When Mark Lanegan sang that he was “torn like an old dollar bill” in 1992, he was a 28-year-old man with the voice of one who had lived hundreds of lives, none of them easy. His own life was at times equally grueling. With the news that the artist has today passed away at his home in Killarney, in the Republic of Ireland, at the age of 57, his compelling story of personal redemption has reached a premature end. Only the voice remains, as ageless and deathless as the wind.
Born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, Lanegan was at the epicenter of the Seattle alternative-rock scene, even at the point at which it didn’t fully exist. In 1988, he received a call from a member of Nirvana asking if he could join the Screaming Trees. “Krist Novoselic here,” the voice on the line said. “Are you still looking for a bass player? I can’t stand playing with Kurt [Cobain] anymore. I’m sick of everything always having to be his way.”
Lanegan told Novoselic, “I love your style, and it would be great to have you in my band. But if I were you, I’d get past my problems with Kurt and make it work. You guys have got something special there.” As he later said, “I had known Kurt since I was the famous one.”
Living in Seattle at the exact point at which the Jet City became the nucleus of America’s Alternative Nation, Lanegan watched with humane bewilderment as the entire world went mad for the music made by his friends in Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and Alice In Chains. Despite a major-label deal and muscular management from Peter Mensch and Cliff Burnstein at Q Prime, Screaming Trees themselves fell shy of such widespread commercial success. But with albums such as Sweet Oblivion (1992) and Dust (1996), the street-clothed quartet were the band of choice for the discerning connoisseur. Best of all, of course, was their singer’s deep and sonorous voice. Like Tom Waits or Leonard Cohen, every syllable sounded convincing.
After a concert supporting Johnny Cash, even the Man in Black himself proffered the compliment that Lanegan had “a great voice, son. Thanks for singing tonight,” he said. “I needed to hear that. Good for the soul.”
By any measure, his was not an overnight success. By the time Sweet Oblivion had sold several hundred thousand copies in the United States, Screaming Trees had been recording albums for six years and touring in a van for even longer. They were, by any measure, a fractious unit, a dysfunctional family in which fist-fights, factions and quarrels were the norm. But the tension, and the permeating air of genuine sadness, made for some of the finest music in the Seattle canon. Songs such as “Julie Paradise,” “Look At You” and “Dying Days” remain world class. So too does “Nearly Lost You,” which, with its appearance on the soundtrack album to the “grunge” movie Singles, from 1992, was heard by more than 2 million people.
“We were, even in our mid-20s, still wild unruly children, a gang of misfit toys basically rampaging across the world, enjoying the success of [our] concerts,” was how Lanegan remembered this period in his bestselling memoir Sing Backwards And Weep, from 2020. “The adoration of the audiences, and the joy of making music. After years of playing shows, it was the first time I was singing music I believed in for large crowds, and I took pride in singing as powerfully as possible every single night.”
But for all its musical wonder, the Seattle scene was a dangerous place in which vulnerable artists with punk-rock mindsets learned the hard way that happiness was in no way index-linked to commercial success. For a while, it looked like Lanegan was determined to join Cobain and others in an early grave. Addicted to heroin and crack, the artist was reduced to loitering outside his management company’s offices to borrow 20 bucks from the one person within who still considered him a friend.
When the time finally came to put things right, Courtney Love, the bandleader with Hole and the widow of Cobain, paid for a stay in a rehabilitation clinic in Southern California. As Lanegan told Rolling Stone in 2020, “I remember Courtney leaving me a letter saying, ‘Kurt loved you as a big brother and would have wanted you to live.’ That was powerful because I hadn’t done any good for anybody in years.” As Lanegan prepared to return to life in the outside world, Duff McKagan offered him a place to live.
“[McKagan] was a guardian angel and one of my very best friends,” he later said.
After at last getting clean, Lanegan stayed that way. As a sober man, he released numerous solo albums, appeared on five LPs by Queens Of The Stone Age and recorded albums with Greg Dulli, Duke Garwood, Isobel Campbell and Skeleton Joe. He is survived by his wife, Shelley.