For April 2023, I reviewed two memoirs by Mark Lanegan, Sing Backwards and Weep and Devil in a Coma.
Lanegan was co-founder, lead singer, and principal songwriter of the early grunge band, Screaming Trees.
In addition to his solo career, he was a member of Queens of the Stone Age, Mad Season, and The Gutter Twins. He also collaborated with artists such as Kurt Cobain, Isobel Campbell, Layne Staley, Mike McCready, Moby, Soulsavers, and Unkle.
I’ve read three of the four books he wrote before his death on February 22, 2022, at age 57. I’m currently reading his first book. He also co-wrote three books of poetry with Cold Cave frontman, Wesley Eisold, about the pandemic.
To say I’m a Mark Lanegan fan would be an understatement. The singer/songwriter/musician/poet and author ticks all the boxes for me. His distinctive voice and the haunting lyrics and music he penned have earned him a special place in music. I find his brutal honesty about his struggles with addiction and his turbulent relationship with his mother heart-rending.
Lanegan was born and raised in Ellensburg, Washington. Ellensburg was founded in 1871 and was in contention to become the state capitol of Washington when a major fire destroyed much of the city’s thriving downtown in 1889. Olympia was chosen as the capital of Washington, and Ellensburg, part of the Kittitas Valley, became a major producer of timothy hay, and a haven for the arts and culture. It’s home to Central Washington University.
Just as Ellensburg missed its big opportunity, Mark Lanegan, seemed destined to squander his enormous talents.
In order to fully appreciate Devil in a Coma, you first need to read Sing Backwards and Weep.
As a child, Lanegan spent a lot of time alone and unsupervised in the woods of Ellensburg and his basement while his parents worked. By age twelve, he was having daily confrontations with his mother, drinking regularly, and getting into scrapes with the law. His father tried to act as a buffer between Lanegan and his mother, but his relationship with his wife was also volatile.
Lanegan’s mother had a similar relationship with her own mother. Lanegan’s method of survival became anything that helped distance himself from his unhappy home life - alcohol, drugs, reading, and music. He formed the group Screaming Trees with friends from Ellensburg. The more heavily he got into the Seattle and Los Angeles music scenes, the more access he had to alcohol and drugs.
Lanegan could have blamed his addictions on his home life, but in this first memoir, he chooses to blame himself for his poor choices. Even when music executives were going out of their way to make drugs available, Lanegan blames himself for taking them. The anger issues that plagued him throughout his teen years and well into adulthood, he accepts responsibility for as well as the poor career choices he made during his years of addiction.
His candor about life as an addict is sometimes difficult to read. You don’t like the person he has become, but there’s this vulnerability in his writing that makes you root for him and come to love this broken man/child. Maybe it’s because I raised three sons, but I wanted to put my arms around him and tell him he was enough, and he was deserving of love and success.
His attempts to get clean and sober sometimes ended as soon as he left treatment. Sometimes, they lasted for years. He had been clean and sober for over ten years when he died.
There’s a meter and intimacy to his writing. I can almost hear his distinctive raspy voice, often described as a mixture of sandpaper and velvet, telling me his story as if we’re two people chatting late into the night.
His memoir, Devil in a Coma, takes place after he has been clean and sober for about ten years. Lanegan and his wife, Shelley Brien, made the decision to ride out the pandemic in Ireland. Lanegan found peace there and had decided never to return to his home in Los Angeles. After giving an interview with a journalist, he received word the journalist later tested positive for COVID-19. This was before there was a vaccine and both men had been practicing social distancing and appropriate safety protocols. Lanegan wasn’t worried, he assumed it would be a mild case.
He lost the ability to hear and walk. His lungs, severely compromised from years of smoking, were no match for the virus. He ended up in a small hospital fighting for his life for several months. He was placed in an induced coma while doctors tried to figure out how to fight the virus.
At one point the doctors suggested a tracheostomy. They warned his wife this procedure would permanently change his voice. Realizing her husband’s unique voice was as much a part of his identity as his face, Shelley refused. She wanted desperately to do anything to save him, but she knew after 37 years of performing and touring, he would not be able to survive the loss of his voice. Making correct medical decisions for her husband when he was incapable of making his own decisions weighed heavily on her. For months he was at Kerry Hospital making improvements only to relapse and hover near death.
The COVID ward was primarily comprised of elderly patients who often didn’t survive. Being exposed to so much death and the uncertainty of what his quality of life would be post-covid brought about serious introspection.
Situations Lanegan downplayed in his original memoir took on new meaning. While in a coma, he remembered parts of his life he’d worked hard to forget. Plagued by insomnia and dark dreams after awakening from his coma, he began to write poetry about his life, the pandemic, and his experiences in a COVID ward. He began keeping a journal. He often believed he would never walk out of that hospital.
At one point, he lost his love of music but continued to keep his headphones on listening to drown out the sounds of the machines and the cries and suffering of the patients around him as they labored to breathe.
After lobbying his doctors to let him complete his recovery at home, he signed himself out of the hospital against their advice. At first, he made wonderful progress at home, but within two weeks, he ended up back at the hospital, again fighting for his life.
A man who has spent his life defying authority doesn’t always learn from his mistakes. As soon as he began to improve, he stubbornly insisted on being released again. This time he believed he was on the road to a full recovery. The infection returned in his lungs, and Lanegan checked himself into a larger hospital in Cork – not because he wasn’t satisfied with the care he received in Kerry, but because he was embarrassed to have ignored his doctors’ care recommendations and once again put his life in jeopardy.
This time, Lanegan stays put, listens to his doctors, and recovers. Once again confronted with the poor decisions that plagued his life, he accepts responsibility for his actions.
For all their darkness, Sing Backwards and Weep and Devil in a Coma share a message of hope and the will to survive – perfectly imperfect in an imperfect world.
Books by Mark Lanegan:
I am the Wolf; Lyrics and Writing (2017)
Sing Backwards and Weep (2020)
Devil in a Coma (2021)
Leaving California: poems by Mark Lanegan (2022)
Books of Poetry by Wesley Eisold and Mark Lanegan:
Plague Poems with Wesley Eisold (2020)
Year Zero with Wesley Eisold (2022)
Ghost Radio with Wesley Eisold (2022)
Biographies about Mark Lanegan:
Confessions, Lyrics & Nostalgia Dark Mark Lanegan by Iman Kakai-Lazell (2022)
Lanegan by Greg Prato (2023)
Photo credit:
Image of Mark Lanegan:
By By alterna2 - https://www.flickr.com/photos/alterna2/7042891237/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21555683
Images of Mark Lanegan’s books taken from my personal library.