Chris Whitley

Sharps & Flats is a daily music review in Salon Magazine

By David Bowman

Topics:Music

Chris Whitley once sung about “Secret Jesus” on his “blood antenna … coming through the concrete, baby.” It sounded like he was singing about an
extraterrestial Satan, not Jesus. But then there’s a record industry rumor
that Whitley actually met the devil out on some crossroads, just like Robert
Johnson. Only Whitley didn’t sell Satan his soul — he sold his career.

Whitley’s first three records were released by Sony. He had hours of studio time. Big limos. Champagne for breakfast. But no more. Last year, Sony dumped him. Out in the cold,
Whitley had zero budget to make a new album. So last December, he recorded one
in a single day — not in a studio, but in a barn on his daddy’s farm in
Vermont. And now “Dirt Floor” is being released on Messenger Records, a little label so tiny it’s run by a 24-year-old kid out of his one-room Chelsea
apartment in Manhattan.

How could Whitley fall so far? And what did he get from the devil in
return? Before you learn the answers, know that “Dirt Floor” is a little album the
way Bruce Springsteen’s “Nebraska” was little — which is to say it’s not little at
all, just incredibly ambitious in its modesty. Like Springsteen on “Nebraska,”
Whitley is the only player on his album, strumming his solitary
guitar and singing. His voice is reedy, but good. Some of his songs are good as well. Others are striking. All of them are a little peculiar, borrowing imagery from William Faulkner and Mexican Day of the Dead festivals. He sings about someone called Loco Girl. He sings about a ball-peen
hammer.

But “Dirt Floor” doesn’t sound like “Nebraska” — or Robert Johnson, or early
Bob Dylan, or anyone else. There’s something simultaneously medieval and funky
about Whitley’s sound. His National guitar has a brittle, otherworldly twang to it. “I think the guys that originally designed them 70 years ago were auto-body guys trying to make Hawaiian guitars that were louder,” Whitley says. He spends the next 10 minutes discussing the National the way motorcycle enthusiasts go on about Vincent Black Lightnings.

Whitley introduced his National on his first Sony album, “Living With the Law”
(1991), produced by Daniel Lanois cohort Malcolm Burn. It was a great album
about Big Sky country and someone called Poison Girl and something that was said on a
phone call from Leavenworth. It was an album Cormac McCarthy would make if he
were a guitarist instead of a novelist. The record had solid sales. His second Sony release, “Din of Ecstasy” (1995), was the mother of all flops. What happened? Whitley traded his
career for an electric guitar. Satan’s unholy ax was Whitley’s undoing.

“What’s with this devil business, man?” Whitley laughs. “I grew up on electric
guitar. Psychedelic blues: Hendrix, Cream. Early Muddy. Early Wolf. When I was a kid, I loved Johnny Winter and loved his first Columbia record. He used a thumb pick, not even a flat pick.
Just plugged in.” The lanky guitarist now closes his eyes as if he’s remembering a girl. “Johnny sounded so fluid. He wasn’t really playing any scale or riffs. He was just blowing it out.” He opens his eyes. “The devil had nothing to do with ‘Din of Ecstasy.’ With that record it was, ‘I can afford a band now.’”

Whitley’s electric “Din” was a psychedelic masterpiece that bashed and
screeched, even as it fell like a stone in the marketplace. The suits at Sony
wrung their hands, but gave him another chance. But rather than return to
the rootsy purity of “Living With the Law,” Whitley clung to the devil’s ax and
redefined his psychedelic sound, releasing yet another quirky, unclassifiably
brilliant electric album, “Terra Incognita” (1997). It went nowhere quicker than
“Din” did.

Sony pulled his plug.

But if this was Satan’s intention, the angels of art saved Whitley from hell.
The guitarist didn’t have the patience to do demos and shop around for another
label. He wouldn’t even wait for the schedule of his old mentor, Lanois, to
get clear so that they could record together. Whitley had written new,
simpler songs. So he took his beloved National up to Vermont and recorded
nine songs in a day with Cassandra Wilson’s Grammy-winning producer, Craig Street. The next day, they mixed the tracks. And a few weeks later, “Dirt Floor” was ready to be released on Messenger Records.

