(ALBANY, N.Y.) – On the heels of the release of The Question Jar Show, a two-disc live album culled from recordings of his 2009 tour of the same name, Mike Doughty brings his Book of Drugs tour, featuring new songs and readings from his new memoir, The Book of Drugs (Da Capo Press, due out Wednesday, February 1, 2012), which recounts his life, career, addiction, and the doomed-from-the-start, eight-year roller coaster ride of his former band, Soul Coughing, to The Linda, WAMC’s Performing Arts Studio, on Saturday, February 25, 2012, at 8 p.m. The appearance will include a question-and-answer session.
“If heroin still made me feel like I did the first time, and kept making me that way forever — kept working – I might’ve quite happily accepted a desolate, marginal life and death,” writes Doughty in the introduction to The Book of Drugs, his a funny, haunted tale in which no one – bandmates, producers, fans, A&R reps, fellow musicians such as Jeff Buckley and Redman, and least of all Doughty himself – is spared.
The book is arranged without chapters; it’s a stream-of-consciousness series of vignettes spanning his army-brat childhood, the music world in the 1990s, when Soul Coughing rose to fame, and his current decade-plus clean.
Publisher’s Weekly said that The Book of Drugs is “hardly your typical rock star memoir. Doughty is brutally honest about life as an addict… Bringing the writing skill that he has crafted to his underground poetry, magazine articles, and songs, Doughty conveys his message with both despair and humor.” And author Rick Moody said, “Doughty’s life, as chronicled in these pages, is not so much a revelation for its narrative arc (kid makes the big time, starts in with the dope, the band breaks up, kid is redeemed), as it is for the astonishingly vital, energized, and natural voice contained in its pages, one which never once had a ghost writer presiding over it, likewise its acerbic and sometimes lacerating honesty.”
Mike Doughty, who attended Simon’s Rock College in Great Barrington, Mass., released his fifth solo studio album, Yes and Also Yes, on his own Snack Bar label via Megaforce/RED in August 2011. The first single, “Na Na Nothing,” reached #7 on the AAA indicator chart and has spent three months on the CMJ college radio chart. That particular song was co-written with Nikki Sixx, Dan Wilson and Matt Gerrard. The follow up single, the Christmas-themed Rosanne Cash duet “Holiday (What Do You Want?),” was #1 most added at AAA radio in its first week at radio in late November. This year, Doughty also released the debut album from his electronica side project, Dubious Luxury, via iTunes.
Doughty’s next music release will be The Question Jar Show, a two-disc live album culled from recordings of his 2009 tour of the same name. On the album, Doughty and sideman Andrew “Scrap” Livingston play songs and answer questions that audience members had written and placed in a jar on the stage before the start of each show. The Question Jar Show is out Tuesday, January 31, 2012, via Snack Bar/Megaforce/RED.