The Book of Drugs (14 page)

I got through it, unaccountably, without an STD, or a vengeful boyfriend wielding a lead pipe outside a motel room.

 

We did our second record with this producer named Saul Mongolia. Weirdly, he had been the engineer on the James Brown session with the turbine-cave man, where James yelled “New WAVE!” He was a reserved man who wrote his own Zen koans, but he emitted a thorny, gloomily stubborn energy. He looked like a Botticelli portrait of Richard Nixon.

I liked him because he produced pop songs with weird stuff in them—odd sounds and expertly deployed discordances. He had a bunch of tunes all over the radio and MTV, strange and funny songs riding on big, wobbly bass parts, crisply produced and buoyant. He liked to mix things in mono, which I found rakishly eccentric. I met with him before we hired him, and enthused, tangentially, about George Jones records. “Oh, that's what you like,” he said. “Drama.” He said the way I sang reminded him of a soul singer—my phrasing, my approach. By saying this he won my heart forever.

My band didn't say much; the sampler player spoke of him with resentful deference, like he was talking about a hated, but talented, rival. “The most important thing,” he said, “is that Saul Mongolia doesn't play piano on any of our songs.” Cryptic portent that I didn't catch.

The other guys mumbled, frowning.

We recorded at the Power Station—I saw Russell Simmons on the street before the first session, and I wanted to ask him where the Power Station was, because Russell Simmons would
actually know—
in a massive room, wooden and vaulted like a Scandinavian church. Somebody told me that Michael Jackson had recorded in another studio, down the street, and had rented out this room just for his dinner break; they installed a circus tent and a banquet table. Currently, in the studio next door, guitar overdubs were being recorded for a Meatloaf record. Meatloaf was not in attendance.

We were loading amplifiers into the studio and the sampler player turned to me with his rattled-animal eyes. “Here we are,” he said. “I can't believe we're making a second record.”

I gave him a bewildered look. What? Who wouldn't make a second record? Who cares about hate and wretched time spent in a van,
this is the most important thing in the world.

We tracked everything as a live band, playing all at once. Saul would stop us, and we'd go to the lounge while he tried to get the drummer to play the same beats he'd played in rehearsal. The drummer was changing them—of course—on a whim. Not telling Saul he was changing them—of course—and, as usual, pretending he was playing the same thing as before. Saul complained, when the drummer was out of earshot, that there was no forward motion to his beats. “That weird up-and-down feel that he has,” Saul said. In fact, he talked copious trash about each guy when they
weren't in the room—sometimes when they were overdubbing; behind the glass in the studio, where they couldn't hear him.

Couldn't tell you if he talked trash about me, too.

Saul spoke incessantly about singles. “I hear this as a single,” he would say. Initially this was exciting.
We're cutting a hit record, at last!
I thought. But he said this about every track. He'd want us to play an overdub, and we'd be skeptical; “But I hear this as a
single,
” he'd whine.

 

Tracking was fraught but efficient. At the end of eighteen days we had all the songs down. I was exultant. I had envisioned our grooves rendered with a sort of New Wave tightness, and here it was. From then on, my job was to keep everybody from wrecking it.

I failed. And I'm a hapless archivist; were I better at it, I would have made sure I walked out of the Power Station on day eighteen with a tape in my hand. I could've put it in a drawer for years, and then released the director's cut.

 

We mixed the album at Sony Studios, far on the West Side of Manhattan, next door to a hulking, windowless building topped with satellite dishes that served to house machinery for the phone company. Behind the studio was a room that Mariah Carey had furnished when she was mixing there. Couches deep as queen beds, tasseled pillows, gold-filigreed wallpaper. The band lurked in there, getting high, as I sat next to Saul at the console.

Saul was a gossip. He was a
compulsive
gossip; sometimes the candor made me uneasy, and I tried to change the subject, but he was relentless. He told stories about record company presidents' mob ties, which label president had been excoriated by his Japanese corporate suzerains for the raggedy waywardness of his wife, which singer had a meth habit, which radio executive liked to get
high on coke at his country house and shoot a pistol at imaginary rabbits, which singer fucked every guitar player she ever worked with—thus, any producer who wanted to finish a record with her had to keep her from fucking the guitar player until tracking was done—which R&B superstars had begged their labels, to the point of tears, to let them step outside racial and musical boundaries and make a rock record or a country record, story upon story of singers who were abject idiots, and, uncomfortably, stories about black artists whom he'd call, “
So
smart. So
smart.
”

I thought he was taking me into his confidence. He wasn't. I bumped into the drummer from Sugar Ray a year later, and he asked, “Is it true your bass player once———?”

 

We did a song for a sound track during a break in mixing. I had us work with a producer guy who had done some fantastic lo-fi recordings with some outlandish indie bands; I wanted that scratchy sound. “Who is this guy? You didn't ask us,” the band guys barked, about a month after his hiring was confirmed.

Contrary to my scheme, the producer guy was taking this opportunity to use a major label budget to up his game and leave his lo-fi rep behind. He booked five days at an expensive studio to record one song. I told him we needed one day, and he laughed me off.

The assistant engineer on the session was a wild ass-kisser. “I can't believe I'm working with
Soul Coughing!
” he kept saying. “You are the
most incredible
band I've ever worked with. You sound
incredible!
”

We did the sound-track song in a day. Like I told the guy. Then, as I was packing up to split, I heard the band playing one of the tunes we had already recorded with Saul.

What's going on? I asked, my heart rate speeding up.

“I just want to
play,
”said the bass player. “For the first time in months, I just want to
play.
”

I got in the vocal booth, queasy, and we did a take. My bandmates were whoohooing. “Oh my God,
that's
the take, that's the
take!
” said the assistant engineer. “I can't
believe
how good that sounded.”

The band started talking shit about Saul Mongolia; we never wanted to work with that guy! Fuck that guy! He doesn't know shit about this band! They talked about how Saul made them
change
things, like beats, like phrasing, how he asked for things to be done over and over again. “That's fucked up!” said the assistant engineer. They had this conversation as I stood there. They didn't look at me.

 

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.