Then My Veins Might Burn

As I hear for a countless occasion “Down In The Dark” on my old iPod Classic of 120 GB –it's not that I am freak of technology: I love physical albums and in fact I dislike Apple 'cause my iPod is on perfect conditions and it seems that it is suffering “scheduled obsolescence”, but there are not many options to hear (converted) physical albums while you take a rest from work– and as I cannot stop thinking about a man waiting for the rush as he tells to a girl that she will make it a little better for a while, I would like to write that I heard about Mark Lanegan long before The Winding Sheet was released by Sub Pop in May 1990.

Nonetheless, first I listened Screaming Trees (when I watched Singles, back in 1998... or something like that...?) and, in particular, I heard for the first time this song on which Kurt Cobain sang and played guitar, when I downloaded it from Napster... almost 20 years ago. 

I was a teenager, Internet was “on fire” and I was crazy about Nirvana –I still like their music– and, in Napster, the song was suspiciously labeled as “an unknown song of Kurt Cobain”. 

What I've written so far, might look like an ordinary thing, but I have a different story: almost three years ago, on a pretty awesome period of my life, I saw Mark Lanegan, face to face, and we shook hands after a show. 

His band came to Mexico City. They were touring Gargoyle –Lanegan's tenth solo studio album– and they played at El Plaza Condesa. It was a pretty emotive show. I was about to cry over and over again. In the most Freudian sense of the term, it was a cathartic show for me. 

For more than five years, in which I went from being a postgraduate mentally ill student to being a postdoctoral physically ill researcher, I had been listening to his music.  

In between, I had a few miserable years. 

When I started my postdoctoral research, I was diagnosed with gastroesophageal reflux and I followed various unsuccessful medical treatments. Independently of the terrible suffocating experiences inherent to the disease and independently of the endless awful nauseas provoked by antibiotics, gastroenterologists told me that reflux was eroding my esophagus in such a way that it was very likely that it progressed to a cancerous tumor. 

On the previous months I got to the operating room, I listened Mark Lanegan's music more than ever. I associated his sad music with my ill mood, but, somehow, music turned my negative emotions into something positive.

From his solo career, Blues Funeral was the first album I heard –I bought it almost immediately it was released by 4AD on February 2012–, then I listened The Winding Sheet –couldn't resist to the bunch of papers I'd read over the years pointing it as a big influence on Nirvana's MTV Unplugged In New York– and then Bubblegum and Gargoyle, and then his collaborations with Queens Of The Stone Age, Duke Garwood and Isobel Campbell's Belle & Sebastian.

As I write these words, I have heard all his albums. 

I could try to explain why “Bleed All Over”, “My Shadow Life”, “Emperor”, “St Louis Elegy”, “Deepest Shade”, “When Your Number Isn't Up”, “One Hundred Years”, “Bombed”, “Wild Flowers”, “Juarez”... gave me the chills, but I won't.

Words aren't enough. 

I respect him as an artist. He truly seems one of the very few artists with enough guts to quit “the Seattle Sound” of the nineties. (I know: Screaming Trees were from Ellensburg, but I guess you get my point.) 

At a more personal level, his lyrics were a powerful inspiration on my worst days. They made me think of my disease and they made me realize that my disease was not the worst disease in the world. It was funny, 'cause I really didn't feel OK. My life sucked.

Sometimes I was so tired of not even being able to eat regular food or drink something other than plain water. Sometimes I hated my life. I felt nauseated all day long. I was endlessly clearing my throat. I ate without hunger just a very few selected meals. Eating was so monotonous that I lost a few pounds. 

Day after day, I woke up sick, hopeless and nauseated. I couldn't even tolerate regular smells. They made me threw up. I had to take everywhere my own bag of emergency in case I threw up. I couldn't even read a single paper for 30 consecutive minutes. 

By September 2018, I was finally feeling like a normal guy. Three to four months after surgery, I'd re-started to eat regular food and I could even drink a beer or orange juice. 

Obviously, I was so happy. Besides I was feeling OK and I was so excited by the show at El Plaza Condesa, one day before the show, my then most recent research paper was accepted for publication. 

That paper was the result of my last three devious postdoctoral years and it meant a lot to me. Although I had written all my previous papers in which I was first author –of course they were supervised by my PhD advisor–, it was, officially, my first paper as a corresponding author.

A few minutes before the show, at the stand of Mark Lanegan's official merchandise, I would have loved to buy Phantom Radio or I Am The Wolf, but I was so broke. Instead I bought a lithography. It's strange how sometimes you don't have money when you really need it. 

At the end of the show, Mark Lanegan came out of stage to sign some things. 

I was the first in the line. I was the first in the audience to shake hands with him. He was so polite and he signed the lithography I'd bought and my copy of Uncle Anesthesia (one of the most popular albums of Screaming Trees, which was produced by Chris Cornell).

I would have liked to tell him a few things about the way his music had changed my perspective on life, when I was so sick, but I didn't want to bother him. Neither I wanted to act like a moron. I just told him: “It was a great show”. And I really meant it. 

Under the dim lights of the forum, I saw Mark's smiling. 

For a moment, I looked at his red hair and then into his eyes –he wore thick glasses– and I tried to guess how many times did he had heard the very same words from another silly fans around the world and I felt so stupid. 

Then I gave him my hand and he politely gave me his. We shook hands. 

I walked away feeling numb.

My copy of Sing Backwards And Weep –Mark Lanegan's memoir– arrived a couple of days ago. As I started to read it, I checked my twitter time line and the first thing I found was a tweet on which Mark Lanegan quoted a passage I had just read on his book. 

He said that the Sex Pistols changed his life. 

Then I stopped reading and started to write this post. Hope someday he'll read a few lines of how his music saved my (miserable) life. 

