by Mike Doughty
A fellow doorman named Gordon and I started an improvised-music band called Isosceles; we grabbed slots from the boss on off-nights and asked twenty musicians to play. Seven or so would show up, hopefully a drummer among them. We played to stragglers who hung around after the night’s first set. Gordon bawled on a tenor sax; I bayed poetry out of a notebook. Once, all twenty players showed up. We literally couldn’t fit on the stage.
They say if the band could beat up the audience, cancel the show.
I heard the free-jazz prophet Charles Gayle every Monday. The same fifteen people came every week, so after they’d all gone in, I’d shut down the desk, get high with the sound guy, and watch. The sound was exquisite pandemonium. I learned how to hear this music; it was like seeing through the Matrix. Minuscule changes would flip the whole sound over.
John Zorn’s game piece “Cobra” was performed on the last Sunday of every month. It’s an ingenious system for structured improvisation: twelve players in a semicircle face a prompter at a table who administers multicolored cards that stand for various musical acts. The musicians signal their desired operation, using hand gestures, then the prompter picks up a corresponding card, bangs it on the table, and a musical change happens: players enter or exit, volume goes up or down, tempo goes up or down, players imitate other players, players trade phrases between each other.
A different avant-garde luminary picked the cast every month. (One month, there was a Cobra done by a bunch of layman avant-garde enthusiasts. They were given the night because they were the ones keeping the scene stoked; record-store guys, flyer-putter-uppers, habitual attendees. The show was wretched. The sampler pioneer Anthony Coleman was there. “It’s now proven that there’s such a thing as can play in this music,” he said.)
In March, it was all sampler players. There were a bunch of musicians pioneering new approaches to playing the sampler: they were playing it live, as an instrument, as opposed to chaining the sounds in a pattern using a sequencer, as hip-hop and techno producers did.
I was a solo acoustic guy in a magical time for hip-hop music. You heard it everywhere, booming from passing cars. It was before SUVs were called SUVs, so they called them Jeep beats. The bass Dopplered down Broadway. I tried to replicate the rhythms on guitar, and failed, but in an interesting way. At the Knit, I heard all this atonal, outside, beautifully messed-up music, and connected it to the dissonant textures and flourishes on the rap records. I saw LL Cool J’s glorious version of “Mama Said Knock You Out” on MTV, with a band instead of a DJ. In my head I heard huge rhythms, played live, shot through with surreal information.
The show was wonderful: unearthly noises, volleys of mayhem. You could barely tell who was doing what, as it was twelve guys standing next to machines. Post-show, I cornered them one by one. Each gave me the same spiel: there were two ways to play the sampler—either to trigger sound effects or as a more conventional keyboard. I hoped for something in between.
I was asked to do Cobra and felt like I’d arrived. The doorman takes the stage! To an audience! This one was all singers. One of them was this guy Jeff Buckley.
Jeff had been playing with the guitar player Gary Lucas, a jocular psychedelicist of Zorn’s generation. Gary had, incidentally, been a publicist at Columbia Records in the ’70s and came up with the Clash’s slogan, The Only Band That Matters.
Jeff ’s dad was Tim Buckley, whom I’d never heard of but who was apparently notable in the ’70s. (Everybody thought this meant Jeff was rich. From where I stand now, that’s hysterical; I’ve had a couple songs on the radio and receive a negligible check a few times a year. Everybody thinks I’m rich now, too.)
Alone among the Cobra singers, Jeff had presence on the stage. The show was quasi-disastrous: singers don’t like supporting roles. We fought to bellow loudest. Jeff soared over our ruckus.
Gary Lucas was quickly realizing that Jeff was en route to something spectacular. He tried to corner him, but he ditched Gary and began to play his own shows, accompanying himself on a Telecaster—that brittle, tight guitar sound. Jeff had a fantastic ear, could pick anything out. I saw him mostly play covers: Van Morrison, Edith Piaf, Morrissey, Shudder to Think, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Yeah, that’s right, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. He grew up on Kiss and Led Zeppelin and could play anything of theirs. “Detroit Rock City!” I yelled at him during his shows, and he’d doodle a bar of it, smiling.
Jeff happened to call me on the day Luke and I were moving from Brooklyn to an East Village tenement. “I’ll meet you there!” Uh, Jeff, it’s a six story walkup. He came anyway, ebulliently humping furniture up the stairs with us. We sat on the back of the U-Haul afterwards, eating plums and a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken.
A year later, Luke bumped into him in front of the Second Avenue Cinema, a gorgeous indie-celebrity songstress trailing him. He was snooty and aloof: “I’m sorry, what was your name, again?” Didn’t introduce Luke to the songstress.
The cutest girl in the room always beelined to him. So I hated him for that. We did a gig together; I shorted him his cut of the door money. “Thanks, this is my rent!” he said.
He was conscripted into playing the title role in a cheap production of Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck by a friend of mine who saw him at that gig. It’s the story of a soldier forced to be the subject of cruel experiments. Woyzeck loses his mind, suffers terrible hallucinations, murders his girlfriend. In the last scene, he walks into a lake to wash the blood off, and drowns.
He did a weekly show at a bar on St. Mark’s Place. Even crazy people flocked to him; he played by a window, and this renowned maniac called Tree Man—he adorned himself in branches, looking like he was scowling from inside a bush—would come and glower. There was another guy, Camera Man: fake cameras made out of plastic bottles hung from his neck. He’d stop passersby and coax them to turn their chins in flattering directions as he pretended to take their picture. He’d lean over Jeff ’s shoulder to frame the audience of enraptured girls.
Soon St. Mark’s Place was lined with black Lincoln Town Cars. Jeff signed with Columbia Records. Columbia was a Sony subsidiary, run from a tower on Madison Avenue with a crown shaped like that of an antique cabinet. The label was renowned for ruthlessness, not for carrying out its artists’ creative impulses. There was a marketing person there who brought a big cardboard box into her office and sat in it with her phone for a month, not leaving until Alice in Chains’s “Man in the Box” was in the top ten. This was artistry as Columbia saw it.
Jeff was utterly crushed-out on Sony. He called it Sony, never Columbia. Before CBS sold it off, Columbia had been famous for its stable of iconoclasts—Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Bruce Springsteen. Sony, on the other hand, was a bloodless monolith. Jeff ’s lust for a conglomerate’s approval wasn’t uncharacteristic of the times. There were a lot of artists—myself included—who longed for acceptance by the entities of commerce. (Why? Being an artist wasn’t good enough? We chose bohemian lives and now needed to be patted on the head by somebody respectable?)
We saw each other on the street just as my band was being courted by labels. “Sony!” he enthused. He walked away backwards, yelling, “Sign to Sony!”
Years later, when I myself was on a big record label, my band toured America, opening for Jeff. He snapped, as ever, between eager self-deprecation and haughty self-regard. His managers had hired Soundgarden’s crew. They gave Jeff princely treatment—Jeff would walk to the side of the stage, playing guitar, and a tech would put a lit cigarette in his mouth; he’d puff once or twice before the guy took it back. But they hated being on a rinky-dink tour of clubs and took it out on my band. During our sound check, their stage guy rang out the monitors, discharging shrieks of feedback at us. They set up Jeff ’s band’s amps so close to the lip of the stage that we barely had any room for our stuff; my spastic, outburst-prone sampler player pushed them back and nearly got punched.
We were playing the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco, a place that looks like a mirrored bo
rdello in France. “Detroit Rock City!” I yelled from the crowd. Jeff obliged with a titter of the riff.
He had been selected as one of People magazine’s Fifty Most Beautiful People. He wasn’t happy about it. He went into a monologue about how he didn’t want to be People magazine’s idea of beautiful, and all the black movie stars they’d skipped over.
Jeff played a snippet of The Smiths’ “I Know It’s Over”:If you’re so very entertaining
Then why are you on your own tonight?
If you’re so very good-looking
Why do you sleep alone tonight?
Then Jeff sang:And since you’re Jeff Buckley
Why do you sleep alone tonight?
I muttered acridly: Poor you.
I was standing with a friend. “You should show up at sound check tomorrow with his page from People duct-taped to your chest,” he said.
Later he enthused about Jeff ’s hotness. “How old is he?”
Twenty-eight.
“Twenty-eight!” he said. “No way. I’m no chicken hawk, but that’s a chicken.”
Jeff and I sniffed dope in the Great American’s basement dressing room. It was powder heroin. You get black tar in California—it must have been a bitch to find this stuff. We walked back to the hotel together; a girl who looked like a Modigliani painting traipsed along. He kissed her on the cheek and she walked away.
?! I said.
“I can’t go spreading myself all over the country,” he said distastefully.
If you don’t want to spread yourself all over the country with a hundred different girls, what the hell are we doing here?
Really? I said.
“I’ve got a plan,” he said. He winked. Winked.
Yeah? What’s the plan?
He gave an agitated frown, and didn’t answer.
We played the Urban Art Bar in Houston, a tiny place with a decrepit sound system. Jeff’s crew parked their huge purple bus in front and obscured the whole building.
I talked to this beautiful Texan Indian woman. She was a doctor. I thought we were flirting; she just wanted me to take her backstage to meet Jeff. Devastating.
“He speaks French!” she said.
No, he doesn’t, I said.
“You haven’t heard his version of ‘Je n’en connais pas la fin,’” she said, imperiously. “Edith Piaf. His accent is impeccable.”
I don’t think so—he’s a really talented mimic, I said.
She huffed.
Eventually, she figured out that all you had to do to get into the dressing room at the Urban Art Bar was push the door open.
The next day Jeff said he’d been accosted by a crazy woman who said she was a doctor; she babbled at him in French. “I don’t speak French,” he said, exasperated.
I didn’t speak to Jeff again. I heard stories about Jeff nodding out in bars, deliriously high, and thought, Figures. I wanted him brought down.
My band played the WHFS HFStival at RFK stadium in D.C. Vivian from Luscious Jackson told me that he had walked out into the Mississippi River with his boots on, singing, was pulled under by the wake of a passing boat, and washed up dead at the foot of Beale Street in Memphis.
A perfect fable. You fucking cunt piece of shit asshole fucker, I thought. You’ll be a legend now.
Years later, I met a committee of producers at a coffee place. They had bought the rights to his story. I expounded about Jeff, and the’90s, and my grievances, and how, at some point, it had occurred to me that it was better to stay alive and make music than to be a dead legend; long past his death, I realized it was a horrible fate, and that he had once been my friend.
They told me about Jeff ’s journals, that he wrote something about me, how he admired my drive, and how hard I worked, and how he wanted to emulate me. I was shocked.
I told them my dubious theory that he’d gotten clean before he died. For one thing, a musicians’ recovery organization was thanked in some liner notes. For another, there was an article written by a Memphis acquaintance who said he’d found him walking around a shitty neighborhood in the rain; nonresidents mainly go to shitty neighborhoods to get drugs, but Jeff apparently wasn’t fucked up. Where there’s drugs, there’s twelve-step meetings.
I wondered if he was aping Woyzeck when he walked into the river. I gave them my friend the director’s e-mail, maybe she’d show them the VHS tape of the show.
I told them that on our tour together, my sampler player had put a pebble in the air tube of a tire on his bus, twisting the cap on over it; the air slowly leaked out as they drove. They were stranded on the roadside for twelve hours. They could’ve been killed. His other notable prank was re-arranging some letters on a marquee to read JEFFY O’BUCKLE.
I told them that I thought Jeff wasn’t a songwriter; I had asked him once if he wanted some songs that I wrote and he reacted indignantly—I’d touched a nerve. Few mention the songs he wrote when they rhapsodize about him; they adore his covers of “Hallelujah” and “Lilac Wine.” I thought he just got lucky with
“Last Goodbye.” In Memphis, making his final album, he was repeatedly pushed back to the drawing board by Sony; he journaled about how it made him feel cheap and crazy. The songs on the slapdash compilation of demos that Columbia released postmortem were weak, unmemorable. His enormous gift was interpretation, I told them. The problem was that the only real source of income if you’re a major label artist is publishing—songwriter’s royalties. The label makes sure you don’t recoup; you spend more on touring than you make. You write the songs on your albums, or you’re broke.
Walking away, I hated myself for how I pontificated. I nurtured a fear that when the movie was made, I’d be in it, cast as Jeff’s Salieri: Jeff played by some celebrated young movie star, and I a clown.
The place where Luke and I lived, after I broke up with Mumlow, was in the East Village at a cacophonous intersection. A hundred truck horns thundered every day at rush hour; the screen of the living room TV was filmed with a layer of exhaust soot. Our telephone number spelled out (212) CAT-BUKS.
CAT-BUKS became the destination for everybody we went to school with who lived outside the city. In the evening, the buzzer would ring, and a few random friends would climb up the steep six flights with beer and hang out doing bong hits until they had to take the Long Island Rail Road home. “What are you doing tonight?” “I don’t know, just going over to CAT-BUKS, I guess.”
Nobody ever brought women over.
Luke kicked me out of CAT-BUKS. We were both slovenly post-collegiate stoners, but I was just slightly more slovenly than he was, and it drove him spittingly unhinged. The night he sat me down and told me I had to go was the last time in my life I cried, openly, in front of a man.
I was replaced by a succession of roommates who lasted a month, two months, six months, nine months. I started arbitrarily showing up at CAT-BUKS, myself. I brought over a thumbnail-sized bag of Ketamine that I bought from a guy outside of Wetlands—I’d never had it before, and the moment the bag was in my hand I thought the guy had ripped me off—we sniffed it, and spontaneously, did a mirthless single-file parade, room to room, around CAT-BUKS, radiating that Ketamine whoom-whoom-whoom-whoom, like aliens had seized our bodies.
They never changed the phone book listing; it was under my name for years after I left. A French girl who was quasi-stalking me left messages on the machine. One of the replacement roommates told me, and I asked if she’d called before. “Yeah, like six times in the past four months, maybe.”
I started cadging off-nights, Mondays or Tuesdays, from my boss at the Knit and playing gigs as “M. Doughty’s Soul Coughing” with different guys I heard at the club. The saxophonist Tim Berne played once. I called him up cold, and he had no idea who I was. A friend asked what he was doing that week, and he apparently said, “Monday night I’m playing with this African cat—Emdodi.”
I booked the 11 PM slot on a Tuesday night five days after my twenty-second birthday. A month before the show, I had no
band. I was worrying about it, talking to a bass player who worked a day job as a sound-effects guy on a soap opera. “Don’t worry, Doughty,” he said. “We’ll find you a band.”
I called him up two weeks before the show. He had forgotten. He couldn’t do it, because that week there was a fictitious hurricane in the soap opera’s fictitious town, so he had to work overtime.
There was this one amazing drummer around, an Israeli guy who could sound like a hip-hop record. There were drummers who could play those beats, but nobody who could sound like that. My only interaction with him was that he’d once walked into the Knit’s office and asked me to send a fax for him. I told him that I didn’t work in the office and didn’t know how the fax machine worked. He stayed silent for a minute and then asked me again if I’d send a fax for him.
I had nothing to lose, why not call up this amazing player at random, for the hell of it? He had nothing to do on a Tuesday night at 11 PM. Who would? He said yes. I was astonished.
I wanted an upright bass player; the record I wanted to emulate was A Tribe Called Quest’s The Low End Theory, powered by upright bass lines, some sampled, some played live by the master Ron Carter. There was this one upright player who was unsettlingly corny: he had long hair, wore pointy Night Ranger at the Grammys boots, and was often seen in the sort of pajama-like sultan pants associated with M.C. Hammer. But the drummer said he was good. I got his number from somebody; he, too, had nothing booked on a Tuesday at eleven. I learned later that he had no idea who I was; he showed up for the rehearsal, and thought, The door guy?
