The 'Golden' boy

As love affairs go, Mike Doughty's relationship with the Twin Cities was a whirlwind, young romance that lasted for the long haul.

"We were treated like Creed there for a while," Doughty quipped about his old band, Soul Coughing, which got its first taste of fame in Minnesota, thanks to heavy radio play of such singles as "Super Bon-Bon" and "Circles."

"For like the first couple years in the band, we'd play to 250 people in Chicago, 1,500 people in Minneapolis, and then back to 150 people in Denver. It evened out more with the second and third albums, but there's always been that strong foundation there."

It's still here, eight years after the breakup of his New York-reared "slacker jazz" group. Doughty will play a two-night stand Saturday and Sunday at First Avenue, where he estimates he has performed "at least 4,000 times."

His solo singles such as "Looking at the World From the Bottom of a Well," "Busting Up a Starbucks" and the new one, "27 Jennifers," get strong airplay locally on the Current 89.3 and Cities 97, both staffed by ex-DJs of the late, lamented station that gave Soul Coughing its early boost, Rev-105.

The New Yorker even has found a creative partner in Minneapolis: former Semisonic frontman Dan Wilson, who produced Doughty's two main albums, 2005's "Haughty Melodic" and last month's release "Golden Delicious," both recorded here.

"I think the fact that I am from Minneapolis is one of the reasons I got to work with him," said Wilson, who met Doughty through mutual friends, but admitted he was an unlikely partner. "I think I was brought in to help make 'Haughty Melodic' sound more like a songwriter-with-guitar record, and to provide an unfinished bridge here or there," he said.

"When I first went out there to work with Dan, I loved it," said Doughty, who now shares a manager with Wilson. "I thought he was a really intellectual and empathetic guy. And I loved the way our little recordings sounded. They were just demos, but they were great, and that's how 'Haughty Melodic' came about."

Turning 'Golden'

"Golden Delicious" takes its musical cue from "Haughty," with a lot of acoustic-based and raw-sounding sounds, but it also threw Doughty's new touring band into the equation.

"Mike really wanted to apply what he called the Dude Theory -- that it should sound like dudes in a room playing music," remembered Wilson. "It was a handy way of reminding us to never go overboard on the music or have any kind of pileup of instruments."

His sound has developed over the years, but Doughty, 37, remains as distinctive a songwriting voice as he was with Soul Coughing. He balances poetic and surrealistic songs such as "I Got the Drop on You" with ironic or satirical tunes, including "I Wrote a Song About Your Car" and "27 Jennifers." The latter number is apparently a funny riff on a real-life dating pattern.

His humor can sometimes be misinterpreted, as in the case of his song "Busting Up a Starbucks."

You might think he's anti-Starbucks, but "it's really about the stupidity of railing against some sort of faceless corporate identity as if you're really confronting evil. ... As corporate America goes, Starbucks is actually a pretty decent company, but it somehow got the bad rap."

That message got lost, however: "They won't play me on the Starbucks satellite radio station."

As always, on the new album Doughty tempers his humor with darker imagery and, in the case of the CD opener "Fort Hood," political commentary. The song is named after the Army base that has seen more casualties in Iraq than any other. Inspiration came after Doughty visited wounded soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C.

"Looking the reality of it in the face is kind of indescribable," he said. "It's no longer abstract. You know, here's a guy who lost three limbs and probably won't ever wake up. And there's his family gathered around him."

The son of a lifetime military man, he grew up on bases and saw the Vietnam War's effects on American families.

"There was so much weird behavior on those bases when I was growing up," he recalled. "Guys would just be screaming and scrapping over tiny things. It's because most of them had been in Vietnam. Years later, after talking about post-traumatic stress disorder in therapy, I realized I grew up in a little subculture full of it."

Coughing up bad blood

Doughty rebelled against his military upbringing and headed to New York City. He formed Soul Coughing in 1992 while working as a doorman at the Knitting Factory nightclub. The group quickly got signed to Warner Bros. and issued three albums over six years. However, he said there was bad blood in the group just a few years into it -- mostly over creative control.

"After the first album, getting those three guys to agree to play my ideas was always a problem," he said. "They wouldn't listen to me, or I'd have to go through this weird subterfuge to get my stuff played.

After Soul Coughing's split, the singer/grunter developed a bad drug habit and was more or less left for dead by Warner Bros. and others in the industry. Lesser singers might have fallen by the wayside.

"I wish I could say I had a master plan, but the truth is I really didn't know anything else I could do for a living," Doughty said.

"David Mamet has a great line about acting: 'Those that have something to fall back on will fall back on it.' Having no other prospects, there was nothing else I could do but rent a car, pack up an acoustic guitar and hit the road. Fortunately, people liked it."

The Twin Cities once again played a role in his life. In 2002, he recorded a show at the Woman's Club of Minneapolis and released it himself as a limited-edition CD, "Smofe & Smang."

"It was the first time I had played Minneapolis in a year or two, and I remember it was a pretty magical night," he recalled.

"One of the main reasons I have an audience is because Warner Bros. spent a lot of money on me years ago. I can't imagine what it's like to be a completely new artist without that support nowadays."

Of course, in Minneapolis he has the kind of fans that money can't buy.