She seemed to acknowledge that as well as her own quirks in that write-up very well, the honesty was quite refreshing.

I adore the three albums and three EPs Isobel released with Lanegan. Also got to see a portion of a show on the tour for Hawk.

yeah i loved that. Lanegan was not an easy guy, and at the same time everyone cared deeply for him.

Goddamn that voice.

https://www.theredhandfiles.com/memories-mark-lanegan/

"Do you have any memories of Mark Lanegan that you’d like to share? He seemed to be one of the most highly regarded and respected musicians by his peers. A rare lyrical talent with a voice like no other."

Quite the dichotomy on stage... I totally forgot how much Cave moves around.

Time of the Season may be my GOAT Christmas song

same

I got Sing Backwards and Weep in the mail today, looking forward to reading this.

It's good. It does get a little samey at times, but I'm glad I read it. It's amazing he had the career he did with the life he led.

Barrett Martin's Lanegan Stories #1

With the passing of our brother and bandmate, Mark Lanegan, I have found that humor is really the best medicine, and Mark knew this truth, perfectly. So I outlined 7 stories about Mark and the Trees, which I am currently writing and will post here on my pages. Humor is the operative word here, so I hope these stories lifts your spirits as we think about Mark over the coming weeks.

Story # 1

Beer Projectiles & Falling Refrigerators

By Barrett Martin

For some reason, the Screaming Trees had a propensity for throwing cans and even bottles of beer at each other, and Mark told the story in “Sing Backwards And Weep” of how I threw a can of beer at him in his New York City hotel room. This is true, and I wish I hadn’t done it, but I did. What is much more revealing about that event is the reason for my beer can chucking in the first place. It all came back in 2019, when Mark called to ask if I remembered certain stories differently from the way he remembered them. We had a really great phone conversation where I told him the things I could recall, and I’d say that his book is pretty darn accurate from everything I remember from those wild years. Anyway, Mark reminded me that it was I who threw that first beer, and the reason for this is as follows:

When we went to New York City to record “Sweet Oblivion,” the band was flat broke, but I was literally “broke ass broke” because my previous band, Skin Yard, had just split up on the plane flight home from Europe, and I had just quit my construction job to join the Trees and go to New York to make the album. I left Seattle with $100 cash in my pocket, and I remember that I spent $60 on a black leather jacket at one of those Pakistani leather markets in NYC, so I would look cool in the photo shoot for the back cover of the album. This is the photo (and the jacket) below. I only had $40 left and our label, Epic Records, had not given us any per diem money to buy food, so there we were in NYC, making a major label album and we still had zero funds to live on. My hotel roommate was Van Conner, and he and I survived on $1.00 slices of pizza and cans of Rolling Rock beer – every day. That is literally all we ate and drank, except for the free coffee in the lobby of our hotel. The one thing the label did give us were car vouchers that we could use to order a Lincoln Town Car to take us to the studio. So the label gave us fancy car rides, but money for food - not so much. We had several booklets of these car vouchers, which Van, Lee, and I would use to get to the studio, hours before Mark would arrive. Meanwhile, Mark was using up all his car vouchers riding around NYC raising all kinds of hell that we would later hear about, while we were cutting basic tracks for the album. But Mark would always arrive at the studio just in time to cut his vocals, which were of course, magnificent.

At a certain point, we were down to just one booklet of car vouchers and Mark called my hotel room and said he really needed it. I told him we only had one booklet left and we were all out of money and couldn’t afford to take taxis. But Mark charmed me into taking the booklet down to his room, which he snatched out of my hand quite rudely. I used this as an opportunity to lecture Mark on having better manners towards his band mates, and that I, the newest member of the band, wasn’t even getting food money while I was recording basic tracks for his album. I didn’t really know Mark at the time, and I had only been in rehearsal rooms with him as we prepared the songs for Sweet Oblivion. I was also as tall and even beefier than Mark, and I stood 6’3” and weighed 200 pounds, so I was built more like a linebacker than a drummer. I wasn’t about to take any shit from Mark, but he responded to my lecture with two words, which I remember exactly: “tough titty.” This infuriated me so much that I hurled my freshly opened can of Rolling Rock as hard as I could at his head, which missed him by a mile because, well, I was drunk at the time. Mark just started laughing hysterically, jumped out of his chair and hugged me exclaiming, “Well you must have been raised by Irish alcoholics too!” Which made laugh and cry a little bit, and suddenly everything was fine between us. In fact, I think we actually became brothers in that moment because we understood certain things about each other: I learned that Mark had a wicked sense of humor that disarmed most situations, and he understood that I cared about the band more than myself.

