Sing Backwards and Weep Read online

  As we started making plans to record what would be our final record for SST, Lee and Pickerel blindsided me. Van had not found married life to his liking. Lee and Pix had easily lured him back in behind my back. One day, they bluntly informed me that Donna was out. Van would be making the record with us, not her. It was three against one, they said, so I lost the vote.

  “Three? How the fuck did Van get to vote himself in? You fuckheads never gave me or Donna a chance to vote! Fuck all of you! Don’t you guys know how great we are with her?”

  “I don’t like her and I’m not playing with her again” was Lee’s sullen, slow-witted response.

  People were magnetically drawn to Donna. At best, people were morbidly curious of Lee, but more often simply repulsed. I knew full well his true feeling was one of jealousy. It was that simple and that stupid.

  I had begun to rely on the band more and more as my stepladder to a different future. Even though I was in hell, it was a hell that might lead to a less intensely heated one, and I didn’t want to quit before it got me there. It came down to me to give Donna the call to tell her she was out. I was disgusted with my bandmates for betraying me and disgusted with myself for caving in to these imbeciles’ demands so that I had to betray my friend, a talent like no other. In my heart, I knew beyond all doubt that the band was losing the only natural true star it would ever have. It was a move that undermined not only me, but the Trees’ own success, as we were never as great as what we’d become with Donna.

  I was furious and sad. Fuck this dead-end town and the doomed, self-sabotaging weakness it had instilled in us all. I was done. I stashed my meager belongings in a storage unit my dad still kept in town, one I’d actually lived in one winter with only a couch, sleeping bag, and space heater for comfort. I told the band if they wanted to continue with me as their singer they could find me one hundred miles to the west. I climbed on the back of a friend’s motorcycle and fled the boring, brown-dirt, shit-hilled wastelands of eastern Washington state for Seattle—­ a dope fiend in the waiting, a hillbilly, an idiot know-nothing sex freak, game for the city and every dark thing it had to offer.

  3

  SEDUCED, FUCKED

  “Baby, can you please lend me a buck fifty?”

  “When are you ever going to have your own money?” she screeched. “Here, take it, you scumbag! You’ll just steal it from me anyway!”

  She winged the handful of change at my head with the awkward motion of someone who’d never thrown anything other than insults, missing me completely despite the close quarters. I scooped the coins off the ground and walked quickly out the door, slamming it behind me.

  “Go fuck yourself,” I muttered.

  I stepped outside into the rain and walked to the bus stop to wait for the 26 bus to carry me to my low-wage job in the University District. I fondled the dollar-fifty’s-worth of change in my pocket, enough for two hard-boiled eggs off the food truck at morning break, an acute reminder of my need to alter my intolerable living situation. I couldn’t wait to be free of this woman and her weird-smelling apartment in a building that was 90 percent geriatrics.

  When I had first met my girlfriend, she told me she could read people’s minds. Thinking Sure you can, honey, I had asked her to read mine. She said she never did it anymore because it disturbed her to know people’s thoughts. Several months later, I was tossing around in bed with evil, debilitating insomnia, wet with sweat, thinking about a pretty dark-skinned girl I had slept with in Texas who had given me a lift in her car between Austin and San Antonio while on tour with Screaming Trees. Suddenly my girlfriend rolled over, grabbed my arm, and said, “I just had the worst dream, you were in Texas fucking a black girl.” An electric jolt went through me. I stammered that she was just having a nightmare, urged her to go back to sleep, and tried to clear my mind of any more incriminating thoughts. But the relationship was never the same after that.

  Now things had degenerated to the point where a dollar and a half brought on this kind of drama. No matter how much I earned, I was perpetually broke. If not for her and a couple of soft-touch coworkers, I would never have eaten at all. Still, this had to end.

  Of course, I was going to miss the sex. In between our furious fighting was lots of furious fucking. Three, four times a day, sometimes. But fuck it, I could no longer tolerate her bullshit; it was time to move on.

