Spoken Beats and Urban Static: How "RUBY VROOM" Turned Poetry into Groove.

Soul Coughing was a groundbreaking New York band that fused spoken-word poetry, hip-hop beats, jazz, and alternative rock, led by performance poet Mike Doughty. Their debut album, Ruby Vroom, captured the downtown ’90s scene with sharp, literary lyrics, sample-driven grooves, and a uniquely experimental sound.(Rock)

To really understand the band Soul Coughing and their first album, Ruby Vroom you have to listen to how they mixed hip-hop beats and rock music with jazz and samples. This sounded really new and different when alternative music was just starting out. It is also important to know how poetry and people talking on stage fit, into all of this. Then people were listening to a lot of old music again because compact discs were really popular and the music industry was making a lot of money. Soul Coughing was a part of this and their album Ruby Vroom was something.

Mike Doughty was a guy who performed at the Friday night poetry slam at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in the East Village. The East Village was the place to be, for spoken-word performance. Mike Doughty had a cool upbringing. He was an Army brat. His family moved around the country a lot until they finally settled in West Point. Mike Doughty spent his childhood moving from one place to another. The Nuyorican Poets Cafe was where Mike Doughty liked to perform. After he finished school he went to Manhattan to study at the New School. One of the people in his class was a woman named Ani DiFranco from Buffalo. Ani DiFranco was already popular in Buffalo as a folk-punk singer-songwriter. The New School is where Mike Doughty started to think about music. At first Mike Doughty wanted to be a writer. Soon he wanted to make music too just like Ani DiFranco and other musicians, at the New School. Mike Doughty had his musical ambitions.

The air was filled with poetry. This might have been because people were really getting into the Beats again. The work of writers from the Beat era whether they were still alive or not was very popular in the 1990s. In fact it was probably more popular than it had been since the 1950s and early 1960s when the Beats were at their peak. Poetry and the Beats were everywhere. People were really interested, in the work of these writers the Beats. In 1990 a company called Rhino started something. They made a part of their company called Rhino Word Beat. This part of the company helped people find recordings by Beat writers. They put these recordings on CD. This included a collection of Jack Kerouacs music and things that Allen Ginsberg recorded.

Allen Ginsberg was very busy around this time. He had written a book called "Howl". He was also making music. He worked with a man named Hal Willner on an album called The Lion for Real. This was, in 1989. After that Allen Ginsberg worked with Philip Glass on an opera. The opera was called The Hydrogen Jukebox. Allen Ginsberg and Philip Glass made this opera together.

William S. Burroughs was becoming an important figure for the younger generation. He was working with the magazine SPIN as a contributing editor. The movie Naked Lunch, which was based on his book was released in 1991 by director David Cronenberg. William S. Burroughs stories about the government watching people, addiction and feeling like something is going to happen were really relatable after Reagan and Bush had been in charge, for twelve years. William S. Burroughs ideas were becoming more popular. People were starting to pay attention to what he had to say about these things. Burroughs had a weird voice it sounded like a croak. You could hear this voice a lot in a commercial for Nike and on a music record, with Kurt Cobain.

The peak of words relevance probably happened in 1993. This is when MTV started showing a Spoken Word" edition of MTV Unplugged. After that they took the show to college campuses in 20 cities. The spoken word part of the show was really something. The spoken word edition of MTV Unplugged was a deal back then. The show was often hosted by Maggie Estep. She is a writer and performer. You might know her from the networks bumpers. The show had a performance by Jim Carroll. He is like a deal from the 1970s downtown hip scene. Jim Carroll read his good piece called "Eight Fragments, for Kurt Cobain". This was a way to connect people of different ages through poetry. Maggie Esteps show and Jim Carrolls performance made this connection happen. The show featured Jim Carroll and his poetry, which was very moving.

Doughtys. The way he said things were a lot like the spoken-word people from the early nineties. He did not really sound like the Beat poets even though his writing was funny and had an edge. When people did poetry slams they would often. Chant and they would say some words in a special way like they were making fun of them. They would do this a lot when they were talking about things like buying stuff living in the suburbs or other things that people thought were back when Reagan was president. Doughtys writing was, like this it was funny. It made you think about the things that people thought were so great but were not really that great at all. The guys background as a performance poet made him really different from someone like Beck, who also had a year in 1994. Beck had a song called "Beercan" which was like rap music. On the hand Doughty’s song "Casiotone Nation" was a completely different thing. Doughtys music was not, like Becks music all.

The band started inside the walls of the Knitting Factory. Doughty worked at the Knitting Factory as a doorman after he finished at the New School. He was writing songs on his guitar. Reading at open mics. He was also playing solo around town.. Doughty really wanted to form a band. So he looked for people he had met at the Knitting Factory where he worked. He wanted to find the right people to be in the band, with him the band that would become his focus the band that he really wanted to make music with the band. He went up to the drummer Yuval Gabay. Yuval Gabay really caught his attention with the way he played the drums. The force and precision of Yuval Gabays playing were amazing. It was, like Yuval Gabay was taking the beats from hip-hop songs and playing them on a drum kit. Gabay was perfect because Doughty thought that his group would sound like A Tribe Called Quest when they play live like their album The Low End Theory. He really liked how The Low End Theory had a mix of elastic upright bass. A famous jazz musician named Ron Carter played the upright bass on the song "Verses From the Abstract". Some other tracks on The Low End Theory had samples of the bass. Doughty also liked the programmed drums, on The Low End Theory. He wanted his group to sound like A Tribe Called Quest and The Low End Theory.

Sebastian Steinberg, the bassist was the next person to join the group. Doughty had seen Sebastian Steinberg perform. Gabay thought Sebastian Steinberg was really good. The last person they needed was Mark De Gli Antoni. Mark De Gli Antoni played the keyboards. Did things with sounds on the AKAI S1000 sampler. This was a new machine, at the time.

Within a days the four of them got together to try out some songs that Doughty had written. Doughty had basically figured out what the songs would sound like. Now they just had to play them. The band had a vibe going on. The leader was not very good at playing the guitar but the other musicians were really talented and had been playing for a long time. They were also a lot older, than the leader. With these differences the band members really enjoyed playing music together. They liked the sound they made so they started looking for places to play.

By 1993 big music companies were signing music groups that were really different. They would not have even thought about signing these music groups five years. The people in charge of these music companies did not understand the music that young people were listening to. They knew that people were buying it. So they hired people to find the best music groups. One of these people was Randy Kaye. Randy Kaye had started an important magazine about the punk music scene in Los Angeles when he was a teenager in the late 1970s. He was a person to find new music groups, like the punk music groups. The music companies wanted to sign these music groups the punk music groups because they were popular. After he was denied entry into a sold-out Boss Hogg show at CBGB’s, he went next door to CB’s Gallery, saw Soul Coughing onstage, loved it, and signed them to the Warner Brothers imprint Slash.

Mason Morgan