The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [54]
What? I said. That’s ludicrous.
Amusingly, Saul Mongolia was appointed the head of A&R. I met him at his office—Warner Bros. Records was in a big wooden building that looked like a ski lodge from 1974—and spat bitterly about how terrible the tracks were, that I didn’t give a fuck. I expected him to sympathize. But now his job was to make sure the acts on his label recorded something the radio guys at the label could use.
“You’re still going for a single, aren’t you?” he asked, disconcerted.
Um, yeah, I said, realizing on the spot that I had to lie.
We had a break. I went back to Pensacola with the understanding that I had to write a single. I got high, took Valium to soothe the paranoia, wrote guitar parts, wrote melodies, ordered Papa John’s twice a day. Our manager kept calling and asking if I was writing.
I was tortured, freaked out, convinced that the jig was up, that Saul Mongolia would crumple us up and throw us out if I didn’t come up with the goods. As I was grinding through chord progression after chord progression, I wondered what my bandmates were doing at exactly the same time.
I wrote a couple of good ones, one of which had the chorus “I don’t need to walk around in circles.” I was talking about the endless stupid cycle of life in the band. The first verse referenced, obliquely, the Winchester Mystery House, where the widow of a rifle magnate, convinced that the ghosts of those killed by her husband’s guns were coming for her, built endless rooms and extensions on her mansion—she kept having them built until the day she died—staircases going nowhere, superfluous corridors, all to disorient the evil spirits. “When you were languishing in rooms I built to foul you in,” went the first line of the song.
It would remind radio programmers of Sugar Ray’s “Fly,” and Sublime’s “What I Got,” giant hits that, hilariously, were both produced by Saul Mongolia. “Circles” was the biggest radio song Soul Coughing ever had.
It was 1998. I moved back to New York. I looked at places in Brooklyn, but realized that I couldn’t get drugs delivered out there. So I got a place I couldn’t afford on Rivington Street in Manhattan.
Luke, now living on Avenue B, had a roommate with a great drug delivery dude: the tackle box man. His tackle box had compartments of every drug you could want: Vicodin, cocaine, Ecstasy, Quaaludes (Quaaludes! In 1998!), weed, those skinny, four-dose sticks of Xanax—everything but heroin (because heroin is bad, right? I mean, you’re OK being fucked out of your mind on five different drugs every night of your life as long as you’re not on heroin). Alas, the tackle box man had a very specific clientele and didn’t like the looks of me. So I went to Luke’s house whenever I needed something that my own drug delivery guys wouldn’t get.
(Luke and I had the same favorite scene in The Godfather: the one in which the singer Johnny Fontane—whom the Godfather sprang from a contract by having the severed horse head put in the bed of his studio boss—is asked by Al Pacino to repay the favor: appear at his casino in Las Vegas. The look on Johnny Fontane’s face says he realizes it’s bad for his career, but Johnny says, “Sure, Mike. I’ll do anything for my godfather, you know that.” He says it without resentment: he’s loyal, selflessly obedient. Duty, Honor, Country: the West Point motto. We absorbed it.)
I returned to the studio with “Circles” and was spiteful; as we mixed the album, my bandmates increasingly contemptuous of me, I was vindictive; I struggled to get the artwork done and was despondent.
In the album photos, I wore a hat. The graphic designer used a miniature silhouette of me in an upper corner of the back cover as a graphics detail; the bass player called him up and told him to shave the hat off the graphic, lest somebody examining the back cover with a magnifying glass—who remembered I was the hat guy in the inside photo—would recognize me.
My bandmates told me they wanted the credits to simply be our names, not identifying the instruments we played. Meaning, nobody