This thread is dedicated to Soul Coughing.

Barenaked Ladies? *raises eyebrow*

It's ..to the Mezzanine, though, not through the passing lane, Nick.

Thanks Alex! You RAWQUE!

but really: colossal rhythm section, astounding use of sampler-as-real-time-instrument, and naggingly catchy lyrics. a handful of tracks still really blow my mind: Lazybones, $300, The Bug, Super Bon Bon, Collapse...now that i think of it, i really can't listen to the first album much anymore, even though in many ways it's the best.

unfortunately i think i know a bit too much about certain members of the band, and it may have tainted my memories and feelings about the music some. oh well.

Favorite live experience: M Doughty's solo rendition of the intro to Madonna's "Like A Prayer", seguing perfectly into "Is Chicago, Is Not Chicago".

I saw them live in 1997, and at one point in the show Doughty accidentally dropped his guitar pick into the audience. My brother was in the front row and scooped it up. It was a normal, blue-colored pick, except for the plain white text on one side that read, simply: "Chelsea Clinton."

I felt like El Oso was also kind of a let-down, but the one, um, "So Far I Have Not Found the Science" still will just leap into my head and stay there every couple of days.

I'd never heard that, but it certainly makes sense.

also, yuval gubay had some nice drum work on krust's (of reprazent crew) "coded language" lp.

Yeah, the nonsense lyrics thing is there, but there's some sense on Ruby Vroom (more than their later albums). I've always loved the image of standing on the arms of the Williamsberg bridge crying "Hey man, well this is Babylon." Or of going savage for teenagers with automatic weapons and boundless love. These are cool-ass lyrics.

1. True Dreams of Wichita
2. Uh Zoom Zop
3. Mr. Bitterness
4. Janine
5. Theme from Rachel's Sitcom
6. Buddha Rubarb Butter
7. The Brooklynites
8. Murder of Lawyers
9. White Girl
10. Idiot Kings
11. How Many Cans?
12. Lazybones
13. Lemon Lime
14. Unmarked Helicopters
15. St. Louise Is Listening
16. Maybe I'll Come Down
17. Fully Retractable
18. I Miss the Girl
19. These Are the Reasons
20. 16 Horses
21. Rare Star Ball

None of the singles, obv, because a) I didn't want to include the ones she had already heard and it didn't feel right to, say include Soft Serve but not Screenwriter's Blues, b) I thought she might someday like to check out the Greatest Hits deal and c) I love love love so much of their rarer stuff

Doughty used to walk around stoned much of the time, babbling little phrases (like the causation/correlation bit) and scribbling beat poetry. It was kind of funny to see this turn up in his Soul Coughing lyrics years later. One of the funniest things I've ever seen was him (stoned as usual) with a girl he'd picked up (ditto) sitting at the dining room table trying to divide a phone bill three ways.

Maybe someone should honor his poor forgotten but influential roommate Mr. Dorgon someday.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gj9xq7Lch00

One of my favorite bands ever.

Is it possible to start reviving this band's reputation yet? In amidst some goofiness and some poetry-slam yecch there's some moments that just cut through and strike me as better than almost anything else on record in the 90s. I mean, like:

"Leaning up against the wall
I will: lash out dancing like a madman when you're gone
I will spit the blue flame and hurl my glass against the wall
And I will hear your name called out from a boom box
I will hear your name called out from passing cars"

I'll be damned if anyone else has better summarized that feeling he's talking about. I should find the injection of poetry into jazzy sample-hop-rock grating and cheesy but the thing is I think the guy's actually okay at poetry, or at least he can turn a phrase that rolls off the tongue and also paints a picture:

"Well I dreamed a great parade, shooting all the guns in Brooklyn
The man who had a spare held out two and then you took one"

Every so often he gets a little too caught up or prose-y, but I still kinda like it:

"Six hoodlums, dicey,
their faces apostrophied with headphones,
surround you on the corner of Elizabeth and Spring
and disperse in six directions
like electrons used to scream off from the apple of the atom."

I mean, the guy is trying to compose a rap that compares the movements of hoodlums to outmoded atomic models, but he's not really rubbing your face in it, you can just kinda get lost in the fun of the words.

I dunno - I never listen to their CDs straight through anymore but I feel like it's time to stop denying that I love this band.

