by Mike Doughty
Soon the lo-fi guy was out, and the assistant engineer was producing the sessions.
We went about rerecording half the songs we’d already done with Saul. Saul was already on edge, because the sampler player—goaded by his wife, the receipt-obsessed former accountant, who made him sleep on the couch when she suspected him of wasting money—had called him up and screamed at him, and I mean screamed, for booking a little project studio to try out some sonic stuff without asking the sampler player first. His wife had screamed at him, in turn, about the money. Then Saul discovered that the band was rerecording half the album at a different studio with a different guy. Saul was obliged to show up and watch as the assistant engineer, who was after all an assistant and thus no maestro, enthuse, “This is the best record I’ve ever worked on!”
We hired a guy named Henry as an art director for the album. I was sleeping with his officemate, a rosy-cheeked, plump girl who smelled like rosewater and Kool-Aid; we got high and fucked, after hours, on the floor of her cubicle in the grey-carpeted corridors of the record company, Souls of Mischief crackling the woofers on her office stereo.
Henry had a personality like Eeyore. I think he was closeted and had a crush on me; he would call me, complain for an hour that no one at the record company understood his pristine vision, that they were diluting his art merely to promote bands. I’d try to get off the phone and he’d wait-wait-wait me into staying on for a moment, again and again; the litany of his complaints lasted for hours.
He put me in a lime-green seersucker suit and clown makeup, and had me photographed offering a bouquet of glass roses to the camera. Most of the photos were group shots of the band, taken in a suite at a honeymoon resort in the Poconos; there was a round bed and a heart-shaped tub that Henry filled with pink and white balloons. The sampler player took mescaline, was wandering off, bumping into walls, and staring fascinatedly at his hands. Sometimes he’d walk up to a piece of furniture and lick it. The makeup artist cajoled his tripping self into the makeup chair; the stylist cajoled him into one of the sleek, matching outfits Henry chose; Henry and the photographer cajoled him into the shots. He argued vociferously with Henry about socks; he refused to wear them on principle.
Weeks later, when we saw the proofs of the pictures, the sampler player became convinced that Henry was plotting to put my clown picture on the cover—as if Henry and I, in cahoots, could make the CD cover a picture of me under their noses—though, to be honest, I wouldn’t have complained. Henry denied it, but the sampler player called him a liar, repeatedly, and pressed him and pressed him until Henry quit in tears.
(Incidentally, the photographer wrote a video treatment for us: set at a house in Duchess County, the band played Frisbee in tall grass, drank iced tea, sat around a picnic table staring into space: inside, a teenage couple had graphic sex, detailed scrupulously in the treatment. Alas, this was when videos were meant to be on television, not online.)
Saul Mongolia was working at Columbia back when we met yelling Johnny. Apparently Johnny actually thought we were shit and didn’t want to sign us. He told Saul, “They’re not stars!”
Saul related this to me during mixing, vengefully, dropping an insult that wouldn’t bloom until later. It burst in my head when I was home, mourning the record, and it broke my heart.
It mystifies me now that he’d want to give me a slap across the face, but I guess he just saw me as part of the despicable herd.
In the morning, the sampler player lectured me on being uppity, that it was selfish to have those clown pictures taken without my bandmates in them.
You’re not a star! I yelled at him.
The wife of the label president, the guy who wanted to build the turbine-powered cave-house, was installed in Henry’s place; she put together a stupefyingly ugly mishmash of the photos. The cover image was the top half of the bass player’s face. My bandmates approved it. Disgusted, defeated—thinking it right that the hideousness of the whole process be visible right there on the CD cover—I approved it, too.
We toured Europe. In Barcelona, I lay sleepless all night, obsessing about the horrible record cover; it could never be erased. This awful art was permanently lodged in my history. The window was open; I heard the chatter and joy of the Spanish carousers out in the street. I gritted my teeth and obsessed until it was dawn, and time to fly to Portugal.
