But there was no taking away the glory of the Replacements’ indie years. “Could it have been the last bastion of true pockets of uncontaminated stuff from anything major?” says Mars. “Maybe that was the last instance of where that was true, but what do I know—the attitude of doing something fun and doing something creative and keeping yourselves out of trouble took precedence over any sort of career opportunity.”
Tragically, Mars is exactly right—once Bob Stinson was fired from the Replacements, he found it impossible to stay out of trouble. His problems with drinking and drugs worsened dramatically; he was clinically depressed, unemployed, and virtually homeless; and on February 18, 1995, he was found in his girlfriend’s apartment, dead of an apparent overdose at age thirty-five.
CHAPTER 7
SONIC YOUTH
“A LOT OF BANDS OUT THERE ARE TAKING PEOPLE FOR A RIDE BY PRETENDING THAT THEY ARE DOING SOMETHING VALID, WHEN IN FACT THEY ARE JUST REHASHING THINGS THAT HAVE BEEN DONE A MILLION TIMES BEFORE. AT LEAST WE ARE STICKING OUR NECKS OUT AND HAVING SOME FUN. THAT’S WHAT MUSIC IS ABOUT; NOT FOLLOWING THE RULES.”
—STEVE SHELLEY, CUT, MARCH 1989
By the late Seventies, just about all the original New York punk bands were either out of touch, out of gas, out of town, or out of existence, leaving the hordes of aesthetic pilgrims who had migrated to New York on the heels of the punk explosion to create a new scene of their own. The city became a petri dish for all kinds of musical experiments, from the ultra-minimalist dance beats of Liquid Liquid to Klaus Nomi’s warped techno-opera, from the Lounge Lizards’ noirish jazz to Polyrock’s pointy-headed future-pop.
A precious few, annoyed by how quickly the music industry had chewed up punk and spit it out as “new wave,” formed a small and insular movement defiantly dubbed “no wave.” The music was spare but precipitously jagged and dissonant, with little regard for conventions of any sort; the basic idea seemed to be to make music that could never be co-opted. Although shows by no wave bands were very sparsely attended, a tight-knit little community developed. But when Brian Eno recorded four no wave bands—Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, DNA, Mars, and the Contortions—for 1978’s No New York compilation, he unwittingly fomented the scene’s demise, as jealousies were sparked by the fact that some bands were picked to record and others weren’t.
Despite the fracturing of the no wave scene, it was a heady time—the New York art scene was beginning to explode and the city’s underground rock community got swept up in its coattails. By 1980 downtown New York City rock clubs resembled art spaces and art spaces resembled rock clubs. As more and more artists started playing in bands, the music began to take on a noticeably sculptural quality, as if the musicians were shaping shards of sound. Graffiti by music-friendly artists such as Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat was all over the East Village and SoHo; musicians like Laurie Anderson and Talking Heads were bridging the “high” art world and the “low” rock world; eminent downtown New York composers such as Rhys Chatham, Steve Reich, Glenn Branca, and Philip Glass were all making music that, like rock, dared to place a premium on timbre, harmonic texture, and rhythm.
Sonic Youth took those ideas and transplanted them to rock music. Few American bands were asking to be taken seriously as art, but Sonic Youth did, and they got enthusiastic affirmation from the hipper precincts of the music press; that, coupled with the band’s strong connections to the art world and a rabid European following, gave them a unique prestige. Some accused the band of being charlatans borrowing promotional ideas from the art world to browbeat the underground into building a consensus of cool around them, but however finely calculated Sonic Youth’s astute promotional tactics, the power of their best music is undeniable.
And the indie rock and art scenes have a lot in common: in both, talent is one thing, but otherwise it’s all about making the right connections and orchestrating one’s own creations into discernible and desirable movements. Relationships are currency, something Sonic Youth had picked up on not only from the art world but from the camaraderie of the SST bands. It was a survival tool: empowerment through grassroots maneuvering, as opposed to the way things were done in the mainstream—basically marketing them into existence. This was very autonomous, very self-sufficient. This was punk.
