The urge to disentangle certain charismatic artists from the mythos that clings to them is as eternally irresistible as it is futile. Interviews and memoirs are useful for this only if the subject/narrator is 100% reliable; the internet, teeming with wild opinions and purported truths, is no place to look for verification. Which is why a combination of cultural romanticism and institutionalised trust still has us looking to an artist’s songs for clues as to who they “really” are. As someone drawn to the dark side – well documented, not least of all in his unflinching autobiography Sing Backwards And Weep – Mark Lanegan is often the subject of “authentic self or projected character?” enquiry, as if the entire value of his recordings post-Screaming Trees rests on the answer.
It’s an odd thing to ask of someone who didn’t exactly burn through a wide range of personas in their career and barely tweaked their artistic expression. If Lanegan’s years of sombre reflection, the bleak and unshowy poeticism of his lyrics and borderline uncomfortable live performances point to anything, it’s hardly a carefully constructed other. Talking to Uncut about his writing process in 2012, he said, “I always start from some personal place. Some [albums] are more fictional, some are more based on reality, but they all do start from something real.” As for the vast majority of artists, then, so for Lanegan, who steps metaphorically into the spotlight again with this all-formats reissue of his sixth album, Bubblegum.
It lands as a 20th-anniversary release that includes an expanded 2003 EP Here Comes That Weird Chill (Methamphetamine Blues, Extras & Oddities), a 13-track Unreleased Songs & Demos and (in the 4LP boxset) a 64-page hardcover book featuring memorial essays by confreres including Greg Dulli, Josh Homme, Alain Johannes and Troy Van Leeuwen. Released under the name Mark Lanegan Band and co-produced by Johannes and Chris Goss, Bubblegum sits between the bare-boned, almost rootsy Field Songs and the drum machine- and synths-augmented mixed bag that is Blues Funeral. In his book I Am The Wolf, Lanegan revealed the dark turmoil of Bubblegum’s genesis: “I had been awake for days and nights, crazed from no sleep and illegal stimulants. While I had been out of my mind making records in the past, this was a new peak… or low, depending on one’s perspective.” Mixer Rick Will compared the experience to a scene from A Beautiful Mind, while it caused Lanegan’s manager, Brian Klein, to quit before the record was finished. However tortuous the process, though, the tenebrous self at the centre of Bubblegum certainly enthrals, portrayed in a mix of first-person narrative, potent metaphor and flash-card imagery, against a backdrop of haunted blues, charged alt.rock, country and grunge, flecked with psychedelia. The record also clearly shows the influence of Queens Of The Stone Age, whose Homme, Johannes and Van Leeuwen all make major contributions of a resolutely gnarly and turbo-charged kind.
“Did you call for the night porter/Smell the blood running warm/I stay close to this frozen border/So close I can hit it with a stone.” As album openers go, “When Your Number Isn’t Up” is quite the establishing shot – a stark portrait of drug addiction and the singular hell endured by those existing on the knife edge between life and death, set to a soundtrack of cavernous, slow-mo beats, shivering droplets of piano and a lugubrious organ motif. “The night porter” was Kurt Cobain’s nickname for Mark Lanegan, due to his willingness to deliver dope in the small hours, and deemed so fitting it appears on the latter’s gravestone. Lanegan may have been that netherworld stalker, but it hardly defines him: with the roaring “Hit The City”, one of two songs here featuring PJ Harvey, he exudes the escapee’s mix of relief and awareness that the promised land seldom delivers, while both “Strange Religion”, a Spiritualized-style shimmer of psychedelic gospel soul and the strikingly spare intimacy of “Bombed”, which just scrapes over the one-minute mark, show him as the defeated lover at the end of a turbulent relationship. In the poignant and languorous “One Hundred Days”, Lanegan is both the optimist high on hopes of what the future could hold and the realist who knows it’s not for him. There’s a sudden mood switch with “Sideways In Reverse”, a trashy, punk-pop charge centred on compulsion and bad decisions, which is twin to the pedal-to-the-metal squall of “Driving Death Valley Blues”, where Lanegan is behind the wheel, impelled by addictions to both love and “medicine”.
The additional discs in this boxsetare solid inclusions, albeit with different functions. Necessarily less revealing is Here Comes That Weird Chill…, the EP of songs recorded at the same time as those that comprise Bubblegum and released the year before. It sees Greg Dulli and Dean Ween joining Homme, Johannes and Nick Oliveri, among other players, and since it’s often passed over in any appreciation of Lanegan’s catalogue, it’s worthy of a dust-off. Notable are the fragmentary, almost hallucinatory “On The Steps Of The Cathedral”, a cover of Beefheart’s “Clear Spot” – no great stretch for anyone here, perhaps, but a satisfyingly gruff, rough-necked hammering with some fine guitar vamps – and the blasted, desert-rock workout that is “Skeletal History”. Three bonus tracks feature – “Sympathy”, previously only available on the Has God Seen My Shadow? anthology and the two flips of “Hit The City”, “Mud Pink Skag” and “Mirrored”. The first of those is a raucous stomper with a Stones-y thread running through, the other a tender, Cash-like rumination on love’s perception errors, for fingerpicked acoustic guitar and close-mic’d voice.
As is so often the case with reissue extras, the punctum of Bubblegum XX is its unreleased songs and demos. One disc features seven outtakes from the original sessions plus half a dozen tracks Leeuwen recorded with Lanegan in various hotel rooms during downtime on QOTSA’s tours of Japan and Australia, in February 2003. Chief among the outtakes is the breezy, largely acoustic “Union Tombstone”, which now features a newly recorded Beck on harmonica. This collaboration was part of Lanegan’s original plan, but for various logistical reasons at the time, it didn’t pan out. Here, by the sourcing of song stems over 20 years after he wrote it, that’s been rectified. The hotel sessions see Leeuwen playing all instruments, while Lanegan’s unvarnished vocals are the focus. The fact that these recordings survive in their original rough mixes is surprising in itself – “nobody knew those existed and [Troy] forgot about them,” Klein tells Uncut – but they are strikingly intimate and pack an understatedly powerful emotional punch. The standouts here are a charming cover of Johnny Cash’s “You Wild Colorado” (a first-time recording), the Appalachian folk-flavoured “St James Infirmary” and the penultimate “Little Willie John”, a terrific shortened version of Bubblegum’s “Like Little Willie John”. Here, Lanegan’s voice, thickened and so close the moisture in his mouth is almost palpable, is at its most tenderly haunting, as against the sparest acoustic guitar he croons, “Where’s Willie John, been dead so long/Born to fall, for nothin’ at all/ And who’s gonna grieve when you’re gone?” It may be a projective stretch to claim that Lanegan is drawing a direct parallel between his own life and that of a black, R&B-soul singer who died aged 30 in prison while serving time for manslaughter, not least of all because the song is largely a lament to lost love, but Lanegan’s compassion is writ large as his despair. He certainly had no need to piggyback on another’s tragedy for the sake of authenticity. Bubblegum XX not only amplifies its maker’s profile as a heavy hitter in his artistic field, it reveals a newly raw expression of his life and particular times.
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