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The memoir reveals its essential character about a third of the way through, though it can't come as much of a surprise to anyone acquainted with the grunge era. True, the Trees never achieved anything close to the fame that the bands of Lanegan's friends Kurt Cobain and Layne Staley did, and never became a staple of rock radio (at least not where I lived); but they were swept along by the popularity of Seattle's Big Four to some relative success, at their peak playing Letterman and Leno, and landing their single "Nearly Lost You" (from the 1992 album Sweet Oblivion) on the soundtrack of the movie Singles, which Lanegan says he never watched: "The poster, plastered all over town, told me more than I ever cared to know about the subject. Rare in its rawness and candour, the book is a brutal chronicle of addiction that began aged 12 when Lanegan was “reviled as a town drunk before I could even legally drink”, and continued into his 20s when he branched out into heroin and crack. The climactic chapter here, "Ice-Cold European Funhouse", describes such an absolute rock-bottom that I just had to laugh. My lifelong hard-ass exterior and, underneath that, ironclad interior were all an intricately constructed, carefully cultivated, and fiercely guarded sham.
Sing Backwards and Weep: A Memoir by Mark Lanegan | Goodreads
When Lanegan died this year (maybe from Covid - he had a bad case and it appears he never fully recovered though no cause of death was released) he had been clean for over a decade and was living in Ireland where was apparently happily married and was putting out a lot of music. Before then in ‘Sing Backwards and Weep’, music seems to be just given its due alongside other elements that shaped Mark Lanegan, told it is loved, but little else. Solo albums and collaborations abounded, as well as several books, including two memoirs and a poetry collection.Accurately reconstructing dialogue, incident and motivation from decades in the past is in most cases probably impossible, so objections along those lines (made by a few other readers here) seem irrelevant to me. Mark was lead singer of the Screaming Trees, a second-tier grunge band that was perpetually in the shadows of other more popular bands like Nirvana and Alice in Chains.
Sing Backwards and Weep - Mark Lanegan - BookShelfDiscovery Sing Backwards and Weep - Mark Lanegan - BookShelfDiscovery
Kurt’s body had been found in the small room above his garage—the same room at which I had stood at the foot of earlier—the victim of an apparent suicide. Like Stone Temple Pilots' late frontman Scott Weiland, with whom he recorded an unreleased song, Mark had been a quarterback. Misschien wel omdat Mark Lanegan alles vertelt, zelfs de meest pijnlijke momenten die iemand anders liever zou verzwijgen.Lanegan remembers walking along the boardwalk looking to score, passing through an empty cavernous building (probably the convention center or the old casino), and concluding that the place is an absolute tomb. He makes no attempt to disguise or justify his behaviour, which includes habitually lying and cheating those close to him out of money, though his openness about his basest moments is disarming.