A stroke almost killed him. A doctor said he would never play music again. With a few Therapy Sessions, the music of The Beatles and Neil Young, the Northwest music icon is now back on the stage. 

Scott McCaughey’s dream death has been foiled. The prolific frontman for Young Fresh Fellows and The Minus 5 never wanted to lose the days of wine and booze, but after a stroke nearly killed him last year, McCaughey had to give up the booze.

“I don’t get my wish to be dying after partying my head off the night before. That’s a bummer. I guess I could still arrange for that,” McCaughey, 64, said with a laugh as he clutched a pint glass filled to the brim with a double Americano. “I’m not gonna be in a hurry for it. But yeah, that really twists the knife.”

Death — usually his own — has always been one of McCaughey’s chief muses. Following the stroke, a doctor predicted he would never play music again. But after a rigorous recovery process regaining his speech and ability to memorize lyrics, he has picked up where he left off, writing, recording and performing live.

The heatwave in Portland had finally ended on a Tuesday afternoon in late August. McCaughey biked up to Ristretto Roasters Coffee sporting a pink helmet, purple jeans, a black Rockets From The Crypt shirt and those trademark maroon-tinted sunglasses. With time to reflect on his career, he thinks the stroke was a dose of karma from tempting fate with a lifetime of morbid tunes.

“I’ve written so many songs about being dead or about dying that it’s like, ‘Oh yeah? Take this buddy!’” he said with another laugh that echoed through the coffee shop in Portland’s Mississippi neighborhood. “I seriously feel like it’s payback.”

Read our authorized oral history of the Young Fresh Fellows’ early days and debut record, The Fabulous Sounds of the Pacific Northwest

In addition to his main projects, McCaughey may be best recognized for playing the role of sideman in a multitude of musical groups: R.E.M. (1994 -2011), The Baseball Project, Filthy Friends, Robyn Hitchcock and the Venus 3, Alejandro Escovedo, Tuatara, The No Ones and more. He is as revered for his musical abilities as for his personality. Ask anyone who’s met him and they’ll happily share how much they enjoy his company, his colorful sport coats and his approach to making music.

According to his fan website, the Universal Trendsetter, his record sales range from 450 units to 5 million. McCaughey has played to empty bars; he has played to packed stadiums. He even once played at Paul Westerberg’s (The Replacements) wedding. The Young Fresh Fellows played that particular gig, in part, because they were friends, but also because Westerberg told Creem magazine in 1987 that the Fellows were the best band in the world. Few people knew who they were.

To borrow a term from his hero Neil Young, Scott McCaughey is an unknown legend in his time.

His career has the cult-like ‘your favorite musician’s favorite musician’ trajectory and although he has appeared in the biggest music publications and the largest stages on the planet, he is never the center of attention, even in his own starring roles.

McCaughey’s legacy should be secure off the strength of Young Fresh Fellows’ 1987 album The Men Who Love Music alone, but in 2006 The Minus 5 created another career-defining work, (The Gun Album). The fact that his work has maintained a consistent level of quality over almost four decades is a testament to his abilities as a songwriter. Perhaps even more impressive is that his career’s two greatest peaks are separated by 29 years.

His best songs — “When The Girls Get Here,” “After Suicide,” “Beer Money,” “Out There On The Maroon,” “How Much About Last Night Do You Remember?” to highlight a few — are gems that often entangle morbid imagery with bright music. Like the ’60s rock he was baptized with, they lodge themselves in your head and refuse to leave. They don’t always make sense, but when he’s able to turn a drunken email from a friend into the joyously incoherent lyrics “I had six White Russians tonight and two of them were people / It’s not pretty when your best friend is a saloon,” it doesn’t matter if they make sense. Logic rarely prevails in the best rock music.

Once the funnier songs have forced your guard down, he bowls you over with deceptively dark tunes. “With A Gun,” “If You Believe In Cleveland,” “Dear Employer (The Reason I Quit),” “In The Ground,” “Aw Shit Man” and dozens of others boast bright sounds and poppy hooks that obscure the death rotting inside.