Well, the beer projectile karma came back on me years later, after the Trees had played a truly magnificent show in Cincinnati, which was one of the greatest shows I have ever played in my life. We played for something like 3 hours, playing absolutely every song in our catalog, plus a whole bunch of covers by The Velvet Underground, Cream, and the MC5. The encore was a Q & A where the audience could ask Mark questions, and he would answer in the most hilarious, good-hearted way. It was a truly magnificent show. After we finally ended 3 hours later, we went backstage and Mark and Lee got into some kind of petty argument. I said something that I thought was pretty neutral, but it caused Lee to hurl a full, unopened beer bottle at my head, which I ducked and barely missed, feeling it graze the back of my neck as it stuck, nose first in the sheetrock wall behind me. It literally could have killed me, and this infuriated Van to the degree that he screamed like a gladiator as he lunged at Lee, and both brothers began brawling like Godzilla versus Mothra, duking it out as they destroyed the entire backstage. At one point, they collided with a massive 1950s refrigerator that toppled over and landed on top of me, with Van and Lee howling and brawling on top of the fridge. I was crushed, literally.

Mark was sitting in an armchair laughing his ass off the entire time as he watched the spectacle unfold, and Van finally subdued Lee to where I could extract myself from underneath the fridge. But it just goes to show:

If you chuck a beer at someone, you will surely have one chucked back at you, even if it’s many years later. And it might include a refrigerator as well.

Barrett Martin's Lanegan Stories #2

Story #2 (Remembering Mark Lanegan) “Mark On A Moped” By Barrett Martin

I remembered something after posting Story #1 that bears a continued spinning of the yarn, and then I’ll jump into the next story, "Mark On A Moped." The memory is about the time Mark did finally have a beer bottle chucked in his direction, but it happened in the most surreal way.

During the time we were making Sweet Oblivion in NYC, we had the opportunity to play an opening slot for the band Dinosaur Jr. at the legendary Roseland ballroom, where swing bands from the WWII era used to play. We played our opening set, which was a ripper, and then hung out backstage with Lenny Kravitz, who was there to check us out, or rather, to check me out as a potential drummer for his new band. Lenny offered me the job, but I declined because honestly, the Trees were the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me at that point in my life and I thought the ride was going to go much, much longer.

We watched Dino (as the hipsters called them) play their headline set from the side of the stage, and for some reason Mark decided to heckle them a bit, being that they were good friends of his and heckling from the Trees was a badge of honor. The bass player for Dino was Mike Johnson, who was also Mark’s longtime friend and the guitarist in his solo band. At some point Mike had had enough of Mark’s heckling and he spun around on his wing tipped loafers and kicked an empty beer bottle towards our side of the stage. At this point, the spirit of David Beckham entered the game, and the bottle did a supernatural arc through the air, spinning like a UFO as it curved towards the Trees. All of a sudden the bottle zeroed in on Mark, striking him exactly in the middle of his forehead, making that unique sound that only bottles on skulls make. Mark staggered backwards, but never went down – he held his footing, albeit in shock. Mike Johnson didn’t even miss a note on his bass and we were all flabbergasted at the accuracy of his kick. Mark sported an enormous goose egg on his forehead, which seemed to last for months, and well into the tour we were about to undertake.

It was now the summer of 1992 and the Trees were doing the summer festivals of Europe, or rather, the festivals that would have us. This was a traditional thing that most bands did back then, right before they were about to release an album in the fall. The strategy was, we played to the biggest audiences possible (the festivals), we did some interviews about our new album (Sweet Oblivion) to get the buzz started, and we got the band's live show warmed up for major touring in the US and beyond.

The Trees didn’t have a tour bus at that time, and we still didn’t have any kind of budget to support the shows and tours we had just begun, most of which were done with an equipment van and, in a rare splurge of decadence, a chase car rental. Our manager, Kim White, had a credit card (which none of us had yet) and she had rented a very nice Peugeot sedan in Europe, which I happily drove as the chauffeur/drummer. We followed the equipment van from gig to gig all around Europe and we had just played a show in Ljubljana, Slovenia, which at the time was a brand new country that had separated from the former Yugoslav republic, declaring itself a free, independent nation. I had played in Ljubljana the previous year, 1991, with my band Skin Yard, and it was perhaps the best show on our tour. The Trees had an equally great show, and I reconnected with some college students that I had met the previous year at the Skin Yard show.

