The Book of Drugs (9 page)

The story of Nirvana—the band that wrought the cultural sea change—was perceived like this: Nirvana was friends with Sonic Youth, asked them which label was best, and Sonic Youth said, “Our label!” Bands were signed because
they might be friends with other bands,
or they carried a whiff of prestige that might attract more profitable acts. Some bands were pursued as trophies by the labels, pelted with cash in bidding wars, and shrugged off nonchalantly when their CDs tanked.

Nobody worried. They were tax write-offs for companies with much tax to write off. Plus, who knows what this stuff is, what it means? Any of these bands could fluke into a hit.

A hit! What major labels
did
, above all else, was seek a
hit;
a song that gets played on the radio, and then, once MTV was assured by radio of its hit-ness (MTV's reputation as a tastemaker being altogether undeserved) on cable TV. The fanzine-bred label people didn't know what hits were, or how to get bands to make them; many of them were unaware that hits were the heart of the enterprise at all. Eventually the bands-that-were-friends-with-bands, the bands-with-artistic-merit—and, alas, that new guard of A&R people, who couldn't just go play in bars and thus had to find
other ways to make a living—discovered that they had wandered into a car dealership and sniffily announced they were shopping for boats.

 

Corpulent, delicate Stanley Ray used to work in the stockroom at his label but was promoted to A&R when another guy quit. He got the job because he went out to clubs every night, compulsively (if he spent a night at home he'd jabber neurotically about how he must be missing out on something). He was bald on top, with two dirty-blond dreadlocks tied into a ponytail.

He met with us in the revolving restaurant atop the Marriott in Times Square and charmed us comprehensively. He hinted at stories about bands getting fucked by labels, said, “No, I should stop, I can't tell you that story.” We begged, and with a theatrical sigh, he said, “I shouldn't tell you this,” then told the sordid tales, with names coyly omitted.

His boss was an ex-football player who'd fluked into putting out singles by L.A. punk rock bands in the '70s. He was a grey-haired man in big glasses—sort of Harry Caray–looking—who liked to wear a sport jacket over cutoff jeans. He flew out to New York, met us at a Japanese restaurant, sketched out a diagram on a napkin of how his label meshed with its major label parent, Warner Bros. Then he told us, at length, about how he was going to leave the record business and build a house, in a cave, powered entirely by turbine engines.

 

(This guy told a story about once having signed James Brown, incongruously, to his then-minuscule punk rock label. He said that James's contract specified that he be given three Cadillacs; one went to a woman in Kentucky, another to a woman in Ohio, and
one was for James. The sessions were wretched. Having given up on finishing a usable tune, the guy told James, sarcastically, “Why don't you try something New Wave on the chorus?” When the chorus came around, James shrieked, “New WAVE! New WAVE! New WAVE!”)

 

Stanley Ray had a pattern: he'd fall in love with a singer, pursue his band, sign them, then hate him. His charm was powerful. The other side of it was a whining, griping passive-aggressiveness that snarled out if a singer expressed some measure of positive self-regard. His stories invariably went back to how———from ———had once been so rad and they'd been close and he'd told Stanley Ray all his secret hopes, but then suddenly the singer had changed, had only hard-hearted interest in his career, and hadn't called him, in fact
actively avoided him, can you believe that?

I saw this immediately, and made, half-consciously, a resolution: I was the guy who would
never
let Stanley Ray down.

 

We were flown to Los Angeles so Stanley Ray and the turbine-cave guy could further woo us. They put us up at the Mondrian on Sunset Boulevard; our suites looked out over twinkling Hollywood. I'd never stayed somewhere so posh, and they were paying for
everything
. Remembering the nights I had to decide between spending my $3 on cigarettes or food, I opened the minibar and ate all the candy. They took us out for dinner, and when I got back to the room, stoned and stuffed, I immediately ordered a pizza from room service that I could barely take a bite of.

I called the front desk and asked if I could call a dominatrix and charge it to the room.

“Uh, no sir,” the front-desk guy said, contemptuously.

“Dude!” said the turbine-cave guy the next day. “Let's go to the Bu!”

The Bu?

“The
Bu!
Malibu!”

He drove us there in his black BMW, enthusing about the frozen margaritas at some seaside restaurant. We passed a pipe around. I put on a cassette of A Tribe Called Quest that I'd brought along. It came to the song “Show Business,” on which five rappers take turns denouncing record company executives. Q-Tip calls them fakes, snakes, shady, says the business is a cesspool; Sadat X talks about smarmy, “palsy-palsy” A&R people that materialize when you're riding high; Phife kvetches about “bogus brothers making albums when they know they can't hack it”; Diamond D tells the listener to get a good lawyer, and a label that's “willing and able to market and promote.”

Lord Jamar's verse is the most devastating. “You're a million dollar man that ain't got no dough,” he says. He describes being at a restaurant with a label guy, asking him when he'll get paid. Just as a label guy tells him he won't get paid, because he hasn't recouped his advance yet, a waitress arrives. “More soup with your meal?”

“All you want to do is taste the fruit,” Lord Jamar says, “but in the back they're making fruit juice.”

Turbine-cave guy laughed and laughed.

 

Nonchalantly, Stanley Ray lived in peripatetic luxury. He came to New York a few times a year and stayed at the Rihga Royal Hotel, on Fifty-fourth Street, for a month, taking me or some other friend out to dinner every night. When I briefly lived with (and, perhaps, off of) a girlfriend in London, he came out and stayed in a cushy place he called the Disco Arab Hotel for three weeks.

In the '70s, Stanley Ray was the obnoxious guy at the L.A. punk shows, getting in people's faces and telling them off. (Maybe, says your armchair shrink friend Mike Doughty, he was preempting mockery for his fatness by cutting everybody else down first?) Somebody at Warner Bros. complimented him for niceness and he was glum. Seriously.

