In the beginning was the word—first, it was spoken, and then, for some reason, it was slammed. It all started in 1986, when a club in Chicago called The Green Mill began hosting events called “poetry slams.” Over the next 10 years, the term would be used in a wide variety of contexts, describing improv-Olympics-like performances held in bars and coffee shops where writer-performers competed while also serving as a catch-all for spoken-word performances of any kind. In the slice of early-’90s youth culture the media was calling “Generation X,” poetry, oddly, mattered quite a lot.
To fully grasp the band Soul Coughing and their debut album, Ruby Vroom, whose mix of hip-hop beats, samples, jazz, and rock sounded wildly fresh in the early days of “alternative music,” it helps to understand how poetry and spoken-word performance fit in. You also need to get a handle on just how much newly unearthed sound from the past was back in circulation, now that the compact disc had exploded and the record industry was printing money.
Frontman Mike Doughty was a regular performer at the Friday night poetry slam at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in the East Village, the city’s most prominent hub for spoken-word performance. He’d been raised as an Army brat, moving around the country until his family settled in West Point. After high school, he came down the river to study at Manhattan’s New School, where one of his classmates, a woman from Buffalo named Ani DiFranco, was already making waves as a folk-punk singer-songwriter in her hometown. While Doughty was a writer first, he’d soon develop musical ambitions of his own.
Poetry was in the air, which may have had something to do with a resurgence of interest in the Beats. Work from writers of that era, both living and dead, was quite prominent in the early ’90s, arguably more so than at any point since their late-’50s and early-’60s heyday. In 1990, the reissue label Rhino started a new imprint called Rhino Word Beat, which put long-lost and in many cases forgotten recordings by Beat writers in circulation on CD, including a box set of Jack Kerouac’s albums and recordings by Allen Ginsberg. It was a busy time for the author of “Howl,” including on record. After partnering with Hal Willner and a band of downtown luminaries on the 1989 album The Lion for Real, he worked with Philip Glass on the opera The Hydrogen Jukebox.
William S. Burroughs, meanwhile, was in the process of becoming a kind of Gen X mascot/saint. He was listed on the masthead of SPIN as a contributing editor, the David Cronenberg film of his novel Naked Lunch came out in 1991, and his stories about government control, the nature of addiction, and encroaching paranoia seemed newly relevant after 12 years of Reagan and Bush. On top of that, Burroughs’ croak of a voice was a frequent presence, including in a Nike ad and on an EP with Kurt Cobain.
The peak of spoken-word’s relevance may have come in 1993, when MTV began airing a “Spoken Word” edition of MTV Unplugged, and then took the show on a 20-city tour of college campuses. The show, often hosted by writer-performer Maggie Estep, a familiar presence on the network’s interstitial bumpers, eventually featured a performance by Jim Carroll, ambassador of ’70s downtown hip, reading his affecting piece “Eight Fragments for Kurt Cobain” and thus solidifying a cross-generational connection through poetry.
Doughty’s voice, phrasing, and articulation owed a great deal to the intonation of early ’90s spoken-word, even though the Beat influence on his funny and caustic writing was minimal. In the world of the poetry slam, sneering and chanting while putting ironic air-quote-like emphasis around certain phrases was standard procedure—especially when the subject was consumerism, the suburbs, or other markers of the straight life that had been idealized during the Reagan era. His performance poet background differentiated him from someone like, say, Beck, who also had his breakout year in 1994. “Beercan” was rap, kind of; Doughty’s song “Casiotone Nation” was something else.
The band started inside the walls of the Knitting Factory. Doughty, who began working at the club as a doorman after his time at the New School, had been writing songs on guitar, reading at open mics, and playing solo around town, but he wanted to form a band. Naturally, he sought out people he’d encountered at his job. He approached drummer Yuval Gabay, who caught his ear with the force and mathematical precision of his playing, which seemed to translate the sampled beats of hip-hop to a live kit. Gabay was perfect because Doughty imagined that his group would sound something like a live version of A Tribe Called Quest’s The Low End Theory, particularly its combination of deep and elastic upright bass—jazz legend Ron Carter played on “Verses From the Abstract,” other tracks featured samples of the instrument—and hard-as-fuck programmed drums.
Upright bassist Sebastian Steinberg, whom Doughty had seen perform and Gabay had spoken highly of, was the next recruit, and the final piece of the puzzle was Mark De Gli Antoni, who played keyboards and manipulated sounds live on the relatively new AKAI S1000 sampler. Within days, the quartet met to run through songs Doughty had sketched out. It was an uneasy dynamic—the leader’s guitar skills were rudimentary, while the rest of the band had both training and experience, as well as being roughly a decade older. But everyone involved loved the noise they made together, and they began lining up gigs.
