The Book of Drugs

by Mike Doughty

  Not a musician. On my worst days, comparing my rough guitar scribbles to my bandmates’ mastery, I believe this myself. I brought in the chords, the rhythm, the melody, the form, but still: not a musician. Years later, despite a preponderance of evidence to the contrary, I still beat myself up for not being a real musician.

  There’s another interview out there that I can’t find: the interviewer mentions the Howlin’ Wolf sample, the Andrews Sisters sample, the Raymond Scott sample, and then asks the sampler player what makes for a great sample. The sampler player answers at length, and quite pedantically, about how he selects and manipulates them. But wait—though certainly the guy’s fantastic at what he does, no question—the interviewer guy’s talking about samples that I came up with.

  There’s a difference between the sampler player and the other two, in terms of how I had my songwriter’s rights hustled out from under me. He really believed that on every single song—every one—he’s just as much the author as I am. There’s certainly a lot of songs that began with loops or parts that he came up with, but that’s not the full gist of it. Later in the same interview, he was asked about the songwriting process. He said that he plays samples in the rehearsal room and it does something to us. Does something to us. Puzzling. Like I said, sometimes he brought gorgeous loops into rehearsal and songs were derived from them, but that’s not what he’s saying. In fact, most of the time in rehearsal, he was playing so quietly we could barely hear him; we were always asking him to turn it up. Between songs, he’d be hunched in the corner playing near inaudibly.

  At some point I came to believe he was saying he provoked us subliminally into making music.

  I’d bring in songs that I’d written completely, and he seemed to believe, quite innocently, that I’d improvised them in the room, as he’d improvised his accompanying parts. Like you’d walk into a room, see a lamp, and think: I saw the lamp, therefore I created the lamp.

  He was prone to tantrums. He’d throw chairs, turn over tables. Once he was driving and the tour manager said he’d accidentally told the sampler player to make a wrong turn; the sampler player went into a rage, swerved immediately, sent the van jolting over the island in the median and into oncoming traffic.

  The sampler player’s wife worked in a corporate accounting department; she harangued him about money. She would travel with us sometimes. I’d find her with the tour manager’s briefcase open, going through our receipts. The sampler player would show up at meetings with our manager and say perplexingly random things: we have to make some obscure financial move; we have to incorporate in Delaware, for instance, because they don’t tax companies. But we’re not from Delaware, we said, how do we justify it to the IRS, if we don’t, like, have an office down there or something? He’d sit there blinking, in a panic, and answer in fragments he didn’t really understand. His wife had made him memorize something to say in the meeting that he’d recited verbatim.

  There were people who disgusted his wife, and she couldn’t—or didn’t try to?—hide it. Our manager, for instance. In his presence, she’d wear a face, looking like he’d just puked on her.

  The sampler player believed himself to be in a psychic death-war with me, with no incident too petty to be part of the struggle. We did a radio commercial, and I remarked that I was surprised that the ad lady made me do so many takes. “That’s because you’re naïve!” he yelled. “You’re naïve, you’re totally naïve!”

  At the airport, I stubbed out a cigarette on the lid of a trash can and left it there.

  “Litterbug!” he hollered.

  We were in the back of a limousine, headed from a radio show in Queens. I said something innocuously arrogant.

  “Do you need me to wipe your ass for you?” the sampler player asked. My face went slack. I told him once that this was something my dad used to yell to embarrass me. The sampler player was using it as a psyche-obliterating emotional weapon.

  If I disagreed with something, he’d yell at me that I was afraid. “You’re afraid! You’re so afraid! Just admit you’re afraid!” And if I remarked that something he did was unusual, he’d yelp that he had always done it, as if I were trying to catch him in an inconsistency and damn him. Late in the band’s life, he stopped wearing the mom-bought polo shirts, bleached his hair, and wore an opulent Prada overcoat everywhere, even indoors.

  You’ve really changed how you dress, I said.

  “I’VE ALWAYS BEEN A CLOTHESHORSE!” he yelled.

