Despite the success of Sister, Sonic Youth had grown disenchanted with SST. “SST’s accounting was a bit suspect to us,” Moore says, an alarmingly common complaint of SST bands. The band was also disturbed that the label had also been firing employees. “We didn’t like what was going on over there—it seemed sort of odd,” says Moore. “People we liked were being let go.”
“We felt like there was a little too much of a stoner administrative quality going on out there,” adds Ranaldo. “For as fuzzy-headed a group as we sometimes come across as, that’s really what it came down to—we wanted the business side of what we did to be serious and so the people that dealt with the business, we wanted them to know what was going on when it came time to ask those questions. We just felt like it wasn’t really happening.”
By then Sonic Youth’s sales chart was definitely pointed up, and yet the band felt SST couldn’t, as they say in the music industry, take it to the next level. “SST is growing, but not fast enough for us,” Gordon said.
And they felt SST wasn’t musically what it used to be, perhaps due to the stoner quality Ranaldo had detected. “[Greg Ginn] was signing, like, these bands from North Carolina, bands that he liked, but they were kind of boring compared to what was already there,” Moore says. “He had this thing that a lot of distributors won’t take you seriously unless you have a lot of product. So you become less specialized and you become validated as a label. It was all very uninvolving for me.”
By 1987 SST had started to show unmistakable signs of hubris, such as releasing over eighty titles that year, a ridiculous amount even by major label standards. “Toward the end,” Ranaldo says, “we felt like whatever money was coming in from whatever records were making money was being used to fund a bunch of lame-ass records.”
Unlike bands such as the Minutemen or Saccharine Trust, Sonic Youth had no particular allegiance to SST—it was a business relationship, no more, no less. “They completely respected us,” says Moore, “but we did tell them that we didn’t want to do the next record with them.” Ranaldo describes the split with SST as “very unamicable.” (They eventually resorted to legal recourse to get their master tapes back from the label.) Sonic Youth had replaced the late, great Minutemen as the label’s heart and soul, and the band’s defection hit SST hard, starting off the label’s fairly rapid descent back into obscurity.
Blast First’s Paul Smith had long suggested that Sonic Youth could sell more records than SST was capable of selling. Of course, Smith had his own motives—he wanted Sonic Youth on the upcoming American branch of Blast First, not just because he loved the band, but because it would attract funding to the venture. In 1987 Smith set up a New York office and began trying to lure all the U.K. Blast First artists, including Dinosaur Jr (SST), Big Black (Touch & Go), the Butthole Surfers (Touch & Go), and Sonic Youth. But despite Sonic Youth’s enthusiastic lobbying, none of the other bands made the move. Even worse, Big Black’s Steve Albini was annoyed at them for trying to spirit away the best-selling artists on his good friend Corey Rusk’s Touch & Go label; Sonic Youth’s relationship with Albini was never the same.
Smith struck up a relationship with West Coast–based Enigma Records, which in turn was distributed by Capitol Records and half-owned by EMI, similar to the relationship R.E.M.’s label I.R.S. Records had with the music biz behemoth MCA Records. Smith convinced the band to go along for the ride. And so Sonic Youth did the seemingly unthinkable and edged ever so gradually into the major label world.
Indie paragons like Maximumrocknroll, the Dead Kennedys’ Jello Biafra, and the band MDC all preached strongly against dealing with corporate America. But at the same time, many alumni of the indie scene, from college radio DJs to people who had gotten their start packing boxes at indie distributors, were starting to get substantial positions at major labels. Naturally, they were looking to work with bands they knew and liked.
Moore felt independent labels had lost what made them good in the first place, which was that they didn’t try to compete on any level with the majors. But, noting the steady growth in their sales, indie labels had lately begun to aim higher. “The whole thing of becoming bigger and bigger to me was wrong,” Moore said. “You should find a great neutrality and just stay there and maintain that force.”
Unfortunately, capitalism doesn’t work that way—the indie scene wasn’t an alternative network of dedicated music fans anymore; it was now just another industry looking for increased market share—and not doing it very well. If that was the case, Sonic Youth figured, why not work with people who knew what they were doing? “I didn’t feel any allegiance for the independent scene anymore, that’s for sure,” said Moore, “because it was in disarray as far as I was concerned.”
There had been the possibility of going straight to a major label, but Moore shrewdly decided against that just yet—going with a major would delay the release date of the new album, and he wanted it to come out at the end of the year, boosting its chances for a strong finish in the important Village Voice Pazz & Jop poll. Sure enough, Daydream Nation, recorded for a mere $30,000, finished second behind Public Enemy’s landmark It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. Rolling Stone also piled on the hosannas, not only placing the album second in its critics’ poll, but naming Sonic Youth “Hot Band” in its “Hot” issue and placing the album at number forty-five on its list of the hundred best albums of the Eighties. The album was number one on CMJ’s year-end chart; in the U.K. it topped the independent charts of both the NME and Melody Maker.
And with reason: the album mixed the streamlined propulsion of Sister and the jagged high drama of EVOL, all executed by a band at the peak of their powers. The music is shot through with all kinds of strikingly vivid feelings: joy, ennui, sensuality, cynicism, frenzy, poignancy. Laden with guitar hooks, well recorded, and meticulously structured, it flows, like Bad Moon Rising, in one long blurt, with many passages so dense and ingeniously arranged, they border on the orchestral. The cover art, a photo-realist painting of a burning candle by distinguished German painter Gerhard Richter, seemed to speak of faith, illumination, and a righteous constancy that would eventually overwhelm the blithe ignorance of the “daydream nation” the U.S. had become.