McCaughey said he slept later than he planned as we settled into a wooden corner booth to discuss his stroke, recovery and the Therapy Sessions concerts he recently completed. His energy level isn’t quite what it used to be, as he was beat from a Sunday show and a day of emails. But the fact that he can still clutch a guitar and click a mouse in 2018 is nothing short of a miracle.

Ambulance Blues — The stroke

On Nov. 16, 2017, Alejandro Escovedo and the Burn Something Beautiful Band — McCaughey, Kurt Bloch, Peter Buck and Linda Pitmon — arrived in San Francisco around 3 p.m. McCaughey said he stopped drinking coffee about a decade ago, but he wanted to visit his favorite cappuccino store in the world, Cafe Trieste in North Beach. He decided to take a quick walk to the cafe and possibly find a bar after. When he reached Green Street he knew something was wrong.

“I felt kinda weak, I felt dizzy, and there was no pain at all,” McCaughey recalled. “I didn’t just drop on the sidewalk like a lot of people do after a stroke, apparently. I just slowed down and I grabbed onto this scaffold in front of a building where I was walking and I held on to it and I was like, ‘This is weird. What’s going on?’ I kept looking upwards to the corner thinking, ‘If I can make it to the corner I’ll be alright.’ I moved like an inch or two and it was like, I still feel really weird.”

People were passing by all around him, but McCaughey was unable to speak and had no idea what to do. He lost track of time and held onto the scaffolding for what felt like 45 minutes; he estimates it was probably closer to five.

“Finally I just slipped down the rest of the way to the street. I think my whole right side went. I couldn’t talk. I was totally conscious. I knew everything that was happening.” People stepped over his body without thinking twice as he lay crumpled on the sidewalk. “In the Tenderloin that’s what you do,” he said.

Eventually a woman and a man checked if he was OK, but words still weren’t coming. She thought he might have had a seizure and called an ambulance. “I remember looking out the back of that ambulance going over the hills on a beautiful day going to this hospital. Then it gets kinda fuzzy. I was there for 24 hours.”

When he arrived at the hospital the doctor did not believe he’d had a stroke. He refused to conduct an MRI. “I think the doctor thought I was a burnout on drugs, just another guy from the Tenderloin and they just wanted to blame it on drugs and alcohol. In fact I hadn’t even had a drink or anything. I was top of my game! I’m not saying I look like a sharp business guy, but I looked exactly like I always do with this black fucking shirt, red pants or black jeans, just normal me. I don’t look respectable but I don’t look that disrespectable, I don’t think.”

Even while describing a near brush with death, McCaughey repeatedly laughed, mainly over self-deprecating jabs. But he was in danger every second the hospital refused to treat his ischemic stroke. A portion of his brain was receiving no blood due to a clot. The American Stroke Association cites strokes as the fifth leading cause of death in the U.S., killing nearly 130,000 people a year, or one every four minutes. The longer treatment was deferred, the worse its consequences could be.

“It could have been ugly,” McCaughey said. “I could have died because they refused to treat me for a stroke.”

The hospital redialed the last person McCaughey had called on his phone, but when Linda Pitmon picked up she didn’t know what to think. McCaughey has her number saved with a joke name. “They call her and it’s like, Ms. Georgette?’ And she thought someone was fucking with her. They finally convinced her something had happened to me so she and Peter [Buck] were at the hotel and they came in and dealt with it for a long time.”

McCaughey’s wife, Mary Winzig, was at a Portland Trail Blazers game when she received word of the stroke. She boarded the first possible flight and arrived at the hospital around 1 a.m. Little progress had been made.

“Peter really, finally got strong-armed with the doctor and said, ‘Give this guy a fucking MRI, you idiot.’ Something along those lines. I think they did it like 24 hours later,” McCaughey said.

With the MRI they spotted the blood clot and began to treat McCaughey for a stroke. The initial prognosis was grim, even if he did not initially hear it himself.

“They were like, ‘Oh, he’s had a stroke and you might as well get used to it. He’s never going to play music again.’ They said that to Mary: ‘You might as well get used to it.’ Like, great doctor!”

