The Book of Drugs (10 page)

Our food came. They chatted; I sat there stunned.

Something occurred to me, fifteen years later. Since I had actually written the songs, I owned them. As we sat there, those songs belonged to me. Legally and actually. If we went before a judge, and the judge was told, He wrote the melody, and the chords, and the rhythm, and the lyrics, but I wrote the hi-hat part, the judge wouldn't split up the songs even-steven.

I didn't realize this
for fifteen years.

“You think you chose us,
Doughty,
” said the bass player, observing my dazed state, “but after you chose us,
we chose you.
”

 

I wanted each of my bandmates to have a big cut of the songwriting: what I wanted was 40 percent. The idea was that splitting it four ways was 25 percent per man; I wanted it split
five
ways, because I was doing
one extra job.
A five-way split meant twenty per man. Twenty for me as an equal band member; another twenty for me as songwriter. I had no problem divvying up the proceeds from ideas I prodded them into actualizing when they were barely participating in the band. I had no problem giving each of them a sizable, permanent stake—
ownership—
in the songs. I thought I was being modest. One extra job.

I tried one more time. We had a meeting after hours in our manager's office. The sampler player showed up drunk, with an open can of Guinness, and unbuttoned his shirt to his belly. His head lolled back like he'd been punched. “You stabbed me in the back,” he said.

My request for 40 percent—everybody's got one job, but I've got two—was met with howls. That meant I was making
double
what each of them would!

I got whittled down to 33 percent.

“But that's a third,” said the sampler player. “That number has too many implications for me.”

It became clear that if they felt the slightest bit unequal, these guys would actually
walk
on this, the best opportunity that had ever showed up in their faces. I had a terrible feeling that even as I conceded this, this huge thing, it wouldn't be enough; they'd never really be happy. I'd always be a little bit too elevated. They'd always be aggrieved.

I got 31 percent—an extra 6 percent—but only on the first album. It'd be 25 percent each on the next one. All for one and one for all, huh? Some of these were songs I wrote a couple of years before I laid eyes on any of them—songs about Seth and Betty and my post-teen grief.

They told me that they'd give me a little extra money from our publishing deal. It was a six-figure sum—initially quite exciting-sounding—that would pay our lawyer, our manager, a long list of commensurate expenses, and provide a very little bit of income to live on for the next two years or so. “It'll be more than you think it will be,” the sampler player reassured.

This reward turned out to be—the sampler player told me, smiling magnanimously—that I wouldn't have to pay my share of a $5,000 fee for a demo we'd done a year earlier, which meant $1,250.

 

I called the lawyer and told him about the deal we cut.

“Are you
sure?
” the lawyer asked.

Yes, I said, very quietly.

I'd try to convey to the drummer the beat I wanted for a song by referencing a hip-hop tune. I was totally green, so I had no language to express it otherwise. When I hazarded musical jargon, he and the bass player laughed.

(Sometimes I'd ask what some musical term meant, and they'd look nervously at each other, doing a higher-pitched, more nervous version of the laugh. It appeared that they didn't
want
me to learn anything. Years later, I went through a torturously complex explanation of a beat, and the drummer I was working with said good-naturedly, “Oh, you want the snare on the two and the four.” Yes! Exactly! If somebody had taught me the language, maybe I wouldn't have felt helpless at rehearsals.)

He'd sneer, “Yo, G, that beat is played” (
played
meaning used up, out of style). I'd cajole him, and
maybe
he'd play it. Early in the life of the band, he'd roll his eyes and do something kind of in the neighborhood of what I'd asked him for, like he was thinking,
Whatever, who cares about this kid?
As the years went by, he would gravitate towards something self-consciously complicated, rarely funky. Uniqueness was more important to him than making the song better.

I stopped trying to tell him what to do. At rehearsals, I sat in the corner, reading the newspaper as he played permutations of these beats he found acceptably original, but were never particularly good. I waited him out. At some point, almost despite himself, he'd start doing something that was along the lines of what I needed for a song. I leaped up and began strumming the chords, and it would all start falling into place. I'd stop and say, Let's play that again.

We took it from the top and suddenly the beat was different.

Stop stop stop, I said. Hey, could you play the beat you were playing before?

“It's the same beat,” he said.

Bewildering. Maybe I'd heard it wrong. We began again. I started in with my chords, and the beat would be even further removed from what I wanted. I stopped playing.

Hey, that beat that you were doing when we first started this—that was really great—could you try that again?

“Yo, G,” he said, “It's the
same beat.
”

One time I insisted with a little more intensity, and he stood up, threw his sticks, and left the room, cursing at me, telling me he's a drummer, and I can't even play guitar, and he's played all over the world, and what the fuck do you know?

It'd be cool if you played something a little less space rock, a little firmer, I said, one time.

“You stole that there from Mary J. Blige, don't think everybody don't know you steal from other singers, G,” he replied.

We were playing a college festival at a track stadium. I was way up in the bleachers, watching the drums get sound checked. Suddenly he played a beat that I had wanted in a song for years; this kind of shuffly hip-hop beat with a buoyant triplet in the kick drum part. I ran down the bleachers. I ran like hell. All my songs ran through my mind, which one do I start playing when I get there? Because once a song was played to a beat, there was no way to say, Hey, that doesn't quite work there, can we try a different song with that beat? “We already have a song with that there beat,” he'd say.

I bolted down the bleachers to the field, I madly ran across it, ran up the stairs to the stage, pushing tech guys out of my way. I grabbed my guitar—it wasn't plugged in—I untangled the cable, frantically, ran to the amp—

He stopped playing the beat.

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.