by Kim Gordon
Confusion Is Sex was recorded with an eight-track, or rather with four-tracks locked together. We did absolutely everything wrong while making that record, including mangling the tape during a crucial take of “Shaking Hell.” In the end, we had to splice in the end of another tape to create the song.
The lyrics sprung from real life. “Making the Nature Scene” came from walking past the hookers lined up on Grand Street. In the dead cold of winter, they would flock there most nights, standing in a circle around a makeshift oilcan bonfire in leg warmers and stilettos. They were staples of the neighborhood landscape, standing tall like funky trees, leaning back, single hands on their hips, standing in a column “making the nature scene.”
The gold sparkle of the ladies’ leg warmers caught the light of passing cars, flashed in the dark spaces around nearby buildings. I’d been reading about the Italian architect and designer Aldo Rossi, who believed that cities never shake their histories, that they preserve the ghosts of their pasts through time. Rossi wanted to reclaim the small areas in between buildings to make the idea of a city human again, against the prevailing backdrop of large, looming, faintly fascistic architecture. In the early 1980s, the Lower East Side with its modest tenement and railroad apartments was still a small village. No one really cared that the hookers were there; they were part of the landscape. That is, until the new mayor decided to clean up his city and shoo them along.
After our first EP, we embarked on a mini-tour with the Swans. We played D.C., Virginia, Chapel Hill, and Raleigh, North Carolina. The Swans were a harsh, hard-to-listen-to band—they were all about plodding, minimal music, over which Mike Gira’s nihilistically romantic vocals could perch—and Mike, whom I’d known slightly at Otis Art School, was a complete dictator in his band. A friend of ours who’d just got dumped by his girlfriend offered to drive us for free, so both Sonic Youth and the Swans squeezed into the back of an old van with an attached U-Haul. Mike, I remember, spent the entire ride fighting with his bandmate Sue Hanel. Mike was the leader of the Swans, after all, and having convinced himself he was uncompromising and hyperdisciplined in all things, he would scream and carry on at his bandmates if they didn’t toe the line. Compared to the Swans, Sonic Youth was mild.
Here is a bit from a tour memoir I wrote about that period, entitled “Boys Are Smelly”:
Chapel Hill: It was raining and sad as hell and the Swans played their set to jeering cowboys. Chapel Hill is one of the hippest places on earth to play, but in 1982 we were underground even for this place . . . In the van the Swans fought among themselves. Morale was very low and tempers were short. Our expectations were not as high as Mike’s maybe, and we never fight among ourselves when we’re traveling with another band that does; they do it for us.
Georgia: In Athens, Mike Gira jumped off the stage and pushed someone who was pogoing to their music, then he returned to the stage and apologized . . . Mike thought the guy was a poser who was making fun of him. In reality he was a nerd and Mike had never seen a nerd before. Thurston tried to discourage his sister, Susan, from coming to the show, because either he thought we were gonna suck or he thought he might have to protect her. He told her she’d be raped and murdered if she came, and at the time I thought it was just a ploy because she’s so gullible, but now I realize he probably half believed it.
A few years later, from another tour, but the entries have the same feel:
Dallas: On our way to Dallas, we just melt, sleep, and nag our drummer Steve Shelley about driving too slow, and Thurston for driving too much like he plays guitar.
Boston: There was a point where I started getting sickened by the violence onstage. Thurston’s fingers would swell up all purple and thick from banging his guitar. Usually I never know what’s happening onstage, I would just see guitar-like objects whizzing through the air out of the corner of my eye. A couple of times Thurston pushed Lee into the audience, as the only way to end a song, but that was harmless fun.
Naugatuck, Connecticut: There’s nothing like Naugatuck on a Saturday night . . . The club is next to a Chinese restaurant in a shopping plaza. River’s Edge could have been filmed here. I’ve never seen so many metalheads cruising the roads. They make perfect sense, though, when you look at the barren trees, the discount store, all this desolation and quietness—you want to crank up something really loud and ugly. I couldn’t help wondering what the girls did while the boys were off playing with Satan. And I wondered if they were like me and craved the feeling of electricity and sound mixed together, swirling around my head and thru my legs. I always fantasized what it would be like to be right under the pinnacle of energy, beneath two guys who have crossed their guitars together, two thunderfoxes in the throes of self-love and combat, that powerful form of intimacy only achieved onstage in front of other people, known as male bonding.