There were cards made for A&R guys to send out with CDs. He had his altered from “with compliments of . . . ” to “with complaints.”

He called our manager incompetent every time we spoke, and then said, “No, no, I shouldn't talk shit about your manager, he's
your
manager, after all,” and we'd say, No, Stanley, please, we want to hear it, then he'd talk about how insulted he was that we hadn't asked him to quit the label and become our manager, but he didn't
want
to be our manager, he was just insulted that we didn't want him to be our manager. If I pointed out that perhaps management, involving math and planning, required skills other than alternately charming and alienating people at nightclubs, he'd say, “What, like it's hard to manage a band or something?!”

He didn't do anything a traditional A&R guy was supposed to do; he didn't help bands find producers, though he often complained, “Your manager isn't doing
anything
to find producers,” and he didn't help us to develop songs, other than alluding to his displeasure at them. He did sign bands, but after signing Soul Coughing, in 1993, he barely signed anybody for the next seven years—he signed bands that he openly said he didn't take seriously. He was eventually bumped up from the smaller Warner Bros. imprint to vice president at Warner Bros. proper (not so impressive: every other person you met there was a vice president) and was making a quarter million dollars a year. His key mission was to make Soul Coughing feel too guilty to break up.

We sat tensely at brunch. A deranged Frenchman in a clown wig wandered between the tables playing the accordion. Our lawyer had gotten us a publishing deal—that meant songwriting. I had exhorted the guys in my band, when they were disinterested, that they should think of it as
their
band, as well as mine. It didn't really work at the time. But now it became clear that they expected every bit of money to be split even-steven.

I'd spent eight hours the night before typing out a screed explaining what I thought I had done, how it was significant that I put the band together; twelve dense pages of loopy argument. When I woke up, I realized I was just typing the same thing over and over again, in fact barely saying anything at all. I deleted it. My head spun, trying to devise a way to state my case.

Let's think about what songs actually
are,
I said.

They sat scowling.

The drummer spoke: “Yo G, you don't write the beat.
I
write the beat. Just because you do the vocal doesn't mean you're better than me. Listen to them hi-hat parts there. Nobody told me to do that, that's my hi-hat part, G.”

Could I disagree?

“Don't be greedy,” the drummer said.

“We were all doing something else, and then this came along. So this is like a side project for each of us,” said the bass player.

I thought, but didn't say:
This isn't a side project. This is my life. Everything I've ever written I've poured into this band. You feel like this is just some fluke you fell into, because for you it
is.

But I was ten years younger than these guys, and they were much better at their instruments than I was.

The sampler player pulled out a sheaf of papers. “Look at this,” he said. It was sheet music, with notes, actual super-fancy
Western notation
notes,
written on staves with clefs and the whole respectable-composer package.

“This,” he said, “is music.”

I thought, but didn't say:
You've contributed basically one keyboard part, brilliant, amazing keyboard part though it is, around which a song is based—and I put it together, laid it out, I made it into a
song.

But I was ten years younger than these guys, and they were all much better than I was.

“I'm not saying we don't have good lyrics, G,” said the drummer. “Everybody's going to know we're one of those bands with good lyrics.”

One of those bands with good lyrics?
As if to say, we're one of those bands with interesting art on their CD covers?

The sampler player pointed at the bass player. “He's been playing for
years.
He's played in so many bands, he's played with ———” and here he mentioned an ornery avant-jazz legend. “Do you think that guy would even
think
of playing with you?”

“You act like you're the only one whose dream it is to be a rock star,” said the bass player. “It's my dream, too.”

But,
I thought,
what did you do about it? In your entire life, what have you done?
I paid for those rehearsals when I barely had a dime—booked those gigs with those spiteful club people—called everybody I'd ever met in New York to gather a measly crowd for our gigs—

“You play the same riff over and over again,
Doughty,
” said the bass player, putting a cruelly condescending emphasis on my name.

Yes. Just as some of the great rhythm guitarists and songwriters do, having a style that they modify and return to for their entire careers, I'm not great, but I live by the example of the greats, I could've said.

But I was ten years younger, and they were all much better than I was.

Finally, I said, You all sound like yourselves, and you're all amazing, but I knew what this band was going to sound like before I got you guys together.

They threw up their hands and scoffed, but it was true. I'd sat and imagined it for years, and it sounded as I intended it to. I could've said: It doesn't occur to you that I'm better than you think I am, that I have a vision that you'll never give me credit for—maybe you do know it, and you don't want to admit it to yourselves, because this would mean accepting that your future lay in following this guy, this annoying skinny kid from the suburbs with the weird lyrics, who can barely sing, and is such a primitive guitar player he might as well be a novice. Admitting this guy was a whiz kid meant admitting you were never a whiz kid yourself.

I wasn't going to say it. Because I didn't believe it. In my early morning stonedness, writing songs, bass lines, dreaming up rhythms, I thought myself a genius. But in the light of day I had no confidence.

“That's just
boring.
That's really
boring,
” said the sampler player. “I
studied
music. And this man”—motioning to the bass player—“is the most talented musician in New York, and this man”—motioning to the drummer—“everybody wants to play with. You're lucky that he's playing with you. Do you have any idea how lucky you are?”

“You have to ask what key you're playing in, you don't even know the names of the chords you're playing,
Doughty,
” said the bass player.

Long silence.

“We should split the money equally,” said the bass player.

“That's what we'll do. That's the right thing to do,” said the sampler player.

“Nobody should be more important than anybody else,” said the drummer.

It was as if the solution suddenly occurred to everybody. They smiled these
Eureka!
smiles.

“Great! We've decided! What a relief.”