What’s in a memoir? Depends what you did, who you knew; the bigger the subject, the shorter it’s going to be, and equally scattershot. Britney Spears’ The Woman in Me wasn’t comprehensive, and although the highs and accomplishments of her music career weren’t entirely absent, it was a grim book full of abuse, betrayal, failure, humiliation and punishment. Like so many other superstars, Spears couldn’t even enjoy her time at the top, made Queen of the Earth overnight, running at full speed, living a Cinderella story and something closer to Christiane F. Simon & Schuster might’ve suggested this angle, but they must’ve been happy when The Woman in Me came out as dark as it did. I would’ve rather read a comprehensive, day-to-day diary of the recording sessions for Oops!… I Did it Again or 2001’s Britney. But there are far more people who’d rather read about rehab stints than guitar pedals and Neve boards.
Thurston Moore’s Sonic Life, released the same day as The Woman in Me in 2023, is an exceptional rock memoir that flew under the radar, likely due to Moore’s wrecked reputation in the wake of his 2011 split from Kim Gordon. I grew up with Sonic Youth and “Kim & Thurston” as the mom and dad of the American underground, and his betrayal of her wasn’t nothing for their fans and the press—there’s a reason they still sound jilted. Even when Moore makes the smart move of limiting his discussion of his divorce to exactly three pages, he’s criticized by Pitchfork for being “revisionist” and “lazy,” as if he wouldn’t have been criticized even more for going into detail, just as his ex-wife was praised for her “bravery” in her slim Girl in a Band, a far less substantial and far more gossipy book than Sonic Life.
Like my friend Bennington Quibbits wrote a few weeks ago, Sonic Life distinguishes itself from most other rock musician memoirs through Moore’s exhaustive study of music history and the music he lived through. Far more valuable than history books by music critics who’ve never been qualified for anything, Sonic Life is more like a history book than a memoir or an autobiography, despite its linear layout. We begin with Moore as a child of five in his living room with his father playing piano every day (“Classical music ruled our airwaves”), and his first exposure to “Louie Louie” and his burning desire to grow his hair out (“Forget cute”); but once Moore reaches adulthood, the book is almost entirely outwardly directed, with first-hand accounts of epochal shows by Sid Vicious, Public Imagine Ltd., The Fall, Blondie, Nirvana, and many, many more, probably close to a hundred, at least. And all of that is alongside the history of his own band, where the clearest glimpses of Moore as a person come through: as skilled as he is stunted, an eternal teenager who made it work for a very long time, and arguably still is.
Abel Ferrara’s Scene, just released, and Mark Lanegan’s Sing Backwards and Weep, released in April 2020, are junkie memoirs par excellence. Lanegan died just two years after his book’s release, months after a particularly harrowing case of COVID-19 (his former Screaming Trees bandmate Van Conner died a similar death around the same time). It’s amazing that he made it to 57: more than Ferrara, who maintained a heroin and crack habit for nearly a decade and continued to make films, Lanegan’s life is one wasted opportunity after another. He writes as much, and the book is black as pitch, “warts only” as the dust jacket says; despite going from bumfuck Washington state to touring the world and making it onto MTV and the Billboard charts, Lanegan’s life was a black hole of indiscriminate, “garbage can” drug use and all-encompassing self-hatred.
Best friends with Kurt Cobain and Dylan Carlson, the man behind drone metal innovators Earth, Lanegan kept losing friends as the 1990s wore on, and the book ends with him hearing about the death of Layne Staley in 2002, about four years into Lanegan’s sobriety. The book doesn’t cover his 2004 relapse, coma, and subsequent 2006 rehab stint, nor any solo album after 1994’s Whiskey for the Holy Ghost. He mentions in passing on the last page that he was a member of Queens of the Stone Age from 2001 to 2005, their most commercially successful period. Christ, where have I been? Turns out he just sang: Lanegan was never confident enough to play guitar in public, and he was still “getting used to the idea of singing” in his late-30s. Listening to his first solo album The Winding Sheet, you wonder what Cobain saw in this guy other than a drug buddy… and then it hits you right in the chest… this is where Cobain was at, this was his world, this was his surrogate older brother. Reading Sing Backwards and Weep changes your conception of Cobain and grounds him in a much more banal, familiar junkie world.
