Sing Backwards and Weep Page 8

  It was all a terrible, shit-stained charade, a fucked-up and ridiculous farce orchestrated by a man nearly thirty years old with no real human experience outside of his lonely life of solitude, with us but without us, on the road. If I happened to be somewhere and one of our songs came on—one of Lee’s songs, a Screaming Trees song, not anything I would claim any part of—I would cringe and leave immediately. In the recording studio, I was driven by sheer embarrassment and my unflagging admiration for raw, edgy, and meaningful music to try to make Lee’s songs into something I could endure with my head up, but I would never enjoy singing them.

  Yet against heavy odds, through dogged, determined obsession and sheer force of will, I kept trying. With Van Conner as my likewise-­handcuffed, like-minded conspirator battling his sullenly stubborn, broken, savant-like brother residing somewhere on the spectrum in fantasy­land, both our only hope and most glaring hindrance, I kept trying. Trying to shape our music into something I could not only live with, but also something that might give the band continued upward success. So that I could keep running from the painful mire of my past, the uncomfortable reality of my present, and, of course, mainly from myself. Toward where or what, I did not know or care.

  We finished our first record for Epic in late 1990 and Uncle Anesthesia was released early the following year to little, if any, fanfare. As hard as I’d worked in the studio, as hard as Terry and Chris and I had fought to drag the band forward, our major label debut was more of the same shit we’d always done, it just sounded better. Not long after the record came out, I was displeased to see one of our tunes included on a Sony Music compilation CD with several different boring hard rock bands. Epic couldn’t really find another way to market us other than to try and tie us in with late ’80s and early ’90s hair metal, soon to be replaced in the public popularity contest. I had a conversation with our product manager at the company, an enthusiastic, positive, forward-thinking man in his forties named Al. “Mark,” he said, “I’m gonna work my ass off to get you guys to the same place as the Psychedelic Furs or Midnight Oil.” He saw us as an outlier, and not hangers-on of some metal scene with which we had nothing in common. That he had used the Psychedelic Furs as a point of reference made me feel like he got it. Despite their name, the Furs had nothing in common with the fake psychedelia I had fought so hard to distance Screaming Trees from. The Furs were an English post-punk band that I personally loved because they were unique unto themselves. With Richard Butler’s one-of-a-kind voice and their sometime use of instrumentation uncommon in rock music, their sound was unlike anything else out there yet they had several worldwide hits. They were an example of what I hoped we’d become: an original, not an imitator.

  We hit the road. One of the very few upgrades since our SST days was that we now had two vans instead of one, in part to accommodate our three new crew members. I rode in the equipment van with our guitar tech and lighting guy while the rest of the band took the other, more comfortable passenger van with our tour manager/soundman Rod. Mark Pickerel had become involved in a serious relationship and, still in his early twenties, realized the dysfunction in the group dynamic wasn’t worth it any longer and quit the band shortly after we finished the record. Dan Peters, a hilarious and sweet-natured good-time Charlie who was also the drummer for local Seattle stars Mudhoney, took his place.

  Only a couple days into the tour, guitar tech Jim Vincent was driving our crew van down a snow-covered Wyoming highway when we hit black ice. The van swerved, then began to weave from side to side. I was riding shotgun and the van took so long to finally swing out of control that I had time to put a big bag of clothes in front of me like a crude airbag and brace my feet up on the dashboard. After what felt like an unbearable eternity of mounting panic, we skidded off the road into the snow-blanketed median. As the van flipped suddenly, violently, end over end, I was thrown into the windshield, and with my face up against the glass, I saw the ground come rushing up and smash into my head again and again as we toppled through the highway divider, my corner of the van taking the brunt of the contact. Finally, we came to rest upright on the shoulder of the opposite side of the highway. We sat in shock for a few seconds, all three of us still in our seats. Then, realizing the ass end of the extra-long Econoline was still sticking out in the path of oncoming traffic, we scrambled to get out before a semi truck came through and finished the job.

  I looked at Jim, blood streaming down his face on the side of the highway.

