Mike Doughty live!

Mike Doughty
Schubas, Chicago
Thursday, November 8th, 2007

If you expect to captivate a capacity crowd for more than two-and-a-half hours with nothing but a friend and an acoustic guitar, you’d better have either a whole lotta talent or a whole lotta personality. Fortunately for Mike Doughty, he has a whole lotta both.

Enjoying his solo career after spending the ’90s as lead vocalist for Soul Coughing, Doughty didn’t bother with a band for this tour. Instead he armed himself with just his acoustic guitar, songbook, sense of humor, and his good friend Andrew “Scrap” Livingston on the cello.

The house (which supposedly sold out in nine minutes) of mostly 20- and 30-somethings gave Doughty their full attention and listened quietly to each song. This was either because he is just that mesmerizing, or because he had no problem stopping mid-song to yell at people in the back for talking, and threatening to replace them with one of the “59,000 other fans who left me Myspace messages asking to get into this show.” To his credit, the crowd obliged.

It was almost easy to forget this guy once opened for Dave Matthews Band as part of Soul Coughing in huge arenas like Madison Square Garden, because of the incredible level of intimacy he established with his audience. He was in constant conversation with them throughout the show, and other than the four or five songs he had pre-planned (including opener “Busting Up a Starbucks” and closers “27 Jennifers” and “Janine”), he let the audience shout requests to determine the rest of the set list. As a result, he ended up playing through the best of his solo stuff, highlights from the Soul Coughing years, and many somewhat obscure covers. He did decide to play his most famous cover, and most fun for the crowd to sing along with, “The Gambler.”

Doughty named this jaunt “The Question Jar Tour,” which basically meant the audience could write down any question, put it in the jar, and he’d answer it during the show. The creative crowd asked Doughty all sorts of questions, from the personal (“How much money did you make last year?”), banal (“What was the best part of touring with Dave Matthews?”), random (“Will Illinois beat Ohio State?”), and absurd (“How many Jennifers does it take to change a light bulb?”). And he answered all of them — always with honesty, and usually with plenty of humor and sarcasm. For example, when asked how much money he made last year, he first made everyone in the front row shout out their salaries, then finally shared his, then seemed embarrassed as he asked everyone to “please don’t blog about this tomorrow.”

It was a brilliant move on Doughty’s part to include Scrap on cello/guitar because he is the quintessentially quiet, lovable geek. Scrap took over question-reading duties after a while, and finally Doughty even had him answering half of them. Together their talent was impressive, as they blended together perfectly and on the spot. Amid all the humor and conversation, Doughty’s raspy, gutsy bellow was the perfect vehicle for his simple, honest songs. One might consider him a Seinfeld of songwriting, with his penchant for turning everything from white Lexuses to Starbucks to girls named Jennifer into memorable songs. A new song, simply titled “I Wrote a Song About Your Car,” fit right in.

Doughty may never see the commercial success of other singer-songwriters, but he seemed to enjoy himself regardless. It sounds like he makes a decent salary, anyway.

— Carter Moss

Category: Live Reviews, Weekly