Review: Mike Doughty's The Book of Drugs

Mike Doughty's The Book of Drugs is the sort of book that you read in long, marathon gulps. It's not light so much as concise--a carefully chosen word or phrase that does the work of a couple pages. Doughty's released around a half-dozen albums since he began his solo career back in 2000, but he's still best known as the front-man for Soul Coughing, a mid-90s alternative band that fused Doughty's poetry with hip-hop grooves and eclectic samples from the Andrews Sisters to Raymond Scott and everything in between.The Book of Drugs chronicles Doughty's drug years, which roughly coincide with his years in the band. The memoir is a reckoning for both, and amazingly, the drugs come out looking slightly better than Doughty's bandmates. It's a brutally honest book, one that dishes some dirt, but does so in a way that's profoundly unsexy. It doesn't offer the sort of celebration of excess that comes with most rock memoirs and it doesn't offer a tidy arc of addiction in redemption. The Book of Drugs isn't the sort of memoir in which the writer has it all figured out and is now reflecting back. Instead, it reads like an ongoing transmission from someone who's still figuring it out, but wants to share his story along the way.As a songwriter, Doughty has a knack for crafting unlikely hooks; you might forget the chorus of aDoughty song, but odds are you'll remember a particular line that just digs down into your brain and doesn't leave. There are little bombs like this throughout the book. Doughty deploys themcarefully and they stick with you. Early on, he describes his father, who served in Vietnam and becamean instructor at West Point: “He tightened like a fist.”Doughty brings that same talent to his memoir. He's a droll, self-deprecating writer; he's adept at calling himself out in a way that's funny and brutally honest. Doughty is given to tangents and digressive asides, but they don't feel manufactured or manic. (Fans of Doughty's work--both his Soul Coughing output and his solo stuff--will find The Book of Drugs to be something of a Rosetta Stone for some of his songs.)The book works on a few different levels. It's an addiction memoir first and foremost. Drugs--first alcohol and pot and then later coke, heroin, and everything else--helped Doughty cope with his dysfunctional, emotionally-abusive parents and later, with his dysfunctional, emotionally-abusive band. “Maybe,” he writes, “You want to read salacious tales of the debased guy,” and, yeah,the book has that element--there's plenty of dirty and dirty stories. But Doughty is so matter-of-fact and unglamorous in his descriptions of his days of debauchery that a reverse narrative develops. You don't read on to find out what sort of awful thing happens next, but to see if, against the odds, he makes it out alive.He does, of course, but barely. By the time Doughty quit Soul Coughing in 2000, he was a 135-pound heroin addict. He got clean and started touring the country, selling copies of his solo acoustic album, “Skittish,” in plain white sleeves. If drugs occupy, say, 51 percent of the psychic landscape of The Book of Drugs, then Soul Coughing occupies a good 40 percent. For years, Doughty, in interviews and on the internet, has been frank about his dislike of his time in the band and the albums they made. “I'm full-bore bat-shit crazy with regards to Soul Coughing,” he writes. “If somebody says they love Soul Coughing, I hear fuck you.”Based on the stories that Doughty recounts, there's good reasons for that. But the middle third of the book gets bogged down in anecdotes of how Doughty's bandmates mistreated him. Doughty is such an adept, incisive writer that the series of anecdotes get to be too much; they cross the line from servingDoughty's story to becoming excessive. In other spots in the book, Doughty excels at crafting complex characters with a choice word or short description, but when it comes to the band, Doughty reduces them to one-note bastards. The empathy that you can hear in the rest of the book (and that hums throughout Doughty's songs) is gone in these sections. It's clear he's got plenty of axes to grind, and with good reason, but they don't all need to show up in the narrative.Buried within the traumatic band story is a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at the music industry inthe mid-1990s, when labels were investing in any alternative band they could find and landing a video on MTV still meant something. There's plenty of industry gossip (and cameos by Ani DiFranco and Jeff Buckley), but Doughty also gives a thorough accounting of what it was like to be a working, touring musician during those boom years. The Book of Drugs doubles as a post-mortem of those years,dissecting what went wrong not just with Doughty's band, but with the industry as a whole.One of the most interesting angles Doughty pursues is how, nearly 12 years later, he's still trying to free himself from the shadow of Soul Coughing. Is it possible for an artist to escape his past work? When the artist is famous (or even semi-famous, or, as Doughty describes Soul Coughing, a “cult band”), does he get to define himself, or do the fans get to define him? What happens to art when an artist disavows it? Doughty touches on each of these questions, and his answers reveal the sort of frustration that comes from an artist who found his true voice after years of struggle. “There was something great here,” he writes of his time in Soul Coughing, “but we failed to let you hear it.” The Book of Drugs is Doughty'sway to make amends, not with his old band or jilted Soul Coughing fans, but with his own artistic voice, his own spirit. It's a funny, messy book, sometimes lyrical and sometimes discordant, but through it all, it's got the unmistakable ring of a man being honest with himself.