  “Jesus Christ! I’m so sorry, guys. Fuck!” Jim was a staunch perfectionist at his work. I knew he felt personally responsible.

  “Hey, what the fuck, Jim? You couldn’t have done a goddamn thing. It’s okay, man. As long as you guys are okay, I’m okay.”

  I looked at our wisecracking light man Jimmy Shoaf and he nodded his agreement. He had been riding in the back and was virtually unscathed. They both assured me they were fine but I wasn’t convinced. They were both white as a sheet and blood was pouring off Jim’s head. I looked back on four lanes of highway and divider and saw our drums, guitars, and amps strewn across the entire distance. My head began to pound with what I felt but wouldn’t see until later, a large, ugly blue-black bump starting to raise above my right eye.

  There was no way to get in touch with the rest of the guys, who had been driving ahead of us when it happened. But, by chance, one of them had been looking back at a critical moment and noticed we’d disappeared. They eventually turned around and arrived in time to see the van being towed off by the emergency road crew, then located us in the local hospital where we’d been taken by ambulance. To our luck, Jimmy was untouched, Jim took just a few stitches to his head, and I walked away with a concussion, at one point stopping to vomit in a hospital toilet while wandering the hallways in a daze looking for the guys in the waiting room. After staying awake all night in a local motel by doctor’s orders to make sure I didn’t die in my sleep from a brain hemorrhage, the decision was made to continue on. We’d rent new equipment and another van in Chicago, where our next show was scheduled.

  At this point, I’d not had a drink or done hard drugs for nearly five years. I hadn’t even smoked weed for the first three years. But eventually I had fallen back into what had seemed to me to be a harmless routine of smoking pot. I was unhappy much of the time, my mind consumed by the band and its demands, not to mention the pressure I put on myself to steer it away from the music we’d been rehashing for five years toward something greater. I’d done my own record, written all the words and the bulk of the music myself. I now knew how to do it. Although I felt the songs weren’t great, they were a true representation of myself and had some personal meaning. I had managed to create a mood, I’d become comfortable in my own skin, and had sung in my natural range and my authentic voice. And it made coming back to the Trees that much harder.

  Life on the road was dreadful, dreary, and mind-draining most of the time. I sat there like a zombie in an unending, boredom-induced trance brought on by the complete lack of any remotely interesting interaction between us. Half the time, I felt like I was mindlessly staring at a black-and-white TV after it had gone off the air, sucked into the static, trapped between the horizontal and vertical lines.

  Always a two-pack-a-day smoker, I’d developed a cold and nasty case of strep throat by the time we got to Chicago. That on top of the lingering effects of my car-crash concussion had left me in a terrible mood. When it came time to go onstage for our late-afternoon matinee show, my usually robust singing voice was diminished to a faint, painful, red-raw echo. I sounded like Peter Brady in the episode where he goes through puberty. It was impossible to make enough sound to be heard above the roar of the band. After three embarrassing songs I walked offstage, furious that I couldn’t sing. I took off running down the stairs to the backstage to grab my coat and split, anxious to get the fuck out of there and back to my hotel room. In my haste, blinded by anger and humiliation, I did not see a low-hanging beam halfway down the staircase. When I smashed
my head into it, I knocked myself out cold.

  I came to with a club employee holding an icy wet rag against my forehead.

  “Holy shit, man, are you okay? Should I call an ambulance?”

  For several seconds I had double vision, but I finally regained my sight. In my tiny, barely-there voice, I croaked, “No thanks, man. I’m okay.” I slunk off into the dressing room and sat down for a second to steady myself.

  In the span of four days, I’d taken several heavy blows to the head. I had lost my voice, and with it, the will to continue. My friend Garrett Shavlik, drummer for the Denver band the Fluid, my Sub Pop labelmates, burst through the door behind me. I’d not even known they were in Chicago but he was drunk and he was pissed off.

  “What the fuck are you doing, Lanegan? Those guys are dying up there without you.”