The band members’ voracious appetites for all kinds of music and their enthusiasm for spreading the word about it was a big part of the networking process. “We were, on the one hand, trying to take it all in,” says guitarist Lee Ranaldo, “and on the other hand, using whatever position we had to reflect people back out to see a larger world.” That kind of advocacy, given credence by their prescient taste in opening bands, immeasurably boosted the band’s stature. And as the decade wore on and indie rock became more and more codified, Sonic Youth was a vivid reminder of the original impulses behind the movement.
The members of Sonic Youth well remembered the Beatles and the Sixties, when there was a glorious interplay between the avant-garde, progressive politics, and popular culture, and they carried it on, perhaps more than any other band in the Eighties indie community. In doing so, they dignified the scene, but they also heralded the end of what former SST label manager Joe Carducci once called SST’s “New Redneck” sensibility, marking indie rock’s transition from the working-class side of suburbia to the world of urban aesthetes. Yet for all the artsiness, Sonic Youth’s appeal boiled down to one very basic thing: the perennial charms of whaling on a very loud electric guitar.
Within four years of existence, Sonic Youth emerged as an indie archetype, perhaps the indie archetype, the yardstick by which independence and hipness (the very equation is in no small part due to them) were measured. They made records that were not only artistically respected but popular; they helpfully provided at least the illusion that rock still had some fresh tricks up its sleeve. Sonic Youth was more an inspiration than an influence, which may be why, despite their renown, so few of the bands who have cited them as mentors and heroes have directly copied their sound.
And despite their status as indie royalty, the band’s stature was actually enhanced, not diminished, by signing to a major label. Famously, the band retained their artistic control, but in retrospect, that wasn’t much of an issue since there was no pressure on them to sell records anyway. The real coup was the unspoken understanding that they were so cool that their chief function was as a magnet band, an act that would serve mostly to attract other, more successful bands. This move paid off beyond anyone’s wildest dreams when Sonic Youth brought a hot young band called Nirvana to Geffen/DGC Records.
Thurston Moore grew up in Florida and small-town Bethel, Connecticut, and was weaned on the standard hard rock fare of the day: Aerosmith, Kiss, Alice Cooper, and the like. He’d just started at Western Connecticut State College, where his late father had taught music and philosophy, when he suddenly decided to move to New York, arriving in early 1977.
Punk was in first bloom, a heady time, especially for an artistic kid fresh from the suburbs. “It was David Johansen to Patti Smith to John Cale to the Ramones to the Dictators to Punk magazine to New York Rocker to Rock Scene to St. Mark’s Place to Bleecker Bob’s to Manic Panic to Gem Spa to Max’s to CBGB, etc.,” Moore wrote. He joined the Coachmen, a guitar-based quartet heavily in the vein of the hippest bands in New York at the time, Television and Talking Heads. Art student Lee Ranaldo soon became a fan, and he and Moore struck up a friendship.
Ranaldo was in a band called the Flucts (a reference to the Fluxus art movement), who mined similar musical territory to the Coachmen. He was a Deadhead from the suburban wasteland of Long Island who had gone on to study art and filmmaking at the State University of New York at Binghamton, where, by his own admission, he spent more time taking drugs and playing music than attending class. After moving to New York, he joined Glenn Branca’s guitar sextet, touring the U.S and Europe several times. Branca felt Ranaldo understood his musical sensibility better than anyone in the ensemble and made Ranaldo his trusted
musical lieutenant.
The ensemble’s six electric guitarists played Branca’s compositions—a kind of minimalist heavy metal—at astoundingly high volumes. In order to achieve the sonic phenomena that were his trademark, Branca would string guitars with the same gauge strings, all tuned to the same note, producing a fascinating chorus effect, or devise unique tunings that produced massive, complex chords. Branca also used volume as a compositional element, actually calculating the overtones produced by the cacophony and incorporating them into the total effect of the music, which was staggering.
After the Coachmen broke up, Moore jammed with Stanton Miranda, whose band CKM also included an artist named Kim Gordon. Miranda soon introduced Moore to Gordon, and the two hit it off.
