Mike DoughtyReseñas

Great read all around. I love how raw, real, and honest to a fault Doughty Is.

Perhaps my expectations were high. I love Mike Doughty's fabulously jazz-infused poetry, the lyrical element that made Soul Coughing a poetic force, the poetry one still finds in the man's solo efforts. And I had hoped for some sense of the same in this memoir. That was not the case.

The Book of Drugs, while revelatory about an artist whom I admire and whose music I still very much enjoy, was - I'm sorry to say - somewhat dull, lackluster in its crafting and construction. And Doughty's smoldering resentments at his former band-mates, unnecessary litany of women with whom he had sex during that time of his life, and often inexplicable and distantly tangential rambling didn't add to its literary merit.

I get it - the man needed to tell his story - what it was like, what happened, and what it's like now. Perhaps he just didn't need to publish it.

This book does talk a lot about doing drugs. Mostly how he slept with girls he never would have slept with and how he would go somewhere new and exotic and spend the entire time in the hotel room getting high. I became of fan of Mikes solo work before i found soul coughing. I do enjoy his solo work a little more than soul coughing's catalog of music. This book also discusses how Mike hates his old band and how they made him feel. It was kind of surreal reading about his experience on September 11th while it being the anniversary of September 11th. This book would be a great read for a musician who wants to see some of the good and bad sides of music. This book would probably get an MA rating due to Strong Language, Strong Sexual content, and excessive drug use. The book does end on a good note he talks of being clean and how much better life is now the he is no longer an addict.

This book does talk a lot about doing drugs. Mostly how he slept with girls he never would have slept with and how he would go somewhere new and exotic and spend the entire time in the hotel room getting high. I became of fan of Mikes solo work before i found soul coughing. I do enjoy his solo work a little more than soul coughing's catalog of music. This book also discusses how Mike hates his old band and how they made him feel. It was kind of surreal reading about his experience on September 11th while it being the anniversary of September 11th. This book would be a great read for a musician who wants to see some of the good and bad sides of music. This book would probably get an MA rating due to Strong Language, Strong Sexual content, and excessive drug use. The book does end on a good note he talks of being clean and how much better life is now the he is no longer an addict.

This book recalled to my memory the most excellent book review of James Frey's a million little pieces. More specifically, it reminded me of this paragraph in particular;

"A Million Little Pieces is the dregs of a degraded genre, the rehab memoir. Rehab stories provide a way for pampered trust-fund brats like Frey to claim victim status. These swine already have money, security and position and now want to corner the market in suffering and scars, the consolation prizes of the truly lost. It's a fitting literary metonymy for the Bush era: the rich have decided to steal it all, even the tears of the losers."

(the complete review is excellent. For those interested http://www.exile.ru/articles/detail.php?ARTICLE_ID=6948.. )

If someone is interested in the very short version of this review, there you have it: M.Doughty would like victim status. He doesn't go about this very well.

I love Soul Coughing. Alas, by the time a friend had introduced me to this band, they had already disbanded. When I discovered that Mike Doughty was off on his own making music, I gave that a listen to. And found myself greatly disappointed. The lesson I should already have learned by that point was simple; a frontman is not a band, and just because I like a band does not mean I will like the frontman when he goes solo.

But I bought this book anyway. While what I loved about this band was how the music worked in combination (I to this day still make the claim that the best bands are bands featuring an upright bass), I always did think that Doughty did some wonderful things with words in the band. Doughty certainly had musical talent, as you can tell from those parts of his music where he gives us rhythms with nonsensical words (see 'Sleepless' from Irresistible Bliss), but he also could construct fantastic hallucinatory narratives (see 'Lazybones' from the same album). In other words, I had faith that Doughty could do something with Book of Drugs. And with such a title, I was expecting something a little more Naked Lunch-esque. I was disappointed.

The worst part of it all is that the book is not particularly well written. This is a great disappointment coming from a person who built a career on constructing very beautiful images. But he cannot make it happen here. Samuel Delany has made the claim prose is about sentences, while poems are about words (which is to say that good prose is about good sentences. I would tell you what good poetry is about if i had any idea). If that is the case, then this book is truly awful. Every sentence is basically the exact same, and almost all of them begin with "I..." It becomes very monotonous, very quickly. And that in turn makes us care very little about the story in itself. We occasionally get wonderful little gems, such as "Beats dopplered down broadway" but not nearly enough of them to make this book worth anything.
I do find it rather funny that at one point early in this memoir a teacher of poetry gives some advice to aspiring poets, one of which was to scrap a bad poem and keep just the one or two lines that work really well. The advice should have been considered to condense this book down to one really nice poem.