  We were having an argument on whether the personality was encoded in DNA. I believed mostly in nurture rather than nature. “That’s because you’re afraid! You’re afraid!” the sampler player yelled at me. I tried to say, No, I just think that... “Why are you so afraid?!”

  Laughing, I put my arm around him: Now why won’t you let me answer you? He shrank, trembling, as if I were going to punch him.

  He believed himself to be a wise patriarch among us. “Doughty, sometimes I’m afraid that the only things you’re learning from me are about music,” he said, solemnly. Once I had yelled at the bass player onstage, and he issued Solomonic punishment in the van, the next day, raising his index finger. “Doughty, you can’t speak between songs at the show tonight.”

  Doing some preproduction, he punished me for an incident I’d be smarter not to recount. It had something to do with the dif - ference between smoking weed and smoking cigarettes. I had just quit smoking, and he chain-smoked—he wasn’t a smoker—for the entire session. “Doughty, this is how I’m going to teach you a lesson,” he said. I didn’t say that it might behoove him to help me quit smoking, as the entire band was sick of me fouling every dressing room, every vehicle, every studio with noxiousness.

  Our first tour manager was this guy Gus. He was massive and tall—a high school linebacker who blew off football for punk rock—with thick black glasses. His left eye went a little funny; he told me later that a stepbrother had attacked him in his sleep with a hammer.

  The first gig was in D.C. How far is it? I asked.

  “Two hundred miles,” he said.

  Yeah, but, how far is it?

  If you don’t spend a lot of time driving, you measure travel in hours. If your life is spent mostly on the road, you think in miles. I was new.

  How far to Austin? I asked.

  “You’re soaking in it,” Gus said.

  First thing in the morning, at the airport check-in desk.

  How are you? I asked.

  “Pretty horny!” Gus yelled.

  After his stepbrother took the hammer to his face, Gus had no sense of smell. When asked what he liked to eat, Gus said: “I like orange food. Sometimes I like brown food.”

  “She’s soft,” Gus said, describing his girlfriend. “She’s small. I like her parts.” His shorthand for finding girls was, “Let’s go look at some shirts.”

  Gus drove the van, and I sat shotgun, for most of the tour. We had a two-man pop-culture retrospective. There was an M.C. Hammer song sampling the old ballad “Have You Seen Her?” that began: “Aaaaaww yeah, I’m glad I put this tape on.”

  “Aaaaawww yeaaaah, I’m glad I ate that sandwich.”

  Aaaaaaaawww yeaaaaaah, I’m glad I read that local alternative weekly.

  “Aaaaaaaaw yeaaaaah, I’m glad I wore that Green Day shirt.”

  Aaaaaaawwww yeaaaaaah, I’m glad I bought that Trapper-Keeper.

  We had this prank call tape that we loved. A guy called the numbers in the classified ads, seeking musicians for metal bands, in the back of an L.A. paper. The prank caller got drunker and weirder as the tape went on. We quoted the nonsensical lines endlessly. “Don’t be all high and mighty just ’cause you’re from Illinois, Chris!” and “I just want to get my cock fucked and play some guitars with some strings on ’em!” and “That’s what I want to rock about!”

  At one point, the guy is asked for his phone number, and he says, “My number is seven.” This became our answer for everything. What time is sound check? “Sound check is at seven.”
The stylist for the video called, she’s buying wardrobe, what’s your shoe size?” “My shoe size is seven.”

  I was standing outside the 40 Watt Club in Athens, Georgia. There was a tattoo shop next door; I was looking at the flash in the window.

  “You’re not gonna get another tattoo, are you?” said Gus, disparagingly.

  I’m gonna get a seven, I said.

  He reached into his pocket, grabbed a hundred dollar bill, and slapped it in my hand.

  “Get a receipt,” he said.

  The seven, in a blue-black circle, is on my left arm, between some Khmer script and a Dahomey image of a bull.

  We rode to the Frankfurt airport with a cabbie wearing an ur-German walrus mustache. “Vair are you from?” he asked.

