Words and rhythm; rhythm and words. Mike Doughty is a master of crafting those elements into one experience. Whether it be leading a full band, in a duo situation with funky cello/upright bass genius Andrew “Scrap” Livingston, or just holding down the stage with an acoustic guitar, Doughty has a knack for combining infectious, clever lyrics with vibes and beats that will ambush you. This is the kind of music that’ll make one end of you think while the other end can’t help but sway. This man is not to be trusted: he will hook you.
On the heels of Doughty’s latest album, Yes And Also Yes (released on his own Snack Bar label) comes a new literary project. The Book Of Drugs: A Memoir (to be released by Da Capo Press in February) is not only an open look by Doughty at his past addiction problems, but a smart, funny, and honest view of the late 80s/early 90s NY music scene, Doughty’s years with the band Soul Coughing, and what it was like to reach the other side of a very dark place.
Don’t for a moment think that Mike Doughty has written your typical I-got-clean-and-now-I’m-above-all-that sort of book. We’ll talk about that in the following interview, but just to set things up, I think we’re, oh, four paragraphs into Doughty’s memoir when he writes, “I can’t renounce drugs. I love drugs.” This is not the average “Just say no” book, folks – but at the same time, it doesn’t encourage anything but honesty.
Mike was kind enough to share a slab of his time with us recently, talking about his music in general, some specifics about Yes And Also Yes, and The Book Of Drugs. Enjoy.
BR: Mike, thank you for making the time to talk today. Let’s see … according to the tour itinerary, you’re in … Utah?
MD: Yeah, well – we’re driving to Salt Lake City right now. We were in Denver last night and there was a snowstorm – the roads were shut down in Cheyenne, so we just parked the bus there for a bunch of hours and waited. We were 90% sure we were going to have to cancel the show, but they just opened the roads back up. It looks like we’re going to make it.
BR: You going to have time for a soundcheck?
MD: Nope – just throw and go.
BR: Well … that’s the road, right?
MD: Yes, it is. (laughter)
BR: Listen, one thing I wanted to say to you right off the bat is that you’ve always tended to play down your guitar work in interviews over the years. I have to tell you I think you’re one of the great six-string percussionists out there.
MD: (laughs) Well, cool – thank you very much. You know, I went to school with Ani DiFranco and when we were both 19 years old, she was in peak form … and I was like, just fumbling around. So I stole a lot from her – (laughter) – that kind of percussiveness.
I remember hearing Ani at the dorm room talent show: while I was playing something stupid, she played “Fire Door” and it was incredible. Seeing her was the thing that made me say to myself, “I want to get good at this.”
BR: I hear you. My oldest daughter Jess started playing guitar in her early teens. Once she got into Ani’s music, her playing was never the same – in the best of ways.
MD: That’s awesome. Yeah, Ani’s amazing.
BR: So just a couple gear questions for all the pickers out there: do you have a favorite go-to acoustic? And what do you use for strings and picks?
MD: I basically use the second-cheapest Martin. My approach to a lot of stuff is to get the second-cheapest thing. (laughs) It’s just a Martin cutaway acoustic-electric.
I use Elixir strings and they gave me an endorsement, which I’m extremely happy about. If I don’t change my strings literally every show, I end up popping them. One of the odd technical boundaries of my playing is that I’ve developed my acoustic style around bright strings – they can’t be dull at all. The Elixirs stay bright throughout the show. And I just use regular Fender picks.
BR: Wow – plastic? I pegged you for a nylon kind of guy. I figured you’d bust the plastic ones in half.
MD: (laughs) Nope. It’s funny – I break strings, but I rarely break picks.
BR: Where so many of your tunes have such a strong groove, I’ve long thought – in terms of writing – that the guitar riff had to come first. “Looking At The World From The Bottom Of A Well”; “Day By Day By”; “I Keep On Rising Up” – songs like that feel as though they had to be built around the guitar. How does it work for you?
MD: Well, there are sort of parallel processes going on: there’s a riffs-writing process; there’s the collecting of language around places –and the cataloguing of those fragmented phrases and things; and then there’s melody writing, which is sort of between the two. At some point, I’ll just sit down like a screen writer does with a whole bunch of index cards to assemble a screenplay: I’ll take a lyric and put it on top of a riff; shove them around a little bit. Sometimes the riff will sort of suggest a word; sometimes the word will suggest a melody.
