The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [81]
Being strapped to ancient work would be stultifying to any artist, in any medium. It took rigorous effort to get out from under it. I played Soul Coughing songs on my first solo tour, but fewer on the next tour; even fewer on the next. Now I don’t play any. I busted my heart fighting a crowd that wanted old stuff. The people who came back came for the new songs.
When people yell out song names, I repeat them:
Madeline!
Madeline, yes, a few songs from now.
Disseminated!
Disseminated, nope, don’t play Soul Coughing tunes.
Only Answer!
Only Answer, not tonight.
40 Grand!
40 Grand, maybe later, it’s on the bubble.
I do this because a reviewer in Austin once wrote that the crowd was incessantly shouting for old stuff; I wearily, vainly tried to push new songs. But that crowd wasn’t shouting for old stuff. I don’t know if the writer didn’t hear the requests for solo tunes, or if he ignored what actually went down, but in any case, the better story was, “Bitter man fights his past.” So I say titles aloud, to make damned sure that nobody can write that story again.
Each batch of songs I write feels realer than the last batch. But the bulk of the public, the ones who aren’t coming to my shows, don’t bother to investigate. Who leaves a famous band and gets better?
(Somebody I know was at a marketing meeting where they were kvetching about nobody buying Elvis Costello records, despite Elvis being on a creative hot streak. “It’s because people have enough Elvis Costello records,” she said. They hated her.)
The critics didn’t stampede to my shows, either, and sometimes when they write about me, they won’t hear, can’t hear, what I’m doing now. Some of them think I’ve downgraded: where once the music had experimental elements, now it’s a guy with a guitar, as there are thousands of guys with guitars. If I had no past, maybe they’d hear the music as what it is.
(I make exactly the kind of songs I love. So when I listen to them, I dig the hell out of them. When they’re new, I’ll listen to them on headphones on the subway and love everything about them, in a manner disconnected from my pride and narcissism. Just as songs I love. This being the case, of course I feel like I’m genuinely an unrecognized champion. Maybe I’m as good as I think I am; maybe it’s purely myopia.)
(I met M. Ward at a benefit. He professed to be a Soul Coughing fan. He asked me, “So what are you doing now? Writing plays?” I was crushed. He’s a solo-acoustic guy like me. I feel myself to be an artist of his echelon.)
When I do an interview and the writer apologizes for not knowing anything about Soul Coughing other than “Circles,” I thank her or him exuberantly.
There is a Soul Coughing fan reading this whose heart I’ve just broken, who picked up the memoir of the guy from a band he loves, and it turns out I hate what brought him to this book in the first place. Some Soul Coughing fan is going to read this and come to a show to implore me to love what he loves, to sell me on it. How can you hate this? It’s yours.
All I can do is my work, work, work; give everything my best: write songs that I love and believe in, play shows, try to dial into that energy, whatever it is, to let it seize me. My bitterness demolishes me, wakes me at 5 AM and won’t let me fall back asleep, drives me to waste hours fighting ghosts in my head. But, in my struggle to stay with the music, I’ve lucked into people who are with me.
Every song seems to be somebody’s favorite song. The audience seems to be hearing the nuances and the deeper aspects of the tunes. I struggle to ignore whatever my narcissism tells me I should resent—for instance, that I began my solo work just as the big record labels hit icebergs and began to sink, and, being that I know how to write a decent hook, maybe, were it 1997, I’d have a hit or two on the radio, a big one or a small one, but certainly a song or two with enough presence that M. Ward might not think I had dropped out of