  A friend of mine named Dean Overton had given me a job as a grunt in the warehouse of a local Seattle record store chain. It consisted mainly of filling orders from the stores around town, loading boxes with records, stocking shelves, and making deliveries in a van. Compared to the demeaning, physically and mentally taxing agricultural and restaurant work I’d suffered through in eastern Washington, this was cake. The crew were mostly good-natured, funny people, including several other local musicians, and I warmed to the comradery of my coworkers. Despite being by nature an introvert and loner, I slowly came out of my shell and made some friends.

  One day, I unpacked a box set with a haunting black-and-white cover photo of a lone figure walking on a beach in a long coat while smoking a cigarette. It piqued my interest and I asked a quiet but friendly fellow employee named Justin Williams about it.

  “That’s Nick Drake, man! It’s great. I’m gonna make a tape for you.”

  The next day he handed me a cassette. When I got home and put it in my player, I was introduced to the music of Nick Drake, Leonard Cohen, Tim Buckley, Tim Hardin, and others. It captivated my imagination. I had listened to the first four Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds records often and this music was in a similar vein, dark and beautiful. As I immersed myself in it, I felt transformed. I loved the Velvet Underground, the Saints, Captain Beefheart, the Groundhogs, Kraftwerk, New York Dolls, Joy Division, Gun Club, Wipers, the Fall, Lou Reed, the Stranglers, the Birthday Party, the Damned, John Cale, Bowie, and the Stooges and many more … but this mainly acoustic, personal, and confessional music seemed to tell my own story back to me. It hit me in some deep grieving place I’d heretofore been unaware of. It changed my musical perspective in a profound way. Soon, I wasn’t listening to anything else.

  I had already been greatly dissatisfied with what my own band was churning out. Immersing myself in this intimate, deeply moving music made it even harder to invest in the swill Screaming Trees were producing.

  After a particularly vicious argument where my mind-reading girlfriend made it clear what a toxic, lying piece of shit I was, she finally kicked me out. Once again, I found myself at loose ends and in need of a place to crash. Dylan and Slim had recently moved to the city so I moved into their cheap, decrepit, rat-infested three-story house a couple of blocks from north Seattle’s Green Lake. They used the basement for rehearsals with their new two-man band. The music was extreme. Extremely loud, extremely slow, a strange and beautiful glacial guitar drone, unlike anything I had ever heard before. It was unclear what role Slim played in the band. He had been the singer in their old band, and I had coproduced a single for another group he sang with that didn’t include Dylan. I could never hear any vocals over the din coming from the basement but assumed he must have been singing, unheard.

  My room was on the third story and when they practiced, the vibrations from their holy noise slid my bed across the floor. I found it soothing; I had always found noise soothing. As a child, I had been constantly yelled at by my mother for turning on the clothes dryer down the hall from my bedroom in order to fall asleep. While living with Dylan and Slim, I often fell asleep only to wake to find the crusty, fractured futon I had stolen and dragged out of a Goodwill bin wedged against the door at the opposite side of my room.

  The first few months in our new dive were a bleak exercise in shared low-grade unhappiness. The place was cold, damp, depressing. We spent each evening listening to records in the living room we had named “the waiting room at the morgue.” None of us had girlfriends, just ourselves for company. Each morning, all three of us woke up covered in flea bites. We devised a coordinated pla
n to set off flea bombs one day before work. On the target morning, Dylan and I set off our bombs and left the house at precisely eight a.m. as planned. It suddenly occurred to me that Slim might not have exited. He was a chronic oversleeper who always slept fully clothed in polyester slacks and wide-collared polyester shirts, using the rest of his wardrobe piled on top of him as a primitive blanket. After a moment’s hesitation, I ran back inside to make sure he was up.

