Mark Lanegan

facepollution

Pap said:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPMufHyxNaw

Awesome! I played Blues Funeral to death when it came out. Bittersweet as it is, it's been good to dive back into his back catalogue over the last few days, the sheer volume of music he produced is pretty incredible.

fafane45

Hi,
I have been listening to the Gutter Twins lately. Loved his voice and was lucky to meet him several times in Seattle Antwerp.
I am looking to download one of his live Cd's: The night porter London 2010 Union Chapel. If anyone can help.
I have got his show at Melbourne if anyone needs it...

23scidoo

Nick Cave's words..

''Go online and watch Mark sing Blixa’s ‘father’ part with me in ‘The Weeping Song’ on that tour. As a frontman, I move around a lot on stage, I can’t help it, it is a habitual nervous thing, a kind of neurotic compensation for a voice I have never felt that comfortable with. But watch Mark, watch how he walks onto the stage, plants himself at the mic stand, one tattooed fist halfway down the stand, the other resting on top of the mic, immobile, massive, male. When the time comes to sing, he simply opens his mouth and releases a blues, a blues lived deeply and utterly earned, and that voice tears right through you, his sheer force on stage absolutely humbling. A greatness, Mark, a greatness — a true singer, a superb writer and beautiful soul, loved by all.''


https://youtu.be/FOIz8paD4VA

mickeyrat

soooo I'm  a fucking dumbass stuck in my classic rock shit primarily.Miss so much new shit and other shit I should have been clued into all along. Lanegan is one of those of the latter.

Have been giving him his due attention this past week since we heard the news. Was able to pick up a couple of the last records at my local spot. for now.

And as my wallet allows , will be signing up to get taken for a ride on discogs.....

as an aside, listening to blues funeral while doing under kitchen sink work as an overweight fat fuck with arthritic knees helped the entire process.

1ThoughtKnown

mfc2006

mickeyrat said:

soooo I'm  a fucking dumbass stuck in my classic rock shit primarily.Miss so much new shit and other shit I should have been clued into all along. Lanegan is one of those of the latter.

Have been giving him his due attention this past week since we heard the news. Was able to pick up a couple of the last records at my local spot. for now.

And as my wallet allows , will be signing up to get taken for a ride on discogs.....

as an aside, listening to blues funeral while doing under kitchen sink work as an overweight fat fuck with arthritic knees helped the entire process.

I'd wait a little while on Discogs. The prices have skyrocketed since his passing. You may be better off trying to track them down through a record store.

Blues Funeral is an amazing album!

mickeyrat

mfc2006 said:

mickeyrat said:

soooo I'm  a fucking dumbass stuck in my classic rock shit primarily.Miss so much new shit and other shit I should have been clued into all along. Lanegan is one of those of the latter.

Have been giving him his due attention this past week since we heard the news. Was able to pick up a couple of the last records at my local spot. for now.

And as my wallet allows , will be signing up to get taken for a ride on discogs.....

as an aside, listening to blues funeral while doing under kitchen sink work as an overweight fat fuck with arthritic knees helped the entire process.

I'd wait a little while on Discogs. The prices have skyrocketed since his passing. You may be better off trying to track them down through a record store.

Blues Funeral is an amazing album!

listened to some in my pick up.Stock  Kenwood in my Ram with surround sound and it  thumps....  cant wait to get this on vinyl and spin... along with most of the catalog I have heard so far.

as for discogs, theres a couple go to sellers who are straight up. I look for them first. or Japan. they seem reasonable too inculding shipping. Like with Van Halen, got mint shit for very very reasonable prices.

goldrush

Saw Mark’s obituary earlier.

https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/dailyrecordnews/name/mark-lanegan-obituary?id=33356569


Mark William Lanegan, 57, was born on November 25, 1964, in Ellensburg, Washington to Dale and Floy Lanegan. On February 22, 2022, Mark passed away in his home in Killarney, Co. Kerry, Ireland.

As a child, Mark played sports year-round. His favorite, though, was baseball. He fell in love with it early. He made many close friends in childhood that he loved and kept all his life.

