There’s this point during the 4AD Sessions taping for his then newly released album Blues Funeral where Mark Lanegan gives this look -- a look that signals a kind of focus on a singular subject that starts to appear borderline malicious to anyone who notices. I’m certain the 1.3 million people who’ve watched the performance on YouTube would attest.
But it’s a forgivable misdemeanour once you know just how much suffering, death, and self destruction this man went through his professional and personal life, reflected starkly in his entire body of work -- from his time as the lost leading man of celebrated Seattle outfit Screaming Trees to, more importantly, his surprisingly prolific discography as a solo drifter.
Mark Lanegan had always seemed to me an odd duck within the pantheon of the Seattle scene of the late 80s and 90s -- lacking the boyish rage of Eddie Vedder, the herculean stature of Chris Cornell, or the heroin chic of Kurt Cobain and Layne Staley; the closest thing to stage presence that Lanegan ever displayed was his palpable discomfort at being on stage itself, seemingly anyway.
At a time when being alienated and disaffected were in vogue, Mark Lanegan was more of an outsider than most of his peers. And that only further added to his mystery.
“If you’re in a roomful of people and wondering where Mark is, he’s usually standing on the other side of the doorway looking in -- literally. He is an outsider on purpose. I’ve always loved that about him. He is, and I say this lovingly, the meanest nice guy I know,” corroborates Queens of the Stone Age’s Joshua Homme, with whom Lanegan shared the stage (and more than a few needles, one would imagine) on many occasions, in a 2008 Magnet profile.
This year marks the 10th anniversary of Blues Funeral, certainly not the shining jewel of Lanegan’s discography (that honour goes to 2004’s Bubblegum) but it is an album that saw me through a particularly desperate and lonely time in my own life.
With a dwindling number of friends and being waist-deep in the formative years of university -- a place that never failed to make me feel like an outsider -- I took solace in exploring a world of music on the internet, trawling through various forums and making friends with people without faces.
But I didn’t need RateYourMusic or the music sub-section of the Giant Bomb forums to tell me that Blues Funeralwould end up being something of an anchor for me. Lanegan’s uttering of the following few words in the album’s seventh track, delivered through uncharacteristic crooning, is all it took for that to be cemented:
“I thought I'd rule like Charlemagne
But I've become corrupt
Now I crawl the promenade
To fill my empty cup”
Strangely enough, for an album with such a morose title, Blues Funeral shows surprising signs of life, especially as a followup to the incredibly dark and dreary Bubblegum. But eight years are bound to change us all as people, even the most inherent of depressives. And those signs of life were visible for the next decade or so as Lanegan proceeded to embark on his most prolific era, working on a raft of collaborations with artists such as Moby and Duke Garwood while also putting out five more albums culminating with 2020’s bluntly titled Straight Songs of Sorrow.
In late 2017, Mark Lanegan appeared as a guest on Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown, and watching the two men share a meal and a lively conservation about food, music, culture -- everything that makes life worth living -- this close to both of their ultimate demise is now a strangely tough watch, personally speaking.
But I hope the way he appeared in that five-minute feature on a cable network show is how he really was up until his last days: Quite un-mean, passionate about whatever he’s discussing, and relatively comfortable in his own skin.
Maybe there’s hope for me after all.
Rubaiyat Kabir is Joint Editor, Op-Ed and Editorial, Dhaka Tribune.