  America, I said.

  “OH! AMERICA!” he said. “I LOVE AMERICA! Cowboys! Montana! Giddy-up!”

  “I can tell you really know how to party,” Gus said.

  Gus and I could feel the hate burning into our backs from the eyes behind us in the van. We bonded over a mutual childhood in punk rock, and played cruddy punk tapes to annoy them. We’d search out whatever the local alternative rock station was—music so rote and featureless it might as well have been air-conditioning—and blast it.

  The first time we toured Europe, it was without Gus. I didn’t speak in the van for the entire three weeks of the tour.

  The first tours were continuous slogs. The record label was too stingy to pay for a trailer, so the instruments and amps and drums crowded us. We stayed at Red Roof Inns on the outskirts of town, sometimes so close to the airport that the landing-signal lights strobed in our room windows.

  One morning I got into the back bench of the van, where the sampler player usually sat.

  “That’s my seat, Doughty!” he said, sounding unstable.

  I looked at him.

  “It’s very important that I sit in the same place every day!” he yelled. “My routine is very important!” He elbowed in beside me, and sat on the wheel well, jammed in between me and the window, arms folded, grimacing with tremendous agitation.

  The sampler player drove the van sometimes. He’d get particularly stoned for this. Nobody paid any thought to it, because we all assumed that you drove better high. People still believe this. I have friends in their late thirties who believe, genuinely, that weed makes you more perceptive at the wheel. I read about some study on some blog the other day presenting data that, at the very least, it was just as safe as driving not-stoned.

  OK. So. I remember this one time doing bong hits with a girl. It was during the first Gulf War. The media were jazzed about there being a war—first real one in twenty years, right?—so they had canceled all the shows and had three anchors talking about the same unchanging information, sans commercials, until two in the morning. Eventually we tired of it; we turned the sound off and listened to CDs, loving the moments when the lips of the anchor synched, almost-kind-of, to the music.

  I lit a cigarette. (I smoked three packs a day. A morning pack, an evening pack, and then another pack rationed through the intervening hours; I had ashtrays placed at five-foot intervals in my house.) I put it in the ashtray, then got down on the floor to pick out a CD. Flipping through the rack, I decided I wanted to smoke; lit a cigarette; put it in an ashtray on a speaker as I got out my copy of Sign ‘O’ the Times. The girl I was getting high with asked if I still had those Pringles from before. Sure, I said. I walked to the kitchen, lighting a cigarette on the way. When I got to the kitchen, I put the cigarette in an ashtray by the sink and opened the fridge. Blinked at the fridge’s innards for a second. I got out a grape soda and walked back towards the couch.

  Want some grape soda? I asked the girl.

  “The Pringles?” she asked.

  Oh, right, right. I went back to the kitchen, got the Pringles, came back, handed the canister to the girl, sat down, then decided I wanted to smoke, lit a cigarette, and, upon ashing, discovered the first of the four cigarettes I’d lit in the past three and a half minutes still burning in the ashtray on the end table.

  There are a number of people in the world who believe that in this state I could drive better.

  Weed was sustenance. We were never without it. Really and truly never. My bandmates were high constantly, and I resented the hell out of them for it, because weed fucked up my singing, thus limiting my intake. We had terrible days when all we had was shitty weed, shwag weed. Dark agitation would come over us; the other three would actually fight among themselves.

  Purportedly, weed isn’t what people call physically addictive—the expression implies bodily withdrawal when you stop using—but to me, the distinction is more or less superfluous. To me, addiction is mostly a state of being inherent in the addict that can translate to things that stimulate the brain’s pleasure centers which most people can pick up and put down at will, like sex, sugar, gambling. I have no expertise in the biology of weed withdrawal. I do know that just having bad weed discombobulated us in the extreme.