  “My voice is fucked, Tidbit,” I said, using the nickname I’d invented for him with my habitual method of finding a fucked-up near-rhyme to or perversion of anyone’s name. Geoff Templeton became the Tough Gentleman, Blair Underwood, Blood Underwear, etc. A quirk that inexplicably gave me great joy. “I can’t sing, brother.” Without thinking, I reached out to grab the bottle of booze he held in his hand. He wasn’t buying it.

  “Bullshit, dude! What the fuck?” he yelled and yanked the bottle out of my hand.

  I had a soft spot for the usually entertaining and sweet-natured Garrett but he was obviously sloshed. When he suddenly shouted, “You’re not Morrison, motherfucker!” it took a great deal of restraint on my part not to knock the holy fuck out of him. If my head were not already throbbing painfully, I probably would’ve done it. He had said out loud what nobody I knew dared say to my face. I found it sad and demoralizing. If even my supposed friends were convinced I was a rank Jim Morrison imitator, then I had no friends at all. For the first time in years, I needed a drink. If my unsympathetic pal wasn’t going to share his bottle with me, I was splitting.

  “I ain’t got time for this right now,” I croaked. Grabbing my coat, I slipped through the back door and hopped into a cab, my already fucked-up head now much worse.

  On my way to the hotel, I thought, Fuck it, I really do need a drink. In my state of severe depression, physical and psychic pain, what I was really saying was Fuck it, I want to die. The five years in hell I’d not drank or drugged had been a cursed and crazed walk on a tightrope, one I always knew I was destined to fall from.

  Before I had left my far-right-wing hometown, my excessively long hair and fuck-the-world attitude were a statement of rebellion that had nothing to do with rock music. In a place where many people (including many of my high school classmates) wore cowboy hats and boots as their everyday attire, where tattoos were only seen on the occasional biker rolling through town, I stuck out like a sore red dick. I got into frequent fistfights with strangers in broad daylight if they made a cutting remark or looked at me the wrong way. While waiting in line at the post office one day, a man standing behind me wearing a cowboy hat said under his breath, “Fucking faggot.” I punched him in the face. As he staggered out, holding his blood-gushing nose, the forty-something male government employee behind the counter smiled and, with a look of unabashed glee, said, “Nicely done.”

  So there was a faction of more progressive thinkers in Ellensburg, too, mainly older hippy types or immature young college art students. It was from that small pool of art students—overly dramatic girls living away from home for the first time—that I had habitually fished for sex partners/girlfriends. They often acted as if they were on an imaginary stage with bohemian affectations like using cigarette holders, throwing theme parties, and droning on and on in mindless, boring, pretentious conversation with friends while clutching the latest ridiculous cocktail popular among their group. New exotic names they’d given themselves after leaving home to go with their newfound freedom, an excess of lame bracelets and necklaces, jewelry some ex-boyfriend had inevitably “crafted” for them … I was instinctively turned off by these girls but I needed sex and they were easily had and heavily preferred over the homegrown Ellensburg girls who wouldn’t have touched me with a hundred-­and-fifty-foot pole. Nor would I, them.

  I was by nature drawn to and got hooked hardwire-hardest to the feral, streetwise, tatted, dark and sultry Goth girls in black fishnets, short skirts, heavy boots, and heavier eye makeup that I would come across in my travels. Should they happen to wear glasses, that was a plus. Since childhood I’d also had, among a thousand other kinks, a somewhat predictable fetish for the classic “nasty librarian” look. As a fifteen-year-old doing seventy-five hours of court-ordered community service at the public library for one of my teenage misdemeanors, I would jack off a couple times a day in the employee restroom just from the thought that I was actually in a library, never mind that the only women who worked there were in their fifties and anything but sexy. Women who were smart, dirty, and open to any sort of nonmainstream but legal and consensual action in the bedroom were who I sought. In short, the kind of woman I never came across in my hometown. Because of this, I was always eager to hit the road.

