By Boon Sheridan

Dateline: Cambridge, Massachusetts – 1996.

“I swear to God I thought the guy was Jamaican,” was all my friend could muster when Mike Doughty took the stage. Someone had slipped him a promotional sampler at a party, and he’d fallen in love with a song called “Down To This” by Soul Coughing. The strange samples, looping bass lines and the barking chorus led him to believe he’d found some new avant-garde reggae band. He played the song for us so much that when the band rolled into town we had no choice but to see them. Maybe then he’d stop playing the damn song. So when Mike Doughty stepped to the mic and bellowed “Hellloo Boston and thanks for having us!” my friend looked like Arthur Carlson on WKRP in Cincinnati after the infamous "Turkey Drop." In the end, it turns out more than a few people were confused by Doughty's guttural delivery and the nature of the song. Popular rumor had it the Andrews Sisters originally denied the rights to a sample of their song because the song seemed rough and misogynistic.

After that I’m afraid we never let our friend live it down. We did everything we could to get a hold of as many Soul Coughing promotional posters and band photos as we could expressly to draw fake dreadlocks and clouds of ganja smoke around Mike Doughty’s head. We managed to make it fun for a few weeks and moved on to some other reason to mess with our friend (as good friends should always be doing) when he got some sweet revenge. One particularly quiet and hung over Sunday morning, he charged into the room brandishing a CD and smug look:

“See, I may not have been right, but I was RIGHT ON.”

The three of us in the room looked at him, then one another, then at the CD, then back to one another and back to the TV we’d been staring at with glazed eyes. Storming to the TV he turned it off with a flourish and waved the CD under my nose like smelling salts to a man passed out on the street. If my eyes had been able to focus on the disc I might have just read it off, but I was forced to engage in his little reindeer games:

“What the hell are you talking about and why are you doing it so loudly?” I said, praying the answer would be swift and he would stop making such a self-righteous racket.

“I have here a brand new EP I want you all to hear.”

This set the room up to snickering (remember being too hung over to laugh?) and I fear we played right into his hands.

“You laughed when I thought he was Jamaican but I got it right; he has the SOUL of a Jamaican!”

I hated to admit it but he’d now stirred our interest enough, and it was clear he wasn’t leaving until we listened to both him and the CD he kept waving in front of us. (Have you ever seen a horror movie where one guy with a crucifix is surrounded by a few vampires and he keeps swiveling to try to repel them all?)

Having gathered our attention, he snapped the CD out of the case, jammed it in and stabbed a few buttons. Within seconds the room was filled with reverb-soaked jungle beats and a warbling voice in the background chanting a familiar tune.

“OK, we know it’s Soul Coughing because that’s the only band you’ve miscalculated the nationality of a lead singer of lately,” one of my less-comatose companions muttered from a slouched position on the couch, “but what is it?”

My friend beamed as he stood and proclaimed, “It’s a deep house-reggae remix of ‘Sugar Free Jazz’ and it proves my point that he might have not looked Jamaican but that dude from Soul Coughing has the soul of a man from the West Indies.”

In retrospect, we should have let it go at that. We should have let him walk out on a high note and returned to an afternoon of terrible TV and muttered promises to lay off the cheap whiskey next weekend, but hindsight is sober and we weren't. Our barrage of questioning began as befitting our various stages of waking:

From my position on the sofa: "You're telling us that because a band releases a whacked-out jungle remix of a song it suddenly makes up for the fact you thought some pasty white guy from New York was an ace toaster from Kingston? You were all ready to invite this guy back to our place, get drunk, high and talk of life on the island and instead had to sit at the bar and sulk? I thought you didn't even LIKE these guys anymore!"

From the La-Z-Boy: "I'm ready to admit we went overboard ragging on you. The fake dreads and all the Bob Marley posters were probably a bit over the top too but we didn't know your folks were coming to visit!"

Finally from the other side of the sofa: "Besides, you didn't even know what Red Stripe was until you had to ask the guy at the liquor store!"

Our points were raised and brushed aside, his moment of glory was at hand and he would not be denied: “You guys just can’t admit it – I saw into that dude’s soul and was right. End of story.” With that he grabbed the CD and walked out.

Really, after an introduction like that, how could I NOT love Mike Doughty?