Book of Drugs [Paperback]

I think Doughty is a 5 star writer but I decided I wanted to change this review upon realizing that this book kinda made me really dislike him. Essentially this is page after page about how he got hurt feelings and about how unstable his bandmates were, a shocking display of self-unawareness after admitting right off the bat that the drugs may have affected his memory. To sum things up - Doughty meets Jeff Buckley, gets jealous of him, for the women that sleep with him and his god-like status among his followers, then spends the next decade of his life trying to capture that with his band Soul Coughing. Thus, he gets increasingly annoyed with his bandmates, who demand equal pay (which they didn't always get, by the way) and equal credit. I've read both Doughty's account and De Gli Antoni's account and they both actually line up quite well, but I must say that when you listen to the discs, De Gli Antoni's is the one that rings more true. "A band is only as good as its drummer", he says, and Soul Coughing had a really great one. Soul Coughing was a band effort - they needed all four members to work, and Doughty's freestyling and jangly guitar scratching complimented what everyone else was doing. Meanwhile, Doughty really just wanted to be a solo act all along it seems, and would get upset that the band photos didn't highlight him, and that he wasn't being featured enough (for example, demanding a new video be made for "Circles" because the excellent cartoon video didn't make it clear who the singer was). Then, Doughty became a solo act, and you know what, he did alright. He's a better songwriter now. The great thing about Soul Coughing was that they could make magic whether a song was really there or not (and really, Doughty, you think you deserve sole credit for "Super Bon Bon"?)

I don't want to belabor the point about Soul Coughing, as Mike does that for you - literally half the book is him ranting about people he cannot even bring himself to name (the other half is him ranting against everyone else, including you, the fan, who just paid $15.99 to read Doughty's book on a topic that he insists you do NOT bring up). Essentially it's a guy who admits he was a junkie for nearly a decade telling us all how sure he was that everyone else was the problem. He talks about how him not getting his way led to him just not showing up to the studio, and yet he's baffled as to why his bandmates didn't respect him more. He goes on and on about how big Soul Coughing could have been if only they'd listened, and yet his solo career, where he can finally do whatever he wants, has seen diminishing returns, and only produced one song a non-fan might know (Looking at the World From the Bottom of a Well), if they heard it in a Starbucks or something. He gleefully lists all his bandmates failures post-Soul Coughing (they're all quite busy - Mark scores Warner Herzog films and Steinberg has played on a zillion records since), but doesn't dwell on the fact that he struggled mightily to find a record label to release his solo albums, attributing that to the fact that he was balding. Yes, Mark, Sebastian, and Yuval did not have the same success after Mike broke up the band, but neither did Mike himself! If Soul Coughing really was all about you, why did the fans abandon you en masse when you went to your current acoustic set up? The worst part is that he paints his bandmates as these totally unrealistic people, whose only goal in life was apparently to make Mike Doughty suffer and ruin his albums. Of course they wanted credit for Ruby Vroom - the songwriting there is virtually non-existent! Of course, he also takes credit for all the "freaky" parts of the band that people liked - but if you compare Horse Tricks and his similar attempt Dubious Luxury, the difference is night and day. I can't even make it through one of Doughty's "freaky" compositions. Still, a lot of it is just quibbling - there have been bands torn apart because bandmates started sleeping with each others wives, and here is Doughty spending a page complaining that De Gli Antoni took credit for a sample that he's "pretty sure" he came up with. That one of the guys broke his headphones and left him on his bed. That they got sick of each other on the tour bus. Yep. That's where the anger has festered these last 12 years. This is what made Doughty repeatedly compare himself to an "abused spouse" (a pretty offensive comparison, wouldn't you think? It's not like these guys even got physical!)

Still, as far as books that make the reader dislike the author go, this is a pretty good one. Doughty's a good writer. Lets just hope his next book isn't about himself.

I had a funny reaction to this book - I was a fan of Soul Coughing, and have enjoyed Doughty's solo stuff, as well. And now I'm sorry about that. My enjoyment of Mr. Doughty's music would probably have continued unabated, but now that I know he thinks I'm an idiot, I'm going to have a hard time ponying up cash for his work, or enjoying what he produces.
The book is well-written, it carries the reader along, and some of the prose is gorgeous. However, after finishing it, it occurred to me that no one ended up looking anything but awful in this book. It starts off with a giant "f*** you" to his family, continues on with a "f*** you" to the New York music scene, then a "f*** you" to the band, the record label, the A&R rep, the manager, and everyone involved with the band, all underscored with a really notable amount of self-loathing. Not to mention a GIANT "f*** you" to the fans of Soul Coughing or anyone who ever enjoyed the music of Soul Coughing, who seem to deserve a special extra helping of contempt from the author. Then the book moves on to the recovery story, which I found to be also underscored with a lot of loathing from the author - not just of himself, but of everyone around him, though there were bright points here and there about people who might not be as awful as everyone else. When the book moved on to stories about his travels, the fact that everyone (including the author) was portrayed as a total jerk......well, that's really distracting, to read about someone visiting amazing places and seeing amazing sights and being sober and recovering and still being so full of self-loathing that it spills out onto everything and everyone around him.
After finishing this book and having had some time to think about it, I'm truly sorry I read it. It seems like Mike Doughty hates everyone he's ever come into contact with, including himself, and it's going to be hard to listen to his music without remembering that. It's especially hard to enjoy the music of someone who seems to hold his fans in such utter and total contempt. The book gets three stars because it's a compelling read, but a reluctant three stars, because I regret reading it.

This episodic but roughly chronological memoir clips along at an addictive pace. It's very honest and unsparingly self-critical, and portrays a world of sex, drugs, and rock n' roll so squalid and numbingly repetitive you'll be glad you're not a rock star after all. In one especially memorable passage, Doughty recounts how, at the height of his addiction, he was so unhealthy that it took 90 minutes just to walk across the street to the ATM and back.

Alongside the addiction story, Doughty delves into the astonishingly toxic personal politics in Soul Coughing. Most band-infighting narratives are about friendships gone sour, but here we start with strangers who disliked each other from the first rehearsal, yet somehow slogged through three albums and several tours. The "Let It Be" -era Beatles seem positively chummy by comparison.

However, as some other reviewers have noted, the book takes a surprisingly off-putting turn near the end, when Doughty unleashes several pages of white-hot hatred at not just his former bandmates, but at the SC music itself -- and voices more than a little resentment of fans who bring it up. He talks about playing SC songs live in the past, but getting angry when people cheered for them(!), and portrays fans who request those songs or mention the band to him as being a nuisance at best and belligerent tormentors at worst. This may come as a surprise to fans have heard him play SC songs live as recently as a few years ago, and readers who were just told, throughout the first 4/5 of this book, that Doughty wrote all the SC material singlehandedly and wasn't properly credited for it.

It's obvious he doesn't plan on ever playing SC music again, and that's understandable, although why the total ban didn't set in until a dozen years after the breakup remains unexplained. But to want to purge his fan base of all affection for it, or push away current fans who still like it, seems neither realistic nor fair. As Doughty puts it: "When someone says they like Soul Coughing, I hear f--- you." More than a few longtime fans, who have greatly enjoyed and supported his many solo albums, may hear that statement as a "f--- you" right back.