In the mid-to-late 90s, Soul Coughing was an up-and-coming act that played a unique blend
of alternative rock, electronic music, and hip hop. Late-night rotation of their music videos
would help them amass a cult following, and they’d also solidify their fanbase through airplay on
alternative radio. Today, we’re going to explore whatever happened to the band Soul Coughing.
Soul Coughing was formed in New York City by vocalist and guitarist Mike Doughty
in 1992, who was an aspiring music critic and poet at the time.
By his own admission he was born to be an army brat as his father taught
at west point. During his early career he would write for McSweeney’s and Might
and wrote a pretty scathing column called dirty sanchez for several years at the New York Press.
He would work as a doorman at the nightclub The Knitting Factory,
a club that spin magazine referred to as and i quote “the mecca for avant garde experimentation.”
It was at the knitting factory where Doughty showcased his distinctive spoken word poetry,
and others soon took notice. To flesh out his new project, Doughty (do-tee, recruited keyboardist
Mark Degli Antoni , bassist Sebastian Steinberg, and israeli born drummer Yuval Gabay, all three of
whom were regulars of the club, Doughty was significantly younger than the rest of his
bandmates and he barely knew these musicians which would later lead to problems down the road.
The group’s percussionist, Gabay would perhaps have the most interesting musical background.
Born to moroccan-jewish family in his home country of Israel didn’t really have a lot
of exposure to rock and jazz when he grew up, but he would rather be inspired by different
sounds he heard on the streets. He would tell the Chicago Tribune "Even a faucet running, I'll tap
my feet to it until somebody stops me..Mostly, I played weddings in Israel,". "There, to do that,
you have to know how to play Moroccan music, or Yemenite music, or Russian songs, or music
from Kurdistan. And if the couple is mixed--from different cultures." He would end up moving to new
york and started playing with a percussionist trio playing polyrythmic experimental rock
and they eventually signed to a german record label touring across Asia,
Europe and the United States. He soon branched out to working with hip hop acts and even wrote and
choreographed music for new york dance troupes. Soul Couhing would take their name from a slang
for throwing up. Soul Coughing would rely on unconventional instrumentation including aguitar,
sampler, an acoustic bass and drums) to create music that blended jazz, hip-hop, indie rock
and noise experimentation. The band’s website would list influences ranging from black sabbath,
bootsy collins, a tribe called quest and built to spill. The band’s songwriting style differed from
other groups at the time Mark Deli Antoni telling billboard “we’re not one of those bands who sits
down to write and the thing is in stone after a week. We write the music together and flesh it out
in performance. Until it gets to that point which may take 10 to 15 performances it’s not really
fleshed out. ” Those attending soul coughing’s live gigs never knew what they were in store for.
Some gigs would have them playing completely brand new songs that weren’t recorded yet,
while other gigs may have them playing fan favourites. With the rising popularity and
accessibility of the internet, Soul Coughing took advantage of technology, as the band openly
encouraged bootlegging of their concerts. Bootleg tapes would be openly traded on a folder dedicated
to the band on America Online, something which Doughty himself would take part in.
In just one year, the band was signed to Slash Records. By this time,
the label had become part of Warner Brothers, giving the band much-needed mainstream exposure,
Doughty would tell the Baltimore Sun what strings came with being signed to a major label saying"You
don't necessarily have to choose a category musically, but business-wise, you absolutely,
positively have to choose one. And we were very upfront to everybody -- 'OK,
we're an alternative rock band whether you like it or not.' So that's the box that they've thrown
us in, radio-wise and marketing-wise" he'd say The band’s first album, Ruby Vroom, was recorded
in 1994 in Los Angeles at Sunset Studio Factory. The group's approach for it would be experimental,
as they integrated samples of blues and vocal group records, as well as scores from vintage
cartoons. An article written by Mark Brown of the Chicago Tribune explored the surprising
trend of babies and parenting among rock musicians, and noted that the album’s title
was a mispronunciation of Ruby Froom, who is the daughter of producer Mitchell Froom and
singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega. Interestingly, the studio where Soul Coughing recorded had a number
of baby toys in its storage room, like rattles, whistles, and mini xylophones, which the producer
for the album, Tchad Blake, encouraged the band to use. In Doughty’s 2012 memoir, The Book of Drugs,
he praised Blake’s approach, saying, “He’s the closest thing I’ve seen an
engineer come to really being an artist. He put vocals through a big bullhorn on a stick
he found in India, put microphones in old mufflers and recorded sounds through them, [and] ran
sounds recorded with $10,000 microphones through effects pedals he bought for $10 at garage sales.”
