The many lives of Mark Lanegan

 

Mark Lanegan was one of those mystical creatures whose life was so surreal that you assumed it would end at any moment, until it didn’t and you started thinking they were immortal… until they weren’t. Born in the 1960’s in a small town not far from Seattle, he learned to drink and started using drugs by the time others were learning to play piano and drive (respectively). Luckily, the young man found an outlet for his angst: that would be music.

Joining what would become Screaming Trees in 1984, first as a drummer, he proved either too poor a drummer or so great a singer than he ended up being the band’s frontman. Although arguably less famous today than Nirvana, Pearl Jam or Soundgarden, that band was in many ways one of the pioneers of grunge, that Seattle-based subgenre that would eventually take over rock music as we knew it. Over nearly 2 decades and 8 albums, the band carved themselves a place in grunge, rock and music history at large.

A good friend of Kurt Cobain, who actually sang on his debut album, Lanegan saw the man mere hours before he passed away… Meanwhile, he kept on having his own drug-related health issues, that eventually had him spend time homeless before finally going to rehab in the late 1990’s. Still, he relapsed a few years later and ended up in a coma: but the man simply wouldn’t die, no matter how dire his circumstances were…

Having started a solo career in the early 1990’s as all of this was going on, he kept going on his own after Screaming Trees disbanded. In the 2010’s, he enjoyed a bona fide career resurgence as one of the original gangsters of grunge, as Cobain had become a semi-god by then, Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell had taken his own life and the persisting influence of the genre was being felt across the board. He also ventured into new territory, with duet albums featuring Belle and Sebastian co-founder Isobel Campbell. The man simply never ceased to surprise…

Another close friend who committed suicide, Anthony Bourdain, encouraged Lanegan to pick up writing. After a first 2020 essay, he published Devil in a Coma last year, which depicted his horrendous battle with Covid-19. But he also came out of that alive, only to pass away in early 2022 of still unknown causes… One thing is for sure: his life will not have been in vain and the work he leaves behind will be listened to, read and appreciated by generations of people trying to find their way in this world…