But the subject matter might have been beyond redemption even if the writing had been superb. The book gives us some background on Doughty's life, but before you know it he has formed a band and has become the world's largest victim. He doesn't get credit for this, he doesn't get respect for that. Blah Blah Blah. All the while, he spirals down into junkie-hood, never actually getting Last Exit For Brooklyn bad. His prose, dead and wooden as it is, denies us the vicarious high we get from good drug narratives.
And at some point, I stopped believing him.
I am sure he did the drugs he did and had the experiences he had, I would not take that away from him (as we would with James Frey). But at some point I realized that the relationships Doughty had through those year could not have been all bad. I simply refuse to believe that one could be in a band with three people, each one worse than the next. I as well refuse to believe that he could have done all the work for all the songs and still have been unappreciated by the other band members. Had he put so much work into the music, the other band members would likely have treated him as a cash cow. But perhaps the proof is in the pudding. If the songs Doughty had played with Soul Coughing were solely or mostly his, then why has his style and content drifted so heavily in his solo career. I can understand burning bridges, but would you really burn down your own, hard built bridges?
I wouldn't. And if I had to, I would make more bridges in that same style.
Maybe the point Doughty is trying to make in the book is that at that point he wanted to complete come away from his past live. Its not clear from the text, and its not very believable.
According to his website, Doughty had put together a new band, complete with an upright bass, Should he come into my town, we shall see if his new stuff holds a candle to his old. And that might give some validity to this book.

I had no idea how miserable Doughty was in Soul Coughing or how much he would come to hate the band members or the music associated with that time in his life.
Doughty is not a bad writer, but not a great one either. The book reads like a never ending blog entry, because there are no chapter breaks.
The first half deals with his childhood, his relationships, and the gradual forming of Soul Coughing.
The second half of book focuses on the downward spiral of addiction. I did not have any idea from his music, how low he got ie pissing the bed every night and drinking wine before brushing his teeth. The low part of his life takes up a good chunk, and you feel a bit wretched reading it and keep hoping he'll get his stuff together. Eventually, he commits to a 12 step program and kicks his drug and alcohol addictions. The tail end of the book finds him traveling somewhat randomly around the globe for the sheer thrill of it. The bits at the end about visiting Ethiopia were utterly hilarious.
A surprising aspect of this book, is that it makes such a compelling case for twelve step programs. Doughty doesn't pretend like he never enjoyed drugs or alcohol. He talks about how bad things got and how slowly, but surely he came around to the twelve step programs. He doesn't talk about the program in an preachy evangelical manner. The way he presents it is, "This was my experience and it worked for me."
If you a M. Doughty or Soul Coughing fan (or like both) you'll enjoy this book. It gives you an idea of where Doughty's lyrics come from and the stories behind the music.

Decent but disappointing memoir. I am a huge (apologies to M Doughty) Soul Coughing fan. And more specifically a M Doughty fan, but although I enjoyed the book, found it disappointing. Quizzically, Doughty's writing is not as clever or entertaining as you would expect. The book is written free form and it's difficult to place when events were happening. It seems as if Doughty could have benefitted from even greater distance, even though it approaching 15 years since the band existed. Although I realize it's my perspective, Soul Coughing, the band, was always greater than the sum of its parts - they were truly avant guarde. Doughty is capable of forgiving himself but not the petty indiscretions of the others that helped make SC the last truly great band. All things considered, I still dig Doughty, SC and would read the book again.

Poetry makes great bathroom reading. In case you didn't know Doughty is/was the lead singer for the band Soul Coughing. They had some really creative music/lyrics (think Cake) and so I figured this would be interesting. It was much more comprehensible than Serg Tankian's poetry but still didn't blow me away. There's the occasionally cool turn of phrase or piece of imagery but nothing very memorable. As I said with Serg's book (though differently), I understand how much this poetry is part of the author's life (in the time that he wrote it). In other words I get it, but it really doesn't do much for me because it's not mine.

Oh, Mike Doughty. You write beautiful poems and generally put them to music. This is a collection of poems that he didn't turn into an album and they are pretty fantastic. Read them. And then go out and buy Mike's albums and listen to them.