Let me please preface this post by saying I’m a huge Soul Coughing fan and have the utmost respect for their artistic contributions in the 1990s. Their catalogue is a distinct force with, in tow, an incredible variety, dynamic and multitude of kinds of musical influences feeding its prowess.
I am today dispatching from somewhat of a Soul Coughing popularity glut, as it were, with their first tour since the 1990s [1] coming up soon. People have been sharing about the tour on Facebook and just a week ago I was in my yellow El Oso shirt and this dude at Brew Werks flagged me down and complimented it. He and his lady shared that they already had tickets for the tour, which, by all accounts, has been selling like Tickle Me Elmo’s since becoming available.
I personally didn’t attempt to get tickets — actually I’ve had a couple of experiences dealing with seeing bands in their live setting and noticing them to have completely no stage presence, carrying themselves as if playing the music were an obligation, like a job, and not still a passion. Perhaps the most glaring instance of this I’ve ever encountered was Pavement’s set at the 2010 Pitchfork Music Festival, where they even looked relatively lifeless on stage and offered no stage banter, cover versions, segues, song annexations, or anything of the sort which typifies legendary performances like Third Eye Blind’s at the 2000 Q101 Jamboree and Pearl Jam’s featured in Live on Two Legs.
Soul Coughing casts an unsettlingly similar figure to Pavement, in terms of approaching this tour — a high-profile, rather occult band that made its mark in the 1990s and then abruptly broke up, to yield no immediate reunions and to give way to solo projects from respective members. This Soul Coughing tour that’s coming up, to me, though obviously having produce a bulbous amount of revenue, is an artistically dead entity, in that I don’t believe the band’s motives cater to anything presently vital. As far as I’ve heard, they haven’t recorded anything new, and in their press releases there doesn’t seem to be an overwhelming amount of verbal flare or personality being exhibited. (Let’s contrast this, of course, with Soundgarden’s reunion of the 2000s, which did bequeath a new LP as well as Chris Cornell’s high-profile statement to the press something along the lines of “The Knights of the Soundgarden round table ride again.”)
Along these lines, I thought it would benefit the entire operation of the band did something sort of grotesque, if you will, like transforming “Soft Serve”; “Soundtrack to Mary”; “Blue-Eyed Devil”; and perhaps some other numbers, into pop-punk versions. The exact style I had in mind was something like Fall out Boy (whom I can’t stand) [2] or that punk cover of “The Boys of Summer” [3] that seems to be pretty popular these days.
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[1] Setlist.fm documents their last performance as a band with accompanying setlist as September 16, 1999 at Pittsburgh’s I.C. Light Ampitheatre.
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[2] I have a funny story about being at this bar one time and having this girl ask me what her music was. I guessed “Fall out Boy,” to which she responded in exclamatory fashion that the singer wasn’t even male, but female. My next guess: “Fall out Girl.”
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[3] And, I mean, if these North Face Punks can ruin “Boys of Summer”; you know they’ve got artistic synergy.