From Jane’s Addiction to Oasis, 2024 has been the year of unlikely band reunions. But where the Jane’s tour fizzled out in mid-flight, on account of frontman Perry Farrell’s disturbing onstage attack against guitarist Dave Navarro, and the Gallagher lads have yet to hit the road, one band we never thought we’d see on a reunion tour is currently enjoying the fruits of a successful comeback. We are talking about New York City’s own Soul Coughing, who swore they’d never, ever get back together, no matter how many times they were asked in the near 25 years that they remained apart. It seemed that wounds caused by drug addiction and a songwriting-credit kerfuffle were too deep to heal.
But nostalgia is a hell of a drug, and after a quarter century, the band will be playing a trio of hometown gigs at Brooklyn Steel, on October 4th and 5th, and Terminal 5, on the 6th. While reminiscing about the 30th anniversary of the group’s seminal 1994 debut, Ruby Vroom, earlier this year, frontman/guitarist Mike Doughty tested the waters of reconciliation. He reached out to the other band members — bassist Sebastian Steinberg, drummer Yuval Gabay, and keyboardist Mark degli Antoni — about the possibility of a brief tour, during which Soul Coughing would play favorites off Vroom and their other two classic albums, 1996’s Irresistible Bliss and 1998’s El Oso.
“The end was acrimonious, but I just thought I’d give it a shot,” Doughty said in a press release at the beginning of the tour. “So I just wrote an email to all three guys. It took a little convincing for some of them, but I was really gratified that everyone wanted to take part in that again — to see if we can be a great band again.”
Their sound is like a walk down Ludlow Street in its heyday, the din of dive bars, rock clubs, hip hop shops, and secondhand boutiques all converging together to create this rhythmic heart.
Steinberg famously appeared on Fiona Apple’s 2020 masterpiece Fetch the Bolt Cutters, among other projects in the years the band was apart. In the same press notice, Doughty said, “We all have our part to play in any dysfunctional relationship. But it was an immediate relief. I could just say, ‘Hey, man, we did something wonderful. And I’m sorry, too. That was cool.’”
Gabay, who went on to move to the U.K. and record with such drum ’n’ bass aces as DJ Krust and Roni Size & Reprazent, harbored similar sentiments about Doughty’s outreach to his old bandmates. “I respect the music,” he explained in the press release. “I love what I did there. I love what the guys are doing — we were a good band.” As the tour got underway, Gabay also noted that during the band’s first go-round, “We were not boring. If I go to see a band and they’re playing the songs just like they do on the record, I find that boring.” As someone who was lucky enough to catch them back in the day — a dynamic triple bill at Vassar College, on October 5, 1996, with Skeleton Key and Butter 08 — this writer can attest to Soul Coughing’s vibrancy on the concert stage. And when you take into consideration the growth all four men have experienced as artists and musicians — Doughty enjoyed a successful solo career, while degli Antoni delved into the soundtrack world, scoring such documentaries as Werner Herzog’s Into the Abyss and the Netflix film Get Me Roger Stone — it’s not surprising that returning to this music from three decades ago has endowed the band with a sonic acuity that only comes with age.
The group has been back together and touring the country since September 11, when they kicked off the trek — cheekily billed as the “Soul Coughing Play the Songs of Soul Coughing” tour — at the tiny Belly Up Tavern, in Solana Beach, California. Yet it’s a very New York experience catching a Soul Coughing show. Where Doughty might have labeled their sound as “super incorrect,” very few acts beyond Beastie Boys and the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion defined the ’90s NYC aesthetic like Soul Coughing. Their sound is like a walk down Ludlow Street in its heyday, the din of dive bars, rock clubs, hip hop shops, and secondhand boutiques all converging together to create this rhythmic heart, this vibrancy to the air that is a faint echo of itself in these gentrified times.
“All four musicians seemed surprisingly psyched to be onstage together, and the songs sounded as forward-thinking as they did in the ’90s,” wrote Jeff Miller for Variety the day after the Solana Beach show. “Like their indie-leaning, recently re-resurrected ’90s compatriots Pavement, Soul Coughing never had a huge hit or a bunk album, which meant that over the course of the 90-minute set, the bulk of the audience knew (and was excited for) every single song.”
Indeed, it seems as though Soul Coughing was very much missed, their distinctive blend of alt-rock, hip hop, jazz, and drum ’n’ bass popular enough to mark this as-yet-drama-free reunion tour a resounding success thus far.
The band will cap off the road show with the three shows here in New York this coming weekend. They are returning to a city that is very different from the one in which Soul Coughing emerged, in 1992, from the doorway of the Knitting Factory, the go-to venue for such forward-thinking acts as Naked City and the Lounge Lizards. Yet in many ways, it has remained the same, especially in terms of the collective excitement at hearing songs like “Screenwriter’s Blues,” “Super Bon Bon,” and “Circles” performed on the concert stage once again. What truly makes this reunion special is the way these individual players come together to form this Voltron of a band, which shouldn’t make sense but works like a dream. And as fantastic as Doughty is as a guitarist and vocalist, the power of his prose stems largely from the propulsion of the magnificent rhythm section of Steinberg and Gabay, accented by degli Antoni’s live sampling. In fact, Mark broke out his old sampler, the one he spent his student loan money on in lieu of college classes, for the tour, dazzling crowds with his ability to play the device like a piano.
Doughty is right when he says they’ve never been duplicated. There’s only one Soul Coughing, and the excitement and success the group has enjoyed on this tour so far will hopefully make for a memorable homecoming.
“Music is a place of escapism, for people to go to a magical world,” Gabay said when the tour was launching. “That’s what interests me. I want to bring people together. How can you bring a variety of people to the gig? Music brings people together — both the band and the audience.” ❖
♦ For those shut out of the sold-out Brooklyn Steel shows (a few tickets remain for Terminal 5), Soul Coughing will be streaming their Friday night show on Nugs.net.
Ron Hart is the editor-in-chief of Rock and Roll Globe. As a freelancer, he has contributed to numerous publications, including Billboard, Spin, Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, Vice, and Relix, among others. Find him on X at @mistertribune.