The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [22]
I wanted an upright bass player; the record I wanted to emulate was A Tribe Called Quest’s The Low End Theory, powered by upright bass lines, some sampled, some played live by the master Ron Carter. There was this one upright player who was unsettlingly corny: he had long hair, wore pointy Night Ranger at the Grammys boots, and was often seen in the sort of pajama-like sultan pants associated with M.C. Hammer. But the drummer said he was good. I got his number from somebody; he, too, had nothing booked on a Tuesday at eleven. I learned later that he had no idea who I was; he showed up for the rehearsal, and thought, The door guy?
There was a sampler player who had done both the all-sampler and all-vocalist Cobras—he was brought on to the latter along with some other nonvocalists because he knew the piece. He was less intimidating than the other sampler players; they tended to be mavericks, but this guy was timid and high-strung. He was constantly wide-eyed, like the proverbial animal in headlights. He said yes, too.
Rehearsal studios in New York went by the hour. It was something like $12 per; insanely expensive for me. It was my gig, so the assumption was that I was hiring them, that it was my deal. They were, in fact, so busy that this was the single rehearsal I could grab them for.
Half an hour late, the bass player and the drummer arrived with bagels and coffee. I stood there with my guitar plugged in, gawking at them, as they joked and ate their breakfasts.
Can we play? My money’s running out, I said.
They laughed at me. A half hour later, they had finished their bagels.
“Yo, G,” said the drummer, who spoke a thickly Hebrew accented, broken Brooklynish, “it is time to pump. It is time that we must pump now.”
I was floored from the jump. I had tried to explain to other rhythm sections how to do the grooves I wanted. With these two, it was just there. That huge sound.
I started one tune by explaining I wanted the rhythm to be something like James Brown’s “Funky Drummer.”
“Yo, G,” said the drummer, “nobody want to play that there beat. Everybody done that beat already.”
We blasted through a bunch of songs in an hour. I was half elated, half panicked. Suddenly the sampler player walked in.
Where’s your sampler? I said.
“I brought this,” he said. He held up a video camera. “I’m going to record audio and practice to it later.”
To promote a gig, I’d call 200 people; basically, everybody I’d ever met in New York. I sat down at 3 PM, with a notebook with names and numbers anarchically scribbled in it, and made calls until 11. Every third person asked to be on the guest list.
Seventeen people came. One rehearsal wasn’t enough to really know the tunes, so transitions were sketchy, but I was dumbstruck. The bass player and the drummer seemed not to give a fuck that I was standing there, but they filled the room with an extraordinary rumble.
The sampler player didn’t start playing until about the last verse of each tune; it took him that long to load his hard drive. He clearly hadn’t listened to his videotape, but I loved his sounds. Peals from space and spectral voices.
There wasn’t much, but I divided the money four ways.
“Yo, G,” said the drummer. “This is not right. This isn’t enough. You pay for my cab. That’s how it’s done, G.”
After paying for cabs, I had lost the precious (for me) sum of $25. But I was sold: if I could hold on to them, this was my band.
They showed up for the gigs I booked, usually looking sort of bored, sometimes en route to other, more profitable gigs later in the evening. Their lethargy was a little contagious. For one gig, I didn’t call those 200 people beforehand to hawk the show. Too exhausted. Fuck it, if seventeen people was the norm, what difference would it make if it was ten?
Fifty-five people showed up anyway. Fifty-five people. Something was actually happening.
“There’s two ways to play the sampler,” the sampler player said, “as a conventional keyboard, or to trigger