Old FURIOUS nads! by The One True b!X

In these late-night and/or early-morning hours, I notice that Mike Doughty continues to reference Portland even when he isn’t teasing the possibility of his moving here.

He’s been doing that on and off for months now, intimating that he’s falling in love a bit with the place whenever he comes out here. Wander through his archives and you’ll find the relevant posts. But even just in the first few items up there right now, and irrelevant to those items, he uses photos from here.

At any rate, it all prompts me to once again pull out something I had posted elsewhere and bring it over here. Two o’clock in the morning on a Sunday seems as good a time as any.

Back in the middle nineties, music for me was all about the Soul Coughing, the late and much-lamented band from New York City whose own domain at some point vanished into the grabby hands of a domain squatter (hence the use here of the Wikipedia entry).

At the time, I was living in New York City. Or, more specifically, in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, as was a friend of mine who will become important to this story in a little bit. More immediately relevant is the fact that I lived in Williamsburg, which should be evident to anyone who knows the lyrics to “True Dreams of Wichita” off the bands debut, Ruby Vroom.

And you can stand
On the arms
Of the Williamsburg Bridge
Crying
Hey man, well this is Babylon

So resonant had the song become that I stole the last line in that bit to use as the first line in the best thing I’ve ever written, the bulk of which technically takes place in a Williamsburg restaurant called Oznot’s Dish, where I spent rather a good deal of my time.

(Incidentally, I visited Oznot’s for the first time in a decade last November, during what turned out, in fact, to be their tenth anniversary year. I was aghast to discover, beyond the utter change in the menu, that the clutter was gone, and had taken with it any soul the physicality of the place ever had.)

But back to some sort of progress towards the point here. Somewhere in this middling nineties period, the previously-mentioned friend who also lived in Williamsburg went off to London for some theater-related gig. She happened to be there at the right time to see a Soul Coughing show, at which one of her theater colleagues turned to her and asked, “Who’s that friend of yours back in the States who likes Soul Coughing?”

“You mean Slowdog?” came the reply.

(This brings us to the other necessary digression. Anyone who has actually found and read the explanation of my current name knows that during the middling nineties “Slowdog” was how everyone knew me. It’s even how a Rolling Stone article referred to me, but that’s an entirely different story for an entirely different time.)

My friend and her fellow theater people at this point proceeded repeatedly to call out to the band. “Play ‘Wichita’ for Slowdog!”

As the story has been told to me, at any rate, what happened more or less next was this: Doughty said, “We’re playing it all for Slowdog!” and the band dutifully launched into The Song In Question.

Which is how it all began. Over the next string of months, there in the midst of the middling nineties, friends around the country, when in the audience as a Soul Coughing show, shouted requests in the name of Slowdog. And they were fulfilled. Once, or so I’ve been told, front-man Mike Doughty winced when he heard the name, and tried to pretend he hadn’t heard it.

(I don’t recall whether the show I was in a very small club in New York, which turned out to be their homecoming show after a long tour, we before or after the first such incident in London. For what it’s worth, outside of those New Yorkers who saw the band from their beginnings, if you never saw the band playing to their hometown crowd after not being home for a long while, I’d wager that you never really saw the band. I mention this show because at no time when I myself have seen Soul Coughing was the Slowdog stunt ever pulled.)

I’ve occasionally toyed with various propositions for how to go about the final outing of the Slowdog which so plagued the band once upon a time. I utterly failed to think of having Doughty make out the Skittsh CD he was signing to Slowdog when I saw him play at Berbati’s Pan a few years ago — for what it’s worth, the only show I’ve ever seen where an out-of-towner musician played like he was hanging out with a very densely-packed group of hometown friends.

So, the question raised by the sudden telling of this story is: Why am I telling this story now?

Simply, because it came to mind after reading Doughty’s thoughts on Portland after his most recent show here, which I managed to rather definitively miss. (His thoughts on Portland actually begin here and continue through three individual posts).

In that item, where he seems to go completely gaga over the Doug Fir Lounge and Jupiter Hotel, he makes the following threat: “I think my next tour will be a two-week stand here; if they want to see me play, they can fly to Oregon.”

So I guess what I mean to say here is this: Should he ever be quite audacious enough to book himself into the Jupiter and onto the stage at Doug Fir for such a stretch, I’ll take that as a sign. In that future moment, The Slowdog In Question will have to be revealed, and this story put to rest once and for all.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 4th, 2005 at 1:51 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.