I was a ball of anxiety and rage. If I had to be near the bass player, not on stage, I didn’t hide my repulsion. I treated the drummer like an idiot. I was sadistically condescending to the sampler player. I would have spells when I’d lie awake all night hating them. I railed to friends about how horrible the band was; when I got started, I wouldn’t stop, just going on and on, barking about what chronic fuckups they were, not noticing how weary my friends became.
(That’s exactly how my mom’s rage worked, and how I responded to her. The realization devastated me.)
Gus called my rage-self “Fat Doughty.” Because when it gripped me, it was as if I blimped out to three times my size.
I got a chest cold on a European tour, and thought this would be a good excuse to quit smoking. The withdrawal turned me into a monster. The bass player said something bratty, and I screamed GO EAT SOMETHING! four inches from his face. Onstage in Italy, a song was skipped, and I took it as a slight; I threw my guitar down, started screaming, kicked the stage door open and ran into the street, yelling curses.
We played on a prestigious French talk show called Nulle Part Ailleurs. I fucked up a guitar part, and thought it was because my bandmates had sabotaged me musically. (Honestly, maybe they had.) I knew I couldn’t blow up in the middle of a TV show, but it had so seized me that I was actually shaking. I started cursing; I couldn’t stop cursing. I tried to keep it under my breath, but some words I would just bark, involuntarily. The French record company people were staring at me incredulously.
We stopped for a day off in a sun-soaked town by the sea. I was walking down a cobblestone alley, flowers on the balconies, pretty women strolling, and I was filled with hate. I kept thinking, Look where you are, don’t you see where you are? Stop the hate, stop it, stop it. But I couldn’t.
My bandmates were talking about making a video. I had spent a month exchanging e-mails with the video person at the record company. But, utterly disregarding the work I’d done, they had suddenly landed on some half-baked idea. I filled with so much rage that I shut down. I could barely speak. I had to control my movements severely. I felt that if I were to let a little bit of the rage out, my body would explode. We went around to radio stations all day, and at each of them I sat in the corner looking like a chimp shot with a tranquilizer dart. The record company guy ushering us around made desperate, forced jokes to the radio people to draw attention away from the singer’s bizarre comatoseness.
“It’s scary when you yell,” said Stanley Ray. “But it’s scarier when you’re quiet.”
In the midst of recording an album, we went to meet with the head of the art department at Warner Bros.; she was going to show us the portfolios of photographers and graphic designers. In the car on the way over, the sampler player said, in a noble tone, “Whenever we visit the record company, I realize that their jobs depend on us.”
Us? How about I break up this fucking band and you’ll see what the fuck us means? But I didn’t say anything. Again: trying to keep the rage from busting me apart. We went into the art director’s office, she passed around the books, I sat there shaking, scowling, unable to get it together to be the slightest bit cordial, professional. “Is there anything . . . wrong?” she asked.
I mumbled an answer that maybe wasn’t composed of actual words.
Stanley Ray took me to a club called Fez—in the lounge was a portrait of Oum Kalthoum in a gilt frame—in a basement on Lafayette Street so deep that the subway overpowered the music when it rumbled under the stage. A band called The Magnetic Fields was playing: never heard of them. Also, this guy Elliott Smith. Never heard of him, either.
&n
bsp; The show changed my life. I mean, it actually changed my life.
The Magnetic Fields’s singer, Stephin Merritt, was sort of troll-like, with a low, croaking voice. The songs were transcendent and the lyrics cuttingly shrewd. I’d say it was an arch take on the best’80s pop, but imbued with huge, tragic heart—but, though apt, that description can’t capture the ineffable wondrousness of the songs. He kept giving the sound guy a death stare during the show for something messed up in the monitors.
Elliott Smith was a solo acoustic guy—as I used to be—with a wavering voice; gripping, stringent songs that seemed to unspool, lyrics radiating passion and desperation.
There was a blizzard the next day. I walked to Avenue A in a spooky, blank world. There were no cars. I walked in the middle of the white street. The racket of Manhattan was gone. Otherworldly. I heard my boots crunching in the snow, the wind. I went to a tiny record store, picked up an Elliott Smith CD and a Magnetic Fields CD.