We may have been in our infancy as a band, but our psychology was already beginning to form. The band gave us all new identities, thrilling but protected. None of us were alone anymore. Sometimes in a band it can feel as though you’re together because you collectively suffer from a psychological disease none of you can name or acknowledge. Logic proceeds from a kind of group psychosis, but the force of the collective makes everything work. You’re like a family who does what they do for ingrained, habitual reasons—except no one remembers why or what started the behavior. A band almost defines the word dysfunction, except that rather than explaining motivations or discussing anything, you play music, acting out your issues via adrenaline.
Greil Marcus, the music critic, wrote about our cover of Iggy and the Stooges’ “I Wanna Be Your Dog” in his monthly Artforum column. His pieces were made up of small, and to Greil’s mind meaningful, gestures that propelled the culture forward. Later Greil told an interviewer that Confusion Is Sex had gotten to him. It was a mess, he said, with some terrible singing, but he said he’d never heard anyone pull out her guts and throw them into the audience the way I had in “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” and that Iggy Pop would be either ashamed or thrilled. “I Wanna Be Your Dog” was a song that had been covered so many times by so many people, but until then, Greil said, he’d never really known what it meant for one lover to say to another that she wanted to be his dog. “This woman knows stuff that I don’t know,” Greil wrote. In his opinion, Sonic Youth was a band that was taking big chances, really pushing. Greil was one of the earliest witnesses to understand what we were trying to do—maybe the only one.
It was the first time anyone had paid any real attention to us, and in Artforum no less. Thurston and I interpreted it as Greil’s saying: “This small gesture is important and significant.” Later, Greil and I got to be friends.
In fact, the lyrics for the song “Brother James” came after I read about the blues in Greil’s book Mystery Train. “Brother James” appeared on an EP the band put out after Confusion Is Sex called Kill Yr Idols, a name we took from a Robert Christgau quote. Robert was the other big music critic of the time along with Greil, but he basically ignored us. Robert and the Village Voice, the downtown New York City weekly he wrote for, were never sympathetic to Sonic Youth or to the local rock scene in general, and the one night he came to one of our shows, someone in the audience tried to light him on fire. Playfully, though.
23
Bad Moon Rising: “Death Valley ’69”
Photo by Richard Kern
I WOULDN’T DESCRIBE Lydia Lunch as a friend, since friendship requires trust. I was a big fan of Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, and when Thurston and I got to know Lydia better, she was always trying to seduce Thurston. I always found her an interesting figure, and I liked her early music, but that doesn’t mean I was a fan of everything she did. She was a little predatory, and she scared me somewhat. Still, Lydia was responsible for introducing Thurston and me to Paul Smith, who had previously managed a label for the English band Cabaret Voltaire. We sent Paul a tape—maybe they would like it enough to put out Bad Moon Rising. They weren’t interested, but that’s when Paul de
cided to find a backer via Rough Trade, a huge distribution company, who released the album on a new label Paul called Blast First.
Licensing advances meant a new beginning, one where I didn’t have to work full-time and could focus instead on the new album. For the most part we were happy, though a little nervous, to lose our day jobs. Before writing the songs, Lee, Thurston, Bob Bert (our second drummer after Richard Edson), and I were passing around a book about the Velvet Underground. That book, for some unknown reason, brought everyone in the band together. We were now all in the same mood, which shows when you listen. We ended up calling the album Bad Moon Rising, after the Creedence Clearwater Revival song. We may have been preoccupied by the Velvets, but that’s just the way we did things—borrowing something from a pop culture landscape and giving it a different meaning. Creedence Clearwater Revival was a faux–Southern country band in the same way we were a faux–Velvet Underground band. Plus, the title was badass.
