Mike Doughty's 'Book of Drugs': 'Funny Stories' About Substance Abuse, Not a PSA

Mike Doughty isn't going to kid you: "I can't renounce drugs. I love drugs," he writes early in his new memoir, 'The Book of Drugs.' It's a frank chronicle of the early part of Doughty's career, from working as a doorman at the Knitting Factory in the early '90s to assembling, almost by accident, the musicians who became Soul Coughing to his deep and abiding dislike of the music they made together, all filtered through the lens of drugs. And a fair bit of sex. But mostly drugs, sometimes at the expense of sex.

Doughty's been clean now for years, and writing the memoir was more of an effort to collect "funny stories" than attempting to come to terms with his past -- which is not to say there's no introspection in 'The Book of Drugs.'

"I really tried to talk about all the bad s--- that I did or that I was involved with, just lapses of character and terrible moments that I totally engendered," Doughty tells Spinner. "So much of it is really salacious that I felt like, I've got to be hard on myself or I don't deserve to be writing this thing."

Doughty went on to tell us about sifting through his own (sometimes hazy) memories and how he feels, all these years later, about Soul Coughing.

Do you think the book glorifies drug use for all the impressionable children out there listening to singer-songwriters?

I don't know. From my own viewpoint, I didn't need to glorify it. They were glorious enough by themselves. I find the public-service stuff to talk people out of doing drugs very sad. People who want drugs will find drugs. There was an ad campaign in the subway, right before New Year's, there was a guy in a stretcher with a neck brace on and his face bloody, and it said, "This is not what he wanted to do three drinks ago." But if you drink like that, you are going to drink like that. It's very unlikely that the voice is going to intervene and go, 'Well, let's be nice to ourselves.' It's a compulsion.

You're extremely forthcoming in the book. Was anything too personal to include?

There were a couple things that got cut. Yeah. [Laughs.] But there was nothing really personal. It was scary writing about my family, about my parents and my brother. That took a deep breath. But somehow I managed to be in denial that everyone else in the book would read it and know themselves.

Now that word is beginning to filter in about people who have feelings about their portrayal, I'm a bit more nervous. But I guess in order to just do it, I had to pretend like it wasn't going to get read, that the only people who were going to read it were people who were not in the book, which is ludicrous.

You do offer a disclaimer about these stories being only your version of events.

I've got to tell you that one of the people in the book, who I'm still really close to, I sat down with and said, "Look, there's a lot of bad s--- in the book that I don't know if you'll be happy to have retold." And of course, she said, "Well, you're talking about this story and this story and this story." And I said, 'Well, I don't remember those." [Laughs.] "What I put in was this story and this story and this story." And she said, "I don't remember those." [Laughs] It's beyond different angles on something that happened, people's memories are just utterly other from each other.

You generally don't use other people's names in the book at all. Why not?

Some people are going to Google it, but most people aren't. They're just going to read it as a character in a book, and I didn't want to put mud on anybody's name. There's some people that will look it up, but I think by and large, people are more interested in the story than they are the nitty-gritty of who it was.