Mark found life in music. He was a prolific and original talent. He wrote and recorded many beautiful songs as a solo artist and with the Mark Lanegan Band, creating numerous albums and collaborations over a nearly four-decade career. He was also a founding member of, and vocalist for, the band Screaming Trees.

Mark had a fervor to create and did so in many ways, including poetry, music, memoir, and drawing. Artistically, he was dedicated to his own horizons.

His art was, to many, his greatest contribution to our difficult world. But Mark was, above all, a man determined to make a beautiful life, one where writing and singing were gateways to something beyond himself, one where all his friends and family could enjoy the fruit of his countless labors. Mark was convinced that everyone could improve their lives through hard work, a sense of humor, and an eye toward growth, and he demonstrated these values through his actions. 

Visiting family often involved a trip to shoot pool, laughing until our sides split over the ridiculousness of life. The love he held for his Australian shepherds and cats, his passion for the L.A. Clippers, and the genuine way in which he took in what you had just said, listened and thought about it, then responded, made talking with Mark an enormous gift. 

He was our deeply beloved son, brother, uncle, husband, and friend. He was fiercely loyal and, in your corner, forever. He was a protector, confidant, encourager, and teacher (though he would likely reject that title). He could make you laugh on your darkest day.

Mark is survived by his wife Shelley Brien, father Dale Lanegan (Sherrie), mother Floy Hotarek (Bill), sister Trina Lanegan, nephews Teo Bicchieri (Teresa), Paolo Bicchieri (Lucie), and David Coppin Lanegan, as well as great-niece Noémie Bicchieri.

To remember Mark, do something that you love that brings you joy. Talk to an old friend. Walk your dogs and hug them. Throw a baseball.

goldrush

Barrett Martin posted this story on his FB page today…

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.

Loujoe

Funny^ I always kind of romanticize what goes on after a good show. Never would think the band members were fighting. Good stuff.

pjl44

Loujoe said:

Funny^ I always kind of romanticize what goes on after a good show. Never would think the band members were fighting. Good stuff.

You really need to read his autobiography, Sing Backwards and Weep. Every other page is another insane story. 

mfc2006

pjl44 said:

Loujoe said:

Funny^ I always kind of romanticize what goes on after a good show. Never would think the band members were fighting. Good stuff.

You really need to read his autobiography, Sing Backwards and Weep. Every other page is another insane story. 

Yup. Great read

Loujoe

Ordered it from my library. Also requested a CD too. Isn't that how the kids are doing it these days?

Pap

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTCqYUf16G8

goldrush

Barrett has posted his next story…

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.

Loujoe

What a memory.  nicely told. 

static111

Sadly  except for the great Screaming Trees song on Singles I am out of the loop on Mark's music.  Any good points to start?  Does he have some acoustic centered albums at all?

mickeyrat

static111 said:

Sadly  except for the great Screaming Trees song on Singles I am out of the loop on Mark's music.  Any good points to start?  Does he have some acoustic centered albums at all?

throw a fucking dart. you wont be disappointed. really though, begin where he did solo. his first one.....

Screaming Tree

static111 said:

Sadly  except for the great Screaming Trees song on Singles I am out of the loop on Mark's music.  Any good points to start?  Does he have some acoustic centered albums at all?

There is no wrong answer to where to start. To my mind, these are my five solo albums of his that I always return to:

Blues Funeral
Bubblegum
Whiskey for the Holy Ghost
Field Songs
Straight Songs of Sorrow

Mark said in many interviews that Blues Funeral was the album he was the proudest of. Great place to begin.

I am still having a difficult time processing his loss. Just terrible news. The man and his music meant a great deal to me.

Merkin Baller

Screaming Tree said:

static111 said:

Sadly  except for the great Screaming Trees song on Singles I am out of the loop on Mark's music.  Any good points to start?  Does he have some acoustic centered albums at all?

There is no wrong answer to where to start. To my mind, these are my five solo albums of his that I always return to:

Blues Funeral
Bubblegum
Whiskey for the Holy Ghost
Field Songs
Straight Songs of Sorrow

Mark said in many interviews that Blues Funeral was the album he was the proudest of. Great place to begin.

I am still having a difficult time processing his loss. Just terrible news. The man and his music meant a great deal to me.

Whiskey is great, but Bubblegum & BF are definitely my favorites.