Mark Lanegan
Everett True remembers one of the greatest singers of his generation.
CHARLES PETERSON
“SCREAMING TREES ARE just too good to be huge, to be spread thin. You can see no earthly reason why they aren’t the biggest rock band on the planet; you realise how Chris Cornell or Eddie Vedder or even James Hetfield would kill to write anything that’s played tonight,” wrote Melody Maker critic Neil Kulkarni in 1996, the year the Ellensburg, WA group released their tumultuous seventh album, Dust – the album that should have swept all before it.
The band had everything: volatile chemistry; epic, sweeping rock anthems; long, flailing hair, and riffs to match; and in singer Mark Lanegan an old-school bluesman with a whisky-laced honeyed growl of a voice – and the lifestyle to go with it. Obituaries that have appeared since his recent death at the age of 57 refer to him as “perhaps the greatest singer of his generation”. Quite a claim, considering his peers.