Sing Backwards And Weep: Mark Lanegan's Memoir

I just started listening to Sing Backwards And Weep, the memoir written by Mark Lanegan and also read by him, too. I prefer it when authors read their own work and his gravelly voice is so great.

His life was rough from the very beginning; it's amazing he managed to get out alive and stay alive. I'm sure I have more to say when I'm finished with it, but it's already engrossing. I'm up to the formative Screaming Trees years where he saw Nirvana live for the first time.

Listening to it made me return to those days of grunge. A million reams have been written about that 90's word attributed to co-founder of Sub Pop. It was meant to describe the music but just as quickly described a fashion which wasn't so much a a choice as it was a necessity chosen by poor musicians trying to ward off the Pacific Northwest chill–and hide their track marks.

The fact everything was oversized was just an unfortunate byproduct that also found its way into rave culture. For a brief moment I dated a woman whose raver friends used to staple their fifty-inch waist pants to their shoes. Drugs are a bad thing, kids.

I hated the word grunge from the moment I heard it, couldn't stand Hollywood's version of it in Cameron Crowe's worst movie Singles. Everything from the dialogue to the actors are one-dimensional. Just look at this garbage.

The most offensive part to me was the movie's recurring song by Paul Westerberg. I get that he had to sell-out after The Replacements broke up but the song is such a treacly earworm (the opposite of grunge) it felt like it was written for an ABC sitcom. Not even a sitcom, but a spinoff. Like Imperfect Strangers: Balki and Me.

I only saw the movie once--in a theater no less. I seem to recall they played that "Nah nah nah-nah" Westerberg song fifteen times throughout the film, and in different variations, too. There's the regular peppy one you hear in the trailer above, and a slow version during an Important Moment™.  It felt like it announced every new act, as if the "slackers" in the audience were too dumb to realize how films worked.

Singles is the only movie I ever saw that made me angry when I left the theater. I went to see it with a girl (space) friend, as opposed to a girlfriend. I know she was as livid as I was because "What the fuck was this shit," left our lips at the exact same moment. We talked about how much it pandered and how it got this generation– our generation– so very wrong. We weren't losers with no ambition and our version of finding true love was more than just finding someone who would say bless you when you sneeze (sorry to give you a spoiler alert.)

In retrospect, it all makes complete sense now. Cameron Crowe who both wrote and directed it, is a baby boomer. Whereas my friend and I were born at the very  tail end of Gen X. We had zero in common with him and vice versa. Of course he'd get it wrong.

Flannel and pandering aside, I never was into what was called grunge or the bands who had the misfortune to get lumped in to that genre. The stuff I listened to coming out of the Pacific Northwest were the Young Fresh Fellows, The Fastbacks and The Squirrels.

As far as I was concerned, a lot of grunge bands might have shot smack, but none of them wrote "Heroin." No noise guitar was ever going to capture the man who invented noise guitar. No lifetsyle from the safety of the 90's was ever going to approximate Lou Reed's junkie street poet, perfect in the mid 60's no less.

Two exceptions to that rule I don't even put in the grunge camp. Smashing Pumpkins first album "Gish," is a great throwback to classic rock with enough abstract lyrics to keep it interesting. Though it does fall prey to the soft/loud/soft/loud structure, I will forgive it thanks to how tight it sounded.

The other exception came from a "super group" who only released one album: Mad Season. Mark Lanegan was a contributor on that album. The reason I loved Mad Season is because unlike a lot of the bands in that era who pummeled you with darkness, this one sonically balances darkness and light.

For every  slow build like the album's opener "Wake Up," there's a calm narcotic gentleness of the album's hit "River of Deceit," and its tranquil mantra-like closer "All Alone." Along the way are bluesy instrumental workouts, foreboding jams and my favorite, a jazzy number (complete with saxophone, upright bass and marimba) which was Lanegan's best contribution in both lyrics and singing. His voice weaves in and out with Lane Staley's, the smokey coffeehouse jazz is so unexpected it makes it a fantastic standout track on an already great album.

I've broken this album out every October, since the first October I heard it. One vivid memory I have is driving home from the doctor's office with a sprained hand that had turned blue and swollen after a day of horsing around in school. I uses this incident as the bases of  a short story that I'd planned to include in  A-Sides & B-Sides but pulled it at the last moment for various reasons.

I just remember driving awkwardly with my right hand on the steering wheel, while my left one was a dull ache that came from somewhere so deep inside it couldn't be reached but only felt. Pittsburgh's autumn early evening and cold insistent rain and the kind of damp that reaches your bones was a great visual to go along with the audio.

I also also spent long hours staring at the CD cover, an illustration (woodcutting?) Layne Staley made. I used to imagine that it was supposed to represent Layne arguing with himself. In reality it was based on a photograph of Layne and his fiance Demri Parrott who sadly overdosed a year or so after this album came out. Layne followed six years later and the way he went out was so horrifically tragic. Heroin may have inspired some amazing music, but it has unfortuantely taken a lot of lives.