Bad Moon Rising was the first record we ever recorded on twenty-four tracks. Every song flows into the next, with no gaps or spaces in between. When we played our music live, we were forced to create miniature segues onstage between songs. In those days, we had no guitar techs to help tune our instruments, and our twelve to fifteen guitars, each one tuned differently, constantly had to be retuned, or rechecked, or swapped out, which necessitated short breaks. Over time we developed an elaborate system for making those changes as seamless and fluid as possible.
We decided to re-create that illusion of seamlessness on Bad Moon Rising. At the time I was reading a book by the early postmodernist critic Leslie Fiedler called Love and Death in the American Novel. Naturally, Dan Graham turned me on to it, telling me how seminal a book it was for music critics like Lester Bangs, Robert Christgau, and Greil Marcus. Whether he was telling the truth or not, I really responded to the book.
Among other things, Fiedler talked about the homoerotic relationship between the early American settlers and the so-called savage male American Indian. The title of the song “Brave Men Run (in My Family)” was taken from an Ed Ruscha painting that showed a tall ship. Ruscha’s painting seemed to make ironic reference to the early heroics of American settlers. But as someone with gold rush traces in her own DNA, I could relate. From the few stories I’d heard, the women in my family were incomprehensibly strong. My great-grandmother who sold sewing patterns up and down the West Coast in the 1800s. My grandmother, traveling all over with a brood of five kids, finally landing in Kansas during the Great Depression. Stoic, enduring, no questions, no complaints.
When I sang “Brave Men Run (in My Family),” I was singing about those women. The song’s phrase “Into the setting sun” refers to the westward pull, the American romance with death. And then there was “Death Valley ’69.”
When I was a girl growing up in Southern California, death, or the idea of it, kept pushing its way into my life, especially in 1969, when the 1960s hippie utopia merged with the Manson murders and bled into Altamont. So many people I ran into as a teenager had had brief encounters with the charismatic, wild-eyed little man who talked about “Revolution 9” and the desert and a future bliss of destruction. Peace and love had turned sordid, as the Stooges had written in their own sixties anthem: “1969, okay, all across the USA.” “Make love not war” looked better on film than it did in real life, where cops killed college students and riots busted out in D.C., Chicago, and Baltimore. “Death Valley ’69” has sometimes been misinterpreted as a pro-Manson song, especially by younger fans. Nothing is farther from the truth.
In 1985, when Bad Moon came out, hardcore groups were singing songs about Ronald Reagan. I wasn’t interested in this and preferred to sing about the darkness shimmering beneath the shiny quilt of American pop culture.
I suppose you could say that Sonic Youth was always trying to defy people’s expectations. We’d come out of a New York art context—though sideways—and merged with the rock scene. Just being a band from New York City who played outside of New York City messed with people’s expectations. Audiences were expecting to come face-to-face with a bunch of squalid junkies attired in black.
Bad Moon Rising also kicked open the doors to England, which, for an unknown experimental rock band, was fairly unapproachable. After all, we weren’t “gothy” like Lydia Lunch, and we had no “rock look” to speak of either. In that sense, by not caring about dressing up before we went onstage, we appeared more like the denizens of the American hardcore scene. Touring for the album, we played at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. Thurston had a cold, I remember, and was feverish. He did the show wearing his thick winter coat. Paul Smith had decorated the stage with carved jack-o’-lanterns with lit candles inside, creating a spooky, ghostly atmosphere, and as the band played harder, the stage got hotter and Thurston began peeling off his clothes. He even kicked one of the pumpkins off the stage. It was a classic punk rock move, one that affected the Brits so much that when one of the maintenance guys found a syringe backstage, he assumed it belonged to one of us. It didn’t.
