The Book of Drugs (11 page)

 

We played a big Warner Bros. showcase at a ballroom on Thirty-fourth Street. There were four bands from the label, and in between they projected clips from Warner Bros.–produced sitcoms. A guy in a Bugs Bunny suit wandered in the crowd. Backstage, they had me do a chat room thing, which I'd never done before. There were three or four chatters, and they all wanted to talk to the lead singer from Saint Etienne:
hello? is this sarah? sarah are you there?

(Chat room appearances became faddish. Usually they wanted you to call somebody sitting at a terminal somewhere, and they'd read the questions to you and type your answers out. I refused to do them, because I was snooty about my spelling and punctuation, which they always bungled. It's an abuse of the medium, I told the stupefied publicists.)

I met a dark haired, quasi-goth girl from Hackensack with fishnet stockings and an elaborate Italian name. We ended up backstage with my hand up her dress. We sniffed some heroin. I got her number but never called her, because I knew she'd come back with heroin every time, and I had too much at stake to become a junkie.

 

It was the advent of the dial-up modem, and our manager had gotten us an AOL account; each of us had a screen name we
could sign in under. One day my phone rang; I picked up, and heard
click.
I dialed *69, a recent innovation in prank-call prevention; you'd dial it and it'd connect you to the number that just called.

The bass player picked up. “Hello?” he said, with a kind of exaggerated casualness.

Um, did you call me?

“No? . . .”

I just dialed *69, I said.

“That's weird,” he said.

It seems like you called me to see if you got a busy signal, to tell whether or not I was online and you could use the AOL account.

“Doughty,” he said, “you're so
paranoid.
”

The AOL account was mostly for fan e-mail. I checked the sent messages and found a response to a German guy's message suggesting an alternate guitar tuning for me.

“Thanks,” the bass player had written back, “but Doughty doesn't know how to tune his own guitar.”

 

It seemed to me that strange things would happen if he was mad at you. Things would go missing; I'd come onstage to find that my guitar was suddenly out of tune, even though I hadn't touched it since sound check; the little foam-whatsits on my headphones would be ripped out and tossed on the floor; in the dressing room, somebody's bottle of red wine would have mysteriously fallen off the table and shattered; my takeout lunch that I had left on my amp while I went to grab a napkin would suddenly be gone, reappearing in the room he happened to be practicing in.

What the
fuck?
I said.

“Hmm?” he said. “What's the matter?”

There was a tape of Bollywood wedding music,
Vivah Geet,
that I'd bought in a bodega and treasured—Bollywood was a mystery before the 2000s, something you heard emanating from cab radios and nobody could help you find. I left it in the van, and when I went to retrieve it, it had vanished.

Anybody seen that Indian music tape?

“I packed it,” said the bass player.

You
packed
it, I repeated. Can you grab it out of your bag and give it to me?

“Aren't you going to
thank
me for making sure you didn't forget it?” he said.

It took me a month to get it. When he gave it back to me, it was just the case—the cassette was missing.

 

We were in France. I walked into the hotel after a gig and saw the bass player in an alcove, on a hotel phone. He had a grim, secretive look on his face. An hour later, I walked out; he was still on the phone. I came back a couple hours later; he was
still
on the phone.

In the morning, I was sitting in the lobby, groggy, as the tour manager was checking out. He motioned me over.

“Zair ees a long-deestance phone call for Room 210,” said the desk guy.

I had called the States the night before, dialing up the AT&T long distance to punch in my calling card number. It must cost something to call even a toll-free number. These greedy hotel fuckers.

I looked at the bill. It was something in the hundreds. I had no idea what the number meant. This was before the euro; every country had different money. English roadies had a charming tradition of mocking the confusion of currencies by calling every
country's money
shitters.
In Germany, a cup of coffee cost five shitters; in Denmark, fifteen shitters; in Belgium a hundred and fifty shitters; in Italy, astonishingly, three or four
thousand
shitters; in Holland—and I must point out here that the Dutch guilder was once the world's most magnificently psychedelic cash—twenty or thirty shitters. So, whatever it was, I wasn't paying attention—I was just going to pay it and worry about exchange rates when I was broke. I pulled out a multicolored fistful of sooty bills.

The tour manager looked over my shoulder at the bill for the phone call and his eyes bugged out. “That's
seven hundred francs!
” he said. “How long was your phone call?”

Ten minutes?

“Ten minutes! That's not right.” He began to argue with the front desk guy. I was just standing there wondering where I could get coffee.

The front desk guy was yelling at the tour manager. He picked up the phone. “He's calling the employee that was working last night.”

Holding the phone to his ear, the desk guy repeated his description; long hair, striped shirt, pointy boots, long grey coat.

We turned to the bass player, dressed in precisely the same clothes as last night.

