The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [27]
I saw this immediately, and made, half-consciously, a resolution: I was the guy who would never let Stanley Ray down.
We were flown to Los Angeles so Stanley Ray and the turbine-cave guy could further woo us. They put us up at the Mondrian on Sunset Boulevard; our suites looked out over twinkling Hollywood. I’d never stayed somewhere so posh, and they were paying for everything. Remembering the nights I had to decide between spending my $3 on cigarettes or food, I opened the minibar and ate all the candy. They took us out for dinner, and when I got back to the room, stoned and stuffed, I immediately ordered a pizza from room service that I could barely take a bite of.
I called the front desk and asked if I could call a dominatrix and charge it to the room.
“Uh, no sir,” the front-desk guy said, contemptuously.
“Dude!” said the turbine-cave guy the next day. “Let’s go to the Bu!”
The Bu?
“The Bu! Malibu!”
He drove us there in his black BMW, enthusing about the frozen margaritas at some seaside restaurant. We passed a pipe around. I put on a cassette of A Tribe Called Quest that I’d brought along. It came to the song “Show Business,” on which five rappers take turns denouncing record company executives. Q-Tip calls them fakes, snakes, shady, says the business is a cesspool; Sadat X talks about smarmy, “palsy-palsy” A&R people that materialize when you’re riding high; Phife kvetches about “bogus brothers making albums when they know they can’t hack it”; Diamond D tells the listener to get a good lawyer, and a label that’s “willing and able to market and promote.”
Lord Jamar’s verse is the most devastating. “You’re a million dollar man that ain’t got no dough,” he says. He describes being at a restaurant with a label guy, asking him when he’ll get paid. Just as a label guy tells him he won’t get paid, because he hasn’t recouped his advance yet, a waitress arrives. “More soup with your meal?”
“All you want to do is taste the fruit,” Lord Jamar says, “but in the back they’re making fruit juice.”
Turbine-cave guy laughed and laughed.
Nonchalantly, Stanley Ray lived in peripatetic luxury. He came to New York a few times a year and stayed at the Rihga Royal Hotel, on Fifty-fourth Street, for a month, taking me or some other friend out to dinner every night. When I briefly lived with (and, perhaps, off of) a girlfriend in London, he came out and stayed in a cushy place he called the Disco Arab Hotel for three weeks.
In the ’70s, Stanley Ray was the obnoxious guy at the L.A. punk shows, getting in people’s faces and telling them off. (Maybe, says your armchair shrink friend Mike Doughty, he was preempting mockery for his fatness by cutting everybody else down first?) Somebody at Warner Bros. complimented him for niceness and he was glum. Seriously.
There were cards made for A&R guys to send out with CDs. He had his altered from “with compliments of . . . ” to “with complaints.”
He called our manager incompetent every time we spoke, and then said, “No, no, I shouldn’t talk shit about your manager, he’s your manager, after all,” and we’d say, No, Stanley, please, we want to hear it, then he’d talk about how insulted he was that we hadn’t asked him to quit the label and become our manager, but he didn’t want to be our manager, he was just insulted that we didn’t want him to be our manager. If I pointed out that perhaps management, involving math and planning, required skills other than alternately charming and alienating people at nightclubs, he’d say, “What, like it’s hard to manage a band or something?!”
He didn’t do anything a traditional A&R guy was supposed to do; he didn’t help bands find producers, though he often complained, “Your manager isn’t doing anything to find producers,” and he didn’t help us to develop songs, other than alluding to his displeasure at them. He did sign bands, but after signing Soul Coughing, in 1993, he barely signed anybody for the next seven years—he signed bands that he openly said he didn