Our Band Could Be Your Life

by Michael Azerrad

  Back home they all went back to their day jobs; Gordon worked at the legendary Todd’s Copy Shop near the Bowery, a perennial employer of New York underground musicians and artists. And yet morale was high—until they played an off gig in New York that September. In a stroke of bad luck, a Village Voice critic was there and panned it. The Voice, the only hip paper left in New York, had not been kind or even attentive to Sonic Youth or any of the other arty “noise” bands who were making galvanizing music right in the paper’s own backyard. “[Robert] Christgau was the editor and he wasn’t interested in supporting anything that wasn’t Hoboken pop,” claims Gordon. “Anything that was weird was self-indulgent.”

  In retaliation, Moore wrote a scathing letter to the Voice, complaining that the paper didn’t respect its local scene. Christgau replied that the paper was in the business of criticism, not advocacy; Moore fired back by renaming the song “Kill Yr. Idols” “I Killed Christgau with My Big Fucking Dick.” (The feud has long since ended.)

  But the band received some crucial and very prestigious national press when respected critic Greil Marcus wrote a ringing, full-page appreciation in Artforum. “It’s as if Sonic Youth has gone back to the very beginnings of the process by which the world reveals itself as something other than its advertisement, as if the band has discovered the most marginal no,” Marcus wrote. “The power of Sonic Youth’s no will be negligible; few will hear this music. That the spirit of the act is still at work may not be.”

  Later that year they returned to Europe for two more tours. “At that point we just thought the band was so special,” says Ranaldo. “And we’d go to Europe and it would be verified for us, because after shows people would just be like, ‘We’ve never seen anything like this.’ They’d never experienced any of that New York stuff that we were coming out of, so we were like this apparition that came out of nowhere. They didn’t know the Contortions or DNA or any of the stuff that had inspired us.”

  It wasn’t only the adulation that attracted Sonic Youth to Europe—there, musicians got far more money and respect. Besides, Europe was a more practical place to play. “America was almost impossible to deal with,” says Moore. “It’s almost ten times the size of Europe. There’s way more vast wastelands of space here where we didn’t have that much information about where to play. There were no offers that we could get.”

  Shortly after Bert rejoined the band, they played Manhattan’s trendy Danceteria club on a bill with the Swans and Lydia Lunch. The show’s promoter, Ruth Polsky, who had been instrumental in establishing New York’s underground rock scene, was a bit tipsy that night and mistakenly paid Lunch for all three bands twice. Nobody said anything and Sonic Youth used their share to record the Kill Yr. Idols EP at Fun City for Zensor in October ’83.

  The band was excited about the new material. “There was just something about it that consolidated what we’d done up to that point,” says Ranaldo. For one thing, they were now playing exclusively in alternative tunings and beginning to master their limitless possibilities—their guitars sounded like anything from angelic dulcimers to a swarm of killer bees, and the music ranged from apoplectic violence (“Kill Yr. Idols”) to an almost catatonic beauty (“Early American”). Village Voice critic Tom Carson later called Kill Yr. Idols “cut-and-dried howls of impeccably discordant anguish.”

  Thanks to the October ’83 European release of Kill Yr. Idols, awareness of the band on the Continent reached new heights. “Berlin was incredible,” recalled Moore. “It was like we were the Monkees or something. It was great—screaming girls. Too much.” And live, the band was on a roll. “Every gig was just me and Lee running through the audience, getting on people’s shoulders, and Lee playing his guitar with other people’s teeth,” Moore said. “We were totally nutzoid at this point.”

  But their crucial London debut was a nightmare. They were set to open for industrial dance unit SPK at the ultra-trendy Venue club, but it was at the end of a grueling six-week tour—“We’re totally dirty and ragged and everybody there looks right out of The Face magazine,” said Moore. “We’re just greasy people in ripped jeans.” Moore’s hands were so ravaged by a month and a half of abuse that he could barely move them. Then, after telling the entire U.K. music press they’d play at 9:00, the club made them start at 8:00. On top of that, they weren’t allowed to sound check and even had to move SPK’s equipment themselves so they’d have room to play. By show time they were so furious they refused to get onstage.