“The thing with Brandon [Kessler, Messenger's founder] is, he is completely unjaded,”
Whitley says. “He doesn’t listen to songs with an immediate criteria of, say,
what snare drums sound like on the radio and how many beats people are dancing
to.” Whitley met Brandon when the latter was a gofer at Sony. Brandon once told him a story about rushing around Manhattan in the middle of a hot June night trying to find Christmas ornaments,
as well as a tree, so pop diva Mariah Carey would have the right inspiration to
sing two words for her Christmas album: “Bless you.”

Hard to imagine Whitley needing anything more than a little weed to sing those
words. And “Dirt Floor” proves that it is possible for art to triumph over
corporate culture. Whitley’s dinky Messenger Record’s release has been
reviewed by everyone from Rolling Stone to Entertainment Weekly. All are raves. Whitley will also have a spread in Esquire. One wonders how many publicists (and Christmas trees) Sony hires to get the same results for Carey.

Whitley doesn’t quite buy this “triumph of art” business, because he thinks his
work is commercial. Or at least listenable. “I’m not exactly high art and I’m
not pop. I look at my stuff now, it’s very metaphoric to how I grew up.
There’s my art director dad and my sculptor mom. Pure. And expressionist. I
never felt like there was a conflict between the art and commerce.”

Yeah, OK. But anyone with a commercial bone in his body wouldn’t have made
two albums of psychedelia. McCarthy was mentioned earlier — Whitley
is like one of the author’s kid cowboys down in Mexico. There’s an innocence
and naiveti about him that’s touching. And deceiving. This 37-year-old is
chronologically long-in-the-tooth, but he still looks about 23. Except in
brief moments, say in the neon light of a bar sign on Seventh Avenue, where you can
see what Whitley will look like when his age catches up with him. He’ll look a
little like a criminal — like he’s getting away with something.

So now, with “Dirt Floor” a big success, will Whitley fuck it all up again by
recording Satan’s electric guitar again with Daniel Lanois? Maybe not. And
it’s our loss. Nowadays, Whitley complains about guitar-hero bands. He even
claims a banjo can thrash harder than any old Danelectro U1. “Banjo’s are more
pointed,” he claims, as earnest as a choir boy. “People actually get it with a
banjo. With a loud guitar, it’s like just another rock band.” Stephen Foster
heavy metal? He gives a dry laugh. “It’s good to express your existential
anger on the banjo.”

What does Whitley have to be getting existential about? It was the devil who suffered a loss, not Whitley. For just a moment, Satan lost control of his ax. And for just one blessed moment, true art has won a modest battle.

: David Bowman is the author of the novel "Bunny Modern" and the nonfiction book "This Must Be the Place: The Adventures of the Talking Heads in the 20th Century." More David Bowman

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How Madonna liberated America

As the pop icon prepares to play the Super Bowl, a celebration of the way she changed sexual mores forever

By Sara Marcus

Topics:Music, Super Bowl, Editor's Picks

When Madonna takes the stage at halftime of the Super Bowl this Sunday, she’ll be the first female solo performer to do so since Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake played peek-a-boo in 2004. Ever since Nipplegate, Super Bowl programmers have avowedly played it safe, booking a string of hoary grown-man rockers such as Paul McCartney and The Boss, known quantities not prone to random disrobing.

By and large, the halftime show has become the live-performance equivalent of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, an honor bestowed long after an artist’s peak. So Madonna, once the baddest good girl or best bad girl in pop, is now safe prime-time fare? No shocker there. But even if Madonna hasn’t had a mega-hit since Justin Bieber was in diapers, that’s far from the point. Madge will be bringing two other fabulous Ms. M’s — Minaj and M.I.A. — onstage with her, which is exciting, but that’s not the point either.

No, the point is that this Sunday will be an opportunity to celebrate the changes Madonna brought to American culture at the height of her career. Her visionary assault on American prudery, her revelatory spreading of sexual liberation to Middle America, changed this country for the better. And that’s not old news; we’re still living it.

If this sounds elementary to speak of now, it’s only because we’ve spent so long in the world Madonna made that we can hardly imagine it any other way. But throughout the 1980s and into the ’90s, her protean personae and erotic gambits were consistently a step ahead of what Middle America was ready for. She dared us to catch up with her. Remember, she (and the fans who fell in love with her in second grade, ahem) came of age in an era when a U.S. president could reasonably believe that he could confess to having committed adultery in his heart — not in an open marriage or on the Appalachian trail, folks —without sounding utterly ridiculous.

