The Book of Drugs (7 page)

We saw each other on the street just as my band was being courted by labels. “Sony!” he enthused. He walked away backwards, yelling, “Sign to Sony!”

Years later, when I myself was on a big record label, my band toured America, opening for Jeff. He snapped, as ever, between eager self-deprecation and haughty self-regard. His managers had hired Soundgarden's crew. They gave Jeff princely treatment—Jeff would walk to the side of the stage, playing guitar, and a tech would put a lit cigarette in his mouth; he'd puff once or twice before the guy took it back. But they hated being on a rinky-dink tour of clubs and took it out on my band. During our sound check, their stage guy rang out the monitors, discharging shrieks of feedback at us. They set up Jeff 's band's amps so close to the lip of the stage that we barely had any room for our stuff; my spastic, outburst-prone sampler player pushed them back and nearly got punched.

 

We were playing the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco, a place that looks like a mirrored bordello in France. “Detroit Rock City!” I yelled from the crowd. Jeff obliged with a titter of the riff.

He had been selected as one of
People
magazine's Fifty Most Beautiful People. He wasn't happy about it. He went into a monologue about how he didn't want to be
People
magazine's idea of beautiful, and all the black movie stars they'd skipped over.

Jeff played a snippet of The Smiths' “I Know It's Over”:

Then Jeff sang:

I muttered acridly:
Poor you.

I was standing with a friend. “You should show up at sound check tomorrow with his page from
People
duct-taped to your chest,” he said.

Later he enthused about Jeff 's hotness. “How old is he?”

Twenty-eight.

“Twenty-eight!” he said. “No way. I'm no chicken hawk, but that's a
chicken.
”

 

Jeff and I sniffed dope in the Great American's basement dressing room. It was powder heroin. You get black tar in California—it must have been a bitch to find this stuff. We walked back to the hotel together; a girl who looked like a Modigliani painting traipsed along. He kissed her on the cheek and she walked away.

?! I said.

“I can't go spreading myself all over the country,” he said distastefully.

If you don't want to
spread yourself all over the country
with a hundred different girls, what the hell are we doing here?

Really?
I said.

“I've got a plan,” he said. He winked.
Winked.

Yeah? What's the plan?

He gave an agitated frown, and didn't answer.

 

We played the Urban Art Bar in Houston, a tiny place with a decrepit sound system. Jeff's crew parked their huge purple bus in front and obscured the whole building.

I talked to this beautiful Texan Indian woman. She was a doctor. I thought we were flirting; she just wanted me to take her backstage to meet Jeff. Devastating.

“He speaks French!” she said.

No, he doesn't, I said.

“You haven't heard his version of ‘Je n'en connais pas la fin,'” she said, imperiously. “Edith Piaf. His accent is
impeccable.
”

I don't think so—he's a really talented mimic, I said.

She huffed.

Eventually, she figured out that all you had to do to get into the dressing room at the Urban Art Bar was push the door open.

The next day Jeff said he'd been accosted by a crazy woman who said she was a doctor; she babbled at him in French. “I don't speak
French,
” he said, exasperated.

 

I didn't speak to Jeff again. I heard stories about Jeff nodding out in bars, deliriously high, and thought,
Figures.
I wanted him brought down.

 

My band played the WHFS
HFStival
at RFK stadium in D.C. Vivian from Luscious Jackson told me that he had walked out into the Mississippi River with his boots on, singing, was pulled under by the wake of a passing boat, and washed up dead at the foot of Beale Street in Memphis.

A perfect fable.
You fucking cunt piece of shit asshole fucker,
I thought.
You'll be a legend now.

 

Years later, I met a committee of producers at a coffee place. They had bought the rights to his story. I expounded about Jeff, and the'90s, and my grievances, and how, at some point, it had occurred to me that it was better to stay alive and make music than to be a dead legend; long past his death, I realized it was a horrible fate, and that he had once been my friend.

They told me about Jeff 's journals, that he wrote something about me, how he admired my drive, and how hard I worked, and how he wanted to emulate me. I was shocked.

I told them my dubious theory that he'd gotten clean before he died. For one thing, a musicians' recovery organization was thanked in some liner notes. For another, there was an article written by a Memphis acquaintance who said he'd found him walking around a shitty neighborhood in the rain; nonresidents mainly go to shitty neighborhoods to get drugs, but Jeff apparently wasn't fucked up. Where there's drugs, there's twelve-step meetings.

I wondered if he was aping
Woyzeck
when he walked into the river. I gave them my friend the director's e-mail, maybe she'd show them the VHS tape of the show.

I told them that on our tour together, my sampler player had put a pebble in the air tube of a tire on his bus, twisting the cap on over it; the air slowly leaked out as they drove. They were stranded on the roadside for twelve hours. They could've been killed. His other notable prank was re-arranging some letters on a marquee to read JEFFY O'BUCKLE
.

I told them that I thought Jeff wasn't a songwriter; I had asked him once if he wanted some songs that I wrote and he reacted indignantly—I'd touched a nerve. Few mention the songs he wrote when they rhapsodize about him; they adore his covers of “Hallelujah” and “Lilac Wine.” I thought he just got lucky with

“Last Goodbye.” In Memphis, making his final album, he was repeatedly pushed back to the drawing board by Sony; he journaled about how it made him feel cheap and crazy. The songs on the slapdash compilation of demos that Columbia released postmortem were weak, unmemorable. His enormous gift was interpretation, I told them. The problem was that the only real source
of income if you're a major label artist is publishing—songwriter's royalties. The label makes sure you don't recoup; you spend more on touring than you make. You write the songs on your albums, or you're broke.