It was just a few months after the nightmare of the second album: January 1996. It was time to do something where I only had to rely on myself. I took some songs that my bandmates had rejected—too normal—and wrote some new ones. I named it before I made it: Skittish.
There was a producer named Kramer who had made albums by two bands that I loved, Low and Galaxie 500. The spare music floated in a billow of reverb.
So I would abandon the Soul Coughing sound entirely.
Kramer’s studio was in an extravagant New Jersey suburb. He had bought a house once owned by a disco drummer of some renown who lost his fortune to a crack habit. There was a studio the size of half a gymnasium, bedecked in shag carpet—floor, walls, and ceiling—with concentric sun patterns set off in slightly beige-er shag.
We cut nearly twenty songs in a single day, just acoustic guitar and voice, me sitting in the darkness of the vast carpeted chamber. Kramer was invisible almost the entire time, seated below the control room window, smoking joints. An assistant did the work. Kramer’s one solid contribution was to disallow me from doing a second take on an electric guitar overdub. Yet it sounded exactly like I wanted it to sound. It was unmistakably a Kramer record. It was more than the reverb—which was achieved with big echo plates running down the sides of his garage—there was an eerie plaintiveness to the music. It wasn’t the assistant: he was a new guy. Kramer put some other parts on after I left, but mostly it’s just as it was laid down that day.
I walked with a tape. Later, I tried to get the master tape from him, and he equivocated weirdly. It turned out that Kramer only owned two reels of tape, erasing and rerecording on them, for every record, over and over again.
Stanley Ray was irritated when I played Skittish for him. He’d spent a lot of energy keeping us from breaking up. He certainly wasn’t going to help me get Warner Bros. to put the record out.
I make inexplicable decisions to get with a certain kind of woman. A short woman, a Latina, an Asian woman, an artist, a non-artist, a woman above twenty-nine but below thirty-three; it’s less than a fetish, more like an arbitrary criterion. Maybe my unconscious mind wants to limit my possibilities, and keep me lonely. Lonely is safer. I decided that what I wanted was an English girl: the accent.
I did a vocal on a song by a techno band from Manchester (do you call it a band when all the music making is done in the studio, and live, it’s three guys standing behind machines, watching data turn into music, like Laverne and Shirley watching the bottles on the quality control line?). They flew me to Britain to shoot a video.
The set was an abandoned airstrip. The German lady directing the video made me chase a truck, until I was wheezing, lip-synch in front of flame jets, and lie on the cold, wet asphalt. All the band had to do was stand in a triangular formation in their mod jogging suits, looking past the camera, regally.
They had a potbellied guy named Rufus with them, who didn’t dress groovily and had an unfashionable mustache. “Do you want some pyooaah?” Huh? “Some pyooaah, mate.” Oh, pure. Pure what?
“Whizz, mate, pure whizz.” Rufus held up a bag of white powder. I didn’t know what “whizz” was, but I sniffed some anyway. It was something other than cocaine—probably speed? My displeasure at lying on an airstrip in the drizzle dispelled.
There was a girl cast as the girl in the video. I wasn’t that attracted to her. She was, in fact, the German lady’s pinch-hitter for the girl role—the model who was originally cast dropped out, and this woman was somebody who worked in a production company the German director was affiliated with. She was a half-Chinese girl with an extremely snooty-sounding English accent, incongruously named Françoise. Her friends called her by the last syllable of that name: Swaz.
How do you say that name when making love to her? Well, it’s sexier than the phlegmy charms of Bregggggkkkkkgggggggya.
We were taken to a trailer, where a gay guy with an Afro and circular glasses wielding blush and eye shadow had transformed Swaz into a glamour icon. Her sudden transformation into a beauty was disquieting.
In the makeup chair, I said, They want me made up to look like a dead man.
“Really?!”
No, I said, not really.
He got sullen.