Doughty adds, “He really didn’t give an f about how the music sounded anywhere other
than the beat-up ‘60s-vintage pickup truck he drove between home and the studio. It always
sounded amazing there,” he’d say. Once Ruby Vroom was released,
it failed to chart and sold poorly, moving less than 100,000 copies in the next few years,
but it received critical acclaim, with Rolling Stone later calling it one of the 40 best
mainstream alternative albums of 1994, as well as one of the 100 Greatest albums of the 90s.
Despite the band’s underwhelming debut, their label had faith in them. The product manager
for Soul coughing for Warner Brothers would tell billboard a few years later ‘we were not satisfied
with the 70,000 records sold and we will not be satisfied until we reach a much greater
goal...This band is mining turf that no one else is mining. The product manager would go on to say
that the biggest realization they had about Soul coughing is that the group were capable of being
paired up with a variety of artists on the road including Jeff Buckley and the Dave Matthews band
only further helping bolster their profile. But Steinberg would tell billboard magazine“our record
company says we have faith in you guys. Which is becomes more and more loaded.’
In 1995, during an appearance on the Canadian show The New Music, Doughty offered some more
insight into Soul Coughing’s music, saying, “It was entirely an accident. I think the only
idea that was present before Soul Coughing started was that it was going to be funky.”
“Beyond that, it’s been sort of ‘anything goes’, and over time, it’s become very closely
related to who we are as people, and how [our] particular personalities interact,” he’d say.
Yuval Gabay would add, “We try to relate to the lower part of the body – have people
shake their booty, dance, and just feel good.” When asked what role the band’s lyrics play
while their music is based on movement, Doughty expanded further:
“In the nature of language, each word evokes a tremendous amount of things for specific people.”
“What these words are about, more than getting across a narrative or expressing an idea…is
just getting the rhythmic or musical quality of a word into people’s minds, so that it loops
over and over again, and then whatever it means to them comes to the front of their mind,” he’d say.
The same year, Soul Coughing started working on their follow-up album, Irresistible Bliss,
a record consisting whose main theme consisted of love and heartbreak. In fact Doughty would
tell the orlando sentinel “not that i exactly have a nation of ex-girlfriends,
although it seems that way sometimes. I think I’m blessed with a band that doesn’t even listen to
the words. No questions ever arise." he would say The band wanted Blake as producer again, but due
to a death in his family, he was only available for part of the mixing sessions. In the meantime,
Doughty would go with producer David Kahne, despite objections from both the rest of the band,
and from his record label. Doughty’s goal was for the album to have a more contemporary feel,
and as a result, the songs feature catchier, more conventional song structures.
He’d be pleased with the producer's efforts, and would also enlist Steve Fisk to produce the track
“Unmarked Helicopters,” which would be included as part of the X-Files soundtrack,
Irresistible Bliss would be recorded in only 11 days and was released in 1996,
and while the album was less favored by critics, it ended up performing much better
commercially than its predecessor, with its opening track, “Super Bon Bon,” giving
the band their first hit. The album produced another hit with the song soundtrack to Mary.
Drummer Yuval Gabay would tell the morning call newspaper "The second record, as usual,
is the toughest record to make for a band. And it was indeed a tough record to make," "We all
bring a big sack of puppies with us. Sometimes you have to know not to let out a certain puppy.
You have to know how to hold back sometimes." By the late 90s, the band was touring with drum
n’ bass producers Krust and Die, and so their third and final album, El Oso, would feature a
sound heavily influenced by electronic music. It was during this time Doughty was spending a lot
more time in the UK. He would tell billboard magazine where his mind was at saying “dance
culture over here is a lot more interesting than all the post grunge anthems on the US radio.
