Soul Coughing Dazzle Die-Hard San Diego Audience on First Night of Surprise Reunion Tour: Concert Review
variety.comJeff Miller The we’re-never-going-to-play-together-again-to-lucrative-reunion trail is well-worn at this point — just ask such famously feuding acts as the Eagles, Guns ‘N Roses, Pixies and, most recently and famously, Oasis: If there’s a windfall, there’s a way.
But maybe the least-likely ‘90s-era reunion of the year isn’t actually that of the Gallagher brothers, which seemed eventually inevitable: it’s Soul Coughing, the proudly weird cult-favorite NYC-based jazz-meets-poetry-meets-alt-rock foursome whose drugs-and-disparagement 1999 breakup was discussed in excruciating detail in singer Mike Doughty’s autobiography, “The Book Of Drugs,” leading fans to believe it would be impossible for the band members to talk again, let alone play music together.
Time, apparently, heals everything: On Tuesday night, for the first time in 25 years, Doughty and bassist Sebastian Steinberg, sampler/keyboardist Mark De Gli Antony and drummer Yuval Gabay performed publicly at the small Belly Up Tavern in Solana Beach, CA near San Diego, the first date on a multi-week cross-country tour — aptly titled the “We Said It Would Never Happen” tour — that is as improbable as it is nostalgically significant for at least a small subsect of the (mostly white, mostly male, virtually entirely middle-aged) population. “This is the greatest night ever!!!” yelled one man multiple times in-between songs, before singing along to Doughty’s stream-of-concious-y lyrics: “Get onto the bus that’s gonna take you back to Beelzebub!” goes one mantra, “Yellow number 5!
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