In the early ’80s, when the Material Girl owned the dance floor at Manhattan nightclubs and reveled in the downtown scene’s polysexual utopia, the political advances of feminism and gay liberation had stalled out and were hurtling toward backlashville. By the end of that decade, when gay rights laws were being repealed in cities across the country, Madonna was bringing the ball culture of gay and transgender blacks and Latinos — the true voguers — to junior high school gymnasium dances worldwide, popularizing an ecstatic ethos of freedom, sexual and otherwise, sprung directly from big-city club scenes that millions of suburban kids might never get to experience firsthand.

In an era when photographers and performance artists were being blasted in the halls of Congress and the courts of public opinion for using religious iconography or homoerotic images or referring to self-gratification, Madonna hit upon danceably glamorous versions of all of these things. She managed to smuggle the values of the sexually fluid, multiracial art underground into the dead center of American culture before the old-school guardians of moral rectitude could gather their forces to protest.

Oh, they did protest — most memorably in 1989, when her “Like a Prayer” video led the pope to bar her from performing in Italy and made Pepsi back out of sponsoring her next tour — but the forces of censorship were no match for the marketing and dramaturgical genius of Madonna. In “Truth or Dare” and “Sex” and the “Justify My Love” video, she brought pervyness into the mainstream, and it remains firmly lodged there to this day, as we can see in everything from the ubiquity of porn stars to Rihanna’s career.

So what if Madonna has been a garden-variety celebrity since then, balancing slight nuttiness (Kabbalah, hydrangeas) with backward-glancing stunts (Britney) amid a backdrop of mostly unexceptional music and the odd cinematic triumph (“Evita”) or flop (“W.E.”)? The woman remade American culture. And that’s more than enough to justify my love for her.

: Sara Marcus Sara Marcus is the author of Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution." Follow her on Twitter: @thesaramarcus. More Sara Marcus

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Lana Del Rey and the new culture of failure

The controversial pop sensation is somehow more interesting for her spectacular flameouts than her music

By Stephen Deusner

Lana Del Ray

Topics:Music, Editor's Picks

Aside from the basic facts about Lana Del Rey — the most pertinent being that Del Rey is the stage name of Lizzy Grant, formerly a promising folk-pop singer with a so-so album under her own name and a millionaire father bankrolling her career — music writers can’t seem to agree on anything at all. She’s too fake or just fake enough. She’s too detached or just detached enough. She can’t sing or she’s a gifted singer. Some reviewers have called her new debut full-length, “Born to Die,” “the album equivalent of a faked orgasm,” and others have deemed it “not just irritating but almost morally objectionable.” Others have praised “her preoccupation with Hollywood archetypes of American femininity” and called it “close to pop perfection.”

But thanks to the upstart pop star’s disastrous performance on “Saturday Night Live” a few weeks ago, Del Rey inspired fountains of Internet ink dissecting her persona and the critical responses to her persona before most people even knew who she was — let alone had a chance to gripe about hearing her songs all the time. She was Twitter famous — Rebecca Black famous — which these days is more famous than you get by releasing a hit album. Now that she has released a hit album, however, the response from critics and fans has been fascinating for what it reveals about the pop-culture machine — as well as the idea of success in America.

Consensus seems to be forming that “Born to Die” is neither as bad as her detractors claim nor as great as her defenders argue. The album is occasionally compelling, but it’s rarely daring. It’s catchy, but more often strained. There are a few fine songs, but many more that stumble about awkwardly. Perhaps more telling, “Born to Die” is most interesting when it’s terrible. Critics are quoting clumsy lyrics about drinking top-shelf liquor and taking bodies downtown, and certainly there are cringe-worthy lines weighing down all these songs. But Del Rey is a risky songwriter, peppering her lyrics with concrete imagery and specific nouns, depicting her world in exacting detail. On “Off to the Races,” she paints an afternoon skinny-dipping as an all-American tableau: “White bikini off with my red nail polish / Watch me in the swimming pool, bright blue ripples.” It’s often evocative, immersing listeners in her private world, but too often the details seem off; lines about “Pabst Blue Ribbon … on ice” and “Jesus on the dashboard” break the spell and deposit you right back in the real world.