A couple new Mike Doughty albums have dropped lately

I do think this new direction he's going in is fine, but he has taken the opportunity to trash Soul Coughing so many times that it actually kinda hurts. I understand that he was in a bad place but he needs to accept that the music he made meant a lot to a lot of people and it makes his judgement look bad to try so hard to distance himself from that. A buddy of mine is friends with him on Facebook and got a real bitchy response from him for even bringing it up. In fact I emailed him once and didn't mention SC at all and also got a bitchy response.

What's behind his trashing SC?

xpost -- sounds like somebody to maybe just not communicate with. (I heard a track by chance of SC's the other week in listening to an old comp and it reconfirmed my impression that the band was really kinda insufferable to my ears.)

apparently he had a really big experience in SC, the other band members weren't nice enough to him, and he was battling some addiction demons, etc. etc., so he talks all the time about how terrible that was for him, but that's kinda extended into hating on the fans who want to hear the Soul Coughing songs or those who tell him how much they enjoyed that stuff

Ah, I see. Yeah, I was a big fan of the first two SC records. Never heard the Doughty solo records, but I caught him live in 2001-ish and was disappointed at the direction he'd gone in.

I'll still rep for Ruby Vroom being a great album at the time but I don't really have any desire to revisit it now.

I just remember XRT playing the hell out of that awful "Bustin' Up a Starbucks" song and thinking it'd be safe to write him off.

The first time I saw SC the only song I knew by them was "True Dreams Of Wichita," so I went in expecting some kind of downtempo, Tom Waits-y thing. Tiny club, packed to the rafters, they opened with "Is Chicago...' and the room fucking EXPLODED. That bassline and scratchy guitar riff never fail to get me excited to this day.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FX4dQWzll8

yeah, I wonder why he doesn't write songs like that anymore, as he's claimed many times that he was the main creative force behind Soul Coughing...very few of his solo songs hit me like that . for whatever reason he just wants to be Dave Matthews, which is disturbing consdering how well his SC material railed against that kind of sound!

Saw SC on the tour with Jeff Buckley. He and Jeff kept namedropping each other in their songs... I remember Buckley altering "Hallelujah" and it was something like "... I know this room, I've walked this floor / I used to live with Mike Doughty before I knew you."

Doughty's book is out (I felt compelled to get it because I shared a house with him right before SC took off). Drugs, meaningless sex, I gotta be me, and fuck all my old bandmates 'cause they all suck and it was all my idea. That pretty much summarizes it.

I went back and put on the song by SC that I used to like "White Girl" and was struck once again by what a good drummer they had.

Book is "The Book of Drugs." Soul Coughing fans looking for anything other than bile are likely to be disappointed...

i still really like the first two SC albums. i wanted to read doughty's book; sorry to hear it's so bitter.

The Chicago show was superb. No crowd interaction and not a lot of movement but holy cow they are as tight as any 4-piece I have ever seen. Sound was stellar, crowd roar after every song, every detail of every song spot on. Setlist was ideal for me (lots of Vroom and few other standouts). I am very grateful to them for sewing things up and coming out for us one more time regardless of what happened in the past.

Did I mention they sounded like a million bucks? Don't know how much they rehearsed but it was near flawless from my vantage.

how was Doughty? would love it if he got more amped as the tour went on

yeah its sort of an awkward situation to be in as a fan (although obviously happy that he's doing ok & getting help). lukas, how was the show otherwise, was it a weird vibe or still fun?

other than that it was awesome. it helps that they don't really have any bad songs, and the rhythm section hits, and De Gli Antoni does his thing, which no one else does ...

Last show of the tour.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_QXfYuG_Bo

still bummed I couldn't make the Chicago show but I listened to the live album and yeah, they still sound super tight. alas idk if I ever have the need to listen again, they sound *so much* like the studio versions, which I feel like wasn't really the case on those 96-99 bootlegs that came out

they're currently doing another run of shows throughout all of April, so I guess things are going well. who knows what that means for the future, would be awesome if they recorded again or at least started retooling some of the tunes. I mean they don't exactly have a deep catalogue, idk how many tours they can really get out of this

Saw them in Birmingham, AL last night and it killed. I'm a very casual fan but was interested to see how they would pull it off live. Just incredible. Perfect mix, steallar drumming, and Mike seemed moved by all the enthusiasm. One of the best shows I've seen all year.

the new live album recorded last year sounds pretty good. it's probably partly in my mind because i know the baggage but i feel like it doesn't have the vibe that their 90s shows had, like Doughty eventually gets a rapport going with the audience but never with the rest of the band. but it's fine, nice to hear that Yuval is still an absolutely amazing drummer.

my buddy who's close to the band got access to a treasure trove of studio outtakes that were never released or leaked and there's a whole lost album or two of great soul coughing songs out there. not really clear if the band or any label will care enough to release that stuff, though, hopefully i can hear some of this stuff next time i hang out with him.

