First off, Soul Coughing is not an alternative rock band.
Well, not really. Kind of.
Nor are they a jazz-rap combo or a beatnik-poetry project, though they've been called these things during the two years they've been on the downtown New York music scene, rocking an incongruous and fanatical New York following of cool indie-rock kids, soul hippies, earnest coeds, downtown-jazz types and serious hip-hop heads.
What Soul Coughing is, undeniably, is a slamming live band. Funk-hard drum beats and fluid acoustic-bass lines meshing together in fat, gritty grooves. Guitar skittering surf-like or chicken-scratching, backed by blasts of orchestral sounds and random environmental noise from a real-time sampler-keyboard player (not a preprogrammed sequencer or click-tracked DAT). And, over that, a vocal that shifts mid-stream from melodies to chant to spoken word to rapping. Soul Coughing has acquired a deserved reputation as a stunning live experience, sweating packed houses with their funky squall.
"The fun part about live shows is the trance thing, where you try to invoke a spirit. Not in a new-agey way, but in the way that you try to connect with an audience," says guitar/vocalist M. Doughty. Adds drummer Yuval Gabay, "What I do with this band is groove, just concentrate on playing in-your-face beats, something I'd dance to. It takes the most concentration of anything I do, besides...well, sex is pretty demanding."
Flash back to 1992. Doughty was playing around New York as a folk singer but thinking about a way to combine his music with his reading on the poetry scene and his love of hip hop. While working as a doorman at the Knitting Factory, a downtown club (and reviewing jazz and hip hop for the New York Press a local weekly), he met Mark, Sebastian and Yuval as they came through with various bands. Doughty told them about his musical dream: a fully collaborative groove band.
"He left a message and I had no idea who he was," Sebastian says. "He had so much conviction, and he was talking about starting a band that would be a noisy, hip-hop, funky, weird..."
Soul Coughing played their first gig after just one rehearsal, for which Mark brought a tape recorder instead of an instrument. More rehearsals, songwriting sessions and gigs followed.
"A lot of our songs came out of somebody doing one thing for five minutes while everybody else made up their own parts," says Doughty. As for his vocals, which range from sing-songy to stream-of-consciousness to full-out rant, he explains, "I try to write with no regard to what the words mean. But, the idea for my singing is to sound like myself."
After a few months, the band jelled and the local buzz grew into a roar. Soon, fans were coming in droves, and, soon after, the silver-tongued devils from the record companies descended. Eventually, after being pursued by many, the band was signed to Slash/Warner Bros.
Fast forward a few months to Ruby Vroom. Produced by Tchad Blake (the engineer for producer Mitchell Froom and Tom Waits), the album captures the band's irrepressible live energy, as well as lots of eccentric sounds. "Tchad is the king of weird sounds," relates Yuval. "He has a storage room full of sound toys," which supplemented Mark's own transmogrified audio track: jackhammers, crickets, answering machine snippets and samples of a 55-piece orchestra performing his own compositions.
And so, "Is Chicago, Not Chicago" features Mark's sampled door squeaks (from a building in New York's East Village) over Sebastian's kinetic bass and Yuval's drum smacks and rattles, while "Sugar Free Jazz," sort of a goof on acid jazz ("put your fake goatee on"), revels in a sultry groove punctuated by seagull cries and found sounds from the streets of Hong Kong.
There's the open, chunky guitar and deep-Meyers-style funk of "Blue-Eyed Devil," which sets the stage for Doughty's relaxed vocals ("Dig-diggin it, come on"); there's the hip-hop soul beats of "Uh, Zoom Zip," and on "Down To This," cheery snatches of the Andrew Sisters and an eerie moan from Howlin' Wolf.
And then there's the lyrics: the musings of a soul pining for the thrills and decrepitude of L.A. in "Screenwriters Blues"; check the vivid images conjured in "Mr. Bitterness," which take it a step beyond your standard unrequited-love song: "Desire looks just like you with an Uzi-9/Cut down 15 bystanders in a roadside drive by/Desire is a grass fire drinking gasoline..."
As for the name of the band, it comes from suitably humble beginnings. "A friend of mine used the term as a reference to vomiting," says Doughty, "and I used it as the title for a poem I wrote about Neil Young throwing up in the back of the bus. It was a horrible poem. Anybody who read it always got to the end and said 'Oh...that's a great title.'"
