I’m Livin’ On Baby Food
It’s a very strange experience, seeing a band at the height of their career and then at a reunion show two decades and change later.
On-stage, early Soul Coughing had Doughty matching the sheer physical and musical vibrancy of Steinberg, Antoni, and Gabay. Today, he’s mostly stationary at the microphone (with or without guitar) or pacing the stage back and forth, and songs that suddenly punch up don’t punch up quite as much. I’m not calling this out as a flaw. It’s just that in some ways a band in its heyday and that same band reuniting later are different bands, but then fans from the band’s heyday aren’t entirely the same people, either, when they show up those same two decades later.
(Although there were plenty of what at this point at 54 I’d have to call “kids” at the show, including the guy behind me who over the course of the two hours between doors and show steadily moved himself forward an inch or to at a time until he’d managed to squeeze between people at the front.)
During the fifth show of their sudden and unexpected reunion tour for the thirtieth anniversary of their debut album Ruby Vroom, here in Portland at a packed Crystal Ballroom, Soul Coughing did play “True Dreams of Wichita” as part of their 21-song set, although not specifically for Slowdog.
Nonetheless, hearing the song live for the first time in almost exactly twenty-five years was transcendent, and I spent much of it with my eyes closed, head tipped downward or, really, inward into my own self, except for raising my eyes to the ceiling to sing, “And you can stand / On the arms / Of the Williamsburg Bridge / Crying / Hey man, well this is Babylon”. On its own, this made the autistic sensory and anxiety risk of standing second row from the stage, not to mention the various last-minute indecisions before I left the house, worth the effort and the inevitable costs.
Standing second row from the stage was made substantially possible by having finally gotten my Loop Experience earplugs to do what they’re meant to do, rather than simply mimicking what my everyday Loop Quiet earplugs do. The answer, as it turned out, was to use the largest of the four possible eartips. Sure enough: everything was attenuated and yet perfectly, beautifully clear. I’d escaped having to bear the full brunt of the stacks or else muffle all the life out the show.
Also of note is that keeping my phone in my pocket and making use of my new Camp Snap camera was the right choice. While true, as you can see here, that the pictures are “worse” than what my phone would have captured, I was saved from constantly retaking photos that weren’t quite right, and therefore experiencing the show through through the distancing intermediation of both a screen and my own frustration.
There’s been some chatter on r/SoulCoughing about how people wish there were non-album tracks among the various setlist mixes the band is using, so it’s with some surprise that my second-favorite moment in the entire show was getting to scream, for the first time since that homecoming show at Tramps in 1995, “AMY FISHER!” in unison with anyone in the crowd who realized that Doughty had begun to intone “Long Island Teen / Shot the wife of her alleged former lover”, as the band slyly slipped a little of “I’m Livin’ on Baby Food” into the midst of “Down to This”.
We’re all twenty-five years older, band and crowd alike. When I saw Soul Coughing at that 1995 homecoming show, they were brasher, and Doughty for sure was louder and more frenetic. Me, I was self-medicating the sensory and anxiety facets of unknowingly being autistic with alcohol and cigarettes, which is what allowed me to be at a club for live music at all in the first place. We both found ways to do this again, however it worked for us now.
(Alas, I didn’t mean to leave out the rest of the band when I first hit “publish” on this post. It’s the post-exertion brain fog. Antoni mostly was obscured behind Doughty or the row of heads in front of me, so it was hard for my to get a read. Steinberg was in his own little world, not in any way disconnected from the rest of the band but being in the zone seemed to be his vibe. Gabay was on fire and, arguably, was enjoying himself more than anyone else in the room.)
It’s anyone’s guess whether we’ll ever learn precisely how and why this reunion happened, and what the members the band feel they’re getting out of it as the tour continues into October for a wrap-up in New York City. Another homecoming show, of a sort. What the crowd got out of it is something each and everyone there knows only for themselves.
Me, what I got out of it was that it happened at all, as different an experience as it was from the ones twenty-five years ago. What I got out of it was holding my head down, eyes closed, singing lines from my brief sojourn in Williamsburg, living momentarily in some ethereal space. And, yes, what I got out of it was screaming the name of the Long Island Lolita with however many others in the crowd recognized that’s what we were supposed to do.
That’s enough.