I mean they like money enough to tour ...

I do wonder how much exactly that factored into the decision to do this, I mean Doughty has been pretty open about how much of a struggle it can be to make ends meet as a touring musician, and after Haughty Melodic I don't think any of his solo records have sold particularly well. I mean I'm sure there's a part of him that really does want to reconcile with the past but lets face it, this is the thing people will pay for.

After reading that book, I would wager the tour was 100% based on money.

love this mark richardson p4k sunday review of ruby vroom, especially all of the context around gen x and spoken word (poetry slams, beat revival, etc.):
https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/soul-coughing-ruby-vroom/

I look forward to reading that. How often does Mark still write for Pitchfork?

Yeah, that ruled. I posted this to Twitter bcuz ILX wasn't poppin off.

I loved so much "funky white boy" music in high school (Soul Coughing, eels, Fun Lovin Criminals, G Love, 311, Sugar Ray, Sublime) but only Beck & JSBX managed to make the journey with me to adulthood. Do I need 2 revisit Ruby Vroom?

At the least it sounds pretty cool! For some reason I thought it was another Mitchell Froom/Tchad Blake joint, but it's just Blake on this one.

well it's named after froom's daughter at any rate

I loved so much "funky white boy" music in high school (Soul Coughing, eels, Fun Lovin Criminals, G Love, 311, Sugar Ray, Sublime)

lol this reminds me of long-ago ilm poster nickalicious

boy i disliked most of whiney’s similars at the time— a lot— tho i get the grouping. soul coughing seemed very much more original to me. like people who’d been locked in a terrible prison/laboratory that dumped american postwar cultural history onto them, and into them, until finally they corroded and burst and oozed out this magnificent rhythmic living thing. i doubt i ever even heard their other stuff. the first felt complete to me as a statement. life in a pressure cooker of 20th century american media got you trapped just— there.

I still miss nickalicious. Revisited Fun Loving Criminals (as looking for something to play with my 8yo son - didn’t realise there were so many explicits in their songs). Pretty cheesy, all revolving around a 15 yo’s idea of cool but the music and production still sound very good

that richardson piece is solid, thanks for sharing!

(i do think he sells the latter two albums a little short, but that's his prerogative, and makes sense if what drew you in was the very specific fusion revealed on Ruby Vroom.)

Yeah I really liked that piece too. It does a great job of outlining what I loved about them.

fwiw I don’t think of them with “funky white boy music” exactly, I more hear the oddball eclecticism of Cake and Cibo Matto and Money Mark.

Yeah, I never thought of them like those others. They were just a weird mishmash of stuff.

Cake is funky white boy music too tbh

Cake were always the closest comparison to me, in that both bands were just a collection of dudes with a sound built around their talents, plus I think Doughty has way more in common with John McCrea than Nick Hexum or Mark McGrath. main difference is Cake did streamline their sound after a couple of albums whereas Soul Coughing made an effort to get even further out there, maybe because Doughty never really had control of the band - in his book he expresses a lot of frustration with the other guys not playing the way he wants them to, especially Gabay who either didn't understand what Doughty was telling him or just didn't care. either way it's a good thing he didn't listen!

He's such a dick in his (first) book. One of those jerks that thinks they're always right, and no one listens to them, and he is the brains, and those other guys can't play, he wrote all the songs, etc. And sure, he was on hard drugs the entire time, but he still knew best. Then he goes solo and there's not much going on there so he reunites the band because they are actually good at all the things he thought he was the best at.

Anyway, a big difference between Soul Coughing and Cake and a lot of those other acts is that SC and Cake are a bunch of dorks/nerds/dweebs, and those other bands are, like, beach-bros. Soul Coughing would have to be coaxed into taking off their shirts, Sugar Way or Sublime probably had to be tricked into putting shirts on.

fwiw I don’t think of them with “funky white boy music” exactly, I more hear the oddball eclecticism of Cake and Cibo Matto and Money Mark.