“What's the matter?” he said.

My interpretation: before he made the call, the front desk had asked for his room number, and the bass player had given them mine. The bass player
got on the phone with the guy and pretended to be clueless.
I believe that I've never known a man so committed to his lies; somebody who could serenely look you in the eye while he told you something that clearly, unambiguously, wasn't true.

And you know what? He got away with it. Nobody paid anybody seven hundred francs. We got in the van.

He was often on the phone—no, that's an egregious understatement. He was on the phone at every truck stop, in every hotel lobby, every restaurant. I think he had a network of women he badgered into talking dirty. It seemed that in every city, he met a woman but never actually brought them back to the hotel, and they were all of a type; none of them were attractive. I cringe as I type that, but I don't know how else to put it. He liked women who didn't have options.

He didn't have a phone, only a voice mail number, the kind that used to be common for struggling actors in New York to have, so they could call in obsessively and see if they'd scored auditions. He saw himself as super-erotic-man, and his outgoing message, accordingly, was so smarmy that I recoiled from the receiver every time I called him. Sometimes I held the phone at arm's length until I heard the beep.

“Leave me a message,” he said in a porn-star voice. “A
detailed
message.”

 

We did the radio sex advice show
Lovelines
once, with Dr. Drew and the hair-metal gadfly Rikki Rachtman. It was the policy of the band that for any media appearance, all four members had to be there, even though it was customary for the singer to go, because otherwise somebody might think that I was more important than anybody else. (Once, on the French iteration of MTV, an interviewer directed the questions to me, but when I began to speak, they'd all yell answers at the same time, to drown me out; when we showed up for photo shoots, somebody would loudly say, two or three times, pointedly, “We're not the kind of band where the
singer stands in the front of the picture
.” Though the magazines would always use the ones where I managed to be in front, because people look at any picture of any band and think,
Which one's the singer?
)

But
Lovelines
was done from a studio with only two microphones.

“Please let me do this,” said the bass player. “
Please.
I'll never ask for anything again if you let me do this.”

The sampler player and the drummer assented, possibly because they knew it would make me supremely uncomfortable. The bass player and I had done an interview in D.C. with a tiny Korean girl from a college paper, and he boasted at length about not wearing underwear.

We were on the show, and there was a call from somebody talking about a threesome and how watching her boyfriend fuck another woman had messed up her relationship irrevocably.

“I've been in a threesome!” the bass player piped in. Like he'd been waiting to say this.

“What was your experience?” asked Dr. Drew.

“It's nice work if you can get it!” said the bass player.

A discomfited pause, and then Dr. Drew moved on from the dead joke. “Many people in relationships experience blah blah blah something something something,” he said.

“It's nice work if you can get it!” said the bass player, loudly, as if the joke, repeated, would be funny.

 

He often spoke in cartoon voices. When he was nervous, he would
only
speak in funny voices. It made for history's most excruciating conference calls. He would do it in interviews, too. He seemed to believe that somebody would think, “Oh, I love that band! The one with the bass player who does
impressions!
”

 

The very saddest thing about the guy was the way he smoked weed. He said that he had once smoked prodigiously, completely giving his life over to stoner's limbo; then, he had actually given it up for years. But, one day, the sampler player and the drummer
and I were smoking in rehearsal, and he took the pipe and said, quite gravely, “If I get really messed up on
something serious
, you're responsible.”

From then on, he smoked near constantly. Before and after shows; just offstage right before we played the encore. Before and after eating. Before and after watching a movie. Upon waking and before sleeping. He'd smoke and do interviews in cartoon voices, as I cringed. I invited him over to go through some songs, and he showed up too stoned to play, and without his instrument. We'd land in Copenhagen or Frankfurt or Manchester, and he'd whip out a bag of weed, leading me to believe he'd risked the tour by smuggling drugs across a border. He had a tiny wooden pipe. When he smoked, he sucked at it so hard that his body shook. Literally.

 

I was backstage in France, talking to somebody about the bass player. “I just have absolutely no respect for the guy,” I said.

Then I saw that he was just outside the door.

That night he played the best show I ever heard him play; on every song, he abandoned the usual bass lines and improvised something fierce, you could say
persuasive,
seizing the music, flipping keys upside down, bashing around in weird spots in the rhythm. He didn't always play like this. Sometimes he showed up without his talent—sometimes he seemed to be trying to tell us about his blood sugar by playing badly. At this gig, he
killed
. Wholly in control.

 

“You think you write songs?” said the sampler player. “If you want people to know your poetry,
stick with us.
We make something out of your
naïve musical explorations
.”

There's an old interview out there that I can't find on the internet in which he says (I'm paraphrasing, but you remember insults near verbatim, don't you?): “Doughty's not a musician. He's a
wordsmith.
”

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.