The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [18]
A different avant-garde luminary picked the cast every month. (One month, there was a Cobra done by a bunch of layman avant-garde enthusiasts. They were given the night because they were the ones keeping the scene stoked; record-store guys, flyer-putter-uppers, habitual attendees. The show was wretched. The sampler pioneer Anthony Coleman was there. “It’s now proven that there’s such a thing as can play in this music,” he said.)
In March, it was all sampler players. There were a bunch of musicians pioneering new approaches to playing the sampler: they were playing it live, as an instrument, as opposed to chaining the sounds in a pattern using a sequencer, as hip-hop and techno producers did.
I was a solo acoustic guy in a magical time for hip-hop music. You heard it everywhere, booming from passing cars. It was before SUVs were called SUVs, so they called them Jeep beats. The bass Dopplered down Broadway. I tried to replicate the rhythms on guitar, and failed, but in an interesting way. At the Knit, I heard all this atonal, outside, beautifully messed-up music, and connected it to the dissonant textures and flourishes on the rap records. I saw LL Cool J’s glorious version of “Mama Said Knock You Out” on MTV, with a band instead of a DJ. In my head I heard huge rhythms, played live, shot through with surreal information.
The show was wonderful: unearthly noises, volleys of mayhem. You could barely tell who was doing what, as it was twelve guys standing next to machines. Post-show, I cornered them one by one. Each gave me the same spiel: there were two ways to play the sampler—either to trigger sound effects or as a more conventional keyboard. I hoped for something in between.
I was asked to do Cobra and felt like I’d arrived. The doorman takes the stage! To an audience! This one was all singers. One of them was this guy Jeff Buckley.
Jeff had been playing with the guitar player Gary Lucas, a jocular psychedelicist of Zorn’s generation. Gary had, incidentally, been a publicist at Columbia Records in the ’70s and came up with the Clash’s slogan, The Only Band That Matters.
Jeff ’s dad was Tim Buckley, whom I’d never heard of but who was apparently notable in the ’70s. (Everybody thought this meant Jeff was rich. From where I stand now, that’s hysterical; I’ve had a couple songs on the radio and receive a negligible check a few times a year. Everybody thinks I’m rich now, too.)
Alone among the Cobra singers, Jeff had presence on the stage. The show was quasi-disastrous: singers don’t like supporting roles. We fought to bellow loudest. Jeff soared over our ruckus.
Gary Lucas was quickly realizing that Jeff was en route to something spectacular. He tried to corner him, but he ditched Gary and began to play his own shows, accompanying himself on a Telecaster—that brittle, tight guitar sound. Jeff had a fantastic ear, could pick anything out. I saw him mostly play covers: Van Morrison, Edith Piaf, Morrissey, Shudder to Think, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Yeah, that’s right, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. He grew up on Kiss and Led Zeppelin and could play anything of theirs. “Detroit Rock City!” I yelled at him during his shows, and he’d doodle a bar of it, smiling.
Jeff happened to call me on the day Luke and I were moving from Brooklyn to an East Village tenement. “I’ll meet you there!” Uh, Jeff, it’s a six story walkup. He came anyway, ebulliently humping furniture up the stairs with us. We sat on the back of the U-Haul afterwards, eating plums and a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken.
A year later, Luke bumped into him in front of the Second Avenue Cinema,