Sing Backwards and Weep

January 27, 2020
This overwrought debut memoir from the frontman of the proto-grunge band Screaming Trees is packed with rage, guilt, and the seamy details of a life nearly flushed down the drain. Hating his dead-end upbringing in a Washington logging town, Lanegan became a high school alcoholic with a rock-star attitude who cared only about baseball, “punk rock and getting loaded and laid.” His band Screaming Trees gained some success in the Pacific Northwest scene of the late 1980s, garnering accolades from Lanegan’s friends (Kurt Cobain among them), and scoring success with singles including “Nearly Lost You” as the grunge scene exploded. Nevertheless, Lanegan hated being in the band—calling the group “sick, violent, depressing, destructive, and dangerous.” After a few years clean he fell into a spiral of drinking, drug use, and violence. Even while Lanegan’s raspy, soulful, Tom Waits–like solo output, as in Whiskey for the Holy Ghost, racked up acclaim, he was too busy shooting up, he writes, to enjoy it, and by the mid-1990s, he was dealing heroin and crack to support his growing habits. This dark and engaging epic of destruction is at times undone by Lanegan’s obnoxious cockiness, yet it does serve as a raw look at the grunge music scene. Lanegan’s fans will wince and delight in this gritty narrative.

February 15, 2020
The frontman of the Screaming Trees gives a bloody, brawling, dope-fueled tour of his personal battlefields. By any reckoning, Lanegan should be long dead alongside beloved friends like Kurt Cobain of Nirvana, Kristen Pfaff of Hole, and Layne Stanley of Alice in Chains. By either miracle or stamina, the author is still alive to offer a blisteringly raw self-portrait of life not just as an excessively self-indulgent rock star, but also a victim of his own hubris. It's hard to remember in this age of social media, semiclean living, and legalized marijuana, but Seattle circa 1990 was practically a combat zone, thrust into the zeitgeist by the success of grunge rock, especially Nirvana, Soundgarden, and other bands on the Sub Pop label. Lanegan recounts the formation of the Screaming Trees with drummer Mark Pickerel and brothers Gary Lee and Van Conner in the late 1980s, and while their stardom was sudden, the author clearly hasn't forgotten long, brutal tours in a fetid van, featuring stories that recall Henry Rollins' Black Flag diary, Get in the Van (1994). There's plenty of friction behind the music, but the narrative's primal thread is addiction, from Lanegan's early alcoholism to a heroin and crack addiction that would later find him dealing to junkies from his Seattle crash pad. His temper would also find him contemplating murdering Courtney Love and beating Liam Gallagher to death backstage. Elsewhere, the missed opportunities are tragic--blowing a gig on the Tonight Show, turning down an invitation to play Nirvana's fabled MTV Unplugged episode, and ignoring a chance to score a movie. This isn't just a warts-and-all admission; it's a blackout- and overdose-rich confessional marked by guilt and shame. It's also not a redemption song, but like any other train wreck, it's impossible to look away. A stunning tally of the sacrifices that sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll demand of its mortal instruments.

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March 1, 2020

The most shocking aspect of Lanegan's memoir is that he has lived to tell it at all. In the early 1990s, as the lead singer of Seattle grunge band Screaming Trees, with his own promising solo career on the side, Lanegan, like many of his Seattle friends, was poised to enjoy the rock-and-roll limelight. But music took a backseat to his addiction to alcohol, heroin, and crack cocaine and his attempts to fuel his drug habit through illicit means. Lanegan's desperation is palpable; lucid anecdotes take readers from the stages of huge rock festivals to inside decrepit crack houses. Just when he seemed to reach rock bottom, he fell further still, finally getting sober with the encouragement of one of his former drug buddies, Hole lead singer Courtney Love. VERDICT Told in a distinctively heavy voice, this warts-and-all account of addiction's effect on one's body and self-worth comes with heft and hits like a ton of bricks.--Amanda Westfall, Emmet O'Neal P.L., Mountain Brook, AL

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