Yeah, this is where they sit for me, too. Ruby Vroom, Odelay, and Viva La Woman were all landmark albums for me in high school, with a similar blend of eclectic samples and dadaist lyrics.

I don't think Fun Lovin' Criminals or eels would take off their shirts. You guys are splitting hairs to justify liking funky white boy music. It's OK if you do!

To be fair, the only thing I know about Fun Lovin' Criminals is that I sold a lot of their promo CDs without listening to them.

311, beach-bros from the famous beaches of Omaha, Nebraska

Beach bros in spirit!

White boy funk descended from Red Hot Chili Peppers, Ruby Vroom and Odelay influenced more by sample-heavy stuff like Paul’s Boutique is how I break it down.

I just relistened to Ruby Vroom for probably the first time this century. It’s never really funky. It’s surrealist sound collage with good beats.

Yeah, to put it through a Whiney filter, think of Faith No More. Do they share some elements in common with Korn or Limp Bizkit? Sure. Is that where I would slot them? Nope. And it's sure not how the band thinks of itself.

I never said they were a funk band, I said they were "funky white boy music," which describes lots of '90s alternative bands even if they kept their shirts on

Lol I’m bowing out of this, I’m starting to feel like I’m Geir with his set in stone opinions as facts. Funk on, funkateers!

You guys are splitting hairs to justify liking funky white boy music. It's OK if you do!

what if we like both groups of music being discussed but want to make distinctions within that. is that ok

He's such a dick in his (first) book. One of those jerks that thinks they're always right, and no one listens to them, and he is the brains, and those other guys can't play, he wrote all the songs, etc. And sure, he was on hard drugs the entire time, but he still knew best.

look I'll give him some credit here, he did put his money where his mouth was on this by recording his own versions of Soul Coughing songs around the time the book was written. unfortunately they were awful, seemingly designed specifically for that cross section of bands who like Doughty's solo material but can't stand Soul Coughing, a cross section which I think may be limited to Doughty himself.

Steinberg once claimed that Doughty had some form of aphasia that made him unable to hear what anyone else was doing. or maybe he's just a dick who thinks he's the only one who can come up with anything good. fwiw I think he's kind of gotten over that mental block with his second disc of SC covers and the "Ghost of Vroom" stuff, which I think is pretty decent

I liked Ruby Vroom so sue me

the impersonations he does of his bandmates in his book are so savage

Half an hour late, the bass player and the drummer arrived with bagels and coffee. I stood there with my guitar plugged in, gawking at them, as they joked and ate their breakfasts.

Can we play? My money’s running out, I said.

They laughed at me. A half hour later, they had finished their bagels.

“Yo, G,” said the drummer, who spoke a thickly Hebrew accented, broken Brooklynish, “it is time to pump. It is time that we must pump now.”
I was floored from the jump. I had tried to explain to other rhythm sections how to do the grooves I wanted. With these two, it was just there. That huge sound.

I started one tune by explaining I wanted the rhythm to be something like James Brown’s “Funky Drummer.”

“Yo, G,” said the drummer, “nobody want to play that there beat. Everybody done that beat already.”

We blasted through a bunch of songs in an hour. I was half elated, half panicked. Suddenly the sampler player walked in.
Where’s your sampler? I said.

“I brought this,” he said. He held up a video camera. “I’m going to record audio and practice to it later.”

To promote a gig, I’d call 200 people; basically, everybody I’d ever met in New York. I sat down at 3 PM, with a notebook with names and numbers anarchically scribbled in it, and made calls until 11. Every third person asked to be on the guest list.

Seventeen people came. One rehearsal wasn’t enough to really know the tunes, so transitions were sketchy, but I was dumbstruck. The bass player and the drummer seemed not to give a fuck that I was standing there, but they filled the room with an extraordinary rumble.

The sampler player didn’t start playing until about the last verse of each tune; it took him that long to load his hard drive. He clearly hadn’t listened to his videotape, but I loved his sounds. Peals from space and spectral voices.

There wasn’t much, but I divided the money four ways.

“Yo, G,” said the drummer. “This is not right. This isn’t enough. You pay for my cab. That’s how it’s done, G.”

