by Kim Gordon
Like most of the apartments at 84 Eldridge, my new space was a railroad flat. There was a bathtub in the kitchen and bars on the windows by the fire escape. The bed, a mattress on the floor, sat in the middle, at a slant, as railroad apartments were known to buckle slightly down the middle. Cockroaches were a problem, too, and to me the people who invented Combat, the little black roach-trapping contraption, are urban folk heroes.
There was one benefit of Introjection, though. Before Miranda took leave of my life, she wanted to introduce me to Thurston Moore.
“He plays in a band called the Coachmen,” Miranda said. “In fact, they’re playing tonight, it’s their last gig.” She went on to say she thought there was something special about Thurston.
Later that night, Miranda and I showed up at a venue on Fifteenth Street called Plugg, run by a guy named Giorgio, who had some vague association with Led Zeppelin or the Stones. Plugg, of course, isn’t there anymore. But it was the Coachmen’s final show, and the rhythm guitarist was special.
He was very tall and skinny, six foot six, he told me later, charismatic and confident seeming, with pillowy lips. Height never came up for the Coachmen, since the others were even taller than Thurston, except the seated drummer. Afterward, Miranda made the introduction. I was surprised by how excited I was to meet this guy. About our first meeting, Thurston would later tell people that he was very taken by my dark flip-up glasses. There was no Internet back then, no e-mail, no texting, so at some point he and I must have exchanged phone numbers.
All my life up to then I’d been involved with older guys, and I remember thinking, Oh, Thurston is five years younger than I am. I decided to be open to this. He had a glow about him I liked, and he also seemed extremely sure about what he wanted and how to get it, though it was more a quiet self-confidence than anything brash.
A couple of weeks later, Thurston and I met up at Danceteria, but our first “formal” date was at A Space, a small alternative art space that featured performances and shows, and afterward Thurston came back to my apartment. I remember feeling so excited he was there, surrounded by my few belongings. We were talking about this and that when he laid eyes on the Drifter tilted against the wall. It sealed the deal, in a way.
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EARLY ON, THURSTON told me about an incident where someone at an art opening made some disparaging comment about his coat. It was a short black trench. I found that comment incredibly endearing. He was genuinely hurt by the remark, and telling me about it revealed his vulnerability. His feelings matched up perfectly with the fatigue and intimidation I felt around the gallery scene and about the fact that art-as-money was now the prevailing atmosphere.
I could also tell that Thurston was skeptical about the art world, and he was right to be, though he knew little of it. Today the traditional art discourse of creating a show around an idea has almost completely deteriorated into setting up a room with objects for sale. Even then the tide was turning in that direction.
There was something wild, but not too wild, about Thurston. His guitar-playing may have been free and untamed, but we came from similar middle-class academic backgrounds. One night not long after he and I started going out, Thurston filled in for the Hungarian actress Eszter Balint—who would later go on to appear in Jim Jarmusch’s film Stranger Than Paradise—by deejaying at the Squat Theatre. Nico played that night, as did the Heartbreakers, a band led by Johnny Thunders. It was a depressing evening. Nico cried, and though they meant a lot to Thurston, Thunders’s band was only interesting for its heritage. Onstage they were a bunch of rock-and-roll burnouts.
We were slowly getting to know each other. When Thurston was eighteen, his dad had died very suddenly from a benign brain tumor—he hemorrhaged following a brain operation. Thurston attended college for half a semester and then dropped out. Later he told people he moved to New York with the fantasy of starting a band with Sid Vicious. Thurston and his good high school friend Harold used to come into the city from Connecticut, soaking up the scene. Years later, when we saw the film The Ice Storm, Thurston likened himself to the main character, the kid in the train seat heading into the big city. He told me story after story about going to CBGB in the seventies to see Tom Verlaine, Television, the Ramones, Richard Hell, and Patti Smith—all the music and the people I’d missed out on.