Some observers have detected a knowing wink in Del Rey’s performance, as though there’s an element of parody in a song like “National Anthem,” on which she hints she’s “blurring the line between real and the fake.” But that song is bad-movie bad, one of several tracks that drag down the second half of “Born to Die.” Like “Manos: Hands of Fate” or “The Room,” it confounds all critical faculties and almost dares you to read too much into it. As the song wanders from a perfunctory verse to a vacant chorus, it picks up lyrical detritus in its wake, the most famous being:

Money is the reason we exist

Everybody knows it, it’s a fact

Kiss kiss

Is this a Swiftian satire of pop culture in the “Real Housewives” era, or is Del Rey actually embracing a Randian view of existential capitalism? Does it even matter? A bad song is a bad song, no matter its intentions. Besides, even when she begs, “Tell me I’m your national anthem,” her expressionless vocals come across not as ironic, but sourly uninvested.

Neverthelesss, of this writing, it was No. 1 on the iTunes album chart, with the deluxe edition (featuring three additional tracks) at No. 2. That’s higher than Adele and Leonard Cohen, Kelly Clarkson and Coldplay. For an artist with more ups and downs in her short career than the Republican primary, that’s a fairly impressive feat, more or less assuring a decent showing when Billboard announces its definitive sales chart next week. That’s the rub for many observers: Del Rey has achieved a level of success that many feel she hasn’t earned yet.

But pop stars are rarely born; more often they’re made, whether via the popularity of a YouTube clip or the machinations of the musical-industrial complex. It’s not that Del Rey has been heralded and celebrated before she has had a chance to develop her talents and get some experience under her belt. Rather, it’s that Lizzy Grant has been heralded and celebrated before she’s had a chance to truly develop Lana Del Rey as a character. Back in August, she came across as fully formed on her debut single, “Video Games,” billing herself as a “gangsta Nancy Sinatra” and taking full advantage of the mystery that surrounds every new artist.

But that was three minutes; “Born to Die” is just under 50 minutes (the deluxe edition comes in closer to an hour), and Del Rey can’t command the audience’s attention for that length of time. There’s no consistency, no sustained point of view as she toggles between Sue Lyon in heart-shaped glasses and Tura Satana in ass-kicking boots. Her voice has some dramatic range, but at this point there doesn’t seem to be much internal logic to how she deploys it from one measure to the next. Of course, we’re not supposed to develop a fully formed impression of Lizzy Grant from “Born to Die,” but we should come away from the album with some idea of who Lana Del Rey is.

Music, it would seem, is merely a means to an end for her, rather than an end in itself. These songs are tools by which Del Rey partitions out her idea of our collective consciousness, and much like Lady Gaga’s debut album, of course titled “The Fame,” “Born to Die” treats celebrity like the inevitable outcome of simply making a record. “Baby, love me ’cause I’m playing on the radio,” she sings on inevitable single, “Radio.” It’s a pretty desperate plea, not least because it assumes that people still listen to the radio.

Perhaps more than the fact that it aspires too blatantly to celebrity, “Born to Die” is divisive because it’s lifestyle music for a lifestyle that Del Rey arguably hasn’t achieved yet. It’s entitlement pop that puts the cart miles before the horse. Del Rey has become a dubious figure not because she’s playing the poor little rich girl during a recession, but because these songs collectively imply that the 99 percent really want to be the 1 percent. If she has turned herself into what she thinks we all want, then we resent her for thinking so lowly of us.

Whatever the case, writing about Lana Del Rey may actually be more interesting than listening to her music. In fact, there are much better pop albums that never receive a fraction of this press, from the compassionate and complex anthems by Swedish singer Robyn to the latest release by tUnE-yArDs, which topped the recent Village Voice Pazz & Jop poll and deals with some of the same issues that Del Rey takes up, only with much more nuance and passion. So Del Rey joins the ranks of Rebecca Black, Charlie Sheen, Tim Tebow, Newt Gingrich — people we debate and discuss not because they excel in their profession, but precisely because they do not. Success has become mundane and predictable — and, as everybody knows, too easy to have bestowed upon you. Spectacular failures, however, are always unique and uniquely fascinating.

: More Stephen Deusner

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Can music learn from the slow-food movement?