Luckily, he was moved to the UCSF Neurovascular Disease and Stroke Center. The clot had not cleared yet. In order to do so, they needed to raise his blood pressure to a rate so high that it would dissolve the clot. Once the clot was forced out by the pounding blood, blood returned to that portion of his brain and the damage was stopped. But his blood pressure was still dangerously high and he had to be carefully monitored for 10 days in the ICU.

“They saved my life I’m sure,” he said.

The clot had cleared, but his time in the ICU was only the beginning of his road to recovery.

Getting Better — Recovery

“The road to recovery will be a long one, and we believe it will come through music. We can’t wait to see him back in action. The collective energy of the entire creative community is powerful enough to overcome this hurdle. With the love and support of all of you, Scott will continue to share his love of music with the world.” — Mary Winzig, Nov. 17, 2017

McCaughey’s father knew how much 9-year-old Scott loved campy B-monster movies. He could never have predicted the effect it would have on the rest of Scott’s life when he brought a copy of the Monster Mash album home from work at Sears in the early ’60s. The album featured monster-infested versions of hit songs, and, of course, the single “The Monster Mash.”

“I just thought they were really funny or goofy. I didn’t realize it was a subversive use of rock ’n’ roll that got in my blood,” Scott McCaughey recalled. “The beat! I went crazy!”

His dad would bring home another 45 in early 1964 that would change his life forever, The Beatles’ “I Want To Hold Your Hand.” Beatlemania hit young Scott in full force. “He probably regrets it for the rest of all time because I just went completely apeshit. From then on it’s been non-stop rock since 9 years old,” McCaughey said.

As McCaughey recovered in the ICU, the right side of his body was temporarily paralyzed. The stroke had affected the speech center in his brain. For a singer and guitar player, there might not be a worse combination of medical challenges. But Peter Buck refused to believe that McCaughey would never play again.

After three days in the ICU, Buck brought a guitar to McCaughey’s room. His hand immediately found a chord. He remembered how to play. “It didn’t affect that part of me, which was a huge relief. I knew all the chords.” He soon encountered a bigger roadblock.

“I couldn’t remember any words to any songs at all,” he said. “Anything. Completely wiped clean.”

Hundreds of original compositions from dozens of his own albums, and countless songs from his friends and heroes from childhood to the present — everything gone. His long- and short-term memory remained intact so McCaughey was determined to fight against his brain and track down the lost songs. “I’m just going to assume that it’s not irreparable,” he told himself. “There’s gotta be a way to get it back.” So he grabbed a notepad and began to scribble a list of the deepest-seeded memories he had: the names of every Beatles song he could think of. “Some of them were not Beatles songs,” he laughed. “I just started doing stuff like that as exercise to get my brain going.” Buck brought him an iPod loaded with a Beatles playlist that he listened to constantly. Humming along to melodies proved to be no challenge, but the lyrics were still impossible to recall.

Speaking and interpreting speech remained difficult — the words McCaughey attempted to say were rarely what left his mouth; the words he heard were rarely what others said. The first thing he recalled saying were two simple demands: “‘I don’t want any bullshit concert. I don’t want any bullshit Kickstarter. We’ll just figure it out.” Winzig’s response was heard loud and clear: “Too late.” She had already created a GoFundMe page that raised more than $88,000 in its first day, surpassing the overall goal of $75,000. As of this writing, the fund has more than doubled its goal with more than $126,000 dollars from 1,533 contributions.

The ever-humble McCaughey said he didn’t want the attention a fundraiser and benefit concert brings. “I’m kind of embarrassed by being helped. I don’t know why,” he said. He knew it would be difficult but he wanted to attempt to pay off his medical bills on his own. “I didn’t feel like I necessarily deserved to have other people pay for my hospitalization. There’s other people who deserve it more than me. Or could use it more.” But his friends stepped up and two Help The Hoople benefit shows were planned for January in Portland featuring an A-list collection of McCaughey’s friends.

After leaving the ICU his speech therapist asked him to select a song to memorize. He chose “Robert Ryan Is Among Us” from The Minus 5’s 2016 album Of Monkees and Men. She taught him to repeat the lines aloud, and he feels that repetition helped to reopen the channel between his brain and mouth. When he began speech therapy back home in Portland, he had to up it to three songs. He added his 2015 song “Hold Down The Fort” and The Beatles’ “The Ballad Of John And Yoko.” “At first I was starting with one line at a time trying to commit them to memory. It was so hard,” he said. Eventually he was able to recite the lyrics to one song at a time, but as soon as his therapist asked him to recite another of the three his mind would draw a blank.

In December 2017, Buck and McCaughey had begun meeting weekly to work on songs and recordings and to just play music together, which has been the driving force of their friendship since they met in 1984. By January, McCaughey had already teased the idea of performing live again. The Laurelthirst Pub had available dates in April. “It’s something to shoot for,” he said. “I just decided to go for it.” He contacted his Portland Minus 5 crew — guitarist Casey Neill, drummer Ezra Holbrook and bassist Jim Talstra — and they rehearsed almost every Wednesday for four months straight.

In addition to Minus 5 material, he selected the two bands whose music he could not live without. “Neil and Beatles,” he said. “Those songs just have to be in there. They’re part of my DNA. They’ve gotta be back there.” It was a process of relearning and retrieving the deepest-embedded songs inside his head, but he added guitar into the mix to pressure himself beyond simple linear memorization.

“It worked,” he said.

McCaughey worried he would have to read lyrics on stage, but one day he reached a breakthrough. The first few lines from “Roll Over Beethoven” popped into his head. Although it was only a few words, the realization was promising: “It’s there. Somewhere. They’re in there. That started a snowball going and gradually I started finding other songs.” The Minus 5 built a library of songs that drew heavily from his albums Dungeon Golds and (The Gun Album), Young’s Ditch Trilogy and anything from The Beatles. “I really asked a lot of those guys,” McCaughey said. “It was like ‘Here’s 10 new songs to learn every week’” — many of which The Minus 5 had never played before.

Perhaps the most astonishing part of McCaughey’s recovery process is what he did while still in the hospital. About 72 hours after a doctor predicted the sudden termination of his music career, McCaughey began plotting his next album. A good songwriter can find inspiration anywhere, so he did what he knows best: he wrote lyrics — while still in the ICU, paralyzed on one side, unable to speak coherently. He could not remember old lyrics so he created new ones.

“They were complete and utter bullshit, but I was writing,” he said with a laugh. “I was like, ‘I’m going to write and I’m going to write stuff down. Now I’m making a record of all those lyrics just because… I don’t know. They’re weird and I just want to remember it.” 

The “Stroke Album” has no scheduled release date, but much of it has already been recorded, with “Goodbye Braver Man” being the first taste of what the album will feel like.

With A Little Help From My Friends — The Therapy Sessions

“It has been a bit of an ordeal, and a stroke demands itself taken seriously. I have been so fortunate in that I’ve had the time to rest and heal. SO MUCH HELP has gotten me this far. You all know who I am addressing: YOU.

“That being said, eventually it’s time to play some music, and so, let’s give it a try.” — Scott McCaughey, March 13, 2018

Months before entering his 60s, McCaughey penned a song in response to The Who’s defining 1960s anthem, “My Generation.” Whereas The Who romanticized dying young and leaving a legacy, McCaughey’s “My Generation” takes a more practical approach to aging as a rocker. “My generation still as loud it’s old yeah / Not ready to die die die / Not ready to fold.” If the guitars never turned down and the joy of youth never ceased, why leave the stage? After all, Pete Townshend can still be seen striking a windmill today.

In January, just two months after the stroke, McCaughey performed in public again for the first time. He joined a few of his Filthy Friends — Buck, Kurt Bloch, Corin Tucker, Janet Weiss — for three songs at night one of the Help The Hoople benefit concerts. If that seems like too fast of a return that’s because, well, it probably was. The show went fine from a viewer’s standpoint, but McCaughey admitted that he thought his head was going to explode by his third song.

