Dave Grohl Mourns Mark Lanegan, Recalls First Encounter In Tribute

Dave Grohl paid tribute to late Screaming Trees frontman Mark Lanegan, who passed away this week at home in Ireland at just 57.

Grohl's relationship with Lanegan goes back to the early-'90s in the Seattle music scene. The two later worked together in Queens of the Stone Age in the early-2000s.

"When I first joined Nirvana, I was living with Kurt [Cobain] in our tiny apartment," Grohl recalled to The Independent. "One weekend, he said, 'Hey, I'm gonna go up to Seattle for the weekend and hang out with a friend, do you want to come?

"We went up to stay with his friend Dylan and we went to a show. I passed out on the couch and woke up in the morning and opened my eyes, and Mark Lanegan was sitting in a chair right across from me. His first words to me were, 'Who the f--- are you?'"

Grohl was surprised, not just by the rude awakening, but because he had just discovered Lanegan's first solo album, The Winding Sheet. The Foo Fighters frontman considered the album "a f---ing masterpiece" at the time,.

"If you know anything about his story or have read any of his books, you'll understand why he sang what he did and why he sand it the way he did," Grohl added. "There was nobody like him. In Seattle, he was much loved."

The circumstances of Lanegan's death have not been made public, though he had been in poor health early last year when he was hospitalized with COVID-19. Lanegan explained in his Devil in a Coma memoir, published last December, that his illness was so severe, he nearly died several times and briefly went deaf.

While the singer's hearing eventually returned, his overall health remained in flux until his death this week.