By 1993, major labels were signing oddball acts they wouldn’t have even considered five years earlier. Those at the highest reaches of these companies had no clue about the music young people were making, but they knew people were buying it, so they enlisted younger and hipper A&R reps to reel in the most promising acts. Randy Kaye, who had co-founded an important fanzine covering L.A. punk as a teenager in the late ’70s, was one such rep. After he was denied entry into a sold-out Boss Hogg show at CBGB’s, he went next door to CB’s Gallery, saw Soul Coughing onstage, loved it, and signed them to the Warner Brothers imprint Slash.
By this point, Soul Coughing had refined their arrangements onstage to such an extent that recording was mostly a matter of getting down what was already there. But the album’s producer, Tchad Blake, made a considerable contribution to Ruby Vroom’s final sound. He’d been working in partnership with producer Mitchell Froom, and the team had a breakthrough a year earlier with the Los Lobos album Kiko. During the recording of that record, Blake fell in love with a processor called the SansAmp, particularly the way it added a heavenly crunch to drums, and he became a specialist at capturing a band’s live dynamics while processing the output for maximum impact. “He’s the closest I’ve ever seen an engineer come to really being an artist,” Doughty wrote in his memoir The Book of Drugs. “He really didn’t give a fuck about how the music sounded anywhere other than the beat-up ’60s-vintage pickup truck between home and the studio. It always sounded amazing in there.”
The opener “Is Chicago, Is Not Chicago” gathered everything Soul Coughing did well in one place, and you could make a case for it as the best song in the band’s discography. When you talk about first lines of the first song on a band’s first album, “A man drives a plane into the Chrysler Building” holds up. And if you enjoy playing around with words, you can’t help but appreciate Doughty’s decision to go with “drives” instead of the more obvious “flies”; his choice of verb pushes the aircraft into the skyscraper’s concrete with just a little more force. The story behind the song’s title—while tripping on LSD in the titular city, Doughty decided that everything that lay outside of his body was in fact “Chicago,” while everything inside of it was not—is the kind of drug-addled observation you think you’re going to turn into some kind of creative output but never actually do; he did. Amid all this, Steinberg walks the bass on the verses like a nervous commuter rushing for the train, parking himself in the middle of the chorus with a hypnotic riff, De Gli Antoni sprinkles in dissonant moans and keyboard plunks, and Gabay’s snare thwacks away like a machine stamper popping out hubcaps. Perfection.
Doughty’s guitar skills may have been crude, but his percussive parts were just right for what the band was doing, coming across like samples pulled off of old records. And his simple scratched riffs, such as the four-note twangy cluster that snakes through “Sugar Free Jazz,” are often the first thing that comes to mind when retrieving individual songs from memory. The latter is also a good showcase for how Doughty chose his words for how they strike the ear—it doesn’t matter so much what “Normalize the signal when you’re banging on freon/Paleolithic eon/Put the fake goatee on” means, but it definitely sounds cool. And “Sugar Free Jazz” demonstrates the brilliance and necessity of De Gli Antoni’s sample choices, the most notable of which is a repeated cry of a seagull echoing into the distance. The bird calls at first seem random, but on repeated listens, they form the emotional heart of the song, completing the far-off sense of loneliness that Doughty’s words introduce.
De Gli Antoni essentially served as Soul Coughing’s DJ on Ruby Vroom, loading files instead of putting on records, and his sense of texture and meme-like inter-song commentary now sound prescient. In the band’s early days, he and Doughty would meet to mine their CD collections and swap ideas about samples for songs. According to Doughty’s book, two of the more recognizable samples on the record, of a WWII-era song by the Andrews Sisters and Howlin’ Wolf’s “Smokestack Lightning,” were taken from the singer’s CD collection.
The use of these fragments from an era long passed by a musically progressive rock band equipped with the latest technology speaks to a broader idea from the early ’90s—the sheer abundance of music circulating across different media meant that lines between “old” and “new” were being drawn differently. The reissue industry was in overdrive, which meant that long-forgotten artifacts like the space-age exotica of Esquivel and swinging sounds of Louis Prima and Dean Martin were finding new audiences, while the massive influx of CDs meant that a massive amount of offloaded vinyl was making its way to new owners ready to make creative uses of it.
We hear Doughty’s slam-poet phrasing most clearly on “Casiotone Nation,” which seems like a spoken-word piece that later found its musical backing. The song is a laundry list of ironic juxtapositions, creating new societies out of consumer detritus—“The People’s Republic of lemony fresh!” “The Five Percent nation of Milton Bradley!” If you were around Doughty’s age and grew up in front of a television, you probably had the name of the board-game company seared into your brain before you knew how to talk. Hearing it voiced in song felt like someone hitting play on the warbly old tape stashed in the back of your mind—the four syllables, the singsong phrasing, all of which is reinforced by De Gli Antoni, including the clouds of vibraphone that animators used to signal a character drifting off to dreamland. “Your words burn the air like the names of candy bars,” from “Bus to Beelzebub,” was another line about TV-stained memory, and here the prominent motif is a loop of Carl Stalling’s shouting brass from a Looney Tunes cartoon.
