The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [32]
The other guys used to take the rental car out at night, smoking weed and listening to Duke Ellington. I stayed in my room, clutching my head in my hands, obsessed with the record, hating my voice. Then I’d get high and my head would fill with fanciful ideas, and I’d feel better.
I used to write record reviews for the New York Press. My old editors there were overjoyed that their scrawny music critic kid had done good; they put a cartoon of me on the cover. They faxed the cover—my giant head—to the studio. The assistant engineer Scotch-taped it to the studio wall. The next day, it had been ripped down, scraps of ripped fax paper still hanging on the tape.
While we were mixing the songs, O.J. Simpson rode in the back of a white Bronco, moving at a steady, deliberate speed, followed by a formation of cop cars, through the streets of Los Angeles. The TV reporters said he was holding a pistol to his head. People gathered on street corners and overpasses, cheering and waving signs. We watched the helicopter footage of the stately pursuit, just a mile away from where we sat.
The record came out on the same day as REM’s Monster; there was a line outside Tower Records of REM fans waiting to buy it at midnight. Stanley Ray and I went in. I found our CD stuck in some non-glorious spot at the back of the new releases rack. I was crestfallen.
“What, you think you should have a line of people waiting to buy your record?” sniffed Stanley Ray.
I bought a copy and listened to it at home. It sounded like shit to me.
I got high, and listened again. It sounded better.
There were some good reviews. Four stars in Rolling Stone. I was eager to read to the review in Spin, because I actually read Spin. The Spin critic talked about the psychedelic production, the depth, the texture, the robustness of the sound. “In fact, Ruby Vroom might have been one of 1994’s most inviting sonic spaces.”
Paragraph break; next paragraph was one sentence long:
“If it weren’t for the vocals.”
It went on to call me white; a kind of irredeemable whiteness, white without consciousness, not the arch whiteness of Beck or the Beastie Boys. They’re doing something interesting, but this guy, he’s just white.
I felt it. I took it into my heart. At last I knew I was right; my band was a great band, and I was a lowly thing attached to it.
We played a big Warner Bros. showcase at a ballroom on Thirty-fourth Street. There were four bands from the label, and in between they projected clips from Warner Bros.–produced sitcoms. A guy in a Bugs Bunny suit wandered in the crowd. Backstage, they had me do a chat room thing, which I’d never done before. There were three or four chatters, and they all wanted to talk to the lead singer from Saint Etienne: hello? is this sarah? sarah are you there?
(Chat room appearances became faddish. Usually they wanted you to call somebody sitting at a terminal somewhere, and they’d read the questions to you and type your answers out. I refused to do them, because I was snooty about my spelling and punctuation, which they always bungled. It’s an abuse of the medium, I told the stupefied publicists.)
I met a dark haired, quasi-goth girl from Hackensack with fishnet stockings and an elaborate Italian name. We ended up backstage with my hand up her dress. We sniffed some heroin. I got her number but never called her, because I knew she’d come back with heroin every time, and I had too much at stake to become a junkie.
It was the advent of the dial-up modem, and our manager had gotten us an AOL account; each of us had a screen name we could sign in under. One day my phone rang; I picked up, and heard click. I dialed *69, a recent innovation in prank-call prevention; you’d dial it and it’d connect you to the number that just called.
The bass player picked up. “Hello?” he said, with a kind of exaggerated casualness.
Um, did you call me?