The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [31]
They went through to the end; he didn’t play the roll.
“Hey,” she said, “that was great, but you forgot to play that roll after I go, ‘I’ll play the drums for you.’ OK?”
He nodded. They went through it again; again, he didn’t play the roll. Again she told him. Again they played, and again, no drum roll.
I left.
Once I got together with the drummer and Jeff Buckley. I had a notion that maybe we could form a band together. (In retrospect, it would’ve been hell for me to be second banana to a man I envied so bitterly.) Jeff wasn’t interested, on account of the drummer. “He lags, man,” said Jeff. He was right. When the drummer got excited, he hit the drums harder, and the effort made him slow down. In rehearsal, if the drummer lagged too much, the bass player would shut off his amp and stomp away, without explanation, muttering.
Rehearsals were dreadful when the bass player was in a bad mood. I’d sing a part to him, and he’d play back, looking me straight in the eyes, something different than what I just sang. “You think that works, huh?” he taunted.
His moods were ruled by food intake. “I have low blood sugar,” he told us one day. He was telling us that, from then on, it was our responsibility to make sure he ate. If not, dark brattiness would come over him, and he would sit sulking. He had the sort of darkness that could stink up a room.
I’m going to get a bag of apples, so I can give one to you when you have low blood sugar, I said, once, when he was brooding.
“I hate apples,” he replied imperiously.
Rather than communicating his feelings, he’d frown exaggerated frowns, and do these violent exhales until somebody noticed he was angry about something; he truly expected that somebody would be obliged to do something about it once they heard him puffing.
I’m sick of your blood sugar, I said, after enduring months of his blood sugar’s reign.
“Do you know what it’s like to have low blood sugar, Doughty?” he said, as if conveying a lesson in tolerance towards the handicapped. No, I said. Why don’t you just deal, and eat?
There was some event that he took to be a crisis; he wanted Stanley Ray to intervene. “Somebody better call Stanley Ray! Somebody better call Stanley Ray!” he kept saying. He was ignored. “Somebody better call Stanley Ray!”
The drummer wanted to be the loudest thing in the mix. To accomplish this, he’d play quietly during sound check, so the sound guy would turn him up, and then bash the hell out of everything during the show. This infuriated the bass player. Playing the upright bass is difficult with a loud drummer; the boom of the drums would shoot straight into the F holes of the bass, causing hoots of feedback. If he hadn’t eaten, he would throw his bass down and stalk out of the room. I noticed something—though I can’t be sure I saw it—usually he’d play facing the audience directly, but sometimes, when he was in a mood, he’d rotate just a little bit towards the drummer, causing feedback, creating an excuse for a tantrum. We made our first record in Los Angeles. I landed there on the day Kurt Cobain died. We stayed in the Hollywood motel where John Waters’s transvestite muse Divine had died a few years earlier.
The producer was this wild individualist named Tchad Blake. He’s the closest I’ve ever seen an engineer come to really being an artist. He put vocals through a big bullhorn on a stick that he’d bought in India; put microphones in old mufflers and recorded sounds through them; ran sounds recorded with $10,000 microphones through effects pedals he’d bought for $10 at garage sales. He had this spooky grey plastic microphonic head mounted in front of the drummer, staring at him; it had a brow, a nose, and ears, and microphones mounted in the spots where they’d be in the human skull.
He really didn’t give a fuck about how the music sounded anywhere other than the beat-up ’60s-vintage pickup truck he drove between home and the studio. It always sounded amazing there.
I loathed my fucking