When Doughty’s sneering patter reaches a certain pitch, you might imagine his voice coming from a crazed R. Crumb character whose face is scrunched in horror while neck veins are popping, sweat beads firing in all directions. But some songs are delivered sweetly, with a certain tenderness. For the first two-thirds of “True Dreams of Wichita,” Doughty sings it straight, shaping vowels into pretty melodies on earnest images of America, stretching from the arms of the Williamsburg Bridge to the inside of a car where “I’ve seen your hand turn saintly on the radio dial/I’ve seen the airwaves pull your eyes towards heaven.” On the throbbing “Screenwriter’s Blues,” made dense with a screeching orchestral sample, Doughty’s nightmare vision of Los Angeles in a singsong tone that mixes slam cadence with the film-noir deadpan of radio performer Joe Frank.
Blake, who also mixed Ruby Vroom, made the band sound positively huge, in a way that translated on every kind of playback device, from an off-brand Coby drug-store boombox to a club system with fridge-sized subwoofers. It’s the kind of record you fall in love with initially because of how the drums and bass take up space. That’s where the ear goes first, and the gun-like pop of the snare in particular is, to my ear, the platonic ideal of what the instrument should sound like. The clanging groove reaches its peak on “Blueeyed Devil,” with Gabay moving between two snares and a hi-hat that could cut diamonds.
With the music going in so many directions—real instruments that seem like samples, samples that seem like real instruments, word-drunk poetry, near-rap, cavernous breaks—Steinberg was the glue that held everything together. While his instrument would enjoy a certain amount of popularity later in the decade with the swing revival, he didn’t get cute with it, preferring curt, pulsing lines at the bottom end of the instrument’s range, notes that sometimes seem to bloom from the rhythm like another drum (reggae was a primary inspiration).
It’s a physical sound to match the muscle of Gabay, and yet, with the music’s ambiguous harmonic structure—there aren’t always chord changes, or verses or choruses, for that matter—he had the second job of shaping how an individual track progresses, and his basslines can take on a narrative quality. All those elements come together on “City of Motors,” a moody slice of noir that plays like a hardboiled Jim Thompson story. The bass is like a Greek chorus as Doughty spins a yarn about a criminal on the run who meets his end while smoking at a gasoline pump, after he “flips an ash like a wild, loose comma.” Given its sonic variety and sense of forward motion, the album as a whole unfolds like a movie. Which means the closing “Janine,” a sort of love song in which Al Roker appears during a dream sequence involving a 1-900 sex line, is a kind of blooper reel that plays over the closing credits.
If you heard Ruby Vroom playing at a friend’s place, you had to ask, “Wow, what’s this?” It took an entire cross-section of culture and rolled it up into something entertaining and strange. Reviews were generally good—Robert Christgau, writing in the Village Voice, loved it, which, for a New York band, had to have been a pretty big deal, as did Michael Azerrad in his review for Rolling Stone, saying that it rose above mere eclecticism to land on something profoundly original. Chris Norris in SPIN was less enthusiastic, praising the music while declaring Doughty’s voice an irritating non-starter.
Soul Coughing toured heavily and then made a second album, 1996’s Irresistible Bliss, that was nearly as good as its predecessor, even if the shock of the new was gone. After that came 1998’s comparatively flat El Oso, filled with conventionally song-based material that was better realized later in Doughty’s solo career. Then the musicians went their separate ways until reuniting last year for the anniversary of Ruby Vroom. They toured and even played on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, which served as a capstone on their brief yet memorable moment.
The best music is often said to be “timeless,” but sometimes records like this one, which are very much of their time, are even more fascinating. While Soul Coughing’s unique mix of elements, distinctive as it was, may have turned out to be a cul-de-sac, sometimes a strong musical statement can echo down through the decades in unexpected ways. I can’t be the only person who heard Fiona Apple’s 2020 masterpiece Fetch the Bolt Cutters and wondered, “Why does this remind me of Soul Coughing?” before learning that Sebastian had played on the record and, along with the rest of Apple’s band, served as a co-producer. The resemblance was indirect and yet to me undeniable, not just in the timbre of his instrument but also the restless experimentation of the sound, not to mention a certain hard-to-define “90s-ness” to the aesthetic.
But influence ultimately doesn’t matter—they made this, and for those who loved it, that was enough. Ruby Vroom came out the same September day as R.E.M.’s Monster, the Dave Matthews Band’s Under the Table and Dreaming, and Brandy’s self-titled debut. By the time the decade ended, all of these CDs would be choking the used bins of the many record stores that were in the process of going out of business. A new era of media was on its way, and a new generation’s dreams and memories were about to be transformed into art.
