SOUL COUGHING PLAY THE SONGS OF SOUL COUGHING
The Bellwether
Los Angeles
Sept. 13, 2024
They said it would never happen, admitting as much on their tour announcement and promo materials this summer. It makes sense they’d embrace the flip-flop: after mastering, during their brief taste of cult success in the late 1990s, several music-industry narrative tropes — Wandering Minstrel; No-Hit Wonder; Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll — NYC’s Soul Coughing had grown too self-aware to not inhabit one more milestone, the Unlikely Reunion Tour, ironically and full-throatedly.
If you were born after 1995, you probably missed Soul Coughing’s career completely. The end-of-millennium slam-poet idiot kings dropped their batshit debut Ruby Vroom 30 years ago this month, in the Beck/Cake-adjacent WTF “deep slacker jazz” genre; two irresistible classics followed over a five-year stretch that climaxed with the band’s implosion, a trajectory descending perpendicular to the meteoric thrust of critical hype, opportunities, and a fan base that somehow mitotically expanded with each subsequent release. I was beginning middle school in 2000 when Cartoon Network rolled out their “Groovies” interstitial programming, vintage archival cartoons from Hanna-Barbera or Fleischer set to the music of a random handful of chill alternative bands and left-field DJs—two clips of which capitalized on Soul Coughing’s recently released third album. I haven’t stopped thinking about those bizarre songs for 24 years.
That creepy-animation – Soul Coughing synergy only grew more pointed once I eventually explored the band’s discography and was burritoed by their tortillas of non sequitur shower-thought lyrics, found-phrases yawped in spoken-word enunciations, and jazz-age horn samples frantically shuffling listeners onto a “bus / that’s gonna take you back to Beelzebub” and “make you stop going rub-a-dub.” They’d already been embodying the cartoon lifestyle long before the network approached them.
On Friday night, I took a return trip to my childhood’s finale when I gazed upon singer-guitarist Mike Doughty, sampler-keyboardist Mark degli Antoni, upright bassist Sebastian Steinberg, and drummer Yuval Gabay sharing a stage again after 25 years, this time at the Bellwether in Downtown Los Angeles. They bypassed the live-show convention of featuring opening bands, instead jumping straight into (the quasi‑9/11-predicting) “Is Chicago, Is Not Chicago,” surely mindful of the fact that their mostly Gen‑X audience couldn’t stand around on worn-out knees all night. An opener would’ve been unnecessary anyway to warm up a crowd who’d been stockpiling excitement alongside dashed hopes for a quarter century.
Onstage in 2024, the band looked more like a grizzled squad of huggable dads and bearded uncles than they did at their heroin-hipster peak in 1999. Doughty satisfied my expectations, droning open guitar notes or walking the mic around to make stream-of-consciousness pronouncements including “Talkin’ like the botched shot, attempt on the president” (timely) and “The average man, I got disseminated” (timeless). Unexpected for me, though, was the virtuosity of his bandmates’ playing — I’d always assumed Doughty was slack-rapping over tracks that were 90 percent samples. In reality, Gabay’s drumming was mind-shattering, and I couldn’t track Steinberg’s fingers sprinting across the bass neck while Antoni summoned ominously wacky atmospheres from the keys.
The tour’s set lists are tailored to each night’s show, and ours was full of crescendoing slow-burners, cruise-controlled slow-freezers, and unhinged freak-out scramblers. Meta as ever, Doughty coached us on how the encore portion should play out so we could properly cheer and the disseminating band could turn around and feign surprise; then, as planned, they launched into their pre-encore closer, ultimate L.A. anthem “Screenwriter’s Blues,” a catalog of iconic lines with the nervous midnight-radio ambience of a Tom Waits lounge-lizard rant: “It is 5:00 a.m. and you are listening to Los Angeles”; “I am going to Los Angeles to build a screenplay about lovers who murder each other”; “We are all, in some way or another, going to Reseda someday to die.” This was likely the only tour stop where, as the house lights returned, a significant portion of the crowd would actually be going to Reseda.
Both Groovies gratifyingly made an appearance near the show’s culmination, before the band concluded with 1996 anthem “Super Bon Bon,” which Ricky Martin’s songwriters plagiarized three years later without ever crediting (or paying) Doughty et al. In the moment, it was hard to dwell on legal recourse against “armies of lawyers retained by Sony” because the song kicked mesmerizing ass on top of a perfect victory-lap show. But who knows — maybe if the tour continues its successful streak, it’ll give Soul Coughing the financial momentum required to take on Big Ricky. Doughty said it would never happen. Where have we heard that before?