  Weed addicts are alone among drug users in that they think their shit is cute. I heard an anecdote once about a guy working in a studio, and there was somebody sleeping under a blanket on a couch; the guy whips off the blanket and gets up, and it’s a legendary outlaw country music star. The storyteller goes on, like, “He fired up a joint and whoohoo! Wake-and-bake! Whoohoo awesome!” I don’t think that story would go, “The first thing he did when he was awake was chop out a line of blow!” Or, “He downed a shot of tequila when he woke up, ’cause he had the shakes!”

  We pulled into New Orleans at 3 AM, and it took the indifferent desk person half an hour to check us in. The drummer and I were rooming together. We went up to the room; the key didn’t work. We called downstairs; it took twenty minutes for the maintenance guy to get there, and all he did was jiggle the doorknob and shrug. We went down to the desk to get another room, which took another half hour.

  Finally we got into a room; I flopped on the bed. The drummer sat in a chair. “I think I might go to Café du Monde,” he said. “For some of them there beignets.”

  I got under the covers.

  “But then, I think, no, it’s so late, maybe I’m tired, I should sleep.”

  Uh-huh, I said.

  “But, those there beignets are so good, and I didn’t eat almost nothing for dinner.”

  Yeah, sure.

  “But then I think, no, we got the show tomorrow . . . ”

  OK, I said, through gritted teeth. Whatever you decide to do, I’m shutting off this light and going to sleep.

  “Yo, G,” he said, genuinely affronted, “there’s two people staying in this room.”

  Later I roomed with our sound guy, Lars. His name wasn’t Lars, but Gus thought he looked like his name was Lars, and we called him Lars so often that he had to start introducing himself to club staff as Lars, lest they get confused. Lars would go out and get drunk every night, then stumble in, sounding for all the world like he was going around moving absolutely everything in the room a foot to the left.

  Lars had this thing about Asleep at the Wheel, the Texas swing band. At the beginning of every tour, he’d find a greatest-hits cassette in a truck stop, and listen to it every time he drove. “I’ve got miles and miles of Texas!” and “I’m going to boogie back to Texas!” and “Texas something, blah blah something Texas.” He’d slip the tape surreptitiously into someone’s luggage at tour’s end.

  (There was this piece of graffiti, by some astute band guy/ existentialist, that you’d see in the dressing rooms of shitty rock clubs all over America—Madison, Des Moines, Lawrence, Champaign, Tucson—expressing perfectly that feeling of dislocation you felt on tour: “I hate this part of Texas.”)

  The band didn’t drink beer—we just smoked weed, and were insufferable snobs about it—but clubs always supplied it in the dressing room, so Lars hoarded it. Eventually we were traveling on a sleeper bus; Lars filled the fridge with beer. Annoyed that he was hogging all the space, we made him take i
t out; he started storing it in his bunk. He slept on piles of cans.

  I journaled in the van to kill time. I left my notebook under the seat. Personally, when somebody I know has a journal, even if they left it under my pillow, I wouldn’t read it. The sampler player, however, would take it out and read it when I wasn’t around. I’d get in the van, and he’d confront me, saying, intensely, “How dare you say that we———?”

  We did a photo shoot. The bass player had slipped my journal into his pocket when I wasn’t looking. In the photos, he was standing just behind me with the journal open, holding it up, with an exaggerated look of fake shock on his face.

  Warner Bros. gave us a small budget for gear—new amps, etc. I used my cut to buy a laptop—circa 1995, about as thick as a Tolstoy novel. The sampler player wanted to borrow it for some reason. I blew him off. He kept asking. Finally, I said: That’s kind of like asking to borrow both my guitar and my journal, isn’t it?

  Somebody chided him for not answering an e-mail. “I would have, but Doughty won’t let anybody else use that computer that we bought for him,” he said.

  I slept with a girl in Amsterdam who refused to tell me her name. We played a place called the Melkweg—the Milky Way. The crowd was sparse. She was leaning on a column near the front. Her brown eyes floated upward to me as I sang.

  Stanley Ray was following us on tour, riding in the same vehicle but staying at cushy hotels. We went back to his room after the show and got high. She followed us.

  What’s your name? I asked her.

  We were walking along a canal. Lurid light was reflected on the water.