With the release of his new memoir, ‘Sing Backwards and Weep,’ the former Screaming Trees frontman is finally ready to reflect on his dark past
, Lanegan offers an unflinching look at his shadowy past, stretching from childhood up until the death of his friend Staley in 2002. The book reads like a debauched Bukowski novel, as Lanegan drifts from sin to sin, cursing those who held him back from music, drugs, and hookups, and recounting grisly tales about his famous friends.
After his friend Anthony Bourdain, whom he calls Tony, encouraged him to write down some of his stories — building on recollections Lanegan sketched out in his 2017 lyric book— Lanegan found that writing the book consumed him. Once Bourdain died by suicide, when Lanegan was only four or five chapters in, the singer turned to bestselling author Mishka Shubaly for guidance and completed the book, a process Lanegan describes as painful.
You wrote that you have a deep regret for your actions around his death, because he’d called you that day and you didn’t return his calls. How did you process his death? Sometime after his death, I remember going into a pawn shop one day, and my friend who ran the place said, “Courtney Love came in here the other day with material about some rehab.” And my immediate response was, “Tell her to shove her fuckin’ rehab.” My attitude was, unless somebody has some money for me or something I can sell or some drugs, I don’t need your help. I was just that kind of recalcitrant shithead drug addict, who’d rather be homeless than accepting anyone’s help.
The first time I saw him after I’d gotten clean, I’d been clean a year. I’m pretty sure that [Alice in Chains’] Jerry [Cantrell] and Mike Inez flew me up to Seattle because they were unable to get into his house. He had a camera and lived in the penthouse of this condo. So whenever anybody from that camp would come to see him, he would just ignore it. Jerry and Mike knew that when he saw me, he would let me in.
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