BR: Take a song like “(You Should Be) Doubly (Gratified)”, for instance. Margaret Vaughan, one of my English teachers in high school, might have used that phrase in conversation, but you made it funky. (laughter) I’m guessing that would’ve been one of the fragmented phrases you were hanging onto.
MD: Yeah, I guess. I used to keep a notebook; now it’s all on my iPhone. I might write something down on the train; later on, I never know if it’s something I thought up on the spur of the moment, if it’s something that I heard someone say, or if I read it out of a newspaper or something. It’s just a matter of listening and pulling fragments from the world.
BR: Do you play Scrabble?
MD: No – I’m horrible at Scrabble. (laughs) People ask me that all the time. You know I did a photo session with Relix and the guy brought a Scrabble board. They said, “Oh, you’re a word addict.” And I’m like, “Okay – I’m not going to do the Scrabble board.” (laughter) I don’t understand games in general … it’s very strange. I’d rather hang out.
BR: One of the elements that’s become part of your sound is Andrew “Scrap” Livingston’s upright bass and cello playing. Scrap’s been with you since … 2005?
MD: Yeah – his first gig with me was on David Letterman.
BR: Ha – a good trial by fire. (laughter) He’s doing some cool electric work on Yes And Also Yes, as well.
MD: That’s right. A huge part of the sound on the new record is him playing stuff high on the neck of the bass with a pick; sort of a Cocteau Twins/The Cure/New Order kind of 80s stuff. I asked him about playing that sort of thing – and he wrote a bunch of stuff. “Strike The Motion” and “Vegetable” are his; just amazing lines.
BR: Do you ever hear him in your head when you’re coming up with riffs? You know, “Yeah, and while I’m doing this, Scrap could go …”
MD: That’s a funny question. In almost every scenario I kind of not tell people what to do. It really sort of bothers me when I’m with someone and they ask stuff before we start playing the song. You want somebody that just does what they do; they just jump right in and make something happen. I like being surprised. I tell people, “If you do something that’s the wrong direction, I’ll tell you. Other than that, just do stuff that compels you.”
I’m actually in the middle of writing this long-form theater piece that I was commissioned to write. And I realized that I’m writing something that will be a score; someone will play these exact notes – that’s something I have never, ever done before. I’ve sung bass lines to people or whatever, but I always try to get people to play things that interest them and reflect who they are.
BR: So the current tour line-up is you, Scrap, Pete Wilhoit on drums, and … is it Dan Chen on keys?
MD: That’s right. Dan and I first played together on the Haughty Melodic tour. He’s been doing some other things since, but when he asked me about going out on this tour with us, it was like, “Hell – _yes!_” It’s great to have him back with us.
Pete Wilhoit plays in Fiction Plane – that’s his main gig. I don’t remember now who recommended him, but I just basically polled everybody on drummers. The great thing now is, you can just go to YouTube and look at people playing. Even before the actual audition process, you can winnow it down to the most awesome players.
BR: Ahhh – the anonymous audition.
MD: Exactly. (laughs)
BR: Let’s talk a bit about the new album itself. I know the move to your own label – Snack Bar – was probably one of those mixed blessing things. I think my summation in the album review was “Risks and freedom; freedom wins.” It’s got to be scary.
MD: Oh, yeah – it’s great having your own input, but it’s difficult in the sense that you have to pay for everything. I’m really scrounging favors and asking people, “Can I pay you six months after the record comes out?” Actually, I’ve never been on a label that really told me what to do; or if they did, I’d just say, “No” and they’d be fine with it.
There’s definitely some difficulty involved in running your own thing – but there’s no label that I’m going to get the kind of work out of that I really need. Labels are increasingly strapped – not strapped for cash; strapped for time. (laughs) ATO was great, but when I signed with them, there were 20 people working there – now there’s like 4 or 5. Unless you really don’t want any control, you’ve got to run your own thing.
But yeah – it was scary. I had a period in the early 2000s after I’d left Soul Coughing of being totally independent, so I knew it worked; knew it wasn’t an impossible task … but it was still frightening.
