Fictional Sanchez Threatened by Actual True! (reprinted from NY Post 1999)
I believe the writer was in an average-to-mediocre post-grunge band called Soul Coughing during the late 90s.
In the early 90s, Kurt Cobain somehow took up the notion it behooved him to brown-nose True – grunge completists in Sanchez’s devoted audience are encouraged to read the Cobain-penned liner notes to Nirvana’s Incesticide for its bizarrely passionate ass-lick of the English music press – culminating in True’s pushing a hospital-dress-clad Cobain’s wheelchair onstage at the Reading festival as a mocking retort to rumors of K.C.’s little heroin habit. “Which,” the Sister of Sanchez interjects, “was obviously a preposterous notion”.
The unfortunate outcome of this was that squatty, homely Everett gained an inexplicable amount of actual juice. Sanchez fondly recalls being at Max Fish in 1995, during the CMJ festival, watching a super-fucked-up True ricochet sousedly between the bar and the pinball machines. Later that same night, True would forget which hotel he was staying at, and an obliging A&R guy from the West Coast would ride around in a cab with True for an hour, circling midtown as he struggled to recognize his hotel and periodically throw up out the window.
But there at the bar, Sanchez was conversing with the head of a significant British indie label, who cheerfully pointed out that he would be escorting True to a showcase for a new signing of his.
“Do you know how I know if a record of mine’s going to be a hit?” asked the label head rhetorically. “If Everett True is throwing up in my bathroom at the Rhiga at 3 a.m. during CMJ, it’s going to be a hit.”
Recently True split the UK for Seattle, where he briefly edited the music section of The Stranger, only to be replaced by former NY Press writer/receptionist double threat Erin Franzman. The sources of all-seeing Sanchez report that True claims to have been driven out of Washington state and to Australia due to some unmentioned nefarious deed done by his girlfriend. Unsuckerable Sanchez, however, posits that True – who has, numerous times, in print, before the eyes of God and the citizens of the Western World, asserted that there is some aesthetic worth to the Kelley Deal 6000 – was unqualified due to his inability to tell the difference between his own asshole and a techno record.
And, in any case, realistic Sanchez believes that his own pudgy and disgusting self will be involved in a hot threesome with Countess Vaughn and Melissa Auf Der Maur before any woman deigns to touch True.
“All this,” tsk-tsked the Sister of Sanchez, “and space-conscious Sanchez was still unable to recount the time he witnessed the horror of True boogie-ing to the Verlaines at CBGB.”
ADDENDA
Mike Doughty (the fellow behind this) played Seattle a few months previous. This was my preview from The Stranger:
MIKE DOUGHTY, DJ MISSKICK
(Crocodile) I know little about Mike Doughty’s former band, Soul Coughing. It was pretentious. He was a slaphead for a singer who liked to move his hands–like SO and SO–and pretend he was reading beatnik poetry while auditioning for R.E.M. Soul Coughing came from New York, and exhibited all that city’s worst traits–smugness, an inability to laugh at oneself, smugness. Aside from that, I hear he’s a very funny man. EVERETT TRUE