After paying for cabs, I had lost the precious (for me) sum of $25. But I was sold: if I could hold on to them, this was my band.

Doughty is the epitome of an unreliable narrator. Constantly fucked up, and constantly fucking up, but somehow able to reconstruct all these events from memory. But the proof is how it all played out. He breaks up "his" band, tries to go solo for a while, then eventually realizes he needs those other guys and/or money.

would be interesting to hear the other band members' accounts of working with Doughty, his book comes across like a kid detailing all the ways someone was mean to him at school where you just know there's another side to the story. actually it kind of comes across like when Kevin Smith was talking about how rude Bruce Willis was when he directed a movie he was in and when asked about it Bruce Willis was like "I couldn't believe how bad he was at his job, of course I was frustrated with him". given what some of Mike's solo stuff sounds like I can only imagine what a drugged out and much less experienced Doughty was telling these guys

Do I need 2 revisit Ruby Vroom?

yes, I think it's SC's best album and it's def better than the other stuff you mentioned.

listenin to it now and yeah it definitely holds up, I'd almost forgotten how well it evokes this sort of urban chaos, like a combo of crazy talented street musicians all trying to get your attention at the same time. its also arty in a way that appeals to me, just doin' stuff for the sake of it. I like the idea that you don't have to write around real world shit, it can be just fragments of thought that appeal to a different part of the brain

album does feel kinda frontloaded to me, album might work better if you cut out the stuff from Supra Genius to Down to This, granted City of Motors really did grow on me

City of Motors not my fave, but album kinda needs it - or at least, I like that they tried to do that kind of a song. Feels very much like an "indie neo-noir" of the same period, if not an especially compelling one. But yeah... "Supra Genius" I'd gladly drop, and maybe "Uh, Zoom, Zip," both on the "done better elsewhere on this album" principle.

"urban chaos" otm, its always been a very New York album to me, in a way that the other two arent

Doughtys books has always been a nonstarter for me bc I remember the days of the old Soul Coughing website where he would post little essays about each song, a huge percentage of which were variations of "the band worked up this finished instrumental track and presented me with it, and i improvised some nonsense phrases in about 5 minutes to sing overtop of it." which isnt to diminish his contributions on those tracks, but its an awful long way to go from that to "i am the sole author of every soul coughing song and these guys couldnt tie their shoes without me."

Screenwriter’s Blues is my pick from the album. kinda apocalyptic. or an apotheosis of their schtick, whichever

in the book he does talk about his bandmates chiding him for writing the same song over and over, and if you hear his covers album it's pretty apparent this is basically true. there's a certain chord progression he uses a bunch, even on his solo albums. but that was what made SC tick, they were able to do so much with relatively simple tunes, again I think they were sorta similar to Can in that way

The second book was pretty good, iirc. First one was infuriating and dumb, down there with the Moby memoir.

Screenwriter's Blues is an amazing recording, apocalyptic for sure, and a great example of how much the samples and rhythm section are doing to add undefinable atmosphere, tone, etc. The way the second and third layers of samples come in on the chorus to add all this mania - that's NOT there in the song "on paper" but it totally makes it as a listening experience. And if it has a fault, it's as a composition - I always think of the climax, but it could maybe use an actual "ending."

"Never Gonna Come Back Down" by BT came on shuffle today, pretty amazing piece of late 90s ephemera there, BT's vocal treatments are genuinely hilarious. of course I thought this was the coolest song I ever heard in my life when I was 13

I've always liked it. It's silly cheese, and you have to buy into Doughty as a Cool Guy able to pull off "king stinger, the dope beat slinger, sucka DJs they get stopped by a single finger," but I basically can. I was 18 at the time, and have a distinct memory of hearing it on the radio, while driving home from hanging out with a girl I had a crush on... It was my first experience of how driving could feel good with a song there to pump you up. I wonder what it's status would be, had Gone In 60 Seconds had become what The Fast and the Furious became.

I completely forgot Doughty put out a 3rd Ghost of Vroom album (well, one was an EP) a few years ago...listening now and it's actually pretty good? First Doughty album since Skittish where I don't feel I have to talk myself into it. I haven't been totally convinced by any of his post-SC work but this one actually has a deserved swagger to it, idk what to say other than he's just got a lot better at what he's been trying to do for the last 15 years or so