Wasn’t it that we secretly cheered him on for still being alive, that he hadn’t joined the young rock ‘n’ roll dead club like his famous peers before – given an incommensurable amount of drugs, with who Mark Lanegan had worked long and unequivocally to destroy his body? The founder of the Screaming Trees was one of the survivors of a rock narrative that had lost its appeal with the end of grunge – which at the same time gave a boost to his iconization for a worldwide fan base. Mark Lanegan has died at his home in Killarney, Ireland, aged 57, according to a post on his Twitter channel.
Mark Lanegan’s demonically burdened artist existence
The folk-blues that Lanegan and his musicians have been recording over the last few years had been a quasi-natural environment for his deep, deeply touching voice, for the stories of dependency, pain and despair that Lanegan in his – quoted an old song – autobiography “Sing backwards and weep” told on a broad front and with a penchant for ruthlessness. The last stages of a demonically burdened existence as an artist, which early on gave the melancholy and depression of the grunge era an unmistakable sound. In 2020 he fell ill with Covid-19 and was in a coma for weeks. He wrote about the disease in another book in 2021, entitled: “Devil in a coma”.
Lanegan’s work oscillated between extremes, the acoustically instrumented ballads led by his raspy baritone betraying an introverted artist, and the rock monuments he created with the Screaming Trees of the mid-1980s and the early Queens Of The Stone Age who brought the 2000s into the world. Dueting with singer-songwriter Isobel Campbell (Belle & Sebastian), Lanegan discovered slightly different country and chamber folk tones that earned them ample comparisons to Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sintra.
The Screaming Trees in the big grunge elevator
Mark Lanegan, a godfather of grunge? Lanegan, born on November 25, 1964 in Ellensburg/Washington, initially sat behind the drums in the band he formed with his high school buddies in 1983. He is said to have only reluctantly taken on the vocals. When the Screaming Trees first played in Seattle, the term grunge didn’t even exist, and what Lanegan and his band were soon to record for the definitive SST label came more as a dedication to the garage and psychedelic genre. Rock of the sixties and seventies mixed with the drive of punk. In the feedback loops of the songs, Lanegan’s powerful voice initially remained one sound body among many, sometimes pushed against the wall of the colossal sound work by Garry Lee Conner’s guitar.
The Screaming Trees got caught up in the grunge maelstrom of those years whether they wanted to or not. And there is some evidence that they used the grand elevator as an opportunity to tell the story of rise and fall, of self-destruction and the manifold upheavals in the biographies of their generation. Always at a reasonable (also commercial) distance from the comets Nirvana, but still within reach of the group of changing grunge crown princes, which ranged from Alice In Chains to Pearl Jam and Soundgarden.
Lanegan’s solo debut was made with Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic
When grunge and Cobain’s suicide marked the end of rock music as we knew it, the Screaming Trees morphed into junior dinosaurs yet to see the signs of the times. But Lanegan did: In 1990 he released the solo album THE WINDING SHEET, followed in 1994 by WHISKEY FOR THE HOLY GHOST, he would, what nobody could have expected from him at first, pull the first teeth out of monster rock – a distant preview of lo-fi and home recording in the small ensemble with recordings that dealt with trauma and fractures. A certain irony accompanied the solo debut in 1990: the record was made with Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic from Nirvana, among others. Their ex-drummer Dave Grohl calls THE WINDING SHEET “one of the best albums of all time”.
The Screaming Trees provided a stage for quarrels and fisticuffs in the early 90s. After their most successful album, SWEET OBLIVION, separations, time-outs, tours and the brief resumption of band operations followed. Lanegan had already proven himself as an artist in his own right and with his own publications. He recorded more than 20 solo albums (including live releases) in 30 years, quite a few of them with artist friends. Anyone wanting to put on a retrospective or a best-of would have to work their way through a songbook that shows the singer and songwriter to be driven and constantly struggling with his status and his story.
If anyone else could have recorded a record like WITH ANIMALS (2018 with Duke Garwood), it would have been Nick Cave alone. Garwood described the joint album as a “healing record” – and one may add: for the musicians and for the audience. WITH ANIMALS starts with a pounding canned heartbeat, then there is a booming sound from keyboards and guitar, it feels like an eternity until Mark Lanegan starts singing: “Come on now, midnight children/Sing a dark harmony/Play it now, midnight people/Create your own alchemy/Free me/Save me”.