At that point I said, “OK, now I have to finish this book,” even though it was the last thing in the world I wanted to do. He was such a bright light in dark times and such an important person to me. He took his own life, which was stunningly shitty and devastating. I sent him a prologue and he said, “You’re doing it!” That was it.ĭid his death motivate you to finish the book? But Tony was a great enthusiast and champion of my work and when he wrote a blurb for a book of lyrics that I did, he made it known to me that I should write a book. The last thing I wanted to do was write some stupid fucking rock bio and I’ve never written anything in my life-I graduated high school with a fake diploma. Mark Lanegan: Anthony Bourdain is the one who talked me into making this book. VICE: Sing Backwards and Weep is dedicated to “Tony and all my other absent friends,” who is Tony? “But I just want to buy this fucking mouse and have a fucking cigarette. “I like to laugh,” he assured me from the Best Buy parking lot. Over the phone, his voice is a baritone but his laugh is a falsetto, erupting frequently and betraying a giddiness and sense of humour-albeit a very dark one-that rarely comes across in his music. We spoke to Lanegan about his book, his dead friends, and why most rock memoirs suck while he was buying a mouse at Best Buy after his home ProTools set-up was ravaged by hackers. Thanks to blind luck and a big voice, however, he managed to stumble into the Screaming Trees, early forebearers of Seattle’s grunge scene, and then into Queens of the Stone Age and then into a successful solo career, despite his best attempts at self-sabotage, all of which are described in excruciating and mesmerizing detail in Sing Backwards and Weep. The descendant of “coal miners, loggers, bootleggers, dirt farmers, criminals, convicts, and hillbillies of the roughest, most ignorant sort,” Lanegan seemed destined for a similar fate, the feral byproduct of maternal abuse with a promising future as a repo man and a teenage rap sheet that included theft, insurance fraud, urinating in public, illegal dumping of garbage, and 26 tickets for underage drinking.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |