by Mike Doughty
I saw him rehearse with a singer-songwriter; a song for a benefit show. There was a line that went, “I’ll play the drums for you.”
“Hey,” she said, “when I sing that line, could you play a little roll on the toms?” A very corny idea, indeed.
They went through to the end; he didn’t play the roll.
“Hey,” she said, “that was great, but you forgot to play that roll after I go, ‘I’ll play the drums for you.’ OK?”
He nodded. They went through it again; again, he didn’t play the roll. Again she told him. Again they played, and again, no drum roll.
I left.
Once I got together with the drummer and Jeff Buckley. I had a notion that maybe we could form a band together. (In retrospect, it would’ve been hell for me to be second banana to a man I envied so bitterly.) Jeff wasn’t interested, on account of the drummer. “He lags, man,” said Jeff. He was right. When the drummer got excited, he hit the drums harder, and the effort made him slow down. In rehearsal, if the drummer lagged too much, the bass player would shut off his amp and stomp away, without explanation, muttering.
Rehearsals were dreadful when the bass player was in a bad mood. I’d sing a part to him, and he’d play back, looking me straight in the eyes, something different than what I just sang. “You think that works, huh?” he taunted.
His moods were ruled by food intake. “I have low blood sugar,” he told us one day. He was telling us that, from then on, it was our responsibility to make sure he ate. If not, dark brattiness would come over him, and he would sit sulking. He had the sort of darkness that could stink up a room.
I’m going to get a bag of apples, so I can give one to you when you have low blood sugar, I said, once, when he was brooding.
“I hate apples,” he replied imperiously.
Rather than communicating his feelings, he’d frown exaggerated frowns, and do these violent exhales until somebody noticed he was angry about something; he truly expected that somebody would be obliged to do something about it once they heard him puffing.
I’m sick of your blood sugar, I said, after enduring months of his blood sugar’s reign.
“Do you know what it’s like to have low blood sugar, Doughty?” he said, as if conveying a lesson in tolerance towards the handicapped. No, I said. Why don’t you just deal, and eat?
There was some event that he took to be a crisis; he wanted Stanley Ray to intervene. “Somebody better call Stanley Ray! Somebody better call Stanley Ray!” he kept saying. He was ignored. “Somebody better call Stanley Ray!”
The drummer wanted to be the loudest thing in the mix. To accomplish this, he’d play quietly during sound check, so the sound guy would turn him up, and then bash the hell out of everything during the show. This infuriated the bass player. Playing the upright bass is difficult with a loud drummer; the boom of the drums would shoot straight into the F holes of the bass, causing hoots of feedback. If he hadn’t eaten, he would throw his bass down and stalk out of the room. I noticed something—though I can’t be sure I saw it—usually he’d play facing the audience directly, but sometimes, when he was in a mood, he’d rotate just a little bit towards the drummer, causing feedback, creating an excuse for a tantrum. We made our first record in Los Angeles. I landed there on the day Kurt Cobain died. We stayed in the Hollywood motel where John Waters’s transvestite muse Divine had died a few years earlier.
The producer was this wild individualist named Tchad Blake. He’s the closest I’ve ever seen an engineer come to really being an artist. He put vocals through a big bullhorn on a stick that he’d bought in India; put microphones in old mufflers and recorded sounds through them; ran sounds recorded with $10,000 microphones through effects pedals he’d bought for $10 at garage sales. He had this spooky grey plastic microphonic head mounted in front of the drummer, staring at him; it had a brow, a nose, and ears, and microphones mounted in the spots where they’d be in the human skull.
He really didn’t give a fuck about how the music sounded anywhere other than the beat-up ’60s-vintage pickup truck he drove between home and the studio. It always sounded amazing there.
I loathed my fucking voice. Some of the tracks sounded amazing—that song with the looped horns that I mentioned earlier, “Screenwriter’s Blues”—but hearing the vocals, I swelled up with enmity for myself.
The other guys used to take the rental car out at night, smoking weed and listening to Duke Ellington. I stayed in my room, clutching my head in my hands, obsessed with the record, hating my voice. Then I’d get high and my head would fill with fanciful ideas, and I’d feel better.
I used to write record reviews for the New York Press. My old editors there were overjoyed that their scrawny music critic kid had done good; they put a cartoon of me on the cover. They faxed the cover—my giant head—to the studio. The assistant engineer Scotch-taped it to the studio wall. The next day, it had been ripped down, scraps of ripped fax paper still hanging on the tape.
While we were mixing the songs, O.J. Simpson rode in the back of a white Bronco, moving at a steady, deliberate speed, followed by a formation of cop cars, through the streets of Los Angeles. The TV reporters said he was holding a pistol to his head. People gathered on street corners and overpasses, cheering and waving signs. We watched the helicopter footage of the stately pursuit, just a mile away from where we sat.
The record came out on the same day as REM’s Monster; there was a line outside Tower Records of REM fans waiting to buy it at midnight. Stanley Ray and I went in. I found our CD stuck in some non-glorious spot at the back of the new releases rack. I was crestfallen.
“What, you think you should have a line of people waiting to buy your record?” sniffed Stanley Ray.
I bought a copy and listened to it at home. It sounded like shit to me.
I got high, and listened again. It sounded better.
There were some good reviews. Four stars in Rolling Stone. I was eager to read to the review in Spin, because I actually read Spin. The Spin critic talked about the psychedelic production, the depth, the texture, the robustness of the sound. “In fact, Ruby Vroom might have been one of 1994’s most inviting sonic spaces.”
Paragraph break; next paragraph was one sentence long:
“If it weren’t for the vocals.”
It went on to call me white; a kind of irredeemable whiteness, white without consciousness, not the arch whiteness of Beck or the Beastie Boys. They’re doing something interesting, but this guy, he’s just white.
I felt it. I took it into my heart. At last I knew I was right; my band was a great band, and I was a lowly thing attached to it.
We played a big Warner Bros. showcase at a ballroom on Thirty-fourth Street. There were four bands from the label, and in between they projected clips from Warner Bros.–produced sitcoms. A guy in a Bugs Bunny suit wandered in the crowd. Backstage, they had me do a chat room thing, which I’d never done before. There were three or four chatters, and they all wanted to talk to the lead singer from Saint Etienne: hello? is this sarah? sarah are you there?
(Chat room appearances became faddish. Usually they wanted you to call somebody sitting at a terminal somewhere, and they’d read the questions to you and type your answers out. I refused to do them, because I was snooty about my spelling and punctuation, which they always bungled. It’s an abuse of the medium, I told the stupefied publicists.)
I met a dark haired, quasi-goth girl from Hackensack with fishnet stockings and an elaborate Italian name. We ended up backstage with my hand up her dress. We sniffed some heroin. I got her number but never called her, because I knew she’d come back with heroin every time, and I had too much at stake to become a junkie.
It was the advent of the dial-up modem, and our manager had gotten us an AOL account; each of us had a screen name we could sign in under. One day my phone rang; I picked up, and heard click. I dialed *69, a recent innovation in prank-call prevention; you’d dial it and it’d connect you to the number that just called.
The bass player picked up. “Hello?” he said, with a kind of exaggerated casualness.
Um, did you call me?
“No? . . .”
I just dialed *69, I said.
“That’s weird,” he said.
It seems like you called me to see if you got a busy signal, to tell whether or not I was online and you could use the AOL account.
“Doughty,” he said, “you’re so paranoid.”
The AOL account was mostly for fan e-mail. I checked the sent messages and found a response to a German guy’s message suggesting an alternate guitar tuning for me.
“Thanks,” the bass player had written back, “but Doughty doesn’t know how to tune his own guitar.”
It seemed to me that strange things would happen if he was mad at you. Things would go missing; I’d come onstage to find that my guitar was suddenly out of tune, even though I hadn’t touched it since sound check; the little foam-whatsits on my headphones would be ripped out and tossed on the floor; in the dressing room, somebody’s bottle of red wine would have mysteriously fallen off the table and shattered; my takeout lunch that I had left on my amp while I went to grab a napkin would suddenly be gone, reappearing in the room he happened to be practicing in.
What the fuck? I said.
“Hmm?” he said. “What’s the matter?”
There was a tape of Bollywood wedding music, Vivah Geet, that I’d bought in a bodega and treasured—Bollywood was a mystery before the 2000s, something you heard emanating from cab radios and nobody could help you find. I left it in the van, and when I went to retrieve it, it had vanished.
Anybody seen that Indian music tape?
“I packed it,” said the bass player.
You packed it, I repeated. Can you grab it out of your bag and give it to me?
“Aren’t you going to thank me for making sure you didn’t forget it?” he said.
It took me a month to get it. When he gave it back to me, it was just the case—the cassette was missing.
We were in France. I walked into the hotel after a gig and saw the bass player in an alcove, on a hotel phone. He had a grim, secretive look on his face. An hour later, I walked out; he was still on the phone. I came back a couple hours later; he was still on the phone.
In the morning, I was sitting in the lobby, groggy, as the tour manager was checking out. He motioned me over.
“Zair ees a long-deestance phone call for Room 210,” said the desk guy.
I had called the States the night before, dialing up the AT&T long distance to punch in my calling card number. It must cost something to call even a toll-free number. These greedy hotel fuckers.
I looked at the bill. It was something in the hundreds. I had no idea what the number meant. This was before the euro; every country had different money. English roadies had a charming tradition of mocking the confusion of currencies by calling every country’s money shitters. In Germany, a cup of coffee cost five shitters; in Denmark, fifteen shitters; in Belgium a hundred and fifty shitters; in Italy, astonishingly, three or four thousand shitters; in Holland—and I must point out here that the Dutch guilder was once the world’s most magnificently psychedelic cash—twenty or thirty shitters. So, whatever it was, I wasn’t paying attention—I was just going to pay it and worry about exchange rates when I was broke. I pulled out a multicolored fistful of sooty bills.
The tour manager looked over my shoulder at the bill for the phone call and his eyes bugged out. “That’s seven hundred francs!” he said. “How long was your phone call?”
Ten minutes?
“Ten minutes! That’s not right.” He began to argue with the front desk guy. I was just standing there wondering where I could get coffee.
The front desk guy was yelling at the tour manager. He picked up the phone. “He’s calling the employee that was working last night.”
Holding the phone to his ear, the desk guy repeated his description; long hair, striped shirt, pointy boots, long grey coat.
We turned to the bass player, dressed in precisely the same clothes as last night.
“What’s the matter?” he said.
My interpretation: before he made the call, the front desk had asked for his room number, and the bass player had given them mine. The bass player got on the phone with the guy and pretended to be clueless. I believe that I’ve never known a man so committed to his lies; somebody who could serenely look you in the eye while he told you something that clearly, unambiguously, wasn’t true.
And you know what? He got away with it. Nobody paid anybody seven hundred francs. We got in the van.
He was often on the phone—no, that’s an egregious understatement. He was on the phone at every truck stop, in every hotel lobby, every restaurant. I think he had a network of women he badgered into talking dirty. It seemed that in every city, he met a woman but never actually brought them back to the hotel, and they were all of a type; none of them were attractive. I cringe as I type that, but I don’t know how else to put it. He liked women who didn’t have options.
He didn’t have a phone, only a voice mail number, the kind that used to be common for struggling actors in New York to have, so they could call in obsessively and see if they’d scored auditions. He saw himself as super-erotic-man, and his outgoing message, accordingly, was so smarmy that I recoiled from the receiver every time I called him. Sometimes I held the phone at arm’s length until I heard the beep.
“Leave me a message,” he said in a porn-star voice. “A detailed message.”
We did the radio sex advice show Lovelines once, with Dr. Drew and the hair-metal gadfly Rikki Rachtman. It was the policy of the band that for any media appearance, all four members had to be there, even though it was customary for the singer to go, because otherwise somebody might think that I was more important than anybody else. (Once, on the French iteration of MTV, an interviewer directed the questions to me, but when I began to speak, they’d all yell answers at the same time, to drown me out; when we showed up for photo shoots, somebody would loudly say, two or three times, pointedly, “We’re not the kind of band where the singer stands in the front of the picture.” Though the magazines would always use the ones where I managed to be in front, because people look at any picture of any band and think, Which one’s the singer?)
But Lovelines was done from a studio with only two microphones.
“Please let me do this,” said the bass player. “Please. I’ll never ask for anything again if you let me do this.”
The sampler player and the drummer assented, possibly because they knew it would make me supremely uncomfortable. The bass player and I had done an interview in D.C. with a tiny Korean girl from a college paper, and he boasted at length about not wearing underwear.
We were on the show, and there was a call from somebody talking about a threesome and how watching her boyfriend fuck another woman had messed up her relationship irrevocably.
“I’ve been in a threesome!” the bass player piped in. Like he’d been waiting to say this.
“What was your experience?” asked Dr. Drew.
“It’s nice work if you can get it!” said the bass player.
A discomfited pause, and then Dr. Drew moved on from the dead joke. “Many people in relationships experience blah blah blah something something something,” he said.
“It’s nice work if you can get it!” said the bass player, loudly, as if the joke, repeated, would be funny.
He often spoke in cartoon voices. When he was nervous, he would only speak in funny voices. It made for history’s most excruciating conference calls. He would do it in interviews, too. He seemed to believe that somebody would think, “Oh, I love that band! The one with the bass player who does impressions!”
The very saddest thing about the guy was the way he smoked weed. He said that he had once smoked prodigiously, completely giving his life over to stoner’s limbo; then, he had actually given it up for years. But, one day, the sampler player and the drummer and
I were smoking in rehearsal, and he took the pipe and said, quite gravely, “If I get really messed up on something serious, you’re responsible.”
From then on, he smoked near constantly. Before and after shows; just offstage right before we played the encore. Before and after eating. Before and after watching a movie. Upon waking and before sleeping. He’d smoke and do interviews in cartoon voices, as I cringed. I invited him over to go through some songs, and he showed up too stoned to play, and without his instrument. We’d land in Copenhagen or Frankfurt or Manchester, and he’d whip out a bag of weed, leading me to believe he’d risked the tour by smuggling drugs across a border. He had a tiny wooden pipe. When he smoked, he sucked at it so hard that his body shook. Literally.
I was backstage in France, talking to somebody about the bass player. “I just have absolutely no respect for the guy,” I said.
Then I saw that he was just outside the door.
That night he played the best show I ever heard him play; on every song, he abandoned the usual bass lines and improvised something fierce, you could say persuasive, seizing the music, flipping keys upside down, bashing around in weird spots in the rhythm. He didn’t always play like this. Sometimes he showed up without his talent—sometimes he seemed to be trying to tell us about his blood sugar by playing badly. At this gig, he killed. Wholly in control.
“You think you write songs?” said the sampler player. “If you want people to know your poetry, stick with us. We make something out of your naïve musical explorations.”
There’s an old interview out there that I can’t find on the internet in which he says (I’m paraphrasing, but you remember insults near verbatim, don’t you?): “Doughty’s not a musician. He’s a wordsmith.”