The daughter of a UCLA sociology professor father and a homemaker mother, Gordon had been born early enough to witness the late Sixties California rock scene firsthand, and by high school was a devotee of challenging jazz musicians like Don Cherry, Archie Shepp, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago. Gordon moved to New York after getting an art degree and began curating gallery shows. She also immersed herself in the no wave scene and befriended Glenn Branca. Gordon wasn’t a musician but got the bug after she played in a one-gig band with members of Branca’s and Rhys Chatham’s ensembles. “I was sort of raised all my life to do art,” Gordon later explained. “I just felt like I should be doing music. It seemed to me that this was really the next step after pop art, you see, entering directly into a popular form of culture instead of commenting on it.”
Moore took to Gordon instantly. “She had beautiful eyes and the most beautiful smile,” he wrote, “and was very intelligent and seemed to have a sensitive/spiritual intellect.” The feeling was mutual—“There was something special about him, like he exuded this air of boyish wildness but incredible goodness,” Gordon said. “I guess it was love at first sight.” Gordon began to introduce Moore, five years her junior, to the finer things in life, like jazz and modern art. A generation earlier Gordon might have been a cool beatnik hipster; Moore, on the other hand, boiled over with punk rock energy. “He was definitely a wild kid,” Gordon recalls. “ ‘Wild’ was his main description.”
When Moore saw Branca’s ensemble, he was blown away. “It was the most ferocious guitar band that I had ever seen in my life,” he exclaimed, “even more so than the Ramones or Teenage Jesus and the Jerks.”
Moore and Gordon formed a band that went through names like Male Bonding (then a new term) and Red Milk before settling on the Arcadians in late 1980. The Arcadians played their first show at the June ’81 Noise Festival at New York’s White Columns gallery—nine consecutive nights of three to five bands each—curated by Moore. Early in the festival, right after Branca’s set, Moore asked Ranaldo if he wanted to join the band. Ranaldo accepted and the lineup played three songs at the Noise Festival later that week sans drummer, Ranaldo having rehearsed with them for the first time only the night before. They played three gigs with Moore and Ranaldo taking turns whacking a couple of drums, before meeting drummer Richard Edson.
Moore’s intensity was evident to Edson from the first time they played together. They were jamming at Edson’s East Village practice space, getting into it so intensely that they were playing with their eyes closed. “And I open my eyes and I see these red spots on my drums!” Edson recalled. “Even though my drum set was a piece of shit anyway, I had a priority interest—I wanted to make sure that they stayed nice. I was like, ‘WHERE THE FUCK ARE THESE RED SPOTS COMING FROM??!’ I looked at his guitar and I noticed one of the knobs was missing. It was just a piece of metal sticking up and he was playing and hitting his hand against this metal and I looked at his hand—he was bleeding from his hand! I was like, that’s pretty cool that he’s so committed that he’ll play right through any kind of pain and bodily injury BUT THE MOTHERFUCKER WAS BLEEDING ON MY DRUMS AND I DIDN’T APPRECIATE THAT! So I was like, ‘HEY… WHOA! WHOAA!!! STOP! STOP! STOP!’ He was like, ‘Oh yeah? Hey, man, I’m sorry! No problem.’ That was my introduction….”
Edson wiped off the blood and joined the band, which Moore rechristened Sonic Youth. Part of the name came from MC5 guitarist Fred “Sonic” Smith and part came from the reggae music then in vogue, much of which came from bands with the word “youth” in their name. “It’s a state of mind,” Ranaldo says of the name. “It was never about being twenty, because we weren’t even twenty when we started. We had more experiences than just making rock music in a garage.”
“It was odd,” said Gordon. “As soon as Thurston came up with the name Sonic Youth, a certain sound that was more of what we wanted to do came about.” That sound took the heady, transcendent discord that Branca had extracted so purely from rock and injected it back into a bracing stew of the Stooges, MC5, Television, noise-jazz guitarist Sonny Sharrock, Public Image, Ltd., and no wave.
