Written by Sam Trottenberg<\/p>\n
I left my apartment and put on Soul Coughing\u2019s \u201cCasiotone Nation.\u201d The feverish double bass line pulsed as I looked both ways for cars and buttoned my coat. I was no longer going to a show. I was in a noir, or at least the Oliver Stone version of a noir. The image of me playing chicken with cars on both sides as I j-walk to the T stop could have easily been another incoherent scene out of \u201cNatural Born Killers.\u201d Those blaring moments when the synthesizer and the bass synced up echoed this feeling, as did lyrics like \u201cthe five perfect nation of nipple clamps.\u201d It\u2019s the kind of song that fits the other side of the coin created by the Cowboy Junkies cover of \u201cSweet Jane.\u201d That late twentieth century madness oozes from both.<\/span><\/p>\n Soul Coughing broke up in 2000. \u201cAt last. At last. At last,\u201d frontman Mike Doughty later wrote in his first memoir \u201cThe Book of Drugs.\u201d He didn\u2019t get along with his bandmates from the start. Yuval Gabay, Sebastian Steinberg, and Mark Degli Antoni, the other members of Soul Coughing, were all trained, experienced, New York jazz musicians. Doughty\u2019s skills laid more in his poetry. They didn\u2019t let him forget it. The band was popular, with multiple singles reaching the alternative charts, but it wasn\u2019t enough.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cDeep slacker jazz\u201d was over. Doughty grabbed an acoustic guitar and went solo. At first, he relied on his shows to physically sell his CDs to fans, but he really solidified himself when Dave Matthews signed him to ATO Records in the mid 2000s. It took years for Doughty to revisit his Soul Coughing material, but he slowly began incorporating his old songs into his new, very alternative and intimate sound.<\/span><\/p>\n When I entered City Winery that night, I wondered if the side of the venue I sat in would matter. With guitar players, you have to pick your side of the room the same way you pick a batter to send out in baseball. If it\u2019s a right-handed guitar player then you want to sit to the left, just as a right-handed pitcher would ideally be met with a left-handed batter, or as C. Montgomery Burns calls it, \u201cplaying the percentages.\u201d This is because guitars are held diagonally, so only one side of the venue will really get a good look at what\u2019s going on on the fretboard. I wondered if this mattered. I was seeing a man who was once treated by his band mates as the instrumental laughing stock of Soul Coughing.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n They sat me on the left. Doughty is right handed, so I would get a good look at his guitar work. An acoustic guitarist from Lowell opened the show. His name was Eric Marcs, also right handed. I looked him up on Spotify and he had 65 monthly listeners and had just released a live album of mostly covers. He played six songs. I think they were all originals. None of the tunes particularly struck me, but they were all solid. He played in time and sang well and didn\u2019t miss a note on his guitar. He was funny and charming. I sat there and waited for something amazing to happen, and it didn\u2019t, but I still feel like it could have. After he played his song \u201cPerhaps I Was A Pirate,\u201d I wrote down what he said next.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve literally had dreams about playing that song in this room,\u201d Marcs said.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cYou did very well,\u201d someone from the audience replied.<\/span><\/p>\n Mike Doughty walked onto the stage wearing all black like a true New York City beatnik. He sat down, and picked up a tan Fender telecaster with a red sticker by the bridge that said \u201chell yeah.\u201d It sounded like the guitar was in an alternate tuning. His low E string was tuned so far down that when he struck it the vibrations scraped against the fretboard. He opened with a song from his solo career, \u201cLooking At the World from the Bottom of a Well,\u201d then revisited one of the most popular Soul Coughing tunes, \u201cCircles.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m going to play some obscure numbers, super obscure numbers,\u201d Doughty said. Then he played maybe the most well-known Soul Coughing song, \u201cSuper Bon Bon.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Doughty joked throughout the night, and, mostly, the butt of the joke was the idea that we were all sitting there and watching him play guitar on a stage. Later on in the set he said, \u201cThis is going to be the song before the fake last song.\u201d He explained the idea of an encore like it was a totally new thing. He played the two songs, said \u201cthank you very much and good night,\u201d turned his back to the audience, waited, then picked up his guitar again.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cSorry about the fake-out ending there,\u201d he said, almost sheepishly.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n He played well. His guitar style is similar to Bob Dylan\u2019s in that he mostly strums but occasionally picks single notes, usually ones with melodic importance. Doughty is sparser than Dylan, but I think that works for the rugged simplicity of Doughty\u2019s songs. It also gives a sense of two clear voices making up each song, Doughty\u2019s voice and the guitar\u2019s, instead of a lead and rhythm relationship. He played in time too. I checked every so often and he was rock solid, save for some false starts and a few times where he stumbled in complex sections, and even then he recovered quickly.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n I noticed as the set went on that every song was starting to sound like \u201cSuper Bon Bon.\u201d I don\u2019t think this is a bad thing. Every artist has a sound, some are just more specific than others. People who saw James Brown play expected and received a certain sound. The same is true, I think, for Doughty. His sound is hard to pin down, but I’ve always thought of him as the New York version of Morphine\u2019s Mark Sandman, replacing the gutsy, working-man\u2019s blues roots with an art school, lower Manhattan jazz club feel, and lyrics like \u201cJesus to my left, the Holland Tunnel on my right.\u201d Musically, I noticed Doughty has a tendency to throw the important notes on the and of three and the and of four in a lot of his songs. One and two and three AND four AND. A horse, a horse, my KINGdom FOR. It\u2019s punchy, in a weird way, and don\u2019t expect anything else.<\/span><\/p>\n City Winery may be the perfect venue to see Mike Doughty solo. They\u2019re lucky with the sound of that room. The vocal reverb was crisp and the frequencies were well balanced. I suppose I could have used a little more bass because of the gravelliness of Doughty\u2019s voice, but I\u2019m not sure if this is a nitpick or just a personal preference. His amplifier came out clean and just as crisp as the vocals, but with enough of a punch that I\u2019m sure the thing runs on vacuum tubes. And everyone was quiet and respectful. The MC announced before the show that this was a space for listening, and that\u2019s really how it felt. If Mike Doughty had played at the Paradise Rock Club, this would be a very different review.<\/span><\/p>\n Doughty played 21 songs, did his fake encore bit, played two more songs, thanked the audience, and left. I was satisfied. He probably won\u2019t ever be as popular as he was with Soul Coughing, but that might not be a bad thing for Doughty\u2019s artistry. His ego doesn\u2019t really appear in his songs or his banter, and that night it didn\u2019t have to. He wasn\u2019t leading a band, he didn\u2019t have to compete with anyone, he didn\u2019t have to be complex. He just had to try and he did.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n After almost every song, he would look at me and smile a little and raise his eyebrows slightly. I half-expected him to shrug. Maybe he was looking at the sound guy behind me or maybe he was looking at nothing or maybe he just felt like making that face. It was not a face of pride, but of contentment, and of curiosity about the off-chance that he just moved someone. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Written by Sam Trottenberg I left my apartment and put on Soul Coughing\u2019s \u201cCasiotone Nation.\u201d The feverish double bass line pulsed as I looked both ways for cars and buttoned my coat. I was no longer going to a show. I was in a noir, or at least the Oliver Stone version of a noir. 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