I know some people back home in Brooklyn – young singer-songwriters in their 20s – who I just look at and say, “It’s not fair … you simply don’t have the opportunities that I had. I was way stranger than what you’re doing – but you may not have the opportunity to be a full-on musician for a living.”
BR: Did you have a concentrated period of writing for Yes And Also Yes?
MD: Yeah – the bulk of the album was written at Yaddo, which is an artist’s colony in upstate NY. It’s an interesting joint: you apply and they let you in for a month, two months – put you up, give you a studio space, feed you, and give lots of time. It’s all people working in any media: writers, composers, painters, and poets. It’s been around since the early part of the last century – Truman Capote, Leonard Bernstein, and Aaron Copeland have worked there.
I wrote 21 songs in a month. They all got chopped up, which is not unusual for me. There was one song where the chorus was good and another song where the verse was good, so I chopped out the rest and sort of jammed them together and made them one song. But the shoulder-to-the-wheel work happened at Yaddo.
BR: How about the recording for the album – that was spread out over a period of time, wasn’t it?
MD: Yeah – and again, that’s a product of not having the money to do it all at once. On one hand, it’s annoying, but in terms of working on it for five days and then having a month to think about what you’re going to do next … having that much spare time to think is great; it’s amazing for a record. If I’d had my druthers, I wouldn’t have done it that way, but I know it’s good for me.
One thing I wondered as I listened through the first few times: why live drums on some cuts and you covering the beats on others?
Well, when I started recording, my idea was that it was going to be a serious rock record. Marty Beller, who played drums on the album, is a rock guy – I don’t think I’ve ever worked with anyone who’s that much of a rock drummer. (laughter) Basically what happened was we recorded a bunch of stuff and then there were some songs that were written late in the game, like “Na Na Nothing” and “Holiday”. I started by augmenting “Day By Day By” with some electronic stuff and the album became sort of hybridized. It’s all me for the first four tracks or so and then the rest is sort of a combination of electronic beats and Marty.
I had great people all around me for this album: Marty on drums; Scrap on cello and bass; Thomas Bartlett, who has his own band Doveman – he plays with an amazing range of people: Laurie Anderson, The National, The Johnsons, Martha Wainwright, Rufus Wainwright. Thomas is like the “dude of the moment” – he’s one of the secret weapons of this album’s sound. So is Carolin Pook, who plays violin.
BR: Oh, man – I wanted to talk to you about her. I didn’t have the album credits when I did the original review – just the pre-release download to listen to. I didn’t realize that Carolin played violin on the album – I attributed things like the “spine shivers” on “Russell” to fancy bow work by Scrap. I owe Carolin an apology; her violin work is beautiful.
MD: Isn’t it? She’s my neighbor in Brooklyn, actually.
BR: Really?
MD: Yeah, Carolin lives in the apartment next door. She’s in her 20s and it’s one of those apartments that kids of that age get in Brooklyn: 5 bedrooms and there’s constantly some sax player or some painter that’s moving in or moving out. (laughter) She started putting on house parties, playing avant-garde music and improvised classical stuff – she was just great. I got her into the studio, put her in front of the mic, and said, “Make weird noises and we’ll sort them out.” (laughs)
That thing on “Russell” that you mentioned was actually a part that she wrote – three violin tracks going at once and she just kind of made this undulating bed of strings.
BR: Oh – it’s a real hair-standing-up-on-your-arms kind of moment. Well, please pass my apologies along when you see her in the hall. (laughter) Great lyrics in “Russell”, by the way. Where else is a verse going to end with “aspartame” – and have it be the perfect last word? (laughter)
MD: Well, thank you. That’s what I like. (laughs)
BR: Another song I wanted to ask you about is “Holiday”. That’s a deceptive song: it’s so easy to get wrapped up in the swirling snow and the Christmas spirit –
MD: Right, right.
BR: And then, when you really listen to the lyrics, you realize that the singer’s world is coming apart.
MD: It’s really about drunk people being unable to relate to each other. I’d gone out to Los Angeles to do some stuff and while I was out there, I wrote some songs. I scheduled some time to write with Dan Wilson: we do it just because we love doing it. And the idea was that we’d write a Christmas song that was not corny but genuinely emotional. I mean, there’s all kinds of ha-ha Christmas albums and songs out there, but I wanted to write something that was genuinely resonant – and I think we nailed it.
