The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [30]
This reward turned out to be—the sampler player told me, smiling magnanimously—that I wouldn’t have to pay my share of a $5,000 fee for a demo we’d done a year earlier, which meant $1,250.
I called the lawyer and told him about the deal we cut.
“Are you sure?” the lawyer asked.
Yes, I said, very quietly.
I’d try to convey to the drummer the beat I wanted for a song by referencing a hip-hop tune. I was totally green, so I had no language to express it otherwise. When I hazarded musical jargon, he and the bass player laughed.
(Sometimes I’d ask what some musical term meant, and they’d look nervously at each other, doing a higher-pitched, more nervous version of the laugh. It appeared that they didn’t want me to learn anything. Years later, I went through a torturously complex explanation of a beat, and the drummer I was working with said good-naturedly, “Oh, you want the snare on the two and the four.” Yes! Exactly! If somebody had taught me the language, maybe I wouldn’t have felt helpless at rehearsals.)
He’d sneer, “Yo, G, that beat is played” (played meaning used up, out of style). I’d cajole him, and maybe he’d play it. Early in the life of the band, he’d roll his eyes and do something kind of in the neighborhood of what I’d asked him for, like he was thinking, Whatever, who cares about this kid? As the years went by, he would gravitate towards something self-consciously complicated, rarely funky. Uniqueness was more important to him than making the song better.
I stopped trying to tell him what to do. At rehearsals, I sat in the corner, reading the newspaper as he played permutations of these beats he found acceptably original, but were never particularly good. I waited him out. At some point, almost despite himself, he’d start doing something that was along the lines of what I needed for a song. I leaped up and began strumming the chords, and it would all start falling into place. I’d stop and say, Let’s play that again.
We took it from the top and suddenly the beat was different.
Stop stop stop, I said. Hey, could you play the beat you were playing before?
“It’s the same beat,” he said.
Bewildering. Maybe I’d heard it wrong. We began again. I started in with my chords, and the beat would be even further removed from what I wanted. I stopped playing.
Hey, that beat that you were doing when we first started this—that was really great—could you try that again?
“Yo, G,” he said, “It’s the same beat.”
One time I insisted with a little more intensity, and he stood up, threw his sticks, and left the room, cursing at me, telling me he’s a drummer, and I can’t even play guitar, and he’s played all over the world, and what the fuck do you know?
It’d be cool if you played something a little less space rock, a little firmer, I said, one time.
“You stole that there from Mary J. Blige, don’t think everybody don’t know you steal from other singers, G,” he replied.
We were playing a college festival at a track stadium. I was way up in the bleachers, watching the drums get sound checked. Suddenly he played a beat that I had wanted in a song for years; this kind of shuffly hip-hop beat with a buoyant triplet in the kick drum part. I ran down the bleachers. I ran like hell. All my songs ran through my mind, which one do I start playing when I get there? Because once a song was played to a beat, there was no way to say, Hey, that doesn’t quite work there, can we try a different song with that beat? “We already have a song with that there beat,” he’d say.
I bolted down the bleachers to the field, I madly ran across it, ran up the stairs to the stage, pushing tech guys out of my way. I grabbed my guitar—it wasn’t plugged in—I untangled the cable, frantically, ran to the amp—
He stopped playing the beat.
I saw him rehearse with a singer-songwriter; a song for a benefit show. There was a line that went, “I’ll play the drums for you.”
“Hey,” she said,