Great-sounding records can be made on home computers, but one man's convinced a fantastic studio is music's future

By David Menconi

(Credit: manifoldrecording.com)

Topics:Art in Crisis, Music, Editor's Picks

This past summer, Zenph Sound Innovations had a problem. Zenph is a North Carolina-based company specializing in computer-generated “re-performances” of classic recordings with astounding results. But Zenph’s latest project — “The Spanish Masters,” featuring renowned cellist Zuill Bailey and soprano Isabel Bayrakdarian accompanying recreations of century-old piano-playing — was coming in over budget.

That’s when Zenph’s management took a cue from the project’s setting, Manifold Recording Studio, which was designed with both old-school live performance and new-school open-source philosophy in mind. Manifold co-owner Michael Tiemann suggested that Zenph go the crowd-funding route to raise the money needed.

“I proposed that we offset the costs by holding a recording salon,” Tiemann says. “So we invited a select group of people to come in and experience the music live in the studio as it was being created.”

Six people came in to watch, and each paid $250 for the privilege. Presto, budget gap closed. If Tiemann has his way, that will be a regular happening at Manifold, a wildly ambitious high-end studio that opened over the summer in the rural splendor of Chatham County, North Carolina (near Raleigh).

Thanks to his deep pockets from his position at the software company Red Hat, Tiemann had the means to turn his “passionate obsession” of a dream into reality. He spared no expense on Manifold, which is a remarkable facility with lavish attention to detail. Most of the building’s dimensions are based on the Fibonacci sequence and/or the golden ratio, with all the grids of the floors, walls and ceilings lined up to interlock and intersect with perfect symmetry. The wooden floor of the main studio is composed of a diamond pattern, and each diamond has 12 slats in honor of the 12-note scale of Western music.

The studio’s technical gear is all state-of-the art, of course. Manifold is the sort of destination studio where you could imagine U2, Adele or some other chart-topping act setting up shop for a month or three to wax their latest opus. But if anything seems less practical than starting a record company right now, it’s building a high-end recording studio that rents for $2,000 a day. Having built it, Tiemann is convinced they will come — although the “they” he has in mind is less top-of-the-pops and more grassroots.

Even though Manifold is very much a high-tech facility, Tiemann’s vision of it is steeped in the vibes of past glory days from the era before Pro Tools rendered studios obsolete. Speaking of models for Manifold, Tiemann cites the Beatles’ old stomping grounds of Abbey Road, where they pioneered the technique of using the studio as another instrument; Peter Gabriel’s Real World, a studio he says was “built to support creativity”; and most of all the old CBS 30th Street Studio, favored back-in-the-day recording venue of everyone from Miles Davis to Leonard Bernstein.

“When Miles Davis would record at 30th Street, he’d bring three or four dozen people into the studio and they’d do a live recording session,” Tiemann says. “This was a lot like a musical version of the salon model, people gathering in a room small enough to support conversation and large enough to hold a diverse group of people. Glenn Gould, who recorded ‘The Goldberg Variations’ there, said that recording would completely replace live performance within 50 years. That was in 1966 and it has not quite come true, not yet. What we’ve got in mind is to bring together those two experiences, recording and performance.”

To that end, Manifold is set up to do broadcasting or webcasting, just in case anyone is of a mind to make a recording/performance available to a wider real-time audience. Even without that, it’s a very comfortable space for a live audience of several-score fans. And with the right act and setup — an unplugged rock band, say; or James Taylor, who grew up right down the road in Chapel Hill and still has ties to the area — you could imagine Manifold being the perfect setting for the right kind of live-recording project.

“Everybody still wants to make great-sounding records in great studios,” says Souvik Dutta, a producer scheduled for two Manifold projects in 2012 including one with Widespread Panic guitarist Jimmy Herring. “It’s like taking your kid to a baseball game to see his favorite player.”

Still, are there enough projects like that out there to support a studio that cost millions to build? Tiemann is convinced there is, citing parallels with the slow-food movement.

“Just as the slow-food movement encourages eaters to think more holistically about how food is grown, prepared and brought to the table, this co-producer model gives people much more access to the creative process of music,” Tiemann says. “They’re not just financially involved, but also participants in a stronger way than the traditional music industry has really encouraged. There is a new economy waiting to be discovered, new markets waiting to be engaged. We’re very early in addressing this brave new market, and doing so at a time when the record industry’s rhetoric is so wildly against anything new that it makes us look like the crazy ones.”

Trying to sell an idea like Manifold is actually familiar territory for Tiemann, a guru of the open-source-software movement whose career began just as the Internet was coming together in the 1980s. Early in the game, Tiemann was doing a lot of work with open-source software, which is free and set up so that users can easily modify it.