Walking away, I hated myself for how I pontificated. I nurtured a fear that when the movie was made, I'd be in it, cast as Jeff's Salieri: Jeff played by some celebrated young movie star, and I a clown.

 

The place where Luke and I lived, after I broke up with Mumlow, was in the East Village at a cacophonous intersection. A hundred truck horns thundered every day at rush hour; the screen of the living room TV was filmed with a layer of exhaust soot. Our telephone number spelled out (212) CAT-BUKS.

CAT-BUKS became the destination for everybody we went to school with who lived outside the city. In the evening, the buzzer would ring, and a few random friends would climb up the steep six flights with beer and hang out doing bong hits until they had to take the Long Island Rail Road home. “What are you doing tonight?” “I don't know, just going over to CAT-BUKS, I guess.”

Nobody ever brought women over.

Luke kicked me out of CAT-BUKS. We were both slovenly post-collegiate stoners, but I was just slightly more slovenly than he was, and it drove him spittingly unhinged. The night he sat me down and told me I had to go was the last time in my life I cried, openly, in front of a man.

I was replaced by a succession of roommates who lasted a month, two months, six months, nine months. I started arbitrarily showing up at CAT-BUKS, myself. I brought over a thumbnail-sized bag of Ketamine that I bought from a guy outside of Wetlands—I'd never had it before, and the moment the bag was in my hand
I thought the guy had ripped me off—we sniffed it, and spontaneously, did a mirthless single-file parade, room to room, around CAT-BUKS, radiating that Ketamine
whoom-whoom-whoom-whoom,
like aliens had seized our bodies.

They never changed the phone book listing; it was under my name for years after I left. A French girl who was quasi-stalking me left messages on the machine. One of the replacement roommates told me, and I asked if she'd called before. “Yeah, like six times in the past four months, maybe.”

 

I started cadging off-nights, Mondays or Tuesdays, from my boss at the Knit and playing gigs as “M. Doughty's Soul Coughing” with different guys I heard at the club. The saxophonist Tim Berne played once. I called him up cold, and he had no idea who I was. A friend asked what he was doing that week, and he apparently said, “Monday night I'm playing with this African cat—Emdodi.”

I booked the 11 PM slot on a Tuesday night five days after my twenty-second birthday. A month before the show, I had no band. I was worrying about it, talking to a bass player who worked a day job as a sound-effects guy on a soap opera. “Don't worry, Doughty,” he said. “We'll find you a band.”

I called him up two weeks before the show. He had forgotten. He couldn't do it, because that week there was a fictitious hurricane in the soap opera's fictitious town, so he had to work overtime.

There was this one amazing drummer around, an Israeli guy who could sound like a hip-hop record. There were drummers who could play those beats, but nobody who could
sound
like that. My only interaction with him was that he'd once walked into the Knit's office and asked me to send a fax for him. I told him that I didn't work in the office and didn't know how the fax machine
worked. He stayed silent for a minute and then asked me again if I'd send a fax for him.

I had nothing to lose, why not call up this amazing player at random, for the hell of it? He had nothing to do on a Tuesday night at 11 PM. Who would? He said yes. I was astonished.

I wanted an upright bass player; the record I wanted to emulate was A Tribe Called Quest's
The Low End Theory,
powered by upright bass lines, some sampled, some played live by the master Ron Carter. There was this one upright player who was unsettlingly corny: he had long hair, wore pointy Night Ranger at the Grammys boots, and was often seen in the sort of pajama-like sultan pants associated with M.C. Hammer. But the drummer said he was good. I got his number from somebody; he, too, had nothing booked on a Tuesday at eleven. I learned later that he had no idea who I was; he showed up for the rehearsal, and thought,
The door guy?

There was a sampler player who had done both the all-sampler and all-vocalist Cobras—he was brought on to the latter along with some other nonvocalists because he knew the piece. He was less intimidating than the other sampler players
;
they tended to be mavericks, but this guy was timid and high-strung. He was constantly wide-eyed, like the proverbial animal in headlights. He said yes, too.

 

Rehearsal studios in New York went by the hour. It was something like $12 per; insanely expensive for me. It was my gig, so the assumption was that I was hiring them, that it was my deal. They were, in fact, so busy that this was the single rehearsal I could grab them for.

Half an hour late, the bass player and the drummer arrived with bagels and coffee. I stood there with my guitar plugged in, gawking at them, as they joked and ate their breakfasts.

Can we play? My money's running out, I said.

They laughed at me. A half hour later, they had finished their bagels.

“Yo, G,” said the drummer, who spoke a thickly Hebrew accented, broken Brooklynish, “it is time to pump. It is time that we must pump now.”

I was floored from the jump. I had tried to explain to other rhythm sections how to do the grooves I wanted. With these two, it was just
there.
That huge sound.

I started one tune by explaining I wanted the rhythm to be something like James Brown's “Funky Drummer.”

“Yo, G,” said the drummer, “nobody want to play that there beat. Everybody done that beat already.”

We blasted through a bunch of songs in an hour. I was half elated, half panicked. Suddenly the sampler player walked in.

Where's your sampler? I said.

“I brought this,” he said. He held up a video camera. “I'm going to record audio and practice to it later.”

 

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.