BR: And how did Rosanne Cash end up on that track?
MD: It actually began with a note in the chorus that I couldn’t hit. I thought, “Well, I’ll get a female vocalist and we’ll harmonize; I’ll do the low harmony and she’ll hit the high note.”
I thought we’d take a complete shot in the dark before we got serious and ask Rosanne Cash – who had, in fact, said some extremely nice things about my songwriting recently. And she said yes! (laughter) At that point, it was converted into an actual duet where we’re singing every word together … and I just love it.
BR: Oh, it’s a great piece of work. Hey, there are two instruments you play on the album that I wanted to ask you about. Ffirst there’s the rhythm shaker that you’re playing on a number of the songs …
MD: (laughs) Ah – Duloxetine. It’s a capsule form of Cymbalta, the anti-depressant. Actually, I’m editing a video that we shot in the studio of me shaking this little tiny caplet in front of the mic to get that sound.
BR: (laughs) It sounds great.
MD: Yeah. I’d just opened up the bottle to pop a pill in the morning – they’re prescribed – and I thought, “You know – this is a good shaker sound.” (laughter) It was perfect: just a little tiny thing held up to the microphone.
BR: And then what’s the stringed instrument you play on “Telegenic Exes #1”?
MD: Oh – the zhong ruan. That’s the closest I can pronounce it for you; it’s in Mandarin. It’s a total language thing where there are actual notes in the word that I’m unable to reproduce. But, anyway, it’s a tenor lute. I went to Shanghai a bunch of years ago and I just picked it up – I just stumbled across this instrument store. It’s the kind of thing that any stringed instrument player is going to fumble around on.
BR: Open tuning?
MD: Yeah. I don’t even remember … gosh almighty … I think I tuned it to an open G on that song, but I don’t remember what the traditional tuning is for it.
BR: I’m guessing you’re not touring with that.
MD: No. (laughter) Actually, it’s a pretty cheaply-made instrument. I left it in the studio with Pat Dillett and his little place in Koreatown, Manhattan – everyone that records there picks it up and messes around with it. Maybe it’ll show up on another record. (laughs)
BR: And then what are you playing on “Telegenic Exes #2” – the Martin?
MD: Yeah.
BR: That’s a great closer. It just had to be at the end of the album, didn’t it?
MD: (laughs) That’s something I’ve done time and time again – which I refer to semi-tongue-in-cheekly as the “Paul Westerberg gambit” – put a real melancholy ballad at the end like that.
BR: Do you get involved with the sequencing of the album tracks in general?
MD: I certainly do, but in actual fact I’m really not – and never have been – an album guy. I tend to be sort of song-oriented; single-oriented. The iPodification of music has been perfect for me: just put stuff on “shuffle.”
There’s actually maybe five albums that I like as albums: The Low End Theory by A Tribe Called Quest, Led Zeppelin IV, Funky Kingston, The Stone Roses … and maybe My Aim Is True. And that’s it. (laughs) Those are the only albums that I’ll go to and listen to the whole album.
I’ve always thought of the song as sort of the painting, you know? And that is the unit of measurement. The great masterpieces of the art form are songs.
BR: You mentioned Pat Dillett; it seems like the two of you have a great working relationship.
MD: Oh, Pat is really an incredible guy to work with: super-smart. He’s a very deft producer – not just sonically, but compositionally, as well – and he’s a real collaborator. Some guys are like, “My instrument is the studio” but Pat’s not like that; he certainly has a lot of amazing technique and things sound great, but he’s really about being with the artist and making something happen.
BR: Cool. The connection between the two of you comes through in the tunes, for sure.
MD: Thank you.
BR: Hey – feel like talking about the book?
MD: (laughs) Absolutely.
BR: Early on, you talk about anti-drug campaigns that you remember from your childhood – one in particular that was about meth. And your point is, no matter what the tagline was, what they were really saying was, “Don’t take this, you’ll love it.” You offer an alternative message, which, if you don’t mind, I’d like to quote here for the readers.
MD: Please.
