper for his name: Kurt.

  I walked back to my depressing hovel with an electricity in my step and a newfound buoyancy of spirit. I couldn’t shake the notion that I had just experienced something touched by greatness.

  A couple weeks later I picked up the phone to a voice I didn’t recognize, a somewhat nervous, anxious-sounding voice.

  “Mark Lanegan?”

  “Yes … ?”

  “Krist Novoselic here, I play bass in Nirvana. Are you still looking for a bass player? I can’t stand playing with Kurt anymore. I’m sick of everything always having to be his way.”

  I was silent for a moment, thinking it over.

  “Yeah, man, we’re still looking. I love your style and it would be great to have you in my band. But if I were you, I’d get past your problems with Kurt and make it work. You guys got something special there.”

  I never mentioned the call to Kurt. It had been easy for us to become friends, just a couple of long phone calls talking about girls, music, life. I loved Kurt, and I envied him because Nirvana were fully developed from the first moment I heard them. The difference between Nirvana and the Trees was so clear to me. Nirvana were who they were from the first time I saw them: great songs, great singer, great look, everything.

  The Trees, on the other hand, were always fighting: fighting each other, fighting fans and promoters and bouncers, fighting to find a direction. Three records in, we still didn’t know what the fuck we were. We had no identity beyond our notoriety for our unhinged live show. Lee Conner would go insane and tear up the stage with a ferocity never before seen in a guy that size. People would gawk and stare and then go back to their beers and go on with their lives. Lee’s nightly grand mal–esque fits made us a curiosity, a freak show to be experienced only in that setting, nowhere else. Our records were a shitty mishmash of half-baked ideas and catchy tunes derailed by the stupidest of lyrics. I fucking ached when I thought of all the opportunities we missed as we churned out shit record after shit record. I longed to make music that could be taken seriously, music that I could take seriously, instead of just the tall dumbass singing on the same stage as the lunatic, Falstaffian guitar player. Our mess of a “career” had become only a source of embarrassment, frustration, and turmoil. Worse yet, I myself had set the wheels of this machine in motion. I had idiotically insisted that Lee remain in the band and that we play his songs, a move I cursed myself for almost daily. But beyond all belief, we were still upwardly mobile, and I’d be damned if I was going to quit before the ride was through.

  We found Van’s replacement in a woman from a band we had previously done shows with. Her name was Donna Dresch. She had the most compelling stage presence of anyone I had ever seen, like a more energetic, female Keith Richards, lit smoke hanging out of her mouth, swinging her bass from side to side and banging her blond-haired head from start to finish of every show. When she was onstage, it was hard to take your eyes off her. I came to love playing live just because she kicked so much ass. Somehow, the symmetry was perfect and the combination of Lee’s three-hundred-pound Angus Young impersonation and Donna’s total rock-and-roll charisma on either side of me and Pix’s eye-­catching stick-tossing and -twirling routine behind me made it an outrageous spectacle. Night after night, I watched from the stage as people thrilled to our new lineup. Donna had that rare quality of true magic rock appeal. I liked Van a lot and had enjoyed having him in the band, but Donna lifted our live performances to heights we had never reached with him.

  Like me, Donna preferred the companionship of women, so the minute we came offstage, the two of us were on the prowl for girls to if not sleep with, then at least talk to, look at, and lust after. She was as cool off the stage as she was on it, and before long we were tight pals. Meanwhile Pix and Lee suffered through the long days silently, not part of Donna’s and my gang and Pix never leaving the shelf in the back of the van, unhappy because he couldn’t stand Lee either.

  Lee had been solely responsible for generating our music and always acted as though he were the focal point, the center of the universe. With his huge superiority complex and kindergarten-esque demands and behavior, it had always taken a huge amount of restraint on my part to not kick his ass. When Van had been in the band, he had functioned as a natural border between Lee and me. With Van gone, I often found myself counting the seconds before I strangled Lee to death in a rage. The young, heavily Christian Picke
rel had made silently obvious his distaste in my extracurricular pursuits. He also took quiet exception to the way I ran the show like a self-appointed dictator, so Donna became my only compadre in the band, taking Van’s place in more ways than one. That was fine by me; she was by far the coolest member of the band. I didn’t consider how our connection and Donna’s natural magnetism marked her as a threat to Lee’s fragile kingdom.

  One night, I’d gone to Seattle to hang out with Kurt and catch a Nirvana show at the Vogue, a popular small, dark, and dingy rock dive. They were first on a bill of three Sub Pop Records bands but I was really only interested in them, with just a slight curiosity to see the second act, Tad. Sub Pop owners Bruce Pavitt and Jonathan Poneman sidled up to me together pre-show.

  “When are the Trees gonna quit SST and start making records for us?” Bruce said with a smile.

  “So you came over to check out Blood Circus, huh?” Jon said.

  Blood Circus were the headliner.

  “No.” I’d heard their music and found it not to my liking.

  “Tad?” Pavitt asked.

  “Tad’s cool but I’m here to see Nirvana. They are the best band you have. By far. They’re one of the best bands I’ve ever seen.”

  I’ll never forget the puzzled look they gave me and then the way they looked at each other. It was as if they found it unfathomable that someone would love Nirvana. I found it unfathomable that they were unaware of what greatness they had in their hands, that they had Nirvana opening for such obviously inferior music. They weren’t the only ones who didn’t get it.

  Kurt asked me to try and get Greg Ginn to sign Nirvana to SST because they were a cool label with lots of bands he liked, but mainly because of the freedom; they allowed their artists to do whatever they wanted. SST had never asked to hear anything or see any artwork until we gave it to them and Kurt’s experience with Sub Pop had been the polar opposite. They told him what songs to record, what the album cover would be, and even the title of his record. To my utter disbelief, Greg Ginn was not interested at all in having Nirvana make records for SST. I sent him a cassette of their music twice and had three difficult conversations with him on the phone trying to convince him of their brilliance. Conversations difficult not only because of his aversion to Nirvana, but because any conversation was difficult with the notoriously nonverbal Ginn. His sentences were broken up by lengthy, uncomfortable silences as he made normal communication all but impossible. Yet the worst part of these interactions was that he simply and stubbornly just didn’t get it, period.