When Thurston and I met, I was still recovering from the end of the relationship I’d had with the older male artist in California. The man and I had been incredibly close, our relationship intense but in retrospect maybe slightly off-kilter. With him I felt I’d found something great, maybe even lasting. He and I talked endlessly about ideas and art, about anything visual in fact. In the end he betrayed me, and it was traumatic. When I met Thurston I was still feeling shaky.
They say you always learn something from relationships, even bad ones, and that what your last one lacked, or you missed out on, is what you’re primed to find in the next—unless, that is, you insist on repeating the same pattern over and over again.
The codependent woman, the narcissistic man: stale words lifted from therapy that I nonetheless think about a lot these days. It’s a dynamic I have with men that began, probably, with Keller. Growing up I needed to believe he was bigger than life, a distorted genius, declaiming and wild in white. I did all I could to shield him from disapproval, anger, trouble. I defended him when he dropped out of college, lost sleep over the fear he’d be drafted to go fight in Vietnam, but during that reverent period, he foxed me into squatting in a small room off his larger one, smothering every attempt I ever made to figure out my own place in the world.
Thurston wasn’t a larger-than-life character in the way Keller was, not, at least, in those days. He could be shy. He was good at concealing what he didn’t know and pretended sometimes, for example, to be more knowledgeable about the downtown New York art scene than he actually was. At the same time he exuded a confidence, a certainty about who he was and where he was going. From the start I knew that our relationship wouldn’t center on mutually shared ideas about art. But that excited me, too. Our relationship felt more like an intersection of two separate lines. By coming together the two of us could maybe make something new and bigger. Because he was younger, and I was used to going out with older men, I convinced myself I was breaking an old pattern. As for Thurston, he’d recently ended a relationship with a married woman who had a young son. We were starting out on equal emotional footing, and we wouldn’t do to each other what had been done to us in our other relationships—or so I believed at that moment. Early in our relationship, I remember the two of us walking down Eighth Street together, holding hands, on our way to a movie—it could have been The Rocky Horror Picture Show. That night I felt so happy, and so close to him, as if in this dirty, scrappy, adopted place he and I were the only two people who existed within a perfect moment. Soon after that, I started playing music with him.
One day, in our first months together, Thurston told me we were going to visit his mother in Connecticut. He didn’t ask me—he just proclaimed it, and though I was upset that he hadn’t conferred with me first, that was Thurston’s style. It was hard for me to imagine leaving New York for any reason, even for a place as close as Connecticut, but I went along, being, at the time, more of a follower. It was Anne DeMarinis, in fact, the woman Thurston was playing music with at the time, who read my mind, Anne who told Thurston how inconsiderate and self-centered it was of him to assume I was ready to meet his mother, not to mention the rest of his family.
That same unpredictability made Thurston fun and even thrilling to be around, that and his gregarious manner. Outwardly, Thurston was friendly, good-natured, funny, extremely likable. When I finally met his mom, she told me that when Thurston was little, everyone in the neighborhood and the town knew him. “They would say to me, ‘Oh—are you Thurston’s mother?’” Clearly, with his height and long hair, he was the golden child, and as the youngest of three kids he was used to being doted upon. “Is he as easygoing as he seem
s?” John Knight asked me the first time the two of them met. The truth was that no, Thurston was not that easygoing. Among other things he had a temper, which flared up whenever he put together an issue of his zine, Killer, and he would become incredibly stressed out. Once, when his stapler wasn’t working, he picked it up and threw it through a window, shattering the glass. It scared me.
Today, when I think back on the early days and months of Thurston’s and my relationship, I wonder whether you can truly love, or be loved back, by someone who hides who they are. It’s made me question my whole life and all my other relationships. Why did I trust him, or assume I knew anything at all about him? Maybe I imposed on Thurston a dream, a fantasy. When I look back at old photos of us, I have to believe we were happy, at least as happy as any two creative people who are stressed out with commitments and fears about the future and what’s next, and about their own ideas and inner demons, ever can be.