When Bad Moon hit, people frankly started looking at us differently, and college radio stations began playing our songs. The rock journalist Byron Coley interviewed us for Forced Exposure, and Sonic Youth made the cover of a popular indie-rock zine called Matter. In England, people had been loudly proclaiming the death of the guitar and the birth of the synthesizer, but Sonic Youth and other American guitar bands started to create a buzz. Most if not all of the other guitar bands were a lot more conventional than we were, but it seemed that together they, and we, were making an impact. The Australian band the Birthday Party had broken up and morphed into the Bad Seeds, and we were lucky enough to be asked to support them on a tour. Things were looking up but changing too.
Bob Bert, our drummer for this period, left the band and was replaced by Steve Shelley. Thurston and Lee had seen Steve play at CBGB with a Michigan hardcore band called the Crucifucks. Both of them believed Steve had something special that set him apart from other hardcore drummers. While Sonic Youth was on tour in the UK, Steve sublet our Eldridge Street apartment. When Bob left at the end of the tour, we asked Steve if he wanted to join the band and without hesitation he said, “Sure.” Having struggled with different drummers over the course of our first two records, it felt like magic or destiny that Steve was right there in front of us. He was younger and didn’t share in the band’s collective New York history, but we had other musical influences and appreciations in common, the Birthday Party being one of them. Steve brought a power to Sonic Youth that we’d never had before.
Thurston had the idea of releasing “Death Valley ’69” as a single, and contacted Stuart Swezey at Iridescence Records, who initiated a show we played in the middle of the Mojave Desert at a festival called the Gila Monster Jamboree. It was a dream bill, including Redd Kross, the Meat Puppets, and us, as well as Perry Farrell’s first band, Psy Com. It was a magical night, one of my favorite shows ever. The venue, I remember, was kept a secret until the last minute. The moon was full and huge, the stage surrounded by a large pile of rocks that served as a kind of acoustic enhancement to the sounds coming off the amps. There was no stage, so we set up in the sand. The Meat Puppets sounded amazing, clear and mellifluous, and Redd Kross’s set was just as good, their fur-and-glitter glam appearance making a surreal contrast to the desert’s ritualistic campfire vibe. We just went for it. We had no monitors, only amps and a small P.A. system, which ultimately made our sound chaotic and hard to hear. Mike Kelley was there that night, dancing and drunk, having a great time. Someone shot the whole night on video, and if you know who you’re looking for, you can make out Mike in the film. At one point during our set, I asked, “Does anyone have a beer? One beer for the band? Just one?” but since practically everyone in the crowd seemed to be on LSD or mushrooms, there was not a drop to be had in the desert.
The cover of “Death Valley ’69” was a postcard of one of Gerhard Richter’s paintings. It was Thurston’s idea t
o use that postcard, of course. I would have been too shy to ask our friend if we could use his work. It didn’t matter—the result was beautiful, a dark sinking sunset, perfect for the song and for the pure feeling of being out in the desert in California.
In 1984, Thurston and I got married. Frankly, I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to commit to a long-term relationship. When I moved into 84 Eldridge, Dan kept teasing me about what a hippie I was, and even though I wasn’t, his words had haunted me. By marrying Thurston, I was committing to something permanent, instead of always attempting to balance art with music, music with art, one or the other, back and forth. For someone so young Thurston was much more attracted to domesticity than I was. His faith made me believe our marriage could work.
Looking back, it’s hard to believe how young we were. I was thirty-one, Thurston twenty-six. We were two creative people, and creative people usually delay becoming responsible adults unless there’s a child involved. “I approach adulthood sideways,” a film-director friend told me once. “I’m responsible to my legacy of work and I’m also responsible to my family, but it’s hard.” He added, “No one wants to lose the innocence they have for creativity.” I held on as tight as I could to that innocence, but so did Thurston.
24
Evol: “Shadow of a Doubt”
Photo by Pat Blashill
THE WAY THE BAND composed songs was pretty much always the same. Thurston or Lee would usually sing the poppy, more melodic things from riffs one of them wrote; I sang the weirder, more abstract things that came out of all of us playing together and rearranging until everything jelled. My voice has always had a fairly limited range, and when you’re writing a melody, you tend to write it for your own voice. Lee, on the other hand, usually brought in songs that were complete and ready to go, then we layered dissonance over.
