Did you hear the distant cry?
Mark Lanegan, RIP.
Lately I have been thinking that I don’t want to write about music anymore. In part this is because I don’t want to be someone who’s work is one long reminiscence; it’s also because the circles that I am forced to write in make me feel like I am talking — well, muttering — to myself. But the powerful urge to reminisce keeps descending upon me. It feels terrible to give in to it– dirty almost. But I can’t help it. This morning, for instance, when I saw a post in my feed announcing the death of Mark Lanegan.
Instantly, I flashed on one of the only times I was in his presence, which was during a performance by the band Thin White Rope, in Denmark. It was 1992, and he and I stood side by side watching them, and he was rapt, and I was rapt, and even so I felt a frisson of, for lack of a better word, fear, because he was a man who exuded that particular brand of scary charisma, even during someone else’s set. He always seemed like someone who, though silent, was just on the edge of picking up a nearby boulder and throwing it at the world.
He was very tall. And burly with it. He looked like a jock who’d wandered into the wrong fucking backstage area, because those were the days when being grunge really meant something about you, and it didn’t mean you’d played football, that’s for sure.
He must have been there, at that venue in Denmark, because his band the Screaming Trees were playing at the same festival, but I did not see them play that night. I have seen them though, many times, and what I recall about them was his death grip on the microphone, eyes squeezed tight, flanked by the Conner brother literally rolling around on the floor. Is that what you remember too? I bet it is. They were a fun band. Fun, yet also deep. The Screaming Trees were kind of a miracle, really, if you think about it — so natural, like forest beasts, or desert tundra, or loam, certainly not a band that would get any airplay, or whatever you call it (“going viral on tiktok,” I guess) now.
But those were the days, my friends! And that’s why I feel so sad about the news of his death — news which, if you really think about it, isn’t even remotely shocking. After all, so many of his peers and colleagues are gone already, and he was a hard liver, like them — maybe even the hardest of them all. But something about Lanegan was the epitome of Sub Pop ethos, almost more so than all the others. Perhaps it’s because of where he came from, Ellensburg, halfway between Idaho and the sea, a town on a flat golden plain as I remember it…where everyone knows it is nowhere. Lanegan’s story is so plebeian: small-town boy with a bad record collection goes to the city and finds God and Muddy Waters…it’s the ur- story of grunge, a tale that could only have been lived out in Washington State in the last part of the 20th century. But it’s still my favorite story of all of them. The one I keep coming back to.
After the Screaming Trees broke up, Mark Lanegan became an artist who’s main oeuvre was collaboration. Over the years, between long bouts of dissolution, he sang with many other bands and artists, lending them his grace and his pipes; and all of them were of value in a way that you have to hear to believe. One of the last times I saw him perform was at a show with Greg Dulli at the Independent in San Francisco. It was ages ago, and just some one-off — they sang covers and things, and all I can remember was that it was gorgeous throughout: evocative, thrilling, and deep.
The thing is, I always expected exactly nothing out of Mark Lanegan, and instead I have always gotten so much from him. I chose not to read his recent memoir, ‘Sing Backwards and Weep,” because I was told it would make me hate him, and I didn’t want, or need, to do that. I still don’t, and won’t. The distant cry has called him back now, as it was always meant to do. And this is the remains.
