The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [23]
I brought some CDs over to his house. There were a bunch of sounds I wanted him to use: Howlin’ Wolf, the Andrews Sisters, Toots and the Maytals, The Roches, Raymond Scott, Grand Puba, a cast recording of Guys and Dolls.
His house was so organized, it made me feel weird. He had a master’s degree in composition from an uptown conservatory and was well inculcated in the conservatory mind-set—he called rock drummers “percussionists” and used terms like sforzando when discussing how best to approach a rhythm that I’d ripped off from Funkdoobiest. There was an oddness to his look; it was as if he only wore those clothes that middle-class moms buy at department stores and lay on the childhood bed when their kid comes home for Christmas. Which, it turned out, was exactly the case.
He was a protégé of Anthony Coleman, who brought him into the messier world of the Knit and at whose goading he switched from writing jokey orchestral pieces with scatological titles to electronic-collage pieces, stitched from recordings of his own music school recitals.
The sampler player got me high. Despite his square look and academic pedigree, he was a gluttonous stoner. He had a job editing radio commercials in a windowless studio; he stayed up all night mousing and clicking at a monitor, getting high (next to the computer was a briefcase-sized hard drive with an utterly impressive four gigabyte capacity), alone but for his boss’s yellow canary. The weed made the sampler player so jumpy that sometimes he seemed deranged.
He played me a thing that he’d done with a few horn notes from a recording of his chamber-music pieces. He played slowed-down and sped-up versions of it simultaneously. It was aching, and cyclical, and it was gorgeous. I recited a poem over it, and it became the Soul Coughing song “Screenwriter’s Blues.”
The repetitions of dance music were foreign to him. “You mean, you want me to play this over and over again?” he asked in rehearsal.
“Yo, G,” said the drummer, “just hold down that there key with some duct tape.”
He was too proud for the duct-tape maneuver, but he became OK with the repetition. He bought a copy of Parliament’s Chocolate City and practiced to it. He learned how to load his hard drive faster. He idolized the bass player, who had wizardly ears—he could hear what you were going to play before you played it, and could complement or contradict your part with a bass line, concocted on the spot, of great force and ingenious simplicity.
After a rehearsal, we ate at a diner. The waitress took the plates away, and the check was passed around. I got some change and put down $12. The sampler player got out his wallet, pulled out $10, put it on the table. The drummer got out his wallet, took out $20, put it on the table, took the $10 back.
Then the check got to the bass player. He held the check in his hand, and took out his wallet. Opened his wallet. Then he put the check down and put his wallet back.
The guy had just mimed paying the check.
When the sampler player counted up the money, we were short exactly what the bass player owed. The check was passed around again. The drummer put in a couple extra bucks. He gave it to the bass player. The bass player rubbed his chin, acting stumped by the discrepancy.
The sampler player saw it, too. We didn’t confront him. The sampler player was too in awe of the guy; I couldn’t believe somebody would actually do that.
At that moment, the bass player was thirty-four years old. I didn’t occur to me until I was myself thirty-four that this kind of trickery wasn’t something most adults did.
I was twenty-three, the drummer was thirty, and the sampler player, thirty-one. My idea was that guys older than me would know what they were doing. Musically, I was correct. On every other level, I had no idea what I’d stumbled into.
I talked Louise at CB’s into giving us a Monday night residency at the Gallery. There was a club night—clubs were not buildings but branded parties that migrated between venues—called Giant Step