Soul Coughing Dazzles Die-Hard San Diego Audience on First Night of Surprise Reunion Tour: Concert Review

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, Calif., 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-conscious-y lyrics: “Get onto the bus that’s gonna take you back to Beelzebub!” goes one mantra; “Yellow number 5! Yellow number 5-5” goes another; “You take the ankles and I’ll get the wrists / It comes down to this” yet another.

All four musicians seemed susprisingly psyched to be onstage together, and the songs sounded as forward-thinking as they did in the ’90s. Like their indie-leaning, recently re-resurrected ’90s compatriots Pavement, Soul Coughing never had a huge hit or a bunk album, which meant that over the course of the 90-minute set, the bulk of the audience knew (and was excited for) every single song. It’s arguable that the softer ones actually sounded best: as Doughty plucked the two-chord lick that starts “Sugarfree Jazz” there was an audible murmur in the crowd, and “True Dreams of Wichita” was likewise warmly received, as was “Screenwriter’s Blues,” one of the best songs ever written about Los Angeles.

But the true joy clearly came from shouting along with Doughty, who encouraged the audience to count to 100 with him in “Casiotone Nation” (which sort of makes sense in context) and, in the final encore of “Super Bon Bon,” to yelp the refrain “Too fat, fat / You must cut lean / You better take the elevator to the mezzanine” (not so much). Will this tour win over new fans to Soul Coughing’s sometimes impenetrable music? Probably not, but it doesn’t matter: for those that care, every one of these shows, however many they end up doing before angrily splitting up again, just might be one of the best nights ever.