The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [24]
It was mostly a bust. We played a decent set, but the Knit guys just lingered for a minute at the bar and then left, confused. While the DJ spun a Beatnuts instrumental, I went to the mic and yelled: SLAW! SLAW! SLAW! SLAW!
(I should’ve called the band Slaw. Soul Coughing is a wretched band name.)
A guy named Joel, just out of film school, showed up and wanted to do a video. A mere five grand, he said. Yeah, great, but unfortunately I left my wallet in the penthouse. Undeterred, Joel told me that he was going to call up a bunch of major labels; one of them would sign Soul Coughing and pony up the five grand. I listened in amused disbelief.
They showed up.
As I left the stage, a woman came up and introduced herself as being from a record company. Yeah? I sneered. Want to put out my record?
“Yes,” she said.
I went to a luxuriously wood-paneled office on West Fifty-seventh Street, next door to Carnegie Hall. Huge black-and-white photos of the label’s stars, broodingly lit, loomed in the reception area. I met the label’s tanned, British president in an opulent office. We sat on couches made for a pasha. A lavish platter of sushi was brought in—but it was his lunch, he wasn’t planning on sharing it with me. He lectured me, in the tones of a loony, upper-class limey, about how I should fire the band—saying this without having seen the band—use the band’s name as a brand, continue alone. No, no, I said. The band is important, the sound is important.
He was a rich, tan fool. But he was right.
There had been an awkward pause in the show, for the sampler player to load sounds onto the tiny hard drive of his sampler. “You should tell jokes or something there,” he said irritatedly.
I heard that he appeared in Bob Dylan’s Don’t Look Back; he was the bespectacled student whom Dylan goaded, “Why should I get to know you, maaaaan?” The bespectacled possible-future-label president: “Why, because I’m a very good person!”
I went back to the band, agog, and told them.
“Why didn’t you invite us?” they asked.
Slaw became just a weekly Soul Coughing show. I had posters made, with a slogan I meant to emulate The Who’s inspired descriptive phrase “Maximum R&B.” It was “Deep Slacker Jazz.” The manager of the venue, CB’s Gallery—CBGB had annexed the stores flanking it, making one a pizza parlor and the other a gallery/performance space—knew this junkie guy who put up posters for her. I gave him a stack of posters and some cash.
The bass player came in the next week complaining he never saw posters. Fine, I said. Here’s the posters—you put them up. For the next show, there were even fewer posters. The bass player had hired the very same junkie guy, on the same manager’s recommendation.
“I see my posters all over the place!” he said, outraged, when I brought it up.
I divvied up more responsibilities; the sampler player agreed to advance a show. When we got there, there was an art opening; the place was jammed; there was no way to do a sound check.
“I can’t believe this,” said the sampler player, showing a glimpse of the juddering rage under his frightened surface.
Huh? I said. This is your fault!
“My fault?!”
Yeah, I said. That’s what ‘Call them up and ask if everything’s OK for us to show up at 4’ means.
The drummer refused any other duties. “I play the drums, that’s enough, G,” he snorted. But soon, in what I took to be a sign of surprisingly deepening engagement, he started arranging the rental of a supplemental speaker—just one, a big subwoofer, that’s all we could afford—every week. Two sketchy-looking dudes would come in a hatchback, load the thing into the club, and I’d pay