The result was a particularly New Yorky strain of rock experimentalism that recalled the hypnotic steel-gray drones of the Velvet Underground, another band with close ties to the art world. The music was avowedly forward-thinking, thoroughly cloaked in teeming layers of distortion and dissonance. It was intellectual but also bracingly physical, right down to the often violent contortions Moore and Ranaldo went through to wrench the right sounds from their instruments.
Edson had been aboard only a few weeks when Branca invited Sonic Youth to be the first artist on Neutral Records, a label he was starting with financial help from White Columns owner Josh Baer. Underground labels were few and far between, even in New York, so it was a major break for a band as obscure and challenging as Sonic Youth to make a record. As it turned out, most of their contemporaries went undocumented.
That December they recorded five songs in one late night session at the cavernous Plaza Sound studios in Radio City Music Hall, where punk icons like the Ramones, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, and Blondie had all recorded their debuts. It was an intimidating place for a young band. “We thought, ‘Where are we?’ ” said Moore. “So we just let the engineer take care of it.” Like so many first-time recording bands, they played very cautiously and conservatively, omitting what Moore calls their “loose, just crazy, noisy stuff.”
Not that the material they recorded was very conventional. “It was a lot more wide open as to what a song was,” Ranaldo says. “A song was a lot more about sound and structure than it was about chords and progressions and stuff like that.” On “The Burning Spear,” Moore’s guitar makes a sound like Chinese gongs and Ranaldo plays a power drill put through a wah-wah pedal. (Unfortunately, the drill broke soon afterward and the song was apparently never the same. “We could never find a drill with the same tone as that one,” Gordon said regretfully.)
Despite the band’s looser tendencies, Edson laid down strict, danceable syncopations in the funky “street beat” style then favored by hip New York bands like the Bush Tetras and ESG. “He had a desire for discipline,” Moore said of Edson. “Whereas we were just an anarchy band, and really into being loose, anything goes.”
The fact was the band wasn’t sure what they wanted to sound like yet. “Our first album was just a bunch of songs we wrote because we had the chance to record them,” said Ranaldo. “After that we understood better and better what we wanted to do.”
Neutral released the mini-LP in March ’82 to very little notice—no surprise, since the tiny label had no track record, no connections, and no real plans. Besides, Neutral’s staff—namely, Moore—didn’t know too much about the music business. “I didn’t know what a distributor was,” Moore admits. “I remember Glenn saying, ‘I think this is how it works: Call these distributors, see how many copies they’ll take, and write down how many they’ll take, and I think they should pay you within six months.’ We didn’t know.” Much to Moore’s relief, Branca eventually replaced him with Peter Wright, a savvy Englishman who had worked for the Buzzcocks’ label New Hormones.
But Moore had wisely sent promo kits to the U.S. press, and what little reviews the mini-LP
got were at least uniformly favorable, very encouraging to such an obscure band. And when word got back that the Bush Tetras had liked the bass sound on the mini-LP, “I was like, ‘Wow, we kind of impressed the Bush Tetras,’ ” says Moore. “ ‘Maybe we should take this seriously!’ ”
The band began a serious rethink of their music after Moore saw his first Minor Threat show in May ’82. “I just thought, ‘My god! The greatest live band I have ever seen,’ ” Moore said. “Sonically, they were just so stimulating.” Immediately the band—and Moore in particular—began to listen to whatever hardcore they could get their hands on.
“We were so fascinated by it, especially Thurston, but we knew we weren’t of it,” says Ranaldo. “We were apart from it in a lot of ways—older, more art-schooly kind of music, not straight edge. But we were totally fascinated by it.” Despite their distance from hardcore, the members of Sonic Youth realized they could incorporate elements of it into their music. “I wanted to play high-energy music and I wanted to destroy, you know,” said Moore, “but at the same time work on sound and whatever.”
Hardcore’s organizational energy was just as important as its musical energy—it showed how Sonic Youth could thrive outside the usual New York art world system of grants and patronage. “The way those kids networked was a marvel to us,” says Ranaldo. “You had these little pockets in all these cities, and all of a sudden you were hearing about—it wasn’t just Boston and L.A. and New York and San Francisco—it was Louisville and Athens, all these weird little towns that you’d never even heard of before.”
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