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NEWS : STORIES
Since the break up of his band Soul Coughing in 2000, Mike Doughty has been criss-crossing the country in a rented car getting back to his roots.
Doughty, known for his twisty, neo-noir wordplay, emerged from his wandering with Haughty Melodic a set of catchy tunes that leave behind the wacky samples and rap-like cadence of his former band in favor of more pop-oriented tunes about girls, cars, and, in the case of "American Car," girls and cars. His new boss, ATO Records founder Dave Matthews, sits in on "Tremendous Brunettes," a hook-up that was cemented when both acts played the Bonnaroo festival a few years ago. What do you learn by spending that much time along on the road? A lot, it turns out. VH1 asked Doughty to give us his top 10 list of hard-won lessons, truths, and fables. Yes, breast-signing advice is included below. 1) Glance at the speedometer ... occasionally. My record for driving distance was 900 miles - from San Diego to Santa Fe. I got stopped twice, no, wait, three times for tickets. Each time it blew their minds when I said I'd started in San Diego. "What? Today? Why are you driving from San Diego?" So I said, "Oh, I'm an itinerant musician." To which they said they'd never met one before, but I suspect they didn't know what "itinerant" meant. So one guy says, "I bet you have a really nice guitar, huh?" He asked me to open the trunk and show it to him and I happen to have this gorgeous Gibson in there, but maybe he was thinking I had a meth lab in there or something. Fact is, if you're driving that much, you just start going 100 mph without realizing it. I was doing 90 mph in a parking lot. 2) Get your story straight. I had been living in Florida for a while and I got a license down there, but then I moved back to New York and I was on my way to Missouri for a show. So, I get stopped and I have to explain, "Yes, I'm from New York and my license is from Florida and I'm going to St. Louis." I'm just lucky my name is Mike and not Osama. 3) Osama makes the best coffee. The best espresso in Missouri is in a place in Columbia, which is a great college town with a great club called the Blue Note. The best cup of coffee is at a place called Osama's. He's an Arab guy who opened this place 10 years ago before the name was bad news. It's still pretty freaky. 4) What happens on the road, stays on the road. I would tell you all these great crazy stories about life on the road, but it's all about complete debauchery. When you analyze them, the stories aren't that interesting: I did a bunch of drugs and had sex with this girl. There's nothing involving blood or bungee cords or Cadillacs in swimming pools. 5) There is no downside to #4. The only downside is the near death part of it and the girlfriend finding out. Of course there's you finding out about what the girlfriend was doing while you were out on the road. And I was always out on the road. These days I'm more about the coffee and watching DVD's of the new Battlestar Galactica series. 6) Ani Difranco is a thief. I went to school with Ani Difranco. We took a poetry class together and we did this exercise where you wrote down the five things you write poems about and mine were dogs, coffee, cars, girls and guns. I guess the last one is a phallic thing, but I was 19 at the time. So, she's got a song called "Dog Coffee" and I'm not even thanked on that record! It's totally inspired by me, absolutely. But I still love that girl. 7) This is me, unplugged. I wrote a lot of the Soul Coughing stuff, but everyone brought their own individuality to the songs -- that was the nature of the band. So now, it's just me. My new stuff is stripped down because you're only getting my side of the story. 8) Ironic breast-signing is alive and well. The ironic part of it is still alive, but then there's the quasi-ironic signing of breasts. Like, how can you get it signed and not mean it on some level? A girl comes up laughing and says, "It would be so funny if you sign my chest, ha ha!" I signed my first cell phone in 1997 and I've since signed a lot more, and shoes, bags, iPods. To me signing things just doesn't make sense, but I always sign legibly to make sure it's clear who did the signing. 9) Addendum to #8. I recently had a woman ask me if I minded signing her prosthetic breast. I, of course, said, "No, not at all." And an elderly woman, who was 65 if she was a day, wanted me to sign her breast, too. "Okay, nice old lady, I'll sign your t*tties!" 10) There is no such thing as "Domestic Duty Free." I don't do drugs anymore, so that level of panic in airports is not a part of my life. But when I was in a really bad drinking phase years ago I had a changeover in Chicago on my way to Madison, Wisconsin and I had the shakes real bad. So I went to the duty free store and attempted to get them to sell me a bottle of Jack Daniels even though I was flying domestically. I said I would pay the duty and the woman gave me the most withering look. It made me realize it was time to stop drinking, which was a good thing.
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