Skip to main content
It was weird enough hearing Mike Doughty say the names of his former/now-current Soul Coughing bandmates out loud. In his 2012 memoir The Book of Drugs, he would only refer to them by their roles in the group (The Bass Player, The Drummer, etc.).
But there Doughty was, on stage at Crystal Ballroom on Sept. 17, loudly and joyously shouting out the names of Sebastian Steinberg, Yuval Gabay and Mark degli Antoni without a hint of vitriol or bitterness. A sold-out crowd and money pouring in through merch that included a $150 vinyl of the group’s 1994 debut Ruby Vroom does tend to smooth over any tension lingering from the quartet’s nasty breakup in 2000.
Surely helping the cause of this unexpected reunion was the age of the four men in the group. Like their audience, they are all in their 50s and 60s (and a lot more willing to forgive past slights). That also lent an unmistakable stiffness to their 90-minute set. Without physically being able to tap into the go-for-broke attitude that bled through their previous trips to Portland, they kept tempos manageable and stuck to the script of the recorded versions of their jazz-funk-pop material. Only Gabay dared fuck with the formula with drumming that cut their already angular rhythms even sharper on jungle-infused tunes like “Collapse” and “Rolling.”
As someone whose fandom of Soul Coughing has waned over the past three decades, the whole evening served to further reassess my relationship with the music. Doughty’s Beat-poetics lyrics lost their sting and wit, but I found myself warming to the tunes pulled from 1998′s El Oso that I had long since dismissed. I’m happy they’re securing their bag while they still can, but I never need to see them again.