Down In The Dark

I Wanna Fly With You

It was spring. It was Friday. An undergrad wanted to be accepted in the lab. 

A few days earlier, my advisor had asked him to prepare a seminar about anorexia nervosa. 

I was an advanced postgraduate student and I had an experiment at that precise time.

Even though the talk was so damn boring, I didn't want to be a pain in the neck for my advisor –meaning I didn't want to provoke his typical rage–, so I had to switch between the experiment and the seminar. 

Now that I think about it, I really enjoyed performing experiments. On those days, I'd been performing some experiments with the passive avoidance paradigm. The idea was more elaborated, but in brief: since in my most recent published paper of the time, we had shown that an endocannabinoid acting in the lateral hypothalamus increased REM sleep for almost 24 hours, I was evaluating if an inhibitor of the synthesis of this molecule could block avoidance learning. Then I had a couple of published papers as first author and a couple of manuscripts in preparation more. 

Though I had proposed to my advisor this experiment and another one which ended up in NeuroReport, a couple of weeks before this seminar he had yelled at me in front of the undergrads.

It had been so annoying. He'd said that I just followed his instructions and that I didn't have ideas. 

Obviously it pissed me off. 

Now that I think about it, that's why I acquired an aversion to perform experiments. 

Each time since then, I remember those days and I feel like an idiot. 

Well, that Friday I would have like to focus in the experiment, but I didn't want to piss off my advisor, so, at a moment, I had to cancelled the experiment. 

 
After an hour or so, I was really bored. 

The undergrad didn't know how to explain the brain circuitry responsible for food intake regulation. 

All I wanted to do was to get away from the lab and to get drunk. 

On those days, I was really stressed, and I drank and did some other drugs basically from Friday to Sunday, to deal with my stress problems. I used to get wasted and to return tired and unhappy to the lab on Mondays. 

Alma Delia was an invited professor at the lab. She was about ten years older than me. 

She was kind of pretty, but a conflictive woman. All the undergraduate students worked for her and she didn't recognized them. My advisor trusted her in a pretty sickening way. 

I had the impression that she was responsible for the sickening environment we suffered at the lab, when my advisor experienced his worst times. 

Four years earlier or so, when I'd arrived to the lab, I had a few hours as a half-time professor at the School of Psychology. Alma Delia immediately looked at me in a pretty hostile way. 

Maybe she thought we would become enemies. I dunno. 

Then she used to dressed up in blouses with a pronounced neckline. Her nipples were visible all the time. She even had a nickname. The older postgrads called her “Miss Nipples”. 

Her nipples were so impressive. They looked like a couple of tough craters. 

At the beginning, when we toasted for the end of the year or the end of a congress or the end of a symposium, Alma Delia got wasted. 

She became a crazy sexual woman. Sometimes undergrads had to take care of her. 

She used to loss her head and to make sexual comments that other researchers found like a proposal to get involved with her. When I saw her drunk for the first time in a party, she even told me some sort of joke about she giving me a blowjob. It was so sickening.  

As the undergraduate student tried to decipher the opposing roles of leptin and ghrelin in anorexia nervosa, my need to get stoned increased. I had a seat beside Alma Delia. I could watch her and she could watch me. 

She dressed up a tiny skirt. Her legs were terrific.

 

Sometimes, when she got over bored, she stretched her legs and then leaned her back against the back of the chair. Her breast was exposed on plain view. I just couldn't ignore her.    

She did so, several times. Her legs were terrific. They made think of a story of Bukowski and Bukowski made me desire to get wasted. I couldn't focus on anything else. I couldn't stop watching them. I believed I understood why Bukowski was mad about legs. 

At some point, she discovered I was watching her. 

She smiled to me for a few milliseconds. 

Her smile was sort of diabolic. Alma Delia made me have insane thoughts. It made me analyze if sometimes she was flirting on me. I guess we were all stressed out. As I'm about to get wasted, I put this song on my iPod and I kinda remember that I did the same on that Friday, after the boring seminar ended up and I got home. I would have love to write something about Alma Delia and Bukowski, but I just got wasted. 

And You Wanted To Dance, So I Asked You To Dance

It was a cold sunday evening, when I attended for the first time to an Eagles Of Death Metal show. Someone gave me a couple of free tickets for the festival in which they would play that evening. It happened in Mexico City, in a festival called Corona Capital.

When I heard the studio albums of the band, long before the show, I did not like them at all. I knew Josh Home was somewhat involved in the band, so I thought this band was similar to Queens Of The Stone Age. When I realized they were a funny band, I felt disappointed.

Then, at a show in Paris, they became sadly famous because they were playing when some crazy killers started to shot innocent people. I did not understand why this funny band was in the middle of such a tragedy, but I listened to their albums again.

It was almost 7: 00 pm, when Jesse Hughes and the rest of the band came up to the stage. Ironically, I was really close to the stage. I never do that, even when one of my favorite bands plays. People was enthusiastic and intrigued because of the involvement of Eagles Of Death Metal in the terrorists attacks in France almost a year ago.  Shortly after the band appeared, a popular mexican mariachi song sounded and people started to sing it along and they became crazy.

Before a brief introductory speech, Jesse Hughes and the band started with I Only Want You, and they sounded terrific and powerful, like I never expected. They were a better band than I thought. Obviously, I felt so bigoted and dumb.

The show continued with the same intensity. The frontman was so dynamic, danced here and there, and talked to the audience all the time. At some point, he put on a jacket allusive to David Bowie. Then, the band made a cover of Moonage Daydream and people got wild. Later on, they played Duran Duran's Save A Prayer, and I fall in love with the band. Since then, I cannot stop listening this version. It's really a great cover. 

My point of view changed completelely. From now on, I will not judge a band from a studio album but from its live music.

I Only Want You

Save A Prayer