BR: You write, “Here’s a message that I prefer: If you try meth, it’ll feel amazing. You’ve been in emotional pain for a long time, and you don’t know it; you won’t know it until the drug makes the pain go away. You’ll feel like you’ve solved the essential problem of being alive. But sometimes this leads to an unthinkably gruesome humiliation. Be aware of that.
“We, the adults in authority who are concerned about you, want you to know that other ways to deal with emotional pain certainly won’t provide the sudden cure that a noseful of drugs will. They take more time, more effort, and you may be extremely discouraged along the way. But they may be worth it, especially considering that drugs can be a form of suicide.”
Mike, that’s one of the most honest messages that I’ve ever heard anyone pass along. I would read that to my grandkids when the time comes.
MD: Thank you – I appreciate that.
The reason people say stay away from drugs is because you will love them. Drugs are super-great. I am a fan of drugs; I have nothing against drugs; and when I look at me being an addict, it wasn’t the drugs – it was me. There’s something wrong in me that makes it so that if I take anything, I’m going to go off the deep end, no matter what, without even thinking about it.
You know, most people can smoke weed and they’re fine. But there are weed addicts out there; people who can’t get their shit together because they have to get stoned – all day, every day. And that’s the minority of pot smokers – but it’s real.
What a strange message: “Don’t do this – it will trap you.” When it doesn’t explain why it’ll trap you: which is because it’ll feel … amazing. (laughter) That’s a very odd blind spot in our culture.
I had no idea growing up that drugs were great. So I tried them and I said, “Wait a minute – these are great and I’ve been lied to all this time.” They did amazing things for me. I wouldn’t trade the first couple of years of doing drugs for anything. But it’s the last years – the horrible part – that were bad.
BR: I have to tell you – and I love Lou Reed – but Lou Reed doing a “Rock Against Drugs” commercial isn’t quite the same.
MD: You know, I read an interview with him where he said he was really conflicted about doing that – and I totally understand why. The guy has written so much incredible honest work about drug use that to super-simplify it by “Just say no”, you know …
BR: It feels like nobody’s really talking about what’s what.
MD: That’s right. There’s a number of things we’ve got to do: we’ve got to legalize weed so that people can talk about it honestly; we have to empty the jails of non-violent criminals who were busted for drugs; we have to end this racist drug war; and we have to look our kids in the face and say, “This is what they are. This is what they do. You will like them. I had a great time – here are the dangers.”
BR: As I read the book, I would read passages to my wife and we’d talk about it. The word I kept coming up with was “honest.”
MD: Oh, wow. Thank you.
BR: Did you fetch up at any point? You were so open about things – from your feelings about those around you to how to deal with a piss-soaked bed in a hotel … not everybody could do that. Did you ever pause and say, “I don’t know if I can write about this?”
MD: You know, the only thing that really made me pause was the stuff about other people. Things about friends that they wouldn’t necessarily want other people to know about. So there were things that were excluded. But as far as things about me? I guess … I guess I just don’t care. (laughs) I’m not going to run for the Senate, you know? (laughter) There’s no practical reason for people not to know that I got shitfaced and pissed the bed all the time.
BR: I’d still vote for you. (laughter) Go ahead, Mike – run.
MD: Errrrr … I don’t think it’s gonna happen. (laughter)
BR: Beyond talking about addiction, there were plenty other moments of openness: describing your feelings towards your bandmates years ago – or your envy of Jeff Buckley, even after the guy died. It’s the honesty that keeps you from being detestable. (laughter)
MD: Thanks. It’s one of the things about having a lot of crazy stories about other people – you have to be totally honest about what you were like. It’s a much harder thing to have perspective on, you know? Not that I can’t look back at certain behaviors and think, “God, what a horrible thing to say; what a horrible thing to do or to think.” But to know your own motivations – that’s the tricky part.
BR: Another part of the book I enjoyed were your descriptions of the awakening process – the awareness that came with being clean. Again, it’s more than just a slogan – a “High On Life” bumper sticker or whatever – you put it down on the page really well.
MD: When you look at somebody who’s drinking themselves to death or drugging themselves and they’re trapped in this very grey space of having a half-life, it’s hard to understand. You need to realize that they think they’re different than everybody else: “This is the only good thing in the world – this is the only pleasurable thing in the entire world; it’s all that I have; and it’s worth the risk of death.”
