Mark Lanegan: It's a One-Way Ride (To the End of the Universe)

Mark Lanegan died today. Like most news, it came to me first as somebody's commentary, my friend Ian posting "rest easy" or some such with a link to a Queens of the Stone Age song I guess Lanegan sang, and that I've long since forgotten. I didn't know what Mark Ian meant until I checked a group chat, then Twitter, where a tranche of music writers I follow quote-tweeted the announcement and confirmed their grief at the news.

I've been listening to Mark Lanegan since 1989 or so. Guitar World magazine reviewed the Screaming Trees album Invisible Lantern, comparing it to Hüsker Dü and the Meat Puppets, who by then I'd heard and liked. I bought Invisible Lantern, and immediately hated it. Six-dollar headphones and a twenty-dollar tape deck may not have been the best tools, and the rambling, ramshackle guitar—which is what I mostly listened for, in 1989—was wildly different from the AC/DC riffs still almost entirely central to my aesthetic and understanding of music then. "Ivy" just ... made no sense. But I had only so many tapes, so I kept listening, and one day I took off from school to take the bus downtown and hang out at the college library for a day, the record finally clicked. "She Knows" sounded like someone running a vacuum cleaner over a Ramones song; "Grey Diamond Desert" sounded like the saddest, prettiest ballad I'd ever heard. (Even at 14, a side-ending sad song like "Here Comes a Regular" could just wreck me.)

A year and a bit later, sitting in my room, something very pretty came on my little Radio Shack clock radio, tuned to the nascent alternative station. I had no idea what it was. I sat quietly until it got back announced: "Bed of Roses" by Screaming Trees. I must have heard it one of the forty or so total times it ever got played on any radio station, and it was easily enough to make me ashamed I hadn't recognized the music—this voice—I knew I loved, and it was enough to send me to the Sound Warehouse on Sable Blvd. over and over until Uncle Anesthesia came out. I loved it.

Well, I loved almost all of it. I was a record store kid, and a record review reader, so I had been hardened enough to know that, when I heard the trumpet part in static ballad "Disappearing", I should judge the lyric "that was one mistake / I never thought you'd make" as applying to the song itself.)

Record reviewer bullshit aside, I loved the weird little record, and picked up every tape I could find for the next couple years at whatever used record store I went to. The earlier records didn't hit me the same way as Invisible Lantern and Uncle Anesthesia, but there were good songs on everything, and eventually I found Buzz Factory, which was the first record I ever bought that felt too good to listen to too often. It just seemed too good to reach for in any but a very special circumstance.

Of course I listened to Buzz Factory today.

Two years or so after Uncle Anesthesia, I was a senior in high school. I was discovering vodka, and the world was discovering music from Seattle. The Trees had a minor hit with "Nearly Lost You", a song I never did like, and my favorite band was locked in as mediocre in the minds of the record-buying public, not unparallel to the way my love for fIREHOSE was often mistaken for a weird allegiance to third-string hair-metal scrubs Firehouse. Walking around the suburbs, or on the bus to work, though, with Sweet Oblivion in my headphones, the tape I made with a CD skip on it that made the original always sound not quite right, I found myself in the song "Julie Paradise" somehow. It was then that what I loved most about Screaming Trees moved from the tangled, twisting lead guitar lines and best-of-his-generation guitar tone of Gary Lee Connor to ... everything about Mark Lanegan: his loud rough voice; his dark lyrics; his softer crooning voice; everything.

By 1994, when his solo album Whiskey for the Holy Ghost came out, all I really wanted to do was listen to it three times a day, walking around and imagining that one day I'd be a good poet. Taping boxes at the warehouse, or going through Factsheet Five or the Poet's Market, listening to Lanegan, again and again.

I met him three times, I think. Last time, after a show in SF, I stood in line for a long time to have him not sign anything, just to say "Thanks for playing. Your music has meant a lot to me for a long time." The first time was in Portland. He told me he liked Invisible Lantern best of the Trees records, like I did, and described it with some fondness, using words like "ugly" and "weird". I told him his lyrics reminded me of Rilke—he told me "I don't read"—and I promised I'd mail him a xerox so he could check for himself. I never did. I think I saw the Trees only once, a magnificent show, with Lanegan pitching a huge fit towards the end of the set, tipping over monitors and throwing his mic stand, so the band had to play the obligatory rock encore without him. So, when I went around the back of the venue to see if I could talk to the band, as we did in those days, it was Gary Lee and Van Connor back there, and all I could ask them was what the song I didn't know in the encore had been. It was "Song of a Baker". They said "We stole so much from the Faces, we figured we should give something back."

The second time I met him, I interviewed him by phone for Vice Sports. I got paid for it. I used the money to buy a selvedge black demin jacket from Two Jacks Denim, in Oakland. I still wear it, sometimes. I made him laugh—I think it was a real laugh, with surprise—at one point, and at the end made it all awkward when I told him I'd been a fan for a long time...interview ruining 101 right there.

Over time, his prolific release schedule, frequent collaborations with folks I wasn't inherently interested in, and occasional over-enthusiasm for bad electronic drums outstripped my desire to keep up with everything he recorded. Through the 90s and early 2000s, my answer to the question "who's your favorite band?" was always "Screaming Trees", even through some years when I wasn't reaching for those records much. I wouldn't miss Lanegan when he'd play a show near me, and for years I described him as my "all-time musical hero", second only to Mike Watt as my biggest artistic / moral influence.

I got pretty mad at him and flounced when he gave an outlandish interview, earlyish in the pandemic, about his TV watching him—shit, he was probably right, I just didn't want to hear it—and was horrified and back on his side when I read his recent piece about getting COVID and almost dying.

Eulogies usually reach too far at the end, and I'm not sure death really teaches us anything new. Returning to our prior commitments—openly, explicitly—seems inadequate, even unworthy. But all I can think about Mark Lanegan dying is "Always go to the show". Our heroes, our favorites, they won't live forever. We won't live forever. Mark Lanegan, ten years and one day older than me, died today, and won't be making more records or books, won't be playing more shows. There's a lot he did that I never got to, and I look forward to finding out what it does to me. It feels like there's time to do that. Feels thin, but it feels like what I have.