  But by 8:30 a respectable crowd had gathered, so they figured, why not play a few songs. Two songs in, Ranaldo’s amplifier started smoking, then Moore’s guitar started sputtering out, and Gordon broke a string; even Bert’s drums started collapsing. In frustration, Moore started smashing bottles on the stage with his guitar and even heaved a monitor at a bouncer. Moore kept smashing things even after the curtain closed, screaming, “I hate the English!” and “Bomb London!” at the crowd.

  It was a critical show and it had been a colossal disaster. “That’s it,” Bert thought. “We’re fucked.” Or so they thought—two weeks later the reviews came in, and Sounds and NME both raved about the performance. The next time they played CBGB in New York, the line went around the block.

  During the summer of ’84, they played practically once a week in New York. They were playing by rote, but as Moore told Matter, “It was getting to the point where it was much more physical, too, and much more violent, because that seemed like one way to take it, and so the music was getting really crazed, and we were getting totally insane, and it was getting to the point of overkill.”

  The band started to realize there was nowhere left to go with that approach. Besides, after all the touring, they’d grown tired of playing the same songs over and over. So they retreated to the rehearsal room, where they changed everything about their guitars, from the tuning to the pickups, so they couldn’t play their old songs anymore even if they wanted to. “We killed those songs,” Moore said. And they began working on a whole new batch of music that wasn’t quite so violent.

  Moore and Ranaldo changed or tuned guitars constantly during the live show, sometimes taking up to five minutes between songs and killing the momentum. The solution was little transitional pieces played by whichever guitarist wasn’t changing instruments; either that or they’d play prerecorded sound collages through an amplifier, using source material like church bells, their own rehearsal tapes, the Stooges’ “Not Right,” Lou Reed’s transcendent Metal Machine Music. The between-song sounds solved another problem, too—they drowned out all the heckling the band regularly endured.

  They decided to incorporate those transitional pieces into the next album, with the aid of producer Martin Bisi, who had recorded downtown avantists like Material and Elliott Sharp, as well as many early rappers. It worked like a charm—with no spaces between songs, the album’s two sides went by like a daisy chain of dreams.

  The album leads off with a brief instrumental for several guitars, with a melancholic, meowing slide line playing off a delicate stack of crystalline arpeggios. Then “Brave Men Run” (the title comes from a painting by noted American artist Edward Ruscha) attains a majesty the band had never before reached. “Brave men run in my family,” Gordon murmurs, “Brave men run away from me.” Moore moans through “Society Is a Hole,” a one-chord hymn to big-city anomie, and, like so much of the album, a chant swathed in harsh, intriguing guitar textures and drumming straight from the heart of the urban jungle. Even the album’s bona fide love song, “I Love Her All the Time,” has but one chord, with a noise section in the middle.

  America was a very fashionable subject at the time. The country, plagued by fears of Japan’s overpowering economic rise and terrorism from various Arab nations, suddenly turned very nationalistic. The music world was experiencing similar feelings, spurred by the dominance of precious, synthetic, and oh-so-English pop like the Thompson Twins and Culture Club. There was a sudden profusion of “roots-rock” bands like the Blasters, the D
el Fuegos, and Jason & the Nashville Scorchers; even X and R.E.M. qualified as Americana, while SST’s Meat Puppets came up with their countrified masterpiece Meat Puppets II. Bands like Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, John Cougar Mellencamp, and Bruce Springsteen brought Americana to the mainstream.

  It was against this backdrop that Sonic Youth named their new album Bad Moon Rising, after the 1969 hit by Creedence Clearwater Revival, one of the first and best Americana bands. Taking its title from an old blues term for an ominous situation ahead, Creedence’s “Bad Moon Rising” was a deceptively upbeat song that was really an oblique comment on the war, assassinations, and unrest then ripping the country apart, even as phony flower power and saccharine pop hits attempted to smooth over the maelstrom. That refusal to ignore harsh realities was a sentiment shared and explored much further by Creedence’s more radical contemporaries the MC5, the Stooges, and the Velvet Underground. Sonic Youth tapped into that same refusal.