But open-source software seemed like a commercial dead end until Tiemann figured out how to monetize software that you give away: Sell support services, the software equivalent of giving away cell phones and charging monthly user fees. Red Hat, a company specializing in Linux software, acquired Tiemann’s company in the late 1990s, and he moved from Silicon Valley to Red Hat’s home base of North Carolina.

Tiemann started out as Red Hat’s chief technical officer, eventually settling into his current role as the company’s vice president of open-source affairs. That involves a fair amount of punditry and acting the gadfly. Couple that open-source mindset with his lifelong love of music (he first recorded as a 10-year-old member of the Saint Thomas Choir while growing up in New York City), and Tiemann might be just the guy to drag the record and studio industries kicking and screaming into the 21st century.

“People said the idea of giving away software and selling services to new markets would never work,” Tiemann says. “That worked out fine and this can, too. What would it be worth to provide a path to sustainable success in the music industry? I think that’s worth a lot. Strip-mining the low end, selling less and less quality to more and more people — there are limits to that model, and the music industry has done about as much of that as can be done. It’s time to try something new.”

: More David Menconi

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Alt-rock hitmaker: Why I hate my band

Mike Doughty knows Soul Coughing should have been as big as the Beastie Boys. He tells all in a new memoir

By Steve Almond

Mike Doughty (Credit: paradigmagency.com)

Topics:Music, Books, Interviews

The unspoken rule of rock ‘n’ roll memoirs — especially ones about drug-addled players who get clean — is that the author tends to mend fences rather than sling mud. Mike Doughty: not so much. In “The Book of Drugs,” the former Soul Coughing frontman writes with a lacerating candor about his family, his narcotic and sexual excesses, the idiocy of the music industry, and, most of all, his former band mates.

This will come as bad news to the small but persistent fan cult who harbor hopes of a Soul Coughing reunion. (And I might as well admit right now that I’m one of them.)

For a few years there back in the ’90s, Soul Coughing was making the most interesting music on the planet, a sonic collage of Doughty’s downtown beat poetry and guitar riffs, the monstrous syncopation of bassist Sebastian Steinberg and drummer Yuval Gabay, and the zany sampling of Mark De Gli Antoni. Doughty called it “deep slacker jazz.” The critics, by and large, raved. But the band minted only a few minor hits before imploding.

Doughty details this implosion in the new book, as well as his own stifling childhood, his descent into addiction, and his eventual recovery via the 12-step program. The 41-year-old has since built a thriving solo career, turning out albums full of catchy pop melodies and droll lyricism.

Salon interviewed him by phone from his home in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Your memoir doesn’t pull a lot of punches.

I definitely felt ethically obligated to show myself as a pretty dark character. Who I was earlier in my career is a lot more interesting than some weird white knight version of myself.

I was amazed at how honest you are. There’s a line in the book, for example, where you’re writing about Jeff Buckley and you say, “I wanted him brought down.”

He was just a ridiculously beautiful person and his voice was amazing and people followed him around like he was Jesus — and who could blame them? Boy oh boy did I envy that. When he died, I was so envious. I was like, “He’s a legend.” And years later, when I came to from the fog, I realized he was just a human being, very talented, a very good guy, and he died.

His death made me think about the halfhearted suicide attempts you made as a teenager. At one point you tried to hang yourself from a shower curtain using a guitar cord, which felt like exactly what a young aspiring rock star would do.

Pretty much. I didn’t want to die, though. I just wanted someone to help me and it was the only way I could figure out to get help. I was angry and powerless to put my anger to a more effective use, but I hope I conveyed how haunted and strange and emotionally violent the home I grew up in was. When you grow up in an abusive household, unconsciously you seek out abusive relationships.

It seemed clear your band mates fit that description.

Oh yeah.

The book is so blunt about how angry you were at them and still are. I wondered about this, because isn’t part of the whole 12-step program about seeking forgiveness?

It’s about making amends. But making amends is not a forced march. Part of writing the book is: I want to take responsibility for my part, and that’s why I portray myself quite negatively a lot of the time. But I would say that I was, like, an asshole and they were in my opinion somewhat sociopathic. So their bad is bigger than my bad. But my bad is still bad and I got to take responsibility for that.