Despite the pain, he was overcome with gratitude at the support from fans and peers. “It was insane. I felt like, ‘Why me?’”, he said. “It’s incredible how much people have stepped up. It’s humbling. Very humbling.” The Portland concerts and auction raised $116,000 as of March 25.

With just three months until he had to perform a weekly show, McCaughey worried he couldn’t pull it off. “I was like, ‘This could be horrible, but I’ll call it the Therapy Sessions so I’ve got an out.’” He figured no one would mind if he had lyrics on stage with him. If he had to occasionally rely them on, at least he was up there giving it a wholehearted effort.

Instead of three songs, they played for an hour and 45 minutes every Wednesday in April from 6-8 p.m. at the Laurelthirst Public House in southeast Portland. These were his first full performances since the stroke.

The bar quickly filled and in front of a standing-room-only crowd, The Minus 5 returned. Sporting a “Dr. of Evil” guitar strap on his black Squier Telecaster, McCaughey stood with his newest companion, a music stand, and tried to decipher the guide words he had written in large font. Sometimes they only confused him more, but when he opened his mouth the right lyrics normally wrestled their way out.

“Lots of times it came and I don’t know where it came from,” he said. “It was really weird remembering the words because it didn’t feel like it ever did when I was singing before. It was like they had to make a new pathway and it felt really weird.”

With a core of Holbrook, Neill and Talstra, the band’s rotating fifth guitarist slot was commonly occupied by Peter Buck. Kurt Bloch, Chuck Carroll of the original Young Fresh Fellows lineup, Mike Coykendall, Dave Depper and Lewi Longmire all joined in for a set. Special guests like Patterson Hood (Drive-By Truckers) and Fernando Viciconte were common sights.

Whether playing “Like A Hurricane” or “Blue Jay Way,” McCaughey led his group through tight covers and true-to-source originals. The setlists were fresh each week and featured an impressive amount of material.
In the early shows, McCaughey occasionally slurred a lyric or two and once had to have water crowd-surfed to the front in order to take a pill. But by any metric the first four shows were a success. I convinced a skeptical Portland transplant to watch the third Therapy Session show. “I was expecting some sort of pity party,” my Wisconsin friend said afterward. “Nothing like that.”

McCaughey took time to rest after the initial four shows, saying his brain “kind of shut down.” Then The Minus 5 added two more Therapy Sessions at the Laurelthirst and three Sunday dates at the Alberta Street Pub. He also played solo shows opening for M. Ward and Wreckless Eric, then three nights with The Baseball Project.

“I wanted to keep going because I’d made a lot of headway,” he said.

With more time between performances his confidence and stability made noticeable leaps from April to August. In the early weeks of April, McCaughey’s voice was sometimes wavy and he disappeared quickly after the shows, looking unsteady on his feet. By the end of August he was claiming the lead guitar part in “Cortez The Killer,” jumping in sync with the music. His jumps, he claims, are “not so epic anymore,” but they were convincing enough for fans to toss money into the decal-laden pitcher-turned-tip jar.

After the final show at the Alberta Street Pub, McCaughey mingled for longer than average and thanked everyone for coming. His face showed that he was on top of the world again, but he might have pushed himself too far. “I was really dizzy during the show. At one point I thought I was going to pass out or fall over, but I got it back.”

Perhaps the most telling moment of these Therapy Sessions was the final Laurelthirst concert. McCaughey fought tears back as he screamed the “not ready to die” line to end “My Generation” in the set’s climax. He’d unofficially completed his Therapy Sessions. To celebrate, just seconds after singing about his unwillingness to die, The Minus 5 finished its residency with a cover of The Sonics’ “Strychnine” in which he championed the taste of straight strychnine.

A mixed message, sure, but he’s back to his old ways — tempting death once more.