  Greil Marcus limned the idea in his 1983 Artforum piece on Sonic Youth, calling it “negation.” “Negation is the act that would make it self-evident to everyone that the world is not as it seems,” Marcus wrote, adding that negation had all but disappeared from rock until Sonic Youth. But now the concept was spreading through the American indie underground—bands like Big Black, Killdozer, and the Butthole Surfers were delving into the dark underside of American culture and coming back with some forbidding prizes. It’s no coincidence that all these bands soon forged strong aesthetic and social relationships.

  Creedence’s “Bad Moon Rising” proved to be a very prescient song: the year 1969 saw the Los Angeles–based killings by Charles Manson and his “family”; later in the year the Rolling Stones held their disastrous, era-ending concert at California’s Altamont Speedway. And of course, the Vietnam War was in full swing.

  And 1984 had a lot in common with 1969. The U.S. was intervening in two suspiciously Vietnam-like civil wars (in El Salvador and Nicaragua); banks were failing at a rate not seen since the Depression; homeless people were flooding the streets; a new drug called crack was ravaging America’s cities.

  And so Ronald Reagan’s 1984 campaign slogan that it was “morning in America” rang false to the members of Sonic Youth, who saw the effects of Reagan’s regressive social policies on the streets of New York every day. “That was one of the reasons we wanted to do this Americana-themed record,” Moore says. “In a way, it was a reaction to that.” While many hardcore bands were simplistically hollering, “Reagan sucks!” Sonic Youth came up with a more sophisticated, more thought-provoking, more effective way of saying the same thing.

  The album’s cover shot, by noted art photographer James Welling, features a scarecrow with a flaming jack-o’-lantern for a head, set against a twilit urban skyline. One could not hope for a more foreboding and thoroughly American image. But the band saved their most startling statement about American culture for the album’s finale.

  At rehearsal one day, someone had started banging out a huge, almost heraldic guitar riff. The band had come up with plenty of killer parts like that one but usually discarded them because, Bert says, “they’d rather try to come up with something totally out of this world.” But this one stuck, and Moore wrote the lyrics with Lydia Lunch after he bumped into her on the uptown bus. They called it “Death Valley ’69.”

  The title came from The Family, Ed Sanders’s book about the Charles Manson case. The band had been passing that book and Manson prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter around for months, discussing them at length in the tour van and the rehearsal space. Ostensibly, the lyrics to “Death Valley ’69” are an elliptical but harrowing account of one of the Manson family’s killing sprees, but, as Gordon said, “for us, the song really talks about an entire era of our society.”

  Manson symbolized exactly the ominous side of American smiley-face culture that Sonic Youth wanted to expose. “In a lot of ways, what America is ultimately about is death,” Gordon told Craig Lee of the Los Angeles Times. “California is supposed to be the last frontier, this paradise, so it’s symbolic that the whole Manson thing happened here.”

  The song was later released as a single, with cover art by Savage Pencil, the nom de plume of U.K. music journalist Edwin Pouncey, and it was a watershed for the band. It had started out as a riff that made them laugh because it sounded so much like Sixties biker-rock kings Steppenwolf. But it sounded like Steppenwolf only in the context of everything else the band did—in the real world, it still sounded like Sonic Youth, but it was straightforward enough for newcomers to get a handle on the band. As Hüsker Dü had done with “Eight Miles High,” Sonic Youth had presented a key to their code. And just like “Eight Miles High,” it wound up as one of the most hair-raisingly intense slabs of rock music ever committed to magnetic tape, a masterpiece of murderous, exultant clangor, or as NME’s Mat Snow put it, “a ‘Whole Lotta Love’ for the einsturzende slam-dance generation.”