  The second I opened his bedroom door, I was met with the eruption of a powerful insecticide blast from a flea bomb that had detonated at that very moment, blinding me and choking me and covering my clothes with its rancid chemical smell and blistering, venomous toxins. I slammed the door and staggered out of the house, collapsing to my knees with tears streaming from my eyes, having received the brunt of its noxious cloud full in the face. “Fuck me!” I said out loud to myself and, having missed the bus, walked to work, coughing the entire way.

  As soon as I got there, Dean took me aside.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you? Are you fucked up? Or do you have the flu?”

  I relayed the morning’s comedy of errors. Despite my protests, he insisted on calling the Poison Control hotline and they strongly urged me to seek medical attention. Given the rest of the day off but with no money for the clinic, I spent the afternoon lying in the wet grass under the freeway overpass a block from our house, vomiting up bile intermittently. When I started to feel a little better, I bought a chocolate bar from the gas station up the street and promptly puked that up, too. I gave up and lay there, occasionally dry-heaving, waiting for the eight hours to expire until it was safe to go back inside the house. It was only much later that we discovered the huge rats that shared the house with us and figured out where the fleas had come from in the first place.

  Eventually, Dylan confided in me that Slim was contributing nothing to this new band that Dylan had named Earth. It was such a slow drone that Slim, who had previously sung in somewhat boring trad punk bands, could not find a way to fit himself into the music. He was also opposed to any real work so picking up a bass or guitar was not going to happen. His impotent dissatisfaction began to create a fissure between the two. By this time, a friend of mine from Ellensburg, Nate Hill, had moved into our giant house. A guitar player with such an uncanny resemblance to Axl Rose circa 1988 that everyone in the Burg had called him “Little Axl.” He’d asked me what was up when Slim, who always unsuccessfully tried to assume the mantle of alpha dog in his bands, began to sulk, then bitch around the clock. In a fit of anger, he told Dylan, “If you’re not going to play something I can sing to, I quit!”

  Dylan was the most loyal of anyone I’d ever known and would have taken a bullet for Slim or any of his friends. He did not argue with Slim but neither did he attempt to tailor his music to accommodate him. Dylan was a true original. A genius whose vision was stubbornly forward-facing and springwater clear, he was in the process of inventing a new genre of rock music, one to become known as drone metal. Finally, Slim left, bitterly and unilaterally ending his years-long friendship with Dylan in the bargain. He went on to say publicly years later that it was because of the “danger” in the house, that we were obsessed with firearms. That was a joke. We had exactly two firearms: Dylan’s rifle and my piece-of-shit .22 pistol. Ironically, Slim had spent much time proudly bragging about his rough upbringing and the prevalence of guns among his relatives back in Montana. The truth was he craved being a top dog, and since he was finding that to be an impossibility in Seattle, he went back to Olympia, tail between legs, to become a big fish in a goldfish bowl.

  By now, the rest of the Trees had one by one emigrated to Seattle: first Pix, then Lee, and finally Van, his short-lived, ill-advised marriage over. Our manager Susan Silver had rented a house for her assistant and we began rehearsing in the basement along with a couple of Susan’s other bands, Soundgarden and Alice in Chains. As I was coming in one day, I was met at the door by a stunning black-haired girl in glasses named Anna, the girlfriend of an acquaintance of mine.

  My mind went straight back to a night several months earlier when my previous girlfriend and I had gone out to eat at a local restaurant where Anna had waited on us. My girlfriend had been borderline rude to the smiling and friendly waitress and hadn’t spoken a word to me throughout the entire meal. In the car afterward, I couldn’t take any more of her scowling silence.

  “Okay, what’s your problem?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it. You’ll just say I’m crazy anyway.”

  “Goddamnit, I can’t take this shit! What in the fuck is it now?”

  “You’re going to be with her,” she said, starting to cry.

  “What are you talking about? Be with who?” I had obviously missed something along the way and now I was genuinely steamed. “Please enlighten me as to what you are talking about. Now.”

  “That waitress back there. You two are going to be together someday.”

