Sing Backwards and Weep

January 27, 2020
This overwrought debut memoir from the frontman of the proto-grunge band Screaming Trees is packed with rage, guilt, and the seamy details of a life nearly flushed down the drain. Hating his dead-end upbringing in a Washington logging town, Lanegan became a high school alcoholic with a rock-star attitude who cared only about baseball, “punk rock and getting loaded and laid.” His band Screaming Trees gained some success in the Pacific Northwest scene of the late 1980s, garnering accolades from Lanegan’s friends (Kurt Cobain among them), and scoring success with singles including “Nearly Lost You” as the grunge scene exploded. Nevertheless, Lanegan hated being in the band—calling the group “sick, violent, depressing, destructive, and dangerous.” After a few years clean he fell into a spiral of drinking, drug use, and violence. Even while Lanegan’s raspy, soulful, Tom Waits–like solo output, as in Whiskey for the Holy Ghost, racked up acclaim, he was too busy shooting up, he writes, to enjoy it, and by the mid-1990s, he was dealing heroin and crack to support his growing habits. This dark and engaging epic of destruction is at times undone by Lanegan’s obnoxious cockiness, yet it does serve as a raw look at the grunge music scene. Lanegan’s fans will wince and delight in this gritty narrative.