by Mike Doughty
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,” s
aid 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.”
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.
B
ewildering. 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.