Read Online The Book of Drugs by Mike Doughty - Free Book Online Page B

He held up a video camera. “I’m going to record audio and practice to it later.”
    Â 
    To promote a gig, I’d call 200 people; basically, everybody I’d ever met in New York. I sat down at 3 PM, with a notebook with names and numbers anarchically scribbled in it, and made calls until 11. Every third person asked to be on the guest list.
    Seventeen people came. One rehearsal wasn’t enough to really know the tunes, so transitions were sketchy, but I was dumbstruck. The bass player and the drummer seemed not to give a fuck that I was standing there, but they filled the room with an extraordinary rumble.
    The sampler player didn’t start playing until about the last verse of each tune; it took him that long to load his hard drive. He
clearly hadn’t listened to his videotape, but I loved his sounds. Peals from space and spectral voices.
    There wasn’t much, but I divided the money four ways.
    â€œYo, G,” said the drummer. “This is not right. This isn’t enough. You pay for my cab. That’s how it’s done, G.”
    After paying for cabs, I had lost the precious (for me) sum of $25. But I was sold: if I could hold on to them, this was my band.
    Â 
    They showed up for the gigs I booked, usually looking sort of bored, sometimes en route to other, more profitable gigs later in the evening. Their lethargy was a little contagious. For one gig, I didn’t call those 200 people beforehand to hawk the show. Too exhausted. Fuck it, if seventeen people was the norm, what difference would it make if it was ten?
    Fifty-five people showed up anyway. Fifty-five people. Something was actually happening.
    Â 
    â€œThere’s two ways to play the sampler,” the sampler player said, “as a conventional keyboard, or to trigger sound effects.” I hoped I could convince him otherwise.
    I brought some CDs over to his house. There were a bunch of sounds I wanted him to use: Howlin’ Wolf, the Andrews Sisters, Toots and the Maytals, The Roches, Raymond Scott, Grand Puba, a cast recording of Guys and Dolls.
    His house was so organized, it made me feel weird. He had a master’s degree in composition from an uptown conservatory and was well inculcated in the conservatory mind-set—he called rock drummers “percussionists” and used terms like sforzando when discussing how best to approach a rhythm that I’d ripped off from Funkdoobiest. There was an oddness to his look; it was as if he only wore those clothes that middle-class moms buy at department
stores and lay on the childhood bed when their kid comes home for Christmas. Which, it turned out, was exactly the case.
    He was a protégé of Anthony Coleman, who brought him into the messier world of the Knit and at whose goading he switched from writing jokey orchestral pieces with scatological titles to electronic-collage pieces, stitched from recordings of his own music school recitals.
    The sampler player got me high. Despite his square look and academic pedigree, he was a gluttonous stoner. He had a job editing radio commercials in a windowless studio; he stayed up all night mousing and clicking at a monitor, getting high (next to the computer was a briefcase-sized hard drive with an utterly impressive four gigabyte capacity), alone but for his boss’s yellow canary. The weed made the sampler player so jumpy that sometimes he seemed deranged.
    He played me a thing that he’d done with a few horn notes from a recording of his chamber-music pieces. He played slowed-down and sped-up versions of it simultaneously. It was aching, and cyclical, and it was gorgeous. I recited a poem over it, and it became the Soul Coughing song “Screenwriter’s Blues.”
    The repetitions of dance music were foreign to him. “You mean, you want me to play this over and over again? ” he asked in rehearsal.
    â€œYo, G,” said the drummer, “just hold down that there key with some