  But when they completed Bad Moon Rising, they had no idea who was going to release it. It was a very discouraging time for Sonic Youth. They’d enjoyed so much early success—getting written up in hip New York art magazines, making records, touring Europe—“And then all of a sudden it just kind of stopped,” says Ranaldo. “We were moving ahead so fast and yet the world wasn’t caught up enough.” Moore and Ranaldo had a falling out with Branca and were also convinced that Neutral was not paying them proper royalties. So the band now had no label, they were unknown in their own country, and they still needed day jobs. “It was a very poor point,” said Ranaldo. “If there was ever a time when I thought we were gonna break up or something, that was it, because nothing was happening for us.”

  But soon that would all change.

  Back in 1982 Boston-area high school senior Gerard Cosloy read about Sonic Youth in New York Rocker and bought their mini-LP. Reviewing the record in Boston Rock, Cosloy wrote, “Glenn Branca pals who, from the sound of this excellent debut, do some pretty capable puttering around on their own. Metal, noise and ping pong ball rhythms make for a truly mesmerizing mixture. No New York Pt. II swings into full gear and I couldn’t be happier.”

  Down from Boston, Cosloy bumped into Moore at 99 Records, a small but influential Greenwich Village shop (and home of the label that released Branca’s earliest recordings), and they chatted about hardcore. Cosloy sent Moore a pile of copies of his zine Conflict to distribute in New York, and in return Cosloy arranged Sonic Youth’s first Boston show in August ’82.

  Not many people attended that show besides Cosloy, Forced Exposure editor Jimmy Johnson, members of the Boston hardcore band the Proletariat, and legendary Boston scenester Billy Ruane. “Absolutely nobody knew who we were,” says Moore. “There was no scene then.”

  Still, Cosloy had been blown away by their performance. “My response was, ‘Wow, this is totally awesome, this is one of the most exciting rock bands I’ve ever seen,’ ” Cosloy says. “I didn’t get to see Led Zeppelin when they first played, I didn’t get to see the Rolling Stones when they first played, but I kind of doubt they would have affected me the same way even if I had.

  “To me,” Cosloy continues, “it was like, ‘They could be huge right now doing exactly what they’re doing because that’s how good they are.’ And I really believed that.” Cosloy pauses a moment and adds, “I was probably a little naive.”

  After the Boston show, Cosloy and the band became fast friends, with Cosloy crashing at various Sonic Youth apartments whenever he was in New York.

  Then, at age nineteen, Cosloy dropped out of U. Mass. and in the summer of ’84 landed a job at Homestead Records, the newly created label division of the Long Island based distributor Dutch East India Trading, one of many distributors who were eager for a little vertical integration. Cosloy’s responsibilities ranged from “sanitation engineer” to college rep to A&R person. He quickly signed Sonic Youth.

  But the band still had no label in the U.K. and Europe, where they were far more popular. So Moore
made a press kit and sent it to every hip English label he could think of. No one bit except Paul Smith, who ran Doublevision, a new London-based label co-owned by Stephen Mallinder and Richard Kirk of the pioneering English synth-noise duo Cabaret Voltaire. Smith loved the Sonic Youth tape but couldn’t manage to interest Mallinder and Kirk, so he shopped it around to a number of U.K. indies. After meeting with total indifference, Smith started a new label called Blast First just so he could release the new Sonic Youth album.

  Bad Moon Rising came out in March ’85 to little fanfare in the States. Everyone from CMJ to Rolling Stone ignored it. The New York press—who initially liked the band—now criticized Sonic Youth as pretentious, too arty, and intellectual. To some extent, the controversy, far from diminishing the band’s stature, actually raised it by making Sonic Youth a group considered worthy of debate. The band was learning about the power of the press.

  An October ’84 gig at New York’s Pyramid Club had paid only $10. The band could only manage to attract about two dozen people to a Friday night show at Maxwell’s in nearby Hoboken. Gordon and Moore were now making their living as housepainters.

  It was a different story in the U.K, a much smaller country in which a buzz could spread almost instantly. After a few good reviews in the three British music weeklies, Bad Moon Rising sold an impressive five thousand copies there in six months.