Ferrara’s Scene is closer to The Woman in Me than either of these exhaustive rock memoirs. The director’s still living, still working, and the book is so short you can read it one sitting. Ferrara skips from year to year, decade to decade, offering select nuggets (Debbie Harry was a drug buddy in the early-1990s, into heroin) and a few choice anecdotes, mostly involving the semi- or fully-criminal financiers of his many movies. Where Lanegan writhes around in self-loathing, Ferrara (74) is still making amends, having only gotten sober at 61. One of his grown daughters hasn’t spoken to him in years, and he hopes that will change. Childhood friend and longtime co-writer Nicky St. John bailed in the early-1990s and Ferrara “never saw him again;” people and projects drop off when your main project is scoring and staying well. What Scene and Sing Backwards and Weep have in common are their dope-sick odysseys. I’ve never done heroin, but I’ve waited hours and hours in discomfort for drugs, and I will read ANYONE’S copping story.
Ferrara had his times criss-crossing Europe totally dope-sick, but he was never living on the streets for any extended period of time, and certainly nowhere like Seattle’s “the Jungle,” a park full of homeless people and drug dealers near his longtime neighborhood in First Hill. To think this guy made it to 57 is astonishing after reading his book. Why him and not Staley? They had similar appetites. But as antisocial and negative as Lanegan can be, he’s also a self-described “sex freak,” and Staley, like Cobain, “craved isolation.” Lanegan had many, many girlfriends and one-night stands, with “absolutely no moral compass” when it came to cheating. He emphasizes he never went past his “legal, consensual kinks,” and even relates a story involving Anthony Kiedis’ father and two probably underaged girls (he extricated himself quickly), but the takeaway is that this is a guy who enjoyed being alive more than two of his closest friends.
He had more self-confidence, tall and traditionally handsome in ways that Cobain and Staley weren’t. It doesn’t take a stunner to become addicted to dope, but the number of times that Lanegan walked off stage and just started making out with the first girl he saw—to blissful results—is closer to Jimmy Page than any of his grunge contemporaries. Lanegan was Generation X through and through, nihilistic yet socially conscious enough to ask hero and eventual friend Jeffrey Lee Pierce about the racist lyrics on the first Gun Club record. One of his most memorable trysts is with a homeless girl known only as “Shadow”: they’d lure guys up to Lanegan’s drug den apartment, her pretending to be a prostitute, and just as the guys would disrobe, he’d jump out with a baseball bat, demanding money. Rather than have the cops called, it worked every time; years later, after Shadow went for a walk and simply never came back, Lanegan sees her picture on the front page of a newspaper, the latest victim in a local serial killer, her body dumped in “the Jungle” along with two other women.
Before reading Sing Backwards and Weep, I’d never listened to Screaming Trees or Lanegan’s solo work, despite his close connection to Kurt Cobain. They’re as bad as Lanegan claims, just total garbage, the kind of banal, mediocre music that isn’t so bad it’s outrageous, but bad enough that there’s no way to enjoy it. Why’d he stick with a band full of untalented assholes? He wanted to get out of Washington, and that he did. What then? Heroin, crack, shooting coke all night long in complete silence. Music goes out the window very quickly. A second volume would’ve been great, but who knows how much Lanegan wrote before his untimely death. Sing Backwards and Weep is an open wound, an abscess, and one of the most harrowing rockstar memoirs I’ve ever read. It makes Scar Tissue look like a party.
Now, where’s Evan Dando’s book? He’s still living in the Financial District, right? He never got clean. I’d love to hear what he’s up to…
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @NickyOtisSmith