Mark Lanegan Sing Backwards and Weep : A Memoir.

The book has a companion album of songs, Straight Songs Of Sorrow.

Mark Lanegan, lead singer of Seattle's Screaming Trees, is someone I originally knew best from two movie soundtracks: "I Nearly Lost You" by The Screaming Trees from the Singles soundtrack, and "Man In The Long Black Coat" from the Bob Dylan film I'm Not There.

For the past few years, I've been listening to his solo releases and enjoying them very much. I wanted to read his memoir and I would highly recommend it, especially if you're interested in the Seattle music scene in the 90s and 2000's.

We learn that Mark has a lot of cool friends - Nirvana's Kurt Cobain, Josh Homme from Queens of The Stone Age, and Layne Staley of Alice In Chains... but we also learn that Mark and a lot of his friends are severe addicts - and many of them die before the end of the book.

The book, as I was reading it, took over my psyche for a bit. I couldn't help but think of addicts in my life, some of whom have passed, like my friend Clayton and my cousin Zach, and whose passing deeply affected those left behind.

Clayton Gross (1991 - 2018)

I've often thought that if only someone had been able to sit with Kurt on THAT NIGHT, and talk to him calmly, and help him see things in a different light, that he likely would have survived, at least for another day. As it turns out, Kurt called Mark three times on the day he died, looking to hang out but Lanegan didn't pick up, as he had drugs and money and didn't need to go score for Kurt. Lanegan also thought Courtney Love would be there (she wasn't - Kurt had escaped from rehab in California and was in Seattle alone). Lanegan was annoyed by Courtney's flirtations as well as the constant dysfunctional bickering between Kurt and Courtney. (Yet she paid for Lanegan to go to rehab years later.)

One of the most interesting aspects of the friendship between Kurt and Lanegan is their shared interest in old time music, especially the blues; specifically Lead Belly (1888 - 1949), the Black blues master who did hard prison time before moving to New York to record and perform.

Lead Belly songs such as "Goodnight Irene" (covered by Pete Seeger's Weavers), "Midnight Special" (Creedence), "Matchbox" (Lead Belly's version of his mentor Blind Lemon Jefferson's song inspired the Carl Perkins rock classic), and "House Of The Rising Sun" (Dave Van Ronk, Bob Dylan, The Animals) were well-known to folk and rock fans in the 1950s and 60s, but more modern audiences might be forgiven for knowing Lead Belly almost exclusively through Nirvana's Kurt Cobain.

During the taping of Nirvana's MTV Unplugged in New York (1994), Kurt famously joked about wanting to ask David Geffen to buy him Lead Belly's guitar before singing Lead Belly's (who he called his "favorite performer") "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?", a song that Kurt hauntingly howled. It became the finale of the concert as well as the finale of both Nirvana and Kurt himself. Less than 5 months after recording "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?" for MTV Unplugged, Kurt was dead from suicide.

Early in their friendship, Kurt and Lanegan talked about working on some Lead Belly tunes for a new band The Jury. Nirvana's label Sub Pop enthusiastically encouraged the project, quickly booking studio time in August of 1989.

The project never really gelled (sadly), but Lanegan's version of "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?" landed up on his first solo album The Winding Sheet (1990) with Lanegan on vocals and Kurt on guitar.

The other Lead Belly songs they recorded, "They Hung Him On A Cross", "Grey Goose", and "Ain't It A Shame", didn't show up until the Nirvana boxset With The Lights Out in 2004.

In his memoir, Lanegan says Kurt asked him to sing "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?" with him at the MTV Unplugged gig, but that Lanegan declined. Kurt asked Lanegan if he could use the same arrangement Lanegan had used in 1989. We can only wonder what kind of performance a duet would have yielded, and what that would have meant for Lanegan's career.

Kurt's interest in Lead Belly and "unplugged" acoustic music also painted a roadmap for a post-punk, post-Nirvana solo career for Kurt. Toward the end of his life, Kurt often said he felt trapped by the demands of the band, the record company, the "stir-maker machinery". He spoke with R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe and others about leaving the band and persuing a solo career playing acoustic music. Again, we can only wonder...