Don’t Be Denied — The Future

“Whatever I was and whatever I’ll be the world will get on without me” — The Minus 5, “In The Ground”

Aside from some minor heart issues and the occasional dizzy spell, McCaughey said he is learning to accept what his new normal feels like. “It’s not normal like it used to be, but it’s pretty good,” he said. He felt well enough to complete a few days on the road with The Baseball Project in August. His wife is worried about the three-week tour he’s on with Arthur Buck, but he’s ready to return to the unrelenting schedule he once had.

It took almost three and a half years for McCaughey and me to find time to sit down together. I was finishing college, he was on tour and recording. Our schedules never met, and he has continued his voracious output. The week we finally did speak, Filthy Friends had finished recording a new album, which could be released as soon as spring. He has at least three other albums recorded and unreleased. Last fall, Young Fresh Fellows returned to Egg Studios to record a new album in a weekend. The studio, owned and operated by Conrad Uno, closed last year. The No Ones, another group he’s in with Peter Buck, Frode Strømstad and Arne Kjelsrud Mathisen, also have an album recorded. Then there’s the “Stroke Album” of lyrics McCaughey created in and just out of the hospital. And of course there’s always a backlog of Minus 5 songs.

“I should have probably mapped out a career and had some goals, but that’s not me. I just take things as they come along and try to fill up every day I can with stuff that’s fun with friends,” he said.

Through it all, he maintains that the key to a successful collaboration has more to do with personality than talent.

“You can throw a stone in Portland and find somebody who’s better at guitar or keyboards or singing or whatever than I am, but I am easy to get along with because I like to have fun. And I love music. That’s what it’s all about. If you love music, you like to have fun and you feel lucky that you get to play music, well, the rest of it takes care of itself.”

As our conversation wound down, I asked McCaughey what he still wanted to accomplish after more than three decades of making music. His answer arrived in three stages: First, the joke: “Man. I’d like to make some money,” at which he roared with his loudest laugh of the day. “No. That’s not really a goal. It would be nice if it happened.” Then he reflected on the improbable life he has lived and dreamed of since the first time he heard the Fab Four on that fateful 45. “I never would have imagined that in my wildest dreams that that could have been possible. I feel like I’m the luckiest guy in the word. I just want to keep writing songs and get them out there.”

Then his eyebrows drooped slightly as he realized his answer wasn’t the full truth. He paused momentarily, folding his hands in his lap.

“It’s hard for me to say, but… I don’t know how to say this.” He looked down at the table. After a few short seconds and a deep breath, his head shot back up, cocked slightly to the right. Through the tint in his sunglasses, his eyes hardened.

“I’d like to be recognized as a songwriter. I would like that. I feel like my songwriting has always gotten second fiddle because I’m always doing something else that’s more important or more well-known. But I do really feel like that’s what I’ve left for the world. It’s not important to anyone, but it’s kind of what I have to leave behind — besides a really good record collection.”

Much like his music, he had sandwiched a yearning admission between two goofy jokes (and another huge laugh). His work has always balanced the deathly serious with the ridiculously stupid, often in quick succession.

But there was a flaw in his statement — the “it’s not important to anyone” part. For four months, a familiar cast of characters packed the Laurelthirst and Alberta Street Pubs because they cared that McCaughey was performing again; they cared that a hometown hero was back in his natural habitat; most importantly, they cared that he was alive and sharing his songs with them again, music stand or not.

I couldn’t shake two moments from our conversation during my drive home. Midway through our conversation, a man slammed a newspaper down on our table, which had the only open seats available. He was probably in his 60s, close to McCaughey’s age. The nasty look he shot at us for occupying two of six seats at our corner booth screamed of entitlement, demanding we bequeath our seats to him. I resisted the urge to shoot a dirty look back, as if to say, do you know who you’re sitting with right now?

As we stood to leave, I scanned people’s faces for any sign of recognition of McCaughey while he affixed his pink helmet back to his head. The only eyes that gazed up at him were drawn straight to the helmet and his runaway white hair. He was an anonymous face to everyone there, even in his own neighborhood.

None of this phased McCaughey. He smiled that huge smile all the way to the door, looking happy to be alive. He’s not ready to die quite yet, but he probably has a death song or two that he’s itching to write.

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All photos by Christopher Trotchie
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