The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [19]
The cutest girl in the room always beelined to him. So I hated him for that. We did a gig together; I shorted him his cut of the door money. “Thanks, this is my rent!” he said.
He was conscripted into playing the title role in a cheap production of Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck by a friend of mine who saw him at that gig. It’s the story of a soldier forced to be the subject of cruel experiments. Woyzeck loses his mind, suffers terrible hallucinations, murders his girlfriend. In the last scene, he walks into a lake to wash the blood off, and drowns.
He did a weekly show at a bar on St. Mark’s Place. Even crazy people flocked to him; he played by a window, and this renowned maniac called Tree Man—he adorned himself in branches, looking like he was scowling from inside a bush—would come and glower. There was another guy, Camera Man: fake cameras made out of plastic bottles hung from his neck. He’d stop passersby and coax them to turn their chins in flattering directions as he pretended to take their picture. He’d lean over Jeff ’s shoulder to frame the audience of enraptured girls.
Soon St. Mark’s Place was lined with black Lincoln Town Cars. Jeff signed with Columbia Records. Columbia was a Sony subsidiary, run from a tower on Madison Avenue with a crown shaped like that of an antique cabinet. The label was renowned for ruthlessness, not for carrying out its artists’ creative impulses. There was a marketing person there who brought a big cardboard box into her office and sat in it with her phone for a month, not leaving until Alice in Chains’s “Man in the Box” was in the top ten. This was artistry as Columbia saw it.
Jeff was utterly crushed-out on Sony. He called it Sony, never Columbia. Before CBS sold it off, Columbia had been famous for its stable of iconoclasts—Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Bruce Springsteen. Sony, on the other hand, was a bloodless monolith. Jeff ’s lust for a conglomerate’s approval wasn’t uncharacteristic of the times. There were a lot of artists—myself included—who longed for acceptance by the entities of commerce. (Why? Being an artist wasn’t good enough? We chose bohemian lives and now needed to be patted on the head by somebody respectable?)
We saw each other on the street just as my band was being courted by labels. “Sony!” he enthused. He walked away backwards, yelling, “Sign to Sony!”
Years later, when I myself was on a big record label, my band toured America, opening for Jeff. He snapped, as ever, between eager self-deprecation and haughty self-regard. His managers had hired Soundgarden’s crew. They gave Jeff princely treatment—Jeff would walk to the side of the stage, playing guitar, and a tech would put a lit cigarette in his mouth; he’d puff once or twice before the guy took it back. But they hated being on a rinky-dink tour of clubs and took it out on my band. During our sound check, their stage guy rang out the monitors, discharging shrieks of feedback at us. They set up Jeff ’s band’s amps so close to the lip of the stage that we barely had any room for our stuff; my spastic, outburst-prone sampler player pushed them back and nearly got punched.
We were playing the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco, a place that looks like a mirrored bordello in France. “Detroit Rock City!” I yelled from the crowd. Jeff obliged with a titter of the riff.
He had been selected as one of People magazine’s Fifty Most Beautiful People. He wasn’t happy about it. He went into a monologue about how he didn’t want to be People magazine’s idea of beautiful, and all the black movie stars they’d skipped over.
Jeff played a snippet of The Smiths’ “I Know It’s Over”:
If you’re so very entertaining
Then why are you on your own tonight?
If you’re so very good-looking
Why do you sleep alone tonight?
Then Jeff sang:
And since you’re Jeff Buckley
Why do you sleep alone tonight?
I muttered acridly: Poor you.
I was standing with a friend.