  In this tiny college cow-town, I was forced to work with what was available. Without my medicine of drugs and booze, I became very dark, wide awake all night, and open to trouble. I went through a succession of these girls who, after the initial novelty thrill of dating the only semi-known underground rock singer in town wore off, quickly became unhappy. Their complaints were always the same. I was cold and distant, I only interacted when I wanted sex, the intensity of my sexual behavior worried them, their friends were afraid of me, I never wanted to hang out with their friends, I never wanted to go out, I would never agree to let them throw a party at my house nor ever accompany them to a party elsewhere, I would never say what was on my mind or talk about my feelings, I did not appreciate their art, I stayed awake all night and slept all day, all I cared about was music, etc., etc., etc.

  The homegrown aggressive darkness I cultivated during this period of will-driven sobriety followed me everywhere in those days. When someone hurled insults or objects at me or anyone else in my band, I’d be the one to go into the audience and trade punches. The minute someone overtly crossed the line, I was down. At one of our earliest shows, some guy standing there with a drink in his hand had yelled out, “Come on, fat boys! Make some fucking sound!” before we’d even had the chance to start our set. I leapt from my perch into the crowd and punched him a couple of times in the head, putting him on the floor, knocking off his baseball hat and soaking his shirt with his drink. I’ll never forget the surprised look of shock and admiration on the faces of my bandmates while climbing back onstage that first time. I wasn’t having it. I wasn’t being paid twenty bucks a day to stand on a stage and take shit from some drunken frat boy, or anyone else for that matter. In those days, no one pressed charges or tried to sue me for dough I didn’t have, but the river ran both ways and my angry soldier-on-the-wall routine onstage also made me the target at times. On more than one occasion, I was the one whose ass was kicked. While walking behind my road manager/soundman through the crowd to get to the dressing room post-show one night in Daytona Beach, Florida, without warning a big college-jock-looking guy stepped out of the crowd in front of me. With a huge smile on his face, he suddenly crushed my nose with a straight right that immediately dropped me to my knees, down for the count. It was three days before we got to Atlanta where I was able to get my broken nose set and by that time I’d sung a couple of shows with it throbbing in pain, a black bruise covering my face like the mask of the Lone Ranger, or that of a raccoon.

  That intensity I wore like a suit of armor had carried me a long way, but it could only carry me so far. During that cab ride in Chicago, I had finally been beaten down to a place where I surrendered. I was exhausted to the point where willpower wasn’t gonna see me through. I had to get loaded.

  By the time my girlfriend Anna called the next morning, I’d already been drinking for a few hours. It felt so good, all the misery it had
caused me in the past forgotten. All the beatings I’d received or given, the insanity of the constant blackouts, waking up in unfamiliar towns with no memory of having ridden there hundreds of helmetless miles on my motorcycle, coming to in bed with people I’d never have fucked sober, all the jail time and subsequent prison sentence, the year-long rehab, all of it erased in the beautifully familiar warmth of the liquor on my brain.

  “What’s wrong with you? You sound funny,” she said.

  I admitted I had been drinking. Anna freaked out, no doubt recalling the stories I’d told her of my difficult past with alcohol.

  “How long are you in Chicago? I’m coming out there!”

  With a three-day break in this hotel before moving on to our next gig, I had anticipated a good long drunk and did not want that interrupted by her or anyone else.

  “Don’t worry about it, baby, I’m fine. It’s not going to continue after this weekend, I just needed to relax for a minute.”

  She insisted on coming anyway. About four or five hours later, she knocked on my door and walked into my hotel room. Seeing me standing there with a bottle of vodka in my hand, she dropped her bag on the ground and said, “Oh my God.” I braced myself for what I assumed was the coming confrontation, but instead she put her arms around me and quietly whispered, “Oh my God, I can’t believe it.”

  “What can’t you believe?”

  “You look ten years younger.” She sounded honestly baffled.

  I looked into a mirror and was woozily surprised. After several hours of drinking, instead of looking like a disheveled bum, I looked much younger. The hardness I’d developed over five years of white-knuckling, the lines that had been etched on my face from my depression and quick-to-ignite violent firestorm of anger … it was all gone. The unmistakable disappointment and dark concern always written on my features, born from the lifetime of failures, had slipped away. I looked at peace.