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Mark Lanegan (1964-2022)
Photo: Vito Troiano / ZUMA Press / IMAGO
He was the tree that gave his band its name.
At least that's how we inexperienced boys thought it was when Mark Lanegan played with his Screaming Trees in small clubs in Germany in the mid/late 80's.
The other musicians in the band made a furious uproar;
meanwhile, the big, strong guy with his reddish-blond Viking mane stood eerily calm at the front of the stage, his big hands wrapped around the microphone and the microphone stand.
We didn't learn until later that Lanegan also adopted this attitude because he was usually very drunk when he came on stage.
By the time he was 12, he said he started drinking.
But the resulting enraptured attitude on stage soon became iconic.
With a baritone in the feedback wind
And it matched Lanegan's vocals: while Screaming Trees guitarist Gary Lee Conner ignited the most beautiful cascades of psychedelic wah-wah, Lanegan stood in front of the feedback wind, singing the blues in his unwavering gnarly baritone.
Just like a tree that has been observing what people are doing for ages without being too affected by it.
The Screaming Trees - all stately, room-filling figures - came to us with their spacy proud manes and their threadbare lumberjack shirts from Ellensburg in the wooded northwestern US state of Washington.
They were mistaken for outdoorsmen at first sight;
in fact, they were the forerunners of the biggest rock phenomenon of the '90s: grunge.
In the grunge primordial soup
Northwestern US college towns like Seattle and Portland have always had a vibrant music scene, but it was grunge that fed the area into the large commercial coordinate system of the music industry.
The Screaming Trees stirred the creative primordial soup for the new, decidedly slovenly youth movement.
Whether you take the musicians from Mudhoney, Nirvana or Alice in Chains - they all formed their bands after the Screaming Trees showed how it was done.
Of all the artists around them, the Screaming Trees were probably the least suitable for the teenage happiness that grunge became after its commercialization.
With the love song "Nearly Lost You" they had their only real hit in 1992, which ended up on the soundtrack of the generational portrait "Singles" in the same year, with which the fuck attitude of grunge was spoiled in a Hollywood way.
Lanegan later said in disgust about "Nearly Lost You": "I hope I never have to hear that song again."
Psychedelic Self-Inquiry
Basically, the Screaming Trees played classic LSD rock, which they accelerated and unleashed in punk mode.
Lanegan sang about borderline experiences through drugs of all kinds and about the demons he unleashed on these trips.
A psychedelic self-questioning that, like so many artists before him, repeatedly ended in self-destruction.
Lanegan released his first solo album The Winding Sheet in 1990, a collection of shimmering black, shamanic blues songs, followed by almost a dozen other solo works over the decades.
The ghostly jingling arrangements on "The Winding Sheet" sounded as if they had been recorded in some kind of in-between realm.
Also on the recordings were Nirvana's Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic, with whom Lanegan remained close.
It was around this time that the musician, like so many others in his grunge environment, began pushing heroin.
At times he lived on the streets as a junkie, but in the late 1990s he had to move from Seattle because he said he was in trouble with the police and dealers.
He opened up about it in his autobiography, Sing Backwards And Weep.
It was Cobain's widow Courtney Love who motivated him to get off drugs in the late '90s.
Lanegan recalled, “Courtney wrote me a letter saying, 'Kurt loved you like a big brother and wanted you to live.
The world needs you alive.' That gave me strength because at that point I hadn't done anything good for anyone for a long time."
Singing is salvation
Lanegan got clean.
However, in 2004 he had a relapse in which he almost died.
After that he temporarily did not find his way back to music, could neither write nor sing songs.
A traumatic experience - which probably explains the incredible productivity he displayed after finding his way out of the hole.
Lanegan's musical projects are legion, impossible to list them all.
He recorded three albums of hauntingly beautiful duets in the style of Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood alongside former Belle and Sebastian singer Isobel Campbell.
Again and again he was on stage and in the studio with the desert rockers Queens of the Stoneage.
He also regularly intoned dark, gospel-like songs for the electro-blues project Soulsavers.
And with the ensemble The Gutter Twins he sang his heart out alongside Greg Dulli of the Afghan Wigs.
For him, singing always meant salvation.
Lanegan had already contracted Covid-19 in spring 2020 and was in a coma for several weeks.
Last year he wrote the book »Devil in a Coma« about the disease.
He died on Tuesday in his adopted country of Ireland, where he had lived with his wife for two years.
Nothing is known about the exact circumstances of his death.
After Kurt Cobain and Chris Cornell, the world has lost one of the last great style-defining singers of the grunge era in Mark Lanegan.