Soul Coughing's M. Doughty Talks About The Songs On Ruby Vroom
We get accosted by a lot of stoned folks--lovely people, though--who quiz us about the nuances of meaning and overarching thematic content in our songs. I guess our purpose is to cater to the discriminating drug user, so I can't complain. But mostly, when I'm hashing out the lyrics, I'm thinking, "Ooh, nice word. Pretty word. Mm, word tastes nice, I like." So it's mostly a sound thing, a musicality thing. Still, given the couple of lucid flashes in the lyrics, I've been asked to discuss the songs. Though personally, I'm more apt to dig the beats, and being that I can't read or write notation, you'll only get the meatheaded metaphors here.
"Is Chicago, Is Not Chicago" Once, tripping in the metropolitan capital of Illinois, I came up with this theory that everything outside my body was Chicago and all within was not. A nice simple way to look at the world. I would point at, like, a chair and say "Is Chicago," and then at my chest, and say, "Is not Chicago." This entertained me for a good twelve hours or so.
"Sugar Free Jazz" Utter nonsense, actually. The guitar lick on the "Schools he bombs, he bombs" part comes from this kid I went to school with named Matt Swift. He played it incessantly, and so it was dubbed "The Swift Lick."
"Casiotone Nation" The five percent nation of fill-in-the-blank. Live, I fill in the blank with whatever comes into my head at the time. People will come up to me on the street and be like, "Yo, Doughty, the five percent nation of McNugget." Once I said the name of a girl I knew and was approached angrily by this other girl, "Hey you made her a five percent nation, when are you going to make me a five percent nation?"
"Blueeyed Devil" Scathing indictment of Hall and Oates? No, the story of a white junkie traveling salesman who overdoses in a motel bathroom. My deepest hope is that this will eventually be railed against on a Christian cable network--the "six hundred and sixty six" line revealing my hidden Iron Maiden influence. "Thirty three degrees" is a reference to the Masons--the highest rank in Masonry being the 33rd. I remember reading Malcolm X talking about Masons in his autobiography, and him saying something to the effect of, "The devil has only 33 degrees of knowledge, Allah has 360." Pro-Islam or rampant Satanism? You make the call.
"Bus To Beelzebub" Again, sounds nice, means nothing. But we are, in fact, practicing Satanists.
"True Dreams Of Wichita" Boy, girl, etcetera. The open plain, yay.
"Screenwriter's Blues" Kind of a weird hallucination about the hell of my imagined future life as a writer I once had.
"Moon Sammy" The actual real-life Moon Sammy is a security guard at NYU who wore a rent-a-cop uniform with a badge that read, "Moon Sammy." A bunch of unconnected quotes from the book of Revelations, Chapter 10, are thrown in at the end. Again, this theme of Satanism.
"Supra Genius" Boy, girl, planet-destroying death ray, etc.
"City of Motors" An actual narrative! A girl is looking into a pool of oil in a gutter that's streaming from a wrecked car. She sees the reflection of the moon in the oil, and then the silhouette of a burglar over the moon as he jumps from one building to the other. The moral: don't smoke in gas stations.
"Uh, Zoom Zip" More fun words that mean nothing.
"Down To This" I had a job working at a club called The Knitting Factory as a doorperson. One night, zooted no doubt, I was selling tickets as another person checked names off the guest list, and I started chanting, "I got the tickets and you got the list!" much to the annoyance of my co-worker. Finding this not particularly songworthy, we tried out a couple of soundalikes in rehearsal, my favorite of which was "You get Jim Backus and I'll get Koresh." We finally settled on 'You get the ankles and I'll get the wrists,' and it evolved into (don't slap me) a song about throwing an externalized conception of oneself off a building. We still hear many happy misinterpretations of this one, the most common of which is "You get the eggrolls and I'll get the rice."
"Mr. Bitterness" Boy, girl, automatic weapons, fire, etc.
"Janine" I was walking over on lower Second Avenue with my guitar, and this drunken man walks up to me and goes, "Hey, excuse me, how do you get a white woman to love you?" Bright boy that I am, I answered, "Uh, try writing her a song." "You write her a song, you got a guitar," he answered indignantly. "Her name's Janine."
P.S. If you hear lyrics wrong and imagine some construction of words that doesn't really exist, please bring it to our attention and we'll retool the lyrics to match your mistake. We love that more than anything else. Also enclose any five percent nations you may have.
M. Doughty 9/27/94