Have you heard the tale of Mike Doughty and The Question Jar?? Simply told, Mike blows into your town with his sidekick sideman Scrap Livingston. He sets a jar up at your favorite intimate venue (here it was Mississippi Studios - picture your living room), you show up and write all the questions you’ve been meaning to ask Mike but just couldn’t bring yourself to — you write these down and put them in the jar. They come out onto the stage and spend an evening playing songs: requests, stuff off the forthcoming LP Golden Delicious, covers - you name it! And in between songs, they will pull out the questions. Lots and lots of questions. Some will be read by Scrap; most will be answered by Doughty. But they WILL be answered.

Here in PDX (Mike once spent a whole show calling it PUDDOX) we got two shows: the early one was at 7pm and the late one was at 10pm.

I didn’t keep a setlist for the early show, but I will give you a list of what was played, grouped by album and era:

SOUL COUGHING stuff:
Janine (of course), Soft Serve, True Dreams Of Wichita, Idiot Kings (!!), Circles

SKITTISH:
The Only Answer, Rising Sign

ROCKITY ROLL EP:
Ossining (I spent much of the evening yelling out for “40 Grand In The Hole”, to no avail)

COVERS:
Looks, Train To Chicago, Purple Rain (!), and Kenny Rogers’ The Gambler

HAUGHTY MELODIC:
Bottom Of A Well, Tremendous Brunettes, White Lexus, Busting Up A Starbucks, Madeleine And Nine, Unsingable Name, Grey Ghost, Sunken-Eyed Girl

NEW SONGS:
I Just Wrote A Song About Your Car, I Just Want The Girl In The Blue Dress To Keep Dancing, Fort Hood

As for the questions, here’s but one session of many:

Just do a search for question jar and you’ll find all sorts of moments from these shows.

The early set was fantastic. Just about every period of Mike’s career was well-represented (I would’ve loved to hear more Skittish-era songs, but hey…) and the show had a nice jovial laid-back feel to it. Good times were had all around. Quite a different thing all together than the late show.

Mike Doughty, Mississippi Studios, Portland, OR, 30 Dec 07 Late Show setlist: St. Louise Is Listening / Soft Serve / Busting Up A Starbucks / Sunken-Eyed Girl / White Lexus / Real Love / Ossining / Navigating By The Stars At Night / Madeleine And Nine / Unsingable Name / Put It Down / Tremendous Brunettes / Janine / Bottom Of A Well / Fort Hood / Is Chicago, Is Not Chicago (!!) / 27 Jennifers / Grey Ghost // Circles / Your Misfortune.

By far the coolest moment of set number two was “Is Chicago, Is Not Chicago.” Someone asked a question about it during the first show (”Are those not the most chilling first lines of a song you’ve written?” was something like how it went) and it must’ve stuck. Hearing Mike’s version of “Real Love” was also great.

The biggest bummer about the second show was the number of incessantly-talking hooligans in the room. It really brought to light the flip side of the “small intimate venue” coin: any kind of distractions become huge. And there were ALL kinds of distractions. There was a guy in the back that was having what my daughter’s 1st grade teacher calls “side conversations”. There were 2 guys directly behind me that had issues with Mike’s break from Soul Coughing and voiced them throughout the set. And there was a woman who had an abundance of alcohol in her system and let her freak flag fly a little too freely (and loudly). It’s cool of Mike to want to break down that “Fourth Wall”, but it could get ugly, and it kinda did here. At one point Mike had to stop the show, navigate to where one of the troublemakers was sitting, and physically get in his face to tell him to stop or leave. It was uncomfortable seeing all this, as I had not an hour or two before been witness to a successful execution of this experiment and now things were less than perfect.

I think all in all, that Scrap and Mike were able to successfully wrest control back from the audience and finish the show with their respect intact.

And then they were gone — leaving behind the entrails of all our most inquisitive puzzlings.
Presumably they’re headed for your town next.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 1st, 2007 at 4:10 pm and is filed under gig, live music, mike doughty, mississippi studios, portland, puddox, question jar, review, scrap. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.