It felt like the undercurrent of your relationship with the band was resentment against you as the songwriter. You brought in the melodies and rhythms and a sense of how the song was going to sound and your band mates — for whatever else you might say about them, were remarkable players —

We had the muscle to give the Beastie Boys a run for their money! And Beck! And we ended up like a footnote. When people like Soul Coughing, it’s so frustrating because we could have been a truly great band and instead we were an interesting band with a cult following. And my biggest problem is my band mates genuinely think I was not the songwriter. It’s like getting into an argument where you bake a pie and have to prove you baked the pie. It’s like: Here’s the receipt for the flour, here’s the dirty dishes. It’s insane and utterly crazy-making. The thing that really disappoints me is that some of the famous samples on our first record, the Andrews Sisters and Howlin’ Wolf and Toots and the Maytalls — I brought that stuff in. And when the sampler player was asked about how he came up with those samples, he was not even aware that he was talking about stuff I brought in.

It seemed like your age had a lot to do with the band dynamics, the fact that you were so young relative to the other guys.

I was 22 when we did our first gig. I already felt like, “Jesus, why didn’t I have a record at 19?” I was bizarrely grandiose and at the same time ridden with anxiety. I was 23 when we made our first record, and 24 when it came out.

Right, and these guys were a decade older. They’d been around the block. Maybe they had trouble giving you too much credit.

I wonder if they were trying to sink their own boat, if they were just super self-destructive, knowing that this was the one shot they would have, and I would likely go on to make more records and they likely wouldn’t. It just doesn’t make sense that they [messed] with the guy who had his hand on the off switch. But then again, I heard reports after we broke up, and they were shocked and angry. And I was like: Really? You said all this shit. You said we’re going to divide up the song credit equally even though you didn’t write the songs. You didn’t think that eventually I was going to … get out of there.

As a solo artist you’ve been able make the exact kind of records you want.

Yeah, but it’s so funny. Whenever there’s a new album, I read the iTunes reviews and there’s always one that says, “I’m glad this rocks out more like ‘Haughty Melodic.’” And there’s always one review that says, “Yeah, but he’s never as good as he was in Soul Coughing.” I don’t know anybody with an audience that’s so divided. And it’s not just, “Hey, I like acoustic records.” It’s like, “The kind of music I like is better than the music you like.” People — particularly young people — just have this self-centered view of art. If they like something, it’s not a preference. It’s true or false. I’m trying to learn to laugh at it.

It seems like you’ve made your peace with a smaller career that’s more sustainable.

The desire to be immortal is something you’re never going to win. I mean, I just read that Paul McCartney called up Yoko Ono and asked for some of the songs to be changed from “By Lennon/McCartney” to “By McCartney/Lennon.”

You write a lot in the book about being a lonely guy. There’s a lot of self-lacerating groupie sex, for instance. What’s your personal life like now?

Well, I was a ho for the first couple years after I stopped using and I was much better at it than when I was using, but it got really sad. So I got into relationships. I’ve had three major relationships in a decade. I was 18 when I started using full-time and it’s sort of like I got stuck there. So now I’m trying to be an adult, but I feel quite behind the rest of the world.

Are you concerned the book coming out will stir up stuff from past?

I sort of put blinders on when I was writing it and didn’t think about how people were going to react. But now people are coming down the pike, particularly from my long menu of horrible, brief sex encounters.

Do you sense a flame war with your ex-band mates in the offing?

Yeah, I’m better at that than I used to be. I think it’s very much a “Don’t feed the trolls” type scenario. Better for me to let them say whatever it is they want to say and for me not to know about it, even if they’re like, “Doughty’s a Nazi and he shot JFK and he kicks puppies.”

Turn off the Google Alert?

Oh, totally. I did that a while ago.

: Steve Almond's new book is the story collection "God Bless America." More Steve Almond

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Etta James: Five great YouTube moments

Celebrate the late chanteuse's life by watching her perform legendary hits like "Tell Mama" and "At Last"

VIDEO

By Emma Mustich

Etta James.

Topics:Music

Legendary jazz and R&B singer Etta James, whose hits included “I’d Rather Go Blind” and (above all) the world-famous ballad “At Last,” died of leukemia today at age 73. In celebration of the six-time Grammy winner’s career — and in honor of her remarkable but often difficult life — we’ve collected five clips of James performing live: