The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [44]
I got in the vocal booth, queasy, and we did a take. My bandmates were whoohooing. “Oh my God, that’s the take, that’s the take!” said the assistant engineer. “I can’t believe how good that sounded.”
The band started talking shit about Saul Mongolia; we never wanted to work with that guy! Fuck that guy! He doesn’t know shit about this band! They talked about how Saul made them change things, like beats, like phrasing, how he asked for things to be done over and over again. “That’s fucked up!” said the assistant engineer. They had this conversation as I stood there. They didn’t look at me.
Soon the lo-fi guy was out, and the assistant engineer was producing the sessions.
We went about rerecording half the songs we’d already done with Saul. Saul was already on edge, because the sampler player—goaded by his wife, the receipt-obsessed former accountant, who made him sleep on the couch when she suspected him of wasting money—had called him up and screamed at him, and I mean screamed, for booking a little project studio to try out some sonic stuff without asking the sampler player first. His wife had screamed at him, in turn, about the money. Then Saul discovered that the band was rerecording half the album at a different studio with a different guy. Saul was obliged to show up and watch as the assistant engineer, who was after all an assistant and thus no maestro, enthuse, “This is the best record I’ve ever worked on!”
We hired a guy named Henry as an art director for the album. I was sleeping with his officemate, a rosy-cheeked, plump girl who smelled like rosewater and Kool-Aid; we got high and fucked, after hours, on the floor of her cubicle in the grey-carpeted corridors of the record company, Souls of Mischief crackling the woofers on her office stereo.
Henry had a personality like Eeyore. I think he was closeted and had a crush on me; he would call me, complain for an hour that no one at the record company understood his pristine vision, that they were diluting his art merely to promote bands. I’d try to get off the phone and he’d wait-wait-wait me into staying on for a moment, again and again; the litany of his complaints lasted for hours.
He put me in a lime-green seersucker suit and clown makeup, and had me photographed offering a bouquet of glass roses to the camera. Most of the photos were group shots of the band, taken in a suite at a honeymoon resort in the Poconos; there was a round bed and a heart-shaped tub that Henry filled with pink and white balloons. The sampler player took mescaline, was wandering off, bumping into walls, and staring fascinatedly at his hands. Sometimes he’d walk up to a piece of furniture and lick it. The makeup artist cajoled his tripping self into the makeup chair; the stylist cajoled him into one of the sleek, matching outfits Henry chose; Henry and the photographer cajoled him into the shots. He argued vociferously with Henry about socks; he refused to wear them on principle.
Weeks later, when we saw the proofs of the pictures, the sampler player became convinced that Henry was plotting to put my clown picture on the cover—as if Henry and I, in cahoots, could make the CD cover a picture of me under their noses—though, to be honest, I wouldn’t have complained. Henry denied it, but the sampler player called him a liar, repeatedly, and pressed him and pressed him until Henry quit in tears.
(Incidentally, the photographer wrote a video treatment for us: set at a house in Duchess County, the band played Frisbee in tall grass, drank iced tea, sat around a picnic table staring into space: inside, a teenage couple had graphic sex, detailed scrupulously in the treatment. Alas, this was when videos were meant to be on television, not online.)
Saul Mongolia was working at Columbia back when we met yelling Johnny. Apparently Johnny actually thought we were shit and didn’t want to sign us. He told Saul, “They’re not stars!”
Saul related this to me during mixing, vengefully, dropping an insult that wouldn’t bloom until later. It burst