The Indescribable Voice of Mark Lanegan

Mark Lanegan’s voice cannot be described. In fact, until recently, Mark Lanegan’s voice couldn’t even be recorded. At least not properly. It took more than 30 engineers over the course of 20 plus records in as many years just to crack the code of his baritone – a rumbling throttle so coarse you could strike a match on it. This long-overdue feat was accomplished on his 2005 album Bubblegum, on which his voice has so much low end it practically gives the bass guitar the bitch seat. 20 years is a long time for a musician to go without having their instrument accurately captured, especially a world-famous singer like Lanegan who’s fronted bands as big as The Screaming Trees and Queens of the Stone Age. But you can’t really fault the recording engineers. After all, Lanegan’s voice is a bit of a physical anomaly and was once even the subject of scientific research:

In the mid ’90s he volunteered for a series of experiments in Phoenix that were involved with the weaponization of sound. The so-called “brown frequency” produces extremely intense resonance at very low frequencies, causing a person in its path to spontaneously shit their pants. But scientists believed that lower-midrange frequencies, like the ones in Lanegan’s baritone, had the potential to do even more damage to the human body, including shattering bones and bursting blood vessels, if wielded with enough severity. So Lanegan spent a bizarre week being the government’s guinea pig, a pretty strange move for a rebel’s rebel who’s been at odds with the law his whole life. But Lanegan is not the kind of person you want to try and understand. Like God, you’re just supposed to listen to him, not fathom him.

As weird as the Phoenix experiment story is, it’s not the weirdest anecdote about Mark Lanegan. Not by far. His biography is a litany of rock’n’roll hyperbole. In his defense, he got off to a bad start. He was raised by a northern California chapter of the Hells Angels, a radical anti-authoritarian biker gang at its most notorious and violent in the ’60s. (It has been alleged that this same chapter of the Angels was responsible for the murder of Lanegan’s parents in a drug-related incident.) Reared by professional hellions, Lanegan learned the art of trouble-making from the best. But somehow he managed to absorb the culture’s rootless and drunken lifestyle while still remaining a man apart and, until the age of 17, Lanegan had serious ambitions to become a priest. His attempts to convert his fellow bikers to Christ fell flat when it was discovered he was sleeping with not one, but three, of the Angels' "old ladies." I would imagine this is about as unforgivable an offense as exists in the world of outlaw biker gangs and Lanegan was ordered to be taken out. Lanegan claims he fled on foot and escaped in a blinding dust storm that blew through at the last possible minute (his old friend and former Screaming Trees member Van Conner contradicts this account, saying that Lanegan just bribed one of the hitmen with money he had stolen from the Angels’ treasury).

After this, Lanegan went through a period of urban vagrancy in northern Seattle and began meeting many of the musicians that would eventually be part of the grunge explosion. During this time, he stole a copy of Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums from a coffee shop. In the book, Kerouac takes a job as a fire lookout for the United States Fire Service on Washington state’s Desolation Mountain, using the experience for Buddhist epiphanies. Lanegan was so enamored with the story and its ideas that he mimicked Kerouac by securing a similar position on Vancouver’s Ash Peak. He lasted less than a week. The Fire Service removed him after lightening struck his camp three times in five days – nearly starting a forest fire – in a particularly dry week in which there were no storms. (Lanegan claims that lightening has followed him his whole life, one example of which burned down his apartment complex in ’92.)

But even that isn’t the weirdest story about Mark Lanegan. The weirdest story might be the time Lanegan was broadsided by an “off-duty” ice cream truck doing close to thirty miles per hour and walked away with only scratches while the truck had over eight grand in damage, including a caved-in engine. Doctors credited his miraculous survival to adrenaline but at the time of the incident (which was a nightly news phenomenon for days) Lanegan insisted he had seen himself surrounded by a cold, blue light, which he believed was an angel of God wrapping him in its protective embrace. (In the news video from the incident, Lanegan is covered in what looks like several vats of blue Superman-flavored ice cream. I can’t help but wonder what relation, if any, this has to his “cold, blue light.”)

So that’s pretty weird. But actually, the weirdest story might be the one where a group of renegade priests from an L.A. archdiocese tried to use Lanegan’s voice for ritual exorcisms – in one case asking him to sing Ave Maria repeatedly for over three hours – because they believed that his growling, sandpaper croon was imbued with a special power over devils. Lanegan, probably tired of having his voice treated as a commodity of control, first by the government and now the Catholic church, cut his exorcist career short almost immediately, claiming he had only agreed to try it so he could “see who was eviler.”

And then there's the other time he made the nightly news, this time twice in one week. First when he single-handedly stopped the robbery of a late-night Mexican fast-food restaurant. And second when, six days later, he tried to hold the same place up and was arrested in the process.

Come to think of it, the weirdest story by far has to be that the first thing he did with his cash advance when the Screaming Trees signed to Epic Records was to have two stumps of bone and cartilage surgically removed from his back that had been there since birth. They were, oddly, in the exact spot a pair of wings might grow – if a man could grow wings. (Van Conner says that, in high school, Lanegan would sneak into the woodshop at night and try to file them down with a belt sander.)

And the stories never stop. He sold the publishing to “I Nearly Lost You,” the Trees’ biggest-selling single, for a pack of cigarettes and a dirty magazine. His favorite delicacy is to put Maker’s Mark in his Cap’n Crunch cereal. He sleeps in his truck and only eats on the toilet. He can only writes songs in the month of May and, since the early ’90s, has annually spent those four weeks locked in his bedroom with a guitar and a pad of paper, stricken with a mysterious fever. He has over 50 tattoos, all of which he did himself, all of the same picture – a busty, 50-ish San Francisco bartender named Lane that Lanegan met and fell in love with in his early teens and hasn't seen since.

All of these experiences, as heartbreaking and extreme as they are, have made Lanegan’s voice what it is: unknowable. Music writers inevitably use descriptives like “whiskey soaked,” or “cigarette stained,” or some other cliché that implies its weathered sonority is the product of hard living. Because it sounds charred, like a smokestack smells; like a barn looks after it has burned. But it’s really his phrasing, which is Billie-Holiday tattered, that rattles the listener. It’s hard feelings, not hard living, that make his sung sentences waft heavenward like smoke ring prayers (only to die unanswered at the ceiling). It’s the brusque but meticulous delivery, the careful performances carved out of some kind of sad surgery, that make Lanegan’s singing its own kind of holy.

It would be cute to say that Lanegan can only sing that way because he’s done time. Or because he’s learned about time, watching so many of the other addicts from the Seattle rock boom die or lose their muse while he has survived, still and tall like a tree, his voice hardened over with bark, his songs ever-widening, wind-blown blooms. It would be cute, and it might be true. But that would be trying to describe Mark Lanegan’s voice. And Mark Lanegan’s voice cannot be described.

Mark Lanegan Band – When Your Number Isn't Up [From Bubblegum]


Mark Lanegan Band – One Hundred Days [From Bubblegum]


Soulsavers – No Expectations
[From It's Not How Far You Fall, It's the Way you Land]

Soulsavers – Through My Sails (feat. Will Oldham)
[From It's Not How Far You Fall, It's the Way you Land]

Queens of the Stone Age – In The Fade [From Rated R]