In london clubs it’s all about ecstasy, the moment and those crazy beats. You can hear
amazing music one nightt that you’ll never hear again. The only similar situation at home is with
bands like Phish and all the hippies at the shows getting f***** up and dancing around" he would say
Thad Blake was brought back on as producer, while also providing synthesizer accompaniment
and programming. Once the album was released in 1998, reviews for the record were also mixed,
but it made the Billboard top 50, and carried another hit single, “Circles,” their biggest yet,
which peaked at number eight on the US Alternative chart. A year later,
the album also hit number one on college radio station KTUH in Honolulu, Hawaii. It seemed as
though Soul Coughing were on their way to the bigtime, but Mark DeGli Antoni left the band
to focus on family, and rather than continue on, the band called it quits in May of 2000.
Following Soul Coughing’s dissolution, bassist Sebastian Steinberg and drummer Yuval Gabay
took up session work, while Antoni saw success as a composer. Meanwhile, Mike Doughty’s transition
would be initially rough, as by this time the group had broken up he’d grown disenchanted and
developed an addiction to various drugs,, and alcohol. Doughty would start a solo career on
his own after being dropped by Warner Brothers, selling his debut album, Skittish, on blank CD-Rs,
while also touring for several years in a rental car. By the time he released his third solo album,
2003’s Rockity Roll, he’d gained enough of a following independently of Soul Coughing.
And Doughty’s fate would continue to change for the better. The next year,
after playing the Bonnaroo Music Festival, he met up with Dave Matthews, a longtime fan who
previously toured with Soul Coughing. Doughty gave him a rough cut of a solo album he’d been working
on, and after a few further connections, they’d release the album on Matthews’ label, ATO Records,
From there, the album’s singles, “Looking at the Wind from The Bottom of A Well” and “I Hear
the Bells” were featured on the shows Grey’s Anatomy and Veronica Mars, and Doughty found
his way back into the mainstream following an appearance on The Late Show with David Letterman.
In subsequent years, Doughty expressed mixed feelings about his former band. While outside
musical projects were given as the reason for soul coughing breakup in 2000, it went deeper than that
according to Doughty. In his book titled “The Book of Drugs he referred to the band as and i quote
“an abusive marriage full of emotional violence,” he continued to recognize the importance of the
band’s music, and recordes updated versions of their songs on his 2013 crowdfunded album Circles,
Super Bon Bon, and The Very Best of Soul Coughing, and performed Ruby Vroom in its entirety in 2019.
He would tell the village voice in 2009 “I get more and more afraid that a Soul Coughing reunion
is going to be forced upon me at knifepoint. I don’t need money that bad. I swear to God.”
He would also go on to reveal that Soul coughin didn’t make any money and as a
solo artist he’s doing better financially. In the same interview with Village Voice he would state
I was very dumb hanging out with those guys, because they just didn’t like me
from the jump. They really were very cruel to me in a lot of ways, put me down in a big way,
and I believed them. I was 23 when I started the band, and they were in their 30s. I thought they
must be smarter than I am, they must be right, the whole reason this is taking off is because
of them. We found all these terrible people we worked with that were essentially like those guys.
Soul Coughing was this weird universe–sort of a Dante’s Inferno, where I was the devil’s asshole,
and there was the band, the management, the record company, and everybody hated me" he'd say
But as recently as February of 2021, Doughty revealed wanting Soul Coughing to get back
together, and for his latest project, Ghost of Vroom, to serve as a companion album for
their potential comeback. Even though he’d be on good terms with bassist Sebastian Steinberg,
the rest of the band wasn’t interested. As Doughty told the publication Commercial Appeal:
“I actually wrote Ghost of Vroom for Soul Coughing, but honestly, I got back a hot
plate of crazy. I guess I was expecting that when I went to them. The possibility [of a reunion] was
pretty quickly eliminated,” he’d say. Today, Doughty has continued Ghost of
Vroom as a standalone band with longtime collaborator Andrew “Scrap” Livingston,
That does it for today’s episode of Rock N’ Roll True Stories, guys; thanks for watching.
Be sure to hit the like button and subscribe, and I’ll see you in the next video. Take care.