And yet turnouts were disappointing. “We thought we were going to be greeted by cheering crowds everywhere,” Ranaldo says, “but there were plenty of shows where there was just a handful of people.” American bands, they realized, got a much better reception in Europe. “It was far more difficult to impress an American audience than a European audience, just because of the wealth of great stuff that happens here compared to over there and also because audiences are far more critical here than they are over there,” says Ranaldo. “We were going out west and trying to make it in the land of SST, where they didn’t need another good band—they had amazing bands all around their home turf.”
Sonic Youth began to realize that it might be a good idea to find a new label, even a major to help broaden their audience. “At that time, there was no such thing as ‘Be proud to be indie,’ ” Moore says. “Being indie was just sort of like, there was nothing else you could be—major labels had no interest.” Sometimes a feeler would go out, though—Warner Brothers had once asked for a copy of Bad Moon Rising. “And they called back,” Moore recalls, “and they said, ‘Are you sure this is the one we asked for, because this is just a bunch of noise—it’s just crap.’ So there was still this complete chasm there of aesthetics and values.”
The band was fascinated with SST and felt it would be for them. In fact, they seemed to be actively campaigning to get signed to the indie powerhouse. All along the tour, Moore scrawled graffiti on dressing room walls that said “Hello to Black Flag from Sonic Youth,” knowing Ginn and company would soon be coming through town; Gordon pointedly praised Raymond Pettibon’s work at length in the April ’85 Artforum.
In retrospect, even the whole Creedence/1969/Americana concept seems like a calculated attempt to ingratiate themselves with SST: Manson had been a frequent subject of SST illustrator Raymond Pettibon for years; SST’s beloved Minutemen outspokenly championed Creedence Clearwater Revival. “Raymond Pettibon and John Fogerty are our heroes,” Moore proclaimed in a Forced Exposure interview. “They’re our life’s blood.”
And the feeling was mutual—almost. Although SST partners Greg Ginn, Chuck Dukowski, and Mugger were interested in Sonic Youth, Joe Carducci wasn’t. “Record collectors shouldn’t be in bands” Carducci is said to have grumbled, and since SST signing decisions had to be unanimous, that was that. But shortly after Carducci left the label in early 1986—and legend has it that it was minutes after he left—Ginn called Moore and Gordon and offered to sign Sonic Youth. They quickly accepted.
“It was the first real record company we were on that we really would have given anything to be on,” says Ranaldo. “Homestead picked us up and did great things for us, but they were just some really little start-up company. SST was like nirvana.”
Moore broke the news to a very shocked and saddened Cosloy. “He wasn’t too happy about it,” Moore says, “but he dealt with it.”
Now Sonic Youth was on the same label as Black Flag and the Meat Puppets. “We got into the whole SST family,” says Moore. “And that was great because we were really into their whole enterprise. They were involved with the American youth music movement, which we really saw as being really credible and contemporary.”
After intensive rehearsals that winter, they began recording their SST debut in March ’86.
They called the album EVOL, after a piece by video artist Tony Oursler. The reverse spelling represented the flip side of the same vapid, failed, hippie ethos they had pilloried in Bad Moon Rising. That “evol” is also short for “evolution” was only fitting, since with Shelley’s arrival the band began the dramatic ascent to their artistic peak. Shelley was a big part of this rise—precise, powerful, and inventive, his playing both nailed down the beat and suggested all kinds of possibilities the music didn’t seem to have before. The music was now suffused with ragalike crescendos, and an Eastern feeling pervaded many of the new songs.
At the same time, the band’s music was starting to acknowledge, ever so slightly, more conventional music. This was the mid-Eighties, when the likes of Bruce Springsteen and Prince were making mainstream music interesting again. “All of a sudden there was a lot of songs you didn’t mind getting caught humming on the street again,” Ranaldo says. “And we were in a position where it didn’t go against our set of morals as underground hardcore avantists to like a Madonna song.”
The members of Sonic Youth were fans of pop art and the fertile juxtapositions of postmodernism, then all the rage in intellectual and art circles, and their iconoclastic embrace of Madonna did have ironic and academic aspects, but for all their artistic pretensions, they were also just like anyone else who had grown up in America in the Sixties and Seventies and grooved to AM pop radio. “We were just pulling influences from wherever we found them and not worrying about the way in which they clashed together,” says Ranaldo, “because something about that kind of juxtaposition was as interesting to us as anything else.” And besides, turn-about is fair play: mainstream culture was avidly assimilating the underground at the time, with MTV and even Madison Avenue appropriating avant-garde film innovations, the federal government making grants to provocative performance artists, major corporations investing in painters like Julian Schnabel and David Salle.
In the spirit of dancing with the mainstream, EVOL marked the public beginning of Sonic Youth’s long fascination with celebrity, something that had kicked into a yet higher gear in America with the rise of MTV and Reagan’s telecentric presidency—the album has a song called “Madonna, Sean and Me,” another called “Marilyn Moore”; “Starpower” posits the idea of lover as celebrity (or vice versa). But EVOL also extracted a grimy beauty from the grit and menace of mid-Eighties New York, a city that encompassed almost dizzying extremes of splendor and squalor. The songs were far more melodious than ever before; the arrangements ranged from huge and dramatic to hushed and intimate, the recording far better than anything they’d previously attempted. EVOL served notice that Sonic Youth was not just a “noise band”—there were actual songs; even the rave-ups were orchestrated.
The band was now in such control of its power that it could rein it in to produce music that was refined and often quite beautiful, especially in two showcases for Gordon’s new breathy, dreamy delivery. On “Secret Girls,” she recites enigmatic poetry, sighing softly after each line while a forlorn piano plays as if in the next room, guitar noise even farther in the distance. Loosely based on Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train, “Shadow of a Doubt” comes off as a tightly constructed dream. A guitar plinks like an underwater koto; “Kiss me in the shadow / kiss me in the shadow of doubt,” Gordon whispers between sensual crescendos.
Perhaps inspired by Madonna, Gordon had cut her hair, begun dressing more stylishly, and dispensed with the oversize glasses she used to wear—and in the process became something of an indie rock heartthrob. “I definitely know I’m a woman and what that means,” said Gordon at the time. “Now I might be more conscious of it than in the past. Sexuality is something I’m deeply interested in.”
“Expressway to Yr. Skull” was the album’s finale, its magnum opus. “We’re gonna kill the California girls….” Moore sings the first line, dreamily, like some homicidal twist on a Beach Boys lyric. The song builds to a cataclysm, Moore’s slide guitar wailing like an air raid siren, then back down to a meditative, after-the-storm feeling, the whole roller-coaster ride ending with a good three minutes of Moore and Ranaldo drawing sounds from their guitars like the music of the spheres, or maybe the sonorous decay of the closing piano chord of the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life.”
The move to SST instantly catapulted Sonic Youth out of the New York art ghetto and onto a national stage. None of their New York peers ever made a comparable leap. It helped that at the same time, Sonic Youth had come up with an artistic breakthrough of an album. Released in May ’86, EVOL made the band more accessible and strengthened their alloy of the physical (Stooges) and the cerebral (John Cage), not only embodying the debate then beginning to
peak in the art world about “high” and “low” art, but perpetuating a hybrid that rock music had been exploring since the Beatles’ Revolver and on through the Velvets, Roxy Music, Mission of Burma, and beyond.
Back before the term got too specified, Sonic Youth often got tagged as “industrial,” but that wasn’t quite it. Particularly in the mid-Eighties, New York was a veritable symphony of clangs, clanks, booms, thuds, buzzes, and hums; any resident whose ears had been opened by John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen (not to mention the frenzied free jazz of Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, and Eric Dolphy) became a connoisseur of noises. “That stuff can’t be discounted, how important an idea those cityscape sounds are,” Ranaldo says. “The early periods of this band couldn’t have happened anywhere but New York.”
The band also took ideas from conceptual art and media-savvy, urban angst-ridden artists like Robert Longo and Cindy Sherman. They were also big Warhol fans, especially for the way Warhol, like Sonic Youth, mixed high art and popular culture. The music itself was the sonic analogue of the monumental, rough-hewn, and yet thoroughly premeditated and marked neo-expressionist art that was the height of New York hip, but that was probably unconscious. Far more conscious were the band’s use of avant-garde movements like cut-up art, which they adapted for their lyrics, and “appropriation art,” which they adapted for their album covers.
Even the bands that Sonic Youth made sure to champion were, in a way, appropriated art, things that were recontextualized and made to shed new light on Sonic Youth itself. Sonic Youth no doubt loved these bands, but the association with groups like Dinosaur Jr, Mudhoney, and Nirvana also served to take the arty edge off Sonic Youth and emphasize their rock side (conversely, the other bands gained an artsy association they might not otherwise have gotten). “A lot of bands,” says Ranaldo, “are trying to present themselves as a singular entity in the center of it all. And I think we’ve always been the exact opposite, trying to present ourselves amidst a universe or a society of stuff going on.”
The band set out on a six-week U.S. tour in June ’86 with their beloved European booking agent Carlos van Hijfte as tour manager. Van Hijfte had never been in the U.S. or even road-managed a tour, but the band didn’t care—he was their friend and they wanted to show him America. Also along for the ride were soundman Terry Pearson and a preposterously gigantic silver boom box that spewed anything from Black Sabbath to their beloved Madonna on the endless drives down the interstates.
There was a good crowd in Raleigh, where they’d played four distant years before on the Savage Blunder tour to approximately ten people. But elsewhere in the South it was a different story: desolate gigs in New Orleans, Houston, Dallas, and Austin with perhaps fifty people in the audience. Shelley estimates the crowd never exceeded 350 on the whole tour. They hooked up for several dates with fellow SST band Saccharine Trust, starting in Tucson, where the club billed the show as a hardcore night, hoping to draw the music’s built-in audience. But the hardcore kids of Tucson, no fools, stayed away in droves and the show was a bust. A confrontation ensued when the club allegedly refused to pay the bands their guarantee. “The club owners are sub-moronic with very low IQ’s, cheeze business suits and pistols packed neath their vests,” wrote Moore in a tour diary for Forced Exposure. “They ripped us and Saccharine off for big bux.”
Then it was over to Southern California, up the coast to Seattle, a long haul to Denver, and a punishing twelve-hour drive in the July heat to Kansas City. “All day in the van roof melting drops of corrugated scuzz on our 100 degree parched skin,” wrote Moore in his tour diary. “Sweating and shitty and irritable. Living hell.” In Michigan they picked up Dinosaur Jr, who had recently released their debut album on Homestead. The Dinosaur guys were awed by their heroes. “They were so good and their shows were different every night and they were angry as shit on stage,” Dinosaur bassist Lou Barlow recalls. “Kim’s bass was fucking up and she’d be like, ‘Urgh,’ all uptight about it.”
Now that the band was on SST, the mainstream music industry was beginning to take notice: music biz house organ Billboard praised a show at L.A.’s Roxy. “Although the band may be too raw and uncompromisingly experimental for many listeners,” wrote reviewer Chris Morris, “Sonic Youth is unmistakably rewriting the vocabulary of the electric guitar in the ’80s.” Even People acknowledged the band, albeit in a backhanded way: “Meanwhile, out on the lunatic fringe…” the EVOL review began, going on to term the album the “aural equivalent of a toxic waste dump.” And that was a positive review.
Respected New York Times critic Robert Palmer decreed that Sonic Youth was “making the most startlingly original guitar-based music since Jimi Hendrix” while a Melody Maker year-end roundup of 1986’s best albums (EVOL was number twenty-two), said, “EVOL is a murderous crush of perversity, paranoia and naked, twisted visions of blind rage, solitary insanity and silent, thoughtful violence. With truly modern psychedelia, erotic sex and pounding, mindless brutality, it is a cruising, careering mix of variety and movement.” “Starpower,” released as a single with the noisiest parts edited out, vastly raised the band’s profile on college radio; at number twelve, EVOL was the highest indie entry on CMJ’s 1986 year-end chart.
Each Sonic Youth record was selling more than the last; each was getting more praise and airplay than the last. And musically, the band was progressing by leaps and bounds. They were perfectly poised to capitalize on all the hard work.
They recorded the follow-up to EVOL in the spring of ’87 at Sear Sound in midtown Manhattan; the studio boasted a vintage sixteen-track, vacuum-tube board—technologically it was out-dated, but the band wanted the unique “warmth” of the tube sound. “You can hear, actually, the sound of the tubes on the record,” Moore claimed. “You can hear the coils kind of, like, relating to each other, in a way.”
But perhaps the band was emulating the working method of one of their favorite new writers, William Gibson, who wrote his pioneering “cyberpunk” novels not on a computer but on an ancient manual typewriter. Or maybe they hoped the “dirty” sound of tubes would compensate for their musicianship and songwriting, which were cleaner than ever.
Unlike any of their previous records, Sister is mostly up-tempo, with the band rocking out often, clearly for the sheer joy of it—they even cover the garagey “Hotwire My Heart” by the early San Francisco punk band Crime, which was the indie equivalent of the Stones covering a Slim Harpo tune. The tunings were not as harsh and dissonant as before, the changes less arty—many numbers are downright sleek by comparison to their previous material. But this was still Sonic Youth, and despite all the catchy hooks, no song except for “Hotwire My Heart” has anything resembling pop music’s standard verse-chorus-verse structure.
With Sister the band reached its fullest realization—for a long time afterward, anything else would be perfecting a formula. “Between EVOL and Sister, they basically defined Sonic Youth, in sonic terms,” says Steve Albini, “and they have stayed within those parameters ever since.”
Some of the lyrics weaved in themes from visionary science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, who had replaced Charles Manson as the band’s obsession. Dick had written Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?—the basis of the film Blade Runner—and his dark vision of a beat-up, glitch-laden high-tech future fit well with Sonic Youth’s approach, from their fascination with dystopia to their embrace of outdated electronics. Like Dick, Sonic Youth found beauty and genuineness in the messed-up and broken—like a bloodied hand bashing down on the groaning strings of a banged-up Japanese Telecaster copy.
SONIC YOUTH IN A PHOTO SESSION FOR DAYDREAM NATION,1988, STANDING IN FRONT OF THE APARTMENT BUILDING OF THE LEGENDARY AVANT-GARDE COMPOSER LA MONTE YOUNG.
MICHAEL LAVINE
The album title refers to Dick’s twin sister, who died shortly after birth, while the song title “Schizophrenia” refers to a Dick story and ultimately to the author himself, whose mental health began to fail in his later years. But only a couple
of Sister songs actually have anything directly to do with Dick’s writings. More prevalent is Christian imagery, which appears in nearly all of Moore’s songs, notably “Catholic Block,” “Cotton Crown,” “White Cross,” and even “Schizophrenia,” where a character proclaims that “Jesus had a twin who knew nothing about sin.”
As in Confusion Is Sex, Gordon’s songs often deal in images of abuse by speaking in the voice of the persecutor—in “Beauty Lies in the Eye,” she murmurs, “Hey fox, come here / Hey beautiful, come here, sugar”; “Let’s go for a ride somewhere / I won’t hurt you,” she says in the creepy “Pacific Coast Highway.” Out in America, a lot of young women were listening, especially those who later made up the Riot Grrrl movement, which particularly decried sexual abuse, harassment, and assault, and Gordon became an influential and highly visible role model for a generation of young women about to form their own bands.
Although it didn’t quite equal EVOL, Sister had the bigger impact on the indie world when it was released in June ’87. Years of hard touring, plenty of glowing press, the powerful SST cachet, a decent showing on college radio, and the most inviting music the band had yet made all conspired to sell sixty thousand copies of Sister. The album reached number twelve in that year’s Village Voice Pazz & Jop poll—the first Sonic Youth album to crack the top twenty of that influential list.
By the summer of ’88, as it became increasingly apparent that the patrician Republican candidate for president, George Bush, would trounce his feckless Democratic opponent, Michael Dukakis, ensuring yet four more years of Reaganism, the band entered SoHo’s Greene Street Studios to record by far their most ambitious album yet, the classic Daydream Nation.
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