It just seems like when people are telling you to get clean so that you won’t die, they’re telling you to get clean to be miserable and just experience this kind of constantly-throbbing pain. Discovering that having a life is actually quite amazing – and discovering that there are amazing things in the world is … astonishing, really. I didn’t suspect it, myself; I really didn’t suspect there was any kind of enjoyment in being alive.
BR: So that was a surprise to you, rather than a goal? I mean, you were trying to stay alive, I understand, but … you were trying to escape from something rather than get to something?
MD: Right. I looked at the pros and cons and I said, “I’m gonna try not dying. I’m gonna give that a shot.” What I was thinking was, “Well, I’ll go to meetings; I’ll do all these things for a little while and then I can use again and figure out how to manage it better …”
But when I walked in there and met all these amazing, fascinating people – real artists and real thinkers and people with incredibly creative approaches to living … super observant, incredibly aware people, that’s when I was like, “There’s really something to this.”
BR: There’s a place for this book. It should be handed out to people who need to hear somebody who’s been there talk about this stuff.
MD: It’s funny you should say that, because at the same time, I know somebody’s going to read this book and go, “I hate this guy – fuck being clean.” In the same way that I looked at that stretch of people getting sober in the 80s and I looked at them in People magazine and said “Fuck all these people – these are horrible, awful people who are not like me.”
BR: I don’t know … you never come off holier-than-thou in the book; you’re not denying anything or saying, “No – that wasn’t me.” Honest and true? I think you’re probably going to catch more shit from people who are going to say, “well, jeez, Mike – you should be more repentant. You shouldn’t say that you still like drugs after all that … how could you?” (laughter) I would’ve thought you’d be more concerned about people being pissed about that.
MD: Well, listen: in terms of the recovering addicts that I know, everybody was pretty devastated by the loss of Amy Winehouse. If you’re in recovery and you see something like that, it’s so bad. But I swear to God, everybody that I know that’s an addict loved her song “Rehab” when they heard it – loved it. Thought it was just hilarious. Because we’re not Dr. Drew – we’re Amy Winehouse. That’s who we are: that sort of dark humor; that sort of “rapture of the damned” kind of a vibe. That’s our personality … or at least the people that I hang out with.
BR: I have people that I’m close to who have gone through it and come out the other side with their sense of humor intact. I love and admire that.
MD: That’s what saves your life. Getting honest is what’s necessary; a sense of humor is a form of acute honesty – or can be, anyway.
BR: You mentioned something that made me feel better about one of my quirks: according to you, I shouldn’t worry about being somewhere by myself and suddenly saying “Godammit” out loud because I’ve just thought of something stupid I’ve said or done in the past, eh?
MD: That’s right. (laughter) Sometimes I feel like there’s a guy in my head presenting evidence. I’ll sit back and say to myself, “This is something you did in the second grade – you should be able to forgive yourself” or “This is something you did when you were shitfaced” or “This is something you did and you immediately regretted it … it was a human mistake.” But there’s still a voice in my head, constantly punishing me for it.
The good part is, I now realize it’s a voice in my head … it’s just me realizing the truth.
BR: Well, thank you for sharing it with the rest of us. And I guess we should call it good for now and I’ll let you go. You’re an hour closer to Salt Lake City than you were. I wish you luck tonight.
MD: Thank you, man. We’re going to be plugging stuff in five minutes before we play, so it should be fun. (laughs)
BR: Hey, you know what? It may be the best show of the tour.
MD: Indeed. (laughs)
Postscript: The next morning, I couldn’t help but wonder how the day ended for Mike Doughty and the band. I sent him a quick note, thanking him again for the chat and inquiring about the show. I received an e-mail back within minutes:
“The pleasure was mine! Really fun interview. Thanks.
The bus driver pulled a magic trick, as far as I’m concerned – we pulled up to the venue in Salt Lake at 6:30 pm! Incredible. We had enough time to set up the drums, change the strings, and turn on the amps, and we did it. Great audience – they were dancing, and it looked like every single face up front knew every single lyric.
Mike”
There’s nothing like a happy ending.
