The ’90s, arguably, constituted the last era of rock music. When boy bands and pop stars put an end to rock’s five-decade reign over popular music, the decade of grunge and jangly college music was nearly forgotten. Save for classic rock radio holding the torch for Pearl Jam, Nirvana and Stone Temple Pilots, much of the core of what was indie rock (before indie rock was even a thing) nearly vanished.
Perhaps one of the reasons is because it was such a weird time when the formulaic manifestations of Guitar Hero music was being replaced by anything, as long as it sounded like it was made in someone’s garage. It spawned Seattle grunge and jangly folk rock and indescribable underground noisescapes.
Mixed in the middle of all of that was Soul Coughing, a band that is more easily describable by its parts than its whole. Imagine a beat poet fronting a band made up of an upright jazz bassist, a keyboardist playing samples and a live, acoustic drummer grooving on hip hop beats. They came along at a time when such a thing wasn’t just accepted, it was lauded and even got regular rotation airplay on terrestrial radio.
On Wednesday night, they returned to Houston, original lineup intact, just over 30 years since their first album Ruby Vroom hit the shelves of record stores. “Were any of you here at our show at the Urban Art Bar,” frontman Mike Doughty asked a crowd of Gen Xers, referring to a long defunct alternative rock bar in downtown Houston. “We would go to the Allen Park Inn and they would bring you a chicken sandwich at 3 o’clock in the morning. It was the happiest I’ve ever been.”
Back in those days, Soul Coughing was opening for the likes of Jeff Buckley and trying to impress people with chops honed at New York’s famous Knitting Factory, a venue that was part performance art, part avant garde training ground. On Wednesday, the members, now well into their 50s, seemed as spry and funky as ever.
Blending songs from all three of their records, particularly Irresistible Bliss, which garnered the greatest attention for the band with minor hits like “Super Bon Bon” and “Soundtrack to Mary,” Doughty stood calmly out front mixing heavily syncopated beat poetry with low droning melodies over a bed of funk and jazz infused rhythms and layered samples.
All the band members have continued to work as musicians for the intervening decades and it shows. These are well honed players with chops for days. Despite not working together for many years and only reforming in 2024, they sounded like they had been together forever.
The Gen X-friendly crowd was energetic and the entire downstairs of White Oak Music Hall had the vibes of an oversized live music club in 1995. The fact that Doughty brought up Urban Art Bar only heightened the sense of nostalgia for the fifty-somethings reliving their college years.
In truth, Soul Coughing is about as good a representation of music from that era as anyone. What made that decade of popular music so fascinating was the willingness of bands (and their labels) to experiment and still be able to make a living, even get airplay on the radio and sell records. Hell, a band called Presidents of the United States of America had a radio hit with a song about canned peaches, so why not a beat poet fronting a jazz-funk outfit?
It was certainly a refreshing break from the overly processed and autotuned concerts of today that often rely more on the spectacle than the music. Soul Coughing reminded everyone that rock music was once not only cool, but also wildly popular, no matter how weird it on occasion was.