Well, the next morning we had to drive a couple hours to the city of Trieste, just inside the northeast corner of Italy. It’s a beautiful seaside city and our show was inside a castle that had it’s interior removed and replaced with a huge, green lawn, with the stage at one end, and seating across the lawn for the audience. It was a nearly ideal place to play a show, although it was an open-air show and storm clouds were approaching – an ominous sign. I and the two brothers and Kim White had arrived in the early afternoon in the Peugeot, with plenty of time to see the city, have lunch, and a leisurely sound check. But Mark wasn’t there.

We all thought he had ridden in the equipment van, which he often did because, well, he didn’t want to be around the rest of us. When the equipment van arrived with no Mark inside, the driver said that he thought Mark was with us. Apparently Mark had stayed behind in Ljubljana to party with the locals after the show, under the premise that he would get a ride from someone who was also coming to the Trieste show the next day.

Sound check came, and the band played a few songs without Mark, with Van and Lee singing lead vocals, and I sang occasionally too, because we had developed a series of cover songs that we could play during the encores. Then we saw the storm clouds, much darker and closer now, with lighting bolts shooting down from the sky. This is a very dangerous situation for a band to play in, especially on an outdoor stage where you could easily be electrocuted. Then things got weirder.

You see, back then if you played a show in Italy, the promoters all seemed to be mobsters, as they alluded to their extended “families” across Italy, and making the bands feel more like hired restaurant employees than artists. That’s why I hate mobsters in general – they really have no class and are just glorified hillbillies dressed in Armani suits. They're very much like Russian oligarchs, for that matter - hillbilly gangsters in cheap suits. Anyway, these Italian hillbilly mobsters started to threaten us, saying that we had to play in the lightning storm with or without Mark or else there would be trouble at the rest of our shows. Well, the four of us Trees were well over 6 feet tall and had a combined weight of over 1,000 pounds so these mobsters were puny by comparison and we were not intimidated in the least. All the same, we wanted to play the show, collect our fee, and then get the hell out of there and move on to the next city. We just needed Mark.

The time ticked by, our start time came and went, and we were getting ready to play as a trio when all of sudden here comes Mark, riding through the castle gates straddling a moped, and still quite drunk. Let me reiterate, it was a moped – not a Vespa scooter or a motorcycle - it was a moped. Can you imagine that spectacle? No you can’t, because it’s an absurd and ridiculous scenario that is completely incongruous to Mark’s image – the brain cannot imagine this. Yet there he was, his long red hair blowing in the wind, laughing all the way to the stage as the moped pulled up behind the drum riser. And who do you think was driving the moped? None other than the college student I had met in Ljubljana a year earlier on the Skin Yard tour. He had randomly found Mark drinking in a bar on the way to the show and offered him a ride.

Well the show went off without a hitch, although lightning was striking all around us. We ended our set at exactly the amount of time agreed upon in our contract, and went back to our hotel for the night. The next night we would play Rome, a 7-hour drive that could not be driven on a moped. We made sure Mark was inside the equipment van when we left the hotel the next morning.

https://www.sundaypost.com/fp/isobel-ca ... m=facebook

He was more like a feeling: Musician Isobel Campbell on sudden loss of recording partner Mark Lanegan

Note to all, how to do away with pop ups that want you to subscribe (ny times,,eg) or accept cookies

1) 3 dots
2) ,settings ,(gear icon,,,)
3) site settings
4) java script (turn it ,off)

When you want to play wordle again, turn it back on

Gary Lee Conner shared 2 unreleased screaming trees songs along with the last communication he had with Lanegan. Looks like they made up and Lanegan was going to record these songs for a new album.

Wow I hadn't come across this yet. Choked me up a bit reading the text exchange...Still having a hard time accepting that Mark's gone.

What may have choked me up more was hearing those two Trees songs. Been diehard Trees fan going on 20 years; they were my window into Mark's music. Never thought I'd be sitting here in 2022 listening to 'new' Trees material. I remember being equally shocked listening to Last Words some 10ish years ago. I hope these batch songs recorded circa 94 see a proper release someday. Wasn't expecting this to be such an emotional evening...

Me neither

I also got this in the mail this week, ive just started it and its really good so far. i like how its written.