Devil in a Coma: a memoir

Product Information

Compelling . . . When he eventually does sing again, Mark Lanegan has the record of a lifetime to make Uncut Devil in a Coma offers a pleasingly bitter counterpoint to the clap-for-carers mood of the times Speaking of Ireland, has the landscape of the country shaped the work Lanegan has been doing? It’s so different from LA, I say. “It’s extremely physically beautiful here. But I’ve written songs in a lot of different locations over the years. At one point, I wrote an entire record in Motel 6 bathrooms in the middle of the night, sharing a room with the rest of my band. You can’t help but put a part of wherever you’re at, whether mentally or physically, into what you’re working on, and I know I do.”

Lanegan’s worsening drug use (it was on a 1992 tour that an infection from heroin abuse had doctors considering amputating his arm, and in the wake of Cobain’s death in 1994 he admitted diving deeper into drugs) didn’t seem to hinder his productivity. His 1994 solo album ‘Whiskey For The Holy Ghost’ was considered amongst his finest. 1995 saw him collaborate with Alice In Chains singer Layne Staley and Pearl Jam’s Mike McCready in the supergroup Mad Season. Every day,” he says. While he was in the coma, doctors wanted to give Lanegan a tracheotomy, but there was a danger it would alter his voice permanently, so Shelley refused permission. 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. 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 TreesMy 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. 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. 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).

I could have pulled some punches… But the one I hit hardest was myself,” he says. “If I was going to tell my story I was going to let the chips fall where they might.” 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. 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…I was incredibly proud of my wife for making that decision,” says Lanegan. “She’s the most important person I’ve ever had in my life which is why we’ve been together almost two decades.” It was definitely in my top five worst experiences,” the 57-year-old deadpans down the line from his home in County Kerry. He speaks slowly, with traces of the “scratchy whisper” he describes in Devil in a Coma, his memoir of his harrowing illness. “But I finally turned a corner recently and I’m feeling pretty normal, so it looks like it’s behind me.” 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.

A passage that ponders the idea of Covid as a conspiracy is presented as evidence of the dark places to which the disease sent Lanegan’s addled mind. In some ways, the section sits a little uncomfortably inside a book that has nothing but bottomless gratitude to the Irish health service that cared for him. Still, there is always much to admire in Lanegan’s writing even when it is hard to agree with everything he thinks. This slight but weighty volume only adds to the man’s muscular and vivid – in every sense of the word – body of work. 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 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. 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.” Devil in a Coma is self-lacerating (at one point, Lanegan calls himself “a cauldron of negative energy”) but I wondered if he was too hard on himself. His music has brought joy to fans while his writing is exhilarating and unexpectedly funny. In the memoir, he comes across as a comically difficult patient and I laughed out loud at his account of getting busted by a nurse for smoking.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.