A friend once told me that he thought Thurston and I were a great match, as both of us were so independent, which he speculated must contribute to the success and longevity of our marriage. Thurston would do his thing, including assorted side projects, and I had side projects of my own. No marriage can maintain the thrilling-ness of the early days, and over time, in spite of what my friend said, and as creative as our relationship was, our marriage got progressively lonely, too. Maybe it became too professional. Maybe I was a person—like a stapler—who just didn’t work for him anymore.
But at the time, the rumpled shirts Thurston wore with the too-short sleeves and the elbows worn out, the cat he owned named Sweetface, the tortoiseshell guitar that was the same color as Sweetface’s fur, the subtle charisma and sensitivity, the fact that he’d lost his dad at eighteen and didn’t seem to want to talk about it—all those things made me fall for him.
At the time, as I mentioned, Thurston was playing music with a girl named Anne DeMarinis. Anne was the girlfriend of the artist Vito Acconci, and the two of them lived together in a big loft in Brooklyn. A musical prodigy of some kind, Anne was young and beautiful, though she wore scruffy sweaters with holes in them as if to eradicate her good looks, and she rarely washed her hair. She was grunge before grunge existed. I remember taking the subway to Brooklyn to play music with the two of them; I remember, too, that Dan and Vito had been friends once, members of the New York City poetry scene, but for whatever reasons had become competitors.
Their rivalry made it odd for me to go from Eldridge Street, where Dan lived above me, to playing music in Vito’s loft in the middle of what’s now Dumbo. Anne played the keyboards. The band, for lack of a better word, had a bunch of different names—the Arcadians, Male Bonding—and also featured a few different drummers. We were playing at Vito’s the night John Lennon was shot. Such an unbelievable thing to have happen—New York, the place where everything seemed possible, filled at the same time with so much darkness and violence.
Of the two of us, Thurston lived on the far worse block, Thirteenth Street in Alphabet City. Eldridge Street between Hester and Grand wasn’t a block anyone with sense wanted to walk on at night—it was shadowy, scary, and druggy—but it wasn’t nearly as bad as Thirteenth Street between Avenues A and B. Drug dealers were everywhere, selling, with users hunched over on stoops and slung in doorways. The first time I went over to his apartment, it was empty except for a few books, some records, a guitar, and a huge pile of shirts in a mountainous heap, all of them specked and gouged with holes, like some blowout sale at a discount retailer’s. I remember being impressed by the sight of all those shirts; if nothing else, a bunch of stacked shirts was, you have to admit, kind of interesting.
It didn’t take long for Thurston to move into 84 Eldridge. It saved on rent, and we didn’t want to be apart anyway. Sweetface, whom Thurston had gotten from a health food store on Prince Street, joined us. The two of us had Sweetface until 1996. She moved with us to our apartment on Lafayette Street in the late eighties and died when Coco was two. When Coco was old enough to talk, she told me how sad she was at losing Sweetface, which surprised me, because who ever knows if a baby remembers anything at all.
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Photo by Ton van Gool
ONE SUNDAY AFTERNOON, before I met Thurston, I went to a place I’d been hearing about a lot, the Mudd Club. The Mudd Club was owned by Ross Bleckner, a successful artist who was a member of the Mary Boone stable. It was on White Street, a couple of blocks below Canal, and named after the doctor who treated John Wilkes Booth after he shot Abe Lincoln. The Mudd Club had no sign or awning, bore no indication whatsoever that it was more than just another doorway, but inside was another universe, one that hosted No Wave, New Wave, experimental music, poetry readings, and even catwalk shows. There was a column placed before the stage and a bar that sat in the center of the room like a dry island. I got there early and hardly anyone was there. An hour later, people started showing up. A fashion show was happening, with a young girl strutting onstage to the sounds of a barely visible band. It all seemed so decadent, especially as it was taking place on a sunlit Sunday afternoon in New York.
