When I publicized the fact that I'd be taking questions during shows, I thought it'd be implicit that I meant gnarly shitty questions about Soul Coughing, I've pointedly not-answered them before, but, my book (it's a memoir called The Book of Drugs, should you be unaware) is packed with gnarly shitty Soul Coughing stuff.
Of course, the live album The Question Jar Show just came out, and peeps who came to see the Question Jar tours are into asking weird questions. I haven't been answering them during the shows, but I thought I'd post them here.
Can you get a hot tub? You can. You may need money.
Are you referring to Kurt Braunohler and Kristen Schaal's comedy show Hot Tub? It happens at Littlefield, in Brooklyn--in fact, tomorrow, it'll be hosted by Ted Leo, and guests include John Hodgman and Christian Finnegan. Now, Kurt and Kristen, please give me $5.
Perhaps you're referring to the classic Eddie Murphy James Brown's Hot Tub Club sketch. My teenage friends J. Why? and Hillary Brooks had a band called Hot Tub Club in Red Hook (the upstate Red Hook, not the one in Brooklyn), circa the mid-1980s.
Outrageously, they had to rename themselves, Phil Collins called his own touring band The Hot Tub Club. Another instance of The Man keeping The Little Guy down.
Then J. Why? and I started a band called the Difference, and, after that, a band called Da Da Dred.
Hot Breakfast was a nom de guerre that I used for the sort of sliced-and-diced vocal samples, large-beat, electro music that I put out on the Dubious Luxury album, in 2011.
I had the sweet potato pancakes at Rise-N-Dine today. They were delicious.
Boomer.
I don't know if her or his name is publicly known, but, clearly, he or she was the result of one of Yakub's experiments on the isle of Patmos, 6,000 years ago.
I considered getting a business card that said grafted media devil.
Do you remember when ODB went on MTV's TRL, and, when asked by Carson Daly what he was up to, he said, "I'm just looking for more women to put some babies in"? Are there enough acronyms in that sentence?
Over easy.
Very good friends. 12-step stuff. Music. The zen koan, "This being the case, how shall I proceed?"
There are dual processes: in the morning, I mess around with guitar chords, coming up with riffs and progressions, and I mess around with beats on Ableton. Then, as I amble in the world, I write down fragments, words, and phrases; some I think up, some I overhear, some I read. When I have a hefty supply of both purely musical elements, and purely verbal elements, I sit down to mix and match them.
39.
They paid us.
Great show, of course, but we did it because they called us and said they'd give us money.
Yeah. I've done it on a couple of tours.
I have a weird relationship to that tune, because it's partially adapted from a song that I tried to get Soul Coughing to play. Though I wrote it absolutely by myself, my bandmates came after to me to get paid for it. I signed a deal with those guys when I was 23 (and they were in their 30s), in which every song played by the band was split evenly between all four members.
I can't tell you how much I regret signing that deal. There are many songs that began with jamming (though I solely wrote the melody, and lyric)--as well as songs I wrote in their entirety--but the copyrights, and the money, was split with them. My feeling is that I was bullied into signing my rights away.
So it broke my heart that, even though the attempted Soul Coughing version of that tune was a total misfire--and was never released publicly, in any form--they asserted their contractual prerogative.
Like 'em.
(I hasten to add that I'm thoroughly, and quite happily, taken)
A quartet, at Tonic, in...1999? Marc Ribot, Kenny Wolleson, John Medeski, and John Zorn. Improvised noise music, for the most part, and absolutely amazing.
Georgia. Sorry, Ohio.
Yep. As you know, I actually played it at the Eddie's Attic show, an hour after you wrote down this question.
I hadn't played it in--five years? A long time. A writer in Nebraska called the version on Skittish "an embarrassing failure." I was so hurt by that. Later in that same piece, dudeman lifted a big chunk of text from AllMusic, and I wish I'd written a letter to the editor to bust him.
It was in a piece that included an interview with me. I think it's unfair to interview an artist, if you're gonna make such devastating remarks, without telling her or him. The artist can make a choice to participate, or not participate.
Like most artists, I'm extremely insecure. I can really get crushed by a bad review. Despite the fact that the guy is a plagiarist, and plays dirty pool vis-a-vis his interview is--and despite the fact that I know well that loads of people who come to the shows profess to love it--it caused me to abandon the song for years.