In last week’s post, I mentioned an article I’d been working on at SPIN that had been red-lined within an inch of its life and had become, in my mind, a primary reason for me to leave the magazine for other adventures. The story was on the band Screaming Trees and it never was published. A few days after that post, just this last Tuesday, February 22, Mark Lanegan, the band’s singer, left this planet, possibly for other adventures if one believes in that sort of thing. His death, sitting squarely as it does in my excavation of memories, brings up acutely what a voice can do to a person—and possibly why I’m currently struggling to dive as deeply into music as I used to.

Vocals in songs have always soaked me in a way I don’t experience with any other form of creativity. I can and do get completely lost in stories, whether fiction or non, printed or visual—although I mostly prefer written. And song lyrics usually tug me deeper into a song, yet they’re not crucial to my embrace. Smells Like Teen Spirit isn’t a collection of words to move the world. John Lennon’s Jealous Guy (and this Roxy Music version. sheesh.) is. Both those songs rattled me fine&good because of where the voices took me. A note hit, sustained, dropped, caught, high, low, I’d follow with more than my ears. And I’d go with abandon, which is why I suspect I’ve grown shy of those moments, given I’d feel the rip deep inside as I opened myself to the moment. I’d do that gladly because I wanted to feel as much as I could even knowing there would be a scar. I like scars, by the way. I think they tell stories of their own, are testimonies to healing, resilience, a life lived, whether physically visible (I have a stupid amount of scars on my hands from getting the pits out of avocados because I never learned the right, safe way) or the kind that exist hidden from view. What seemed to happen with me and music was that I started to mix up the person breathing life into the song with the flesh&blood person delivering it. I mean, of course I did.

A confusion that darkness always indicated depth. A kind of Eurydice in reverse. I’d follow the voice down and down, curious to know what was underneath but only as a visitor. A part of me happy to not see an inch in front of my face, but to have to depend instead on all the other senses. I wanted to know intimately where the voice might take me…but maybe not really. The thing that would override at some point would be fear: of getting stuck wherever it was we were going, of losing absolute and total control and never being able to get it back, of falling the F apart. So at the very last minute, just as I was about to step over the threshold, I’d feel that voice looking back to make sure I was following, and I’d turn tail. Run left, right, backward, flail off back to shore.

Mark Lanegan was one of the sirens. His voice held every dark corner. I’d never heard anyone (except perhaps Tom Waits) who in the timbre of their vocal was able to communicate exactly the place their emotions lived. As if he was daring you to explore that, stay there, do. not. take. your. attention. away. It wasn’t the fire so much as the vapors. The rubbing of notes one against the other, gravel soaked in kerosene sparked by a Bic that for me burned through to meaning. Felt brave what he was offering. So the courage to hold myself in the white-hot heat he seemed to be offering, to burn away bullshit, kept me curious but also scalded because, once I knew him, I couldn’t separate the soul from the song.

I met him as this song was making its way into the world. Screaming Trees had performed at some kind of SPIN shindig and as I remember it, they were all sitting at the bar: the two Connor brothers (bass&guitar) and Barrett Martin (drummer). (Side note: this documentary Hype! is amusing and has a funny Connor brother quote at minute 49.27. Here’s the trailer. And BTW, watching it now, gads was that scene pale. This article on the Black Godmother of Grunge puts so much perspective on the intrinsic race&sex-ism of that scene.) I went over and we all started talking, except for Mark, who mostly smoked. And drank. His vibe was very much Jim Morrison—not that I ever met Jim Morrison, but I guess my version: sultry, removed, and fascinating in a way that shot a neon danger sign above his head. But yet I persisted because, yes, I was that person who felt I could crack a difficult man’s (any person, really) veneer. Become the one they confided in. Be the only human who truly understood them. (Spoiler alert: this was never in any universe true.) It was a fantasy born from the very first stirrings of Led Zeppelin–listening and why I favored the Stones over the Beatles. The hell-raising, not the harmonies. The difficulties, not the delight. That was my soundtrack.

The conversation turned. The party ended. Mark had talked and watched, and I knew he’d paid me attention. We took a walk through the NYC streets stopping at bars, then up to my roof where I’d brought my walkman with two little speakers and we listened to Percy Sledge’s “When a Man Loves a Woman” over and over and over. And the fact that we cried while listening made me feel whole. Then the sun came up. That day I was traveling but Mark had decided I should cancel that so we could continue wandering and listening. He couldn’t understand how I didn’t want that also. Well, sure, if I could split myself in two, but I loved my job. He was miffed and said some things. In some part of myself I knew this wasn’t about me, that I was getting a really clear view into the part of him where the darkness lived and the lyrics sprang. I left him on the sidewalk and got in a cab. (It makes my head actually hurt to think how I could function with no sleep.)

When I got to my location, there were flowers waiting and a note and while there was a part of me that still thought Maybe this is something, there was a whisper of reality that said No, that needed to only have been a moment. I cannot save this person. No one’s asking me to.

The last time I saw him outside of official music-biz stuff, we were meeting in a hotel bar after one of the band’s shows. I was coming in from the airport late. He arrived with a girl in tow. Suggested we all go up to his room. This was that Eurydice moment for me. I couldn’t follow him there. And weirdly, as I stepped out of the lobby onto the street, I had a moment thinking I’d failed. That I wasn’t willing to experience everything life had to offer. That I was too scared to really live. And in one of those this-is-your-life flashes, across the street my former boss from Rolling Stone was just coming up from the subway. He had on a tux. If he saw me, he didn’t acknowledge, but I immediately entered the one-of-these-things-not-like-the-other zones and felt the road I’d chosen hard under my feet. It was a fine road. Maybe not always solid, but somehow being reminded of what had been while leaving what couldn’t be reminded me I was all right just walking my own road. I was glad in that moment I hadn’t followed anyone into darkness thinking it was the entryway to feeling. It wasn’t the last time I tried to follow though, because memory is fickle.

I understand this confusion around emotion, living, feeling deeply as being connected to where I am with music right now. Until I can sit with the sounds, let the voice enter me, understand I can lose control, but yet find my way back—maybe a Hansel and Gretel version rather than Orpheus—then I’ll still watch from a distance and study the bread crumbs. Listening to Mark Lanegan in this moment scratched me up inside the same as it did decades ago. I go immediately to his pain, yet he undoubtedly had pleasure too, so I’m going back in to listen for that. But really, it’s not about him. I can’t say for sure what it is about altogether, but if singing is a sustained scream delivered on pitch (direct Dennis Fox quote), then the parallel of living is much the same: Holding that sound, finding the pitch, remembering to breathe.

In memory of Mark.