  True, I had thought the girl was hot and I was attracted to her, but only in the way any normal person might be ten times a day when they encountered an attractive member of their preferred sex. There had been zero flirtation, almost no conversation, nothing. I hadn’t given it a moment’s thought.

  “Anna? That girl is going out with a friend of mine. You are out of your fucking mind. I’m over it. You need to check yourself into the psych ward, you’ve fucking lost it.”

  Months later, the second Anna opened the door to the rehearsal house her beauty hit me like a hammer. I tried to shake it off, went downstairs and rehearsed with the band, but I couldn’t stop thinking about her. I still wanted to consider the entire scene with my last girlfriend as mere unwarranted drama, but I knew my ex had that fucked-up “gift” for knowing things a normal person would not. She’d read my mind in her fucking sleep, for chrissakes. I was going to have to explore Anna’s situation.

  I went to use the bathroom during rehearsal. She was curled up on the couch, reading a book. She looked up at me and smiled.

  “Aren’t you Eric’s girlfriend?” I said. “He and I go back a ways.”

  “Oh, that didn’t turn out so well. We’re not together anymore.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” I said, thinking the exact opposite. “It’s really none of my business, forgive me for prying.”

  She laughed out loud and said, “Come on, man! Give me a break.”

  I smiled at her and said, “Do you smoke weed?”

  She laughed again. “Sometimes. Why? Do you wanna get me high?”

  “I actually do, yeah,” I said with a slightly evil look of intent.

  “Come up and see me when you guys are done, hotshot,” she said, smiling with an equally smoky look. It was on.

  We hooked up that afternoon. I got immediately, deeply addicted to her sexually, and to her quiet, smart, and funny bookish manner. We would stay in bed for hours at a time. On the occasions I could get her to smoke weed with me, she would laugh and laugh. It made me happy. I started spending quite a bit of time at her place.

  When I was home, my roommates and I fell into a routine of work, listening to records, and going out to an occasional show at one of the local bars. Sometimes Kurt would come down and stay with us for a couple days. Sometimes I’d hang out with him in Olympia, listening to the old blues records we both loved. One afternoon at his place, we started talking about making a record.

  “We should do a record of this stuff,” one of us suggested.

  And then the other, “We should do a record of all Lead Belly covers.”

  Lead Belly was a legendary folk-blues musician, a twelve-string-guitar-playing ex-convict. We’d spend hours at a time listening to his records and nothing else. I casually mentioned the idea to Mark Pickerel, who was by then working for Sub Pop Records, the label that had signed Kurt’s band. After one rehearsal with Pickerel and Krist Novoselic as rhythm section before we’d really even thought it through, we suddenly found ourselves in the studio to make a record for Sub Pop.
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  Being pals was easy but creating together turned out to be more difficult as our respect for one another turned it into an oddly unproductive exercise. Neither Kurt nor I were really willing to grab the reins. Despite being the least musically proficient member of Screaming Trees, it had become obvious to me early on that I had to be the default leader of the band, simply due to force of personality. I was used to directing Screaming Trees recording sessions, only because it was a chaotic, unproductive shitfest unless I took charge (and even then, it still often went nowhere). I couldn’t bear to do that in this situation, I was too awed by Kurt’s genius. He was also strangely reticent. Dylan had joined us in the studio just to hang out and ended up offering more direction than either Kurt or me, but in the end not much was accomplished. No one was willing to be the shot-caller.

  It was years later that I realized Kurt didn’t take the lead out of respect for me. Part of me knew he saw me as a sort of big brother, but I struggled to get my head around that. I felt like Screaming Trees’ work was second-rate, everything dragged out or cobbled together, every unsatisfying song the result of too much toil, and I saw everything through that prism. It was impossible for me to accept that someone else could find worth in what I did because I could not. How could Kurt be a fan when I saw in him a talent that was genuinely not of this place and time, like Bob Dylan, John Lennon, David Bowie, or Jimi Hendrix? I simply had the heart of a packhorse.