The Mudd Club was technically illegal, in that it skirted New York’s cabaret license laws—but in those days no one cared so long as the proper authorities were being paid off. I also found out that nothing at the Mudd Club ever started when it was supposed to. That was just the way it worked there. If a show was scheduled to begin at three P.M., you knew it wouldn’t get under way until five P.M., with the crowd assembling at around four forty-five. In the ragged, pre-gentrification, pre-art-boom landscapes of downtown New York, the Mudd Club had an anything-can-happen-and-no-one-would-care air, mixed with a touch of glamorous ennui. Sometimes the place would be jammed and other times dead, with only a few upright bodies dancing in syrupy slow motion or in a hyperactive frenzy, depending on what drugs they were taking or the music playing overhead.
As it got better known, the door policy got stricter. Unless you knew the guy at the door, you might have to stand out in the cold for a long time. The only club that rivaled the Mudd in terms of great music was Tier 3, where English bands would play along with their bigger-venue gigs at Hurrah’s or the Ritz. Joy Division was scheduled to play at Tier 3, but Ian Curtis killed himself a week before the gig. Tier 3 is where I saw 8 Eyed Spy—the band Lydia Lunch formed after Teenage Jesus—as well as DNA, Malaria!, Young Marble Giants, and a whole bunch of other No Wave acts. And these days the Mudd Club is just a throwaway line in an old Talking Heads song.
But by the time I got to New York in 1980, No Wave was almost gone, and New Wave acts like Blondie and the Talking Heads had already hit it big. I’d missed out on Lydia Lunch and Teenage Jesus. One of the original No Wave bands, DNA, was still performing, as was Mars, and they were a big influence on me, too. I was especially drawn to the way that Tim Wright played bass. He would appear in his socks, walking the stage in balletic motion like an insect folding backward, cutting and jabbing the air with his instrument, etching out space as he went, as if every single second had been choreographed. I never saw anyone play that way before or since.
What killed No Wave? Probably a famous show at Artists Space that Michael Zwack organized put the final nail in the coffin. Brian Eno had been invited to come, and he decided to produce a No Wave compilation. Since only some bands could be included on the compilation and not all, a rift was created in the scene. By the time Sonic Youth started in 1981, No Wave was essentially over. Maybe it was time to start something new.
In the early eighties, there weren’t a lot of restaurants in Soho, outside of Fanelli’s, the bar on Prince Street. On the corner of Prince and Wooster Streets was Food, a cooperative restaurant that the artist Gordon Matta-Clark began as an ongoing art happening that later evolved into an actual restaurant. Gordon was best known for his “building cuts,” in which he would lop off sections of floor and ceiling within abandoned buildings. From my perspective, there was nothing better than this—nothing.
For a while in the early eighties
Thurston worked at Food as a dishwasher and brought back giant slices of cake to Eldridge Street. Between the two of us, we had so little money that those slices felt absurd in our hands and obscene in our mouths. Food served everything from borscht to rabbit stew and also holds the honor of being the first New York restaurant to serve sushi and sashimi.
Back then, almost every building in Soho was caked over with band posters. Thurston and I used to go out at night and plaster over other bands’ posters with ours, unless it was a band or a musician one of us knew and liked. The poster war was a battle to stand out, though the enemy, if we’d ever thought about it, was the union guys whose job it was to publicize more mainstream entertainment. In the early eighties, you could land an actual gig putting up posters at the Kitchen on Broome Street, where a lot of No Wave and new music performances took place. But you had to be fast, you had to know what you were doing, and you had to have mastered one of two tools. The first was Elmer’s Glue, which was hasty and easy to conceal under your shirt. The other involved wheat paste in an oversized bucket, which could be messy, especially in the winter, when the paste froze on your hands and fingers.
Despite the number of bands playing around the city, clubs were closing down left and right. Hurrah, a club on West Sixty-Second Street that was one of the first big New York City dance clubs ever to showcase punk and industrial music, shut its doors in 1980. The owner, thinking he owed the world an elegy, said, “Oh, there aren’t any good bands anymore anyway. They all sound like noise.”
Back then, noise was an insult, a derogatory word, the most scornful word you could throw at music. But it was from Hurrah’s owner that Thurston got the name for the nine-day-long festival he launched in June of 1981 at White Columns. Thurston said he wanted to reclaim the word noise, even though nobody really knew what a “noise band” was or was supposed to sound like.
