Free The Book of Drugs by Mike Doughty

duct tape.”
    He was too proud for the duct-tape maneuver, but he became OK with the repetition. He bought a copy of Parliament’s Chocolate City and practiced to it. He learned how to load his hard drive faster. He idolized the bass player, who had wizardly ears—he could hear what you were going to play before you played it, and could complement or contradict your part with a bass line, concocted on the spot, of great force and ingenious simplicity.

    After a rehearsal, we ate at a diner. The waitress took the plates away, and the check was passed around. I got some change and put down $12. The sampler player got out his wallet, pulled out $10, put it on the table. The drummer got out his wallet, took out $20, put it on the table, took the $10 back.
    Then the check got to the bass player. He held the check in his hand, and took out his wallet. Opened his wallet. Then he put the check down and put his wallet back.
    The guy had just mimed paying the check.
    When the sampler player counted up the money, we were short exactly what the bass player owed. The check was passed around again. The drummer put in a couple extra bucks. He gave it to the bass player. The bass player rubbed his chin, acting stumped by the discrepancy.
    The sampler player saw it, too. We didn’t confront him. The sampler player was too in awe of the guy; I couldn’t believe somebody would actually do that.
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    At that moment, the bass player was thirty-four years old. I didn’t occur to me until I was myself thirty-four that this kind of trickery wasn’t something most adults did.
    I was twenty-three, the drummer was thirty, and the sampler player, thirty-one. My idea was that guys older than me would know what they were doing. Musically, I was correct. On every other level, I had no idea what I’d stumbled into.
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    I talked Louise at CB’s into giving us a Monday night residency at the Gallery. There was a club night—clubs were not buildings but branded parties that migrated between venues—called Giant Step in New York. It was a cauldron for the sort of stuff that Pete Rock and CL Smooth and DJ Premier were doing: old jazz records, cut
up and played over big beats. They had saxophone players and trumpeters come in and play along with the records. I envisioned a Knitting Factory version of Giant Step, with more strangeness: a tinge of the avant-garde. It would be us and a DJ. I invited some Knitting Factory types to come in and jam along.
    It was mostly a bust. We played a decent set, but the Knit guys just lingered for a minute at the bar and then left, confused. While the DJ spun a Beatnuts instrumental, I went to the mic and yelled: SLAW! SLAW! SLAW! SLAW!
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    (I should’ve called the band Slaw. Soul Coughing is a wretched band name.)
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    A guy named Joel, just out of film school, showed up and wanted to do a video. A mere five grand, he said. Yeah, great, but unfortunately I left my wallet in the penthouse. Undeterred, Joel told me that he was going to call up a bunch of major labels; one of them would sign Soul Coughing and pony up the five grand. I listened in amused disbelief.
    They showed up.
    As I left the stage, a woman came up and introduced herself as being from a record company. Yeah? I sneered. Want to put out my record?
    â€œYes,” she said.
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    I went to a luxuriously wood-paneled office on West Fifty-seventh Street, next door to Carnegie Hall. Huge black-and-white photos of the label’s stars, broodingly lit, loomed in the reception area. I met the label’s tanned, British president in an opulent office. We sat on couches made for a pasha. A lavish platter of sushi was brought in—but it was his lunch, he wasn’t planning on sharing it
with me. He lectured me, in the tones of a loony, upper-class limey, about how I should fire the band—saying this without having seen the band—use the band’s name as a brand, continue alone. No, no, I said.