The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [80]
I’m full-bore bat-shit crazy with regards to Soul Coughing. If somebody says they love Soul Coughing, I hear fuck you. Somebody yells out for a Soul Coughing song during a show, it means fuck you. If I play a Soul Coughing song, and somebody whoops—just one guy—I hear fuck you. People e-mail my own lyrics at me—“Let the man go through!” or “You are listening!”—oddly often (how weird is that, to blurt somebody’s own lyric at them?), and I type back, “Don’t put that on me, I’m not that guy anymore, that guy’s dead.”
If somebody comes up and says, I’ve been listening to you since 1996, it means I had a definitive youthful drug experience to an old CD, and now you’ll never escape that band that you loathe, and you are forever incomplete without those three hateful faces.
When somebody hears your voice for the first time—particularly if they discover the record in school, or at some developmental juncture—they stake out a little place in their minds for you. Your work can get more sophisticated, truer, closer to your ideal, but you’ll never get out of that place. No song you make can get to them: it will fail to turn them twenty again.
There are six or seven Soul Coughing tunes that I like, mostly ones that sound more like my solo records. On those songs, my bandmates’ surliness and contempt makes way for keenly felt accompaniment, contrapuntal profundity. Honestly, I don’t truly love more than six or seven Jay-Z, or Regina Spektor, or AC/DC songs—I’m a song guy, not an album guy—but I’d tell you, without hesitation, that I adore those artists. Again: full-bore bat-shit crazy.
There are a few others that I’m proud of as songs. I dislike the recordings, but, when I play them by myself, I feel what I meant. Unless they provoke whoops of approval, in which case I’ll immediately hate them. My insane-slash-conniving bandmates convinced some deep part of me that I’m not the songwriter. Songs I picked out alone in my room, for which I wrote the chord progression, the melody, the lyrics, the rhythm: not mine. The band’s. Not mine, not mine, not mine.
The rest of the Soul Coughing tunes sound dreadful to me. Geeky, weighted down with a waka-waka Vaudeville thing, diseased with terminal uniqueness, pompous, crammed with ostentatious parts that barely acknowledge the songs, that fight to push the voice into the background, fight every other instrument because each guy’s convinced his part’s the most important. The really great instrumental parts are weakened, transformed from fantastic hooks to stumblers in a jumble. There’s often a refusal to play something that would just make a listener feel good, because what’s unique about that? Instead, those parts are self-consciously obscure, fake sounding, insincere.
(Did I like the recordings when we made them? Two answers of equal weight, the first being yes and no, the second, I don’t remember. I remember loving tracks in this way that seems manic, injected with denial—I remember loving tracks that, now, should I hear them in a bar, nearly provoke me to jump over the bartender and bang my fist on the sound system’s off button, I remember loving some tracks when I was high, I remember loving some tracks in a way that seems genuine in retrospect but baffles me now.)
We were a relatively successful cult band, but I think that, had my bandmates chosen to let me be a bandleader, we could’ve been Led Zeppelin. How do you tell that to someone who loves an album? Yes, you love it, so fiercely, but in my mind I hear something so much better, and thus reject this thing you love. All the people that wrote