The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [83]
(Some affronted fans threaten to withhold their cash. Do they feel their relationship to music and musicians is, on the most essential level, as a consumer?)
Saul Mongolia dropped me from Warner Bros., telling my lawyer that it was because I was going bald.
(He would go on to gain a measure of infamy for being the guy who dropped Wilco from Warner Bros. when they turned in Yankee Hotel Foxtrot; he told them there wasn’t a single on it. Wilco found a new label, and the record sold more than 500,000 copies.)
I got a new manager, this very short and stout, expansively convivial guy. He was married to a gorgeous, redheaded fashionista who towered over him. She dressed him flamboyantly, gave him a lavender faux-hawk and dressed him in linen shirts with complicated floral embroidery. This squat, bespectacled Jewish guy from Long Island, dolled up in L’Uomo Vogue clothes.
It turned out he was clean, too, for a dozen years. I don’t know of anybody else who would take on a newly clean, shaky addict who’d just been kicked off his record label. I wanted to go out and play solo shows; he actually took me out for driving lessons.
I got a rental car, put the guitar in the trunk, printed up cheap copies of that acoustic album Skittish that I made with Kramer, and played wherever they’d have me. I drove 9,000 miles, by myself, on the first tour. After the show I sat on the front of the stage with the cardboard boxes of CDs and sold them for $15.
Skittish had somehow gotten out on the internet; some people knew the songs. For the most part, the audiences were disappointed; they knew Soul Coughing, they wanted Soul Coughing, and here was the extreme opposite: one guy with an acoustic guitar—a fucking balladeer? Some of them were genuinely indignant. Angry. But in the front row, there were cute girls in thick black glasses lip-synching the Skittish songs.
The next tour, the audience was smaller: the Soul Coughing fans were abandoning me. I was still selling Skittish in a plain white sleeve, no label to publicize me. From there, an audience for my acoustic thing was built.
I played the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco—the same place where Jeff Buckley and I had sniffed heroin in the basement. The bass player from that renowned queer-punk band whom I had met at Sluggo’s in Pensacola was managing the place. He asked me, with an implied wink, whether I needed anything. I laughed. No, no. I’m fine with the Diet Pepsi in the dressing room cooler.
Years later, I bumped into him in the rooms in Brooklyn.
I tried to jump back into songwriting and wrote terrible, trite songs. That was because my receptors were charred, disabled by the drugs’ assault on my brain and my heart, and because for the last couple of years of the band, I had just given up on trying to write a great song, knowing that I was in a band that didn’t care.
The rock legend exhorted me to pray. The idea spooked me too much. But I started writing prayers in my journal—maybe not prayers, but scrawled entreaties, please let me get through this day, please help me to not throb to death, please, please, please. Hours and hours, pages and pages.
I started praying to god, then praying sarcastically to god, then to my certainty that I couldn’t trick myself into belief, then to a blurred spiritual notion, and then back to a god that I fully believed in again. In a loop.
(I want to note that I really dislike capitalizing “god.” It’s more like saying “music” or “light” than, for example, “Doreen” or “Uzbekistan.” But my copy editor is telling me that conventional usage dictates “God,” not “god,” and typing “god” calls attention to itself, implies a more complicated philosophical point than I’m capable of making, and makes it seem like I’m one of those people who wants to be e.e. cummings when he grows up.)
One day, without me noticing it, the ability to get something new out of the guitar, out of my voice, came back. I went into those notebooks and pulled phrases and sentences and thoughts out. They became lyrics. Some songs were addressed to god, and I changed