The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [35]
I was backstage in France, talking to somebody about the bass player. “I just have absolutely no respect for the guy,” I said.
Then I saw that he was just outside the door.
That night he played the best show I ever heard him play; on every song, he abandoned the usual bass lines and improvised something fierce, you could say persuasive, seizing the music, flipping keys upside down, bashing around in weird spots in the rhythm. He didn’t always play like this. Sometimes he showed up without his talent—sometimes he seemed to be trying to tell us about his blood sugar by playing badly. At this gig, he killed. Wholly in control.
“You think you write songs?” said the sampler player. “If you want people to know your poetry, stick with us. We make something out of your naïve musical explorations.”
There’s an old interview out there that I can’t find on the internet in which he says (I’m paraphrasing, but you remember insults near verbatim, don’t you?): “Doughty’s not a musician. He’s a wordsmith.”
Not a musician. On my worst days, comparing my rough guitar scribbles to my bandmates’ mastery, I believe this myself. I brought in the chords, the rhythm, the melody, the form, but still: not a musician. Years later, despite a preponderance of evidence to the contrary, I still beat myself up for not being a real musician.
There’s another interview out there that I can’t find: the interviewer mentions the Howlin’ Wolf sample, the Andrews Sisters sample, the Raymond Scott sample, and then asks the sampler player what makes for a great sample. The sampler player answers at length, and quite pedantically, about how he selects and manipulates them. But wait—though certainly the guy’s fantastic at what he does, no question—the interviewer guy’s talking about samples that I came up with.
There’s a difference between the sampler player and the other two, in terms of how I had my songwriter’s rights hustled out from under me. He really believed that on every single song—every one—he’s just as much the author as I am. There’s certainly a lot of songs that began with loops or parts that he came up with, but that’s not the full gist of it. Later in the same interview, he was asked about the songwriting process. He said that he plays samples in the rehearsal room and it does something to us. Does something to us. Puzzling. Like I said, sometimes he brought gorgeous loops into rehearsal and songs were derived from them, but that’s not what he’s saying. In fact, most of the time in rehearsal, he was playing so quietly we could barely hear him; we were always asking him to turn it up. Between songs, he’d be hunched in the corner playing near inaudibly.
At some point I came to believe he was saying he provoked us subliminally into making music.
I’d bring in songs that I’d written completely, and he seemed to believe, quite innocently, that I’d improvised them in the room, as he’d improvised his accompanying parts. Like you’d walk into a room, see a lamp, and think: I saw the lamp, therefore I created the lamp.
He was prone to tantrums. He’d throw chairs, turn over tables. Once he was driving and the tour manager said he’d accidentally told the sampler player to make a wrong turn; the sampler player went into a rage, swerved immediately, sent the van jolting over the island in the median and into oncoming traffic.
The sampler player’s wife worked in a corporate accounting department; she harangued him about money. She would travel with us sometimes. I’d find her with the tour manager’s briefcase open, going through our receipts. The sampler player would show up at meetings with