Devil in a Coma: a memoir

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The Devil was fairly profligate with the best songs, but rare was the singer blessed with His very own voice. Grunge pioneer Mark Lanegan – who died yesterday (February 22) aged 57 – sang like a southern swamp, a canyon catacomb, a gallows tree.

I loved it. A great band — still is. Josh [Homme] is one of my closest friends, and the other guys were totally cool. On his time with Screaming Trees I ask Lanegan if he feels the seasons in his songs, and I tell him that so much of what he sings conjures autumn for me, darker days with warm and fading light. “I grew up in a place where we had really hot summers and really icy, snowy wintertimes. But the fall and the spring are my favourite seasons when you’re in a place that has four seasons, fall being the best. I find it an inspiring time, something about the crisp air, the smell of woodsmoke, the changing of the colours of the leaves.” There’s a little bit of autumn left before the solstice, and it feels like the perfect time to read Lanegan’s new memoir while listening to his records.

One morning in March 2021 with the second wave of infections ripping through Ireland where he was newly resident, Mark Lanegan woke up breathless, fatigued beyond belief, his body burdened with a gigantic dose of Covid-19. Admitted to Kerry Hospital and initially given little hope of survival, Lanegan's illness has him slipping in and out of a coma, unable to walk or function for several months and fearing for his life. No sooner had the accolades dried on that memoir than Lanegan, relocated to Ireland, land of his great-great-great-grandfather, to escape Covid, contracted Covid. In denial at first, he falls downstairs. Unable to breathe, deafened, with deep welts on his scalp and a useless leg, he is committed to hospital and put in an induced coma on kidney dialysis. His wife learns that Lanegan holds the hospital record for surviving longest in this parlous state. At one point, she refuses to allow the doctors to perform a tracheotomy that would have ended his singing career.

Thinking about how so many of the poems in Leaving California illumine experiences of wandering in a pandemic, I ask Lanegan if he starts writing in his mind before he puts anything to print. “It always starts in my head,” he says. “You have to have a thought before you can put it down on something. At least I do, anyway [laughs]. But I never write on paper. I write on my phone or an iPad.” Writing poetry, prose, and songs are different processes, he explains. “If I’m writing a book, I’ll sit down specifically to write for it,” and emphasises that he always writes with an aim toward finishing a book or an album. “I don’t really do something unless there’s a project I’m working at … I don’t really write songs unless it’s for a reason. I’m not somebody who just sits down for the fun of it and writes, although I do enjoy it. Since I usually have more than one thing I’m working on at a time, I have to sort of focus on whatever’s right in front of me and work on it.” I nervously typed the digits of Mark Lanegan’s Ireland number into my phone and pressed the green call button. It wouldn’t connect, and my heart sank. A few seconds later his number appeared as an incoming call. Is this still a good time? “Yeah,” he says, in his gravelly, quiet voice.I expected I’d relate to his story somewhat, but never expected to relate as much as I did. Though I didn’t have Covid, mere months before Covid existed, I was in the ICU with damaged lungs and ventilated for a bit too long, with the conversation of a tracheotomy with my loved ones occurring. His descriptions of the nightmares and hallucinations, the extreme obsession with getting out- all worded as though it came directly out of my own head. I’ve never read such a similar description of my own experience (though his was quite a bit more extreme and a much lengthier stay- my 37 days to his MONTHS). This story of the band The Fat White Family is incredible – the best book I’ve read in a long time.” What I’ll read next… This is a journal not of the Pandemiad but of the plague raging through one man's body and his brutal struggle to survive. If you're a Lanegan fan it feels like a natural extension of SBAW and his recent albums. If you have no idea about Lanegan but want to read about what it was like to have a bad bout of covid this may also interest you.

Lanegan has been so staggeringly prolific in the years of the pandemic, before and after the experience recounted in Devil in a Coma. Before he moved to Ireland, he started publishing his poetry. “Poetry is something I’ve kind of secretly dreamed of doing since I was a kid, dreamed that I might be able to write. But every time I tried to do it, it just didn’t seem to work for me. But in 2020, Wes Eisold suggested we do a book of poetry together, and he encouraged me to start writing poetry.” That book is Plague Poems, a powerful assemblage that’s split between Lanegan’s words in the first half and Eisold’s in the second. Throughout the book, Lanegan’s poems are haunted—by loss, by anger, and by the strange and prescient spectres of judgment days to come. “My first go at it was kind of lyrics masquerading as poetry. But I think I’ve gotten a little better at it since then. It’s something I enjoy. It’s more akin to songwriting, there’s a freedom in it. When you’re writing an actual book, there’s no freedom,” he laughs. Following Plague Poems, Lanegan wrote Leaving California, a collection that reflects on living in liminality, in fragments. Second editions of both Plague Poems and Leaving California were published in October 2021 and are available through Eisold’s Heartworm Press. It's an interesting read. Especially given some of Lanegan's previously released work that swings into the conspiracy view of ~covid~ which effectively kneecapped him regardless of his thoughts on the matter. And for all it's dark and twisty there's the signature Lanegan humour. I could just imagine the doctors and nurses clapping with glee at the chance to find a vein when he was hospitalised for a second time unconscious. My favorite part (if it’s appropriate to have a “favorite” part of such a brutal retelling of an illness) was the style of his writing- the combination of old memories combined with the re-telling of his hospitalization, and then poems that relate to the specific part of the story in between. There’s a 500-copy limited edition of Devil in a Coma that’s accompanied by a 12-inch print of one of the singer’s artworks. I asked him if he’s been painting and drawing for a while now, or if it’s something new. “I took one day of art class in high school and my art teacher told me I had no imagination and to get out of the room,” Lanegan says and laughs. “A couple of records ago, I started designing my own record covers for better or worse. But I didn’t start drawing until about a year ago. It’s really primitive, really amateur [laughs].”

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This slight but weighty volume only adds to the man's muscular and vivid - in every sense of the word - body of work By 2003 he was collaborating with Greg Dulli of Afghan Whigs as The Gutter Twins, who released one album (‘Saturnalia’, 2008), and in 2004 he began a celebrated collaboration with Isobel Campbell which would stretch for seven years and produce three albums.