We were seated in the cab of the truck I had chased, for shots in which I lip-synched while Swaz pretended to drive. They shot one angle, then another from the side, then one from the front, then a close-up. Then the German lady said, “And now it is time you and Swaz vill have a snog.”
We were startled. Did they tell us beforehand that the job description included making out with a stranger? Cameras rolled.
I leaned in and gave her a real kiss. My lips brushed hers, and I budged in closer. Her mouth yielded. A long, soulful, all-enveloping kiss.
In the car back to London we talked about poetry, and then we met the next day; she came over to my hotel room and took a shower with the bathroom door open. I watched her soap herself up, scrub herself off.
At some point in the six hours we hung out, it was decided that I was going to abandon New York and come live with her in London.
I went back to Brooklyn. She called me, blind drunk, when I was throwing my stuff into boxes, and slurred over and over, “Are you going to save me? Are you going to save me?” Unnerving. I told her to stop, she kept repeating it, I pleaded with her, Stop, please stop, but she kept saying, “Are you going to save me? Are you going to save me?”
I boxed up my life and went anyway.
Swaz and I would get high and say words back and forth to each other.
Swear, I said.
“Swah,” she responded.
There, I said.
“Thah,” she responded.
We went to see a refurbished version of Star Wars. I learned that the English put sugar on their popcorn, and they ran a parade of arty commercials before the previews.
The movie started. “Is Han Solo Luke’s brother?” Swaz asked. “Or was it—Obi Wan Kenobi is Luke’s uncle? . . .”
No, I said. Darth Vader is Luke’s father.
“DARTH VADER IS LUKE’S FATHER?!” cried Swaz in the middle of the theater.
I was a terrible boyfriend. I’d get home from tour and not want to do anything but lie on the couch—of which Swaz had two, called the Major Couch and the Minor Couch. I sat on the Major Couch, smoked weed, and ate the Cumberland bangers that Swaz cooked for me.
Swaz was a terrible performance poet. There’s a certain kind of would-be artist who chooses poetry because of its materials: to make a film, you need a bunch of people, a camera, lights, a script; to write a song, you need a guitar or a piano, and you need to learn how to play; to write a poem, you need a piece of paper and half an hour. Swaz’s performance involved undulating while she intoned in a ridiculous sexy-fairy voice. In poetry, she found a way to vend her sexiness.
She performed around London, sometimes just a few blocks from our place. I could’ve gone and been good and clapped and kissed her. But I never went. Lousy, lousy boyfriend.
Since
then, she’s become a kind of quasi-academic. She gives performance poetry workshops all over Britain, and the world: Bogotá, Sarajevo, Dublin. Vending your sexiness works in any medium.
At that time in Britain, it had become near impossible to find good drugs, unless it was cocaine. Swaz had the country’s last decent Ecstasy connection, a bug-eyed, chubby guy named Alfonso who seemed totally hapless and sometimes wore a bolo tie over a Hawaiian shirt.
I was in a club, sitting on the floor, rolling my jaw around and obsessively feeling my skull. A guy came up, shouting over the music.
“Whadeegetyapah,” he said.
Ha ha, what? Ha ha.
“Where did you get your pill,” he repeated.
Alfonso!
“What? Who?”
This guy named Alfonso. Ha ha ha.
“Where is he?”
He’s, ummm, I don’t know, he lives . . .
“Did you get it here?”
No, no, we called him. My eyes crossed and uncrossed.
“You don’t give a fuck, do you, you daft cunt?”
Ha ha ha.
“You fucking twat, you don’t even know where the fuck you are, do you?”
Ha ha ha. Eyes rolling and rolling.
(I don’t do E anymore. I’ll hang out with you when you’re on E. But if you start rubbing your face and telling me how amazing your face feels, I will make fun of you.)
Alfonso called, sounding coked up and disturbed. He said he wanted to be an artist, he wanted to design CD covers; you make CDs, can I design your CD cover?
Um, Alfonso, why don’t you bring some art over next time?