Unfortunately, Capitol had no idea what to do with Enigma’s releases; consequently, it was difficult to find Daydream Nation in stores. “Enigma was basically a cheap-jack Mafioso outfit, I guess,” Moore concluded. “You can quote me on that, but I’m not quite sure how truthful that is. That was the impression we were given.”
The band placed much of the blame on Paul Smith, who was already on thin ice with them ever since Blast First’s 1986 double-LP live set, Walls Have Ears. The album documents two incredible Sonic Youth performances, one with Bert on drums and one with Shelley; although the sound was not so good, the packaging was done with care. The problem was the band knew nothing about it until Smith presented them with finished copies. “[Smith] really thought we were going to be so pleased with it, that it was going to be like opening a surprise package at Christmas,” says Ranaldo. “He was totally flabbergasted when we were horrified by it.” Sonic Youth took swift legal action and forced Smith to halt production of Walls Have Ears at about two thousand copies. And yet two thousand copies was all it took for the album to make the U.K. indie charts, where it resided for several weeks.
The band parted ways with a crestfallen Smith after the Enigma debacle and began shopping for a major label deal. Several labels were interested, but the band was most interested in Geffen. Among other people, they consulted Bob Mould on how to negotiate a major label contract, and Mould counseled them to retain creative control, among other points. Sonic Youth wound up with a unique deal that, among other things, gave the band members the ability to sign other bands. By letting such things be known, and talking a good game, the band preserved their underground credibility through the transition.
Their 1990 major label debut, Goo, continued the streamlining of their sound and songs, goin
g in for a far more conventional rock approach. The album debuted at number one on the CMJ charts and even made the Billboard Top 100. Then Neil Young invited them on a tour for his latest comeback album, Ragged Glory. Although Sonic Youth was met by massive indifference by Young’s audience, it was a significant toe-dip into the mainstream; conversely, Young benefited from a massive hipness infusion from Sonic Youth and repeatedly called “Expressway to Yr. Skull” “the greatest guitar song of all time.”
Yet being on a major label was not always so glorious. “It’s not really very exciting,” Ranaldo revealed. “It’s frightening.” Still, the band continued with Geffen throughout the Nineties, sustaining its large cult following with a long string of albums that were by turns intriguing, visceral, dark, puzzling, joyous, cerebral, and moving.
Why did Sonic Youth succeed when all of their peers—bands like Live Skull, Rat At Rat R, and the Swans—eventually fell by the wayside? “In a lot of ways, Sonic Youth are trailblazers but in a lot of ways they’re followers,” Bob Bert observes. “A lot of times they were jumping on bandwagons and stuff. They were really good at that.”
That may be so, but there’s no taking away the fact that they were (and remain) a great band. Another, more practical reason is that unlike their peers, Sonic Youth simply managed to stay together; their personal and collective longevity was vastly helped by the fact that they never got stuck in the quagmire of heavy drugs. And although it would be easy to assume that Gordon and Moore would side together on most issues, it was in fact as likely for the two of them to disagree with each other as with anyone else in the band. Gordon and Moore rarely seemed to discuss band issues among themselves, which was surely as good for their relationship as it was for the band’s.
But all that meant nothing without the band’s relentless determination. “We were very focused on what we wanted,” Moore says, “even though we never knew what was going to happen from one month to the next. But we were focused on how we wanted to exist.” So when the band wanted to tour Europe, they made that happen; when they wanted to sign to SST, they made that happen; when they went to a proper major label, they did so on their own terms.
According to Moore, squabbling within the band was remarkably minimal. “We always got along fairly well through those indie years,” Moore says, then struggles to recall an instance of band disharmony. “I remember Lee being in Phoenix and coming out of a rest stop with an ice cream,” he says, “and I remember getting really bitter toward him because I couldn’t afford to have one.”
Many bands begin to fragment when one member starts to take control. The members of Sonic Youth had read enough rock history to know not to repeat that mistake. But perhaps more important, that same sense of history—as well as each member’s formidable cool—had made them each too self-conscious to, as Ranaldo puts it, “start wearing silk scarves and prance in front of the other three onstage.”
And best of all, Sonic Youth inhabited a charmed zone where they were successful enough to keep going and yet low profile enough to elude the compromises of success. Although each record sold more than the last, there were no spikes in their sales graph that would have prematurely attracted the attentions of the mainstream music business. “Luckily, we were smart enough in the early days to work it out so we were making enough money to subsist off it,” says Ranaldo. “We never went for the stupid route that might have given us a lot of cash in the short term but also would have been the death knell.”
But no one ever believed the band would last as long as it has. “When I was in the band, there was never even a thought that we’d even be around five years later,” says Bert. “There was no thought of it ever being much beyond a tiny little footnote in Lower East Side history.”
By the early Nineties, the band had become more famous for being influential than for their music. “Interviewers would say, ‘Why are you significant?’ Or, ‘How does it feel to be influential?’ ” says Gordon. “And it became this catchphrase, whereas nobody actually talked about why we were influential.
“We were influential,” Gordon concludes, “in showing people that you can make any kind of music you want.”
CHAPTER 8
BUTTHOLE SURFERS
MELODY MAKER INTERVIEWER: ARE THE BUTTHOLES CLOSER TO GOD OR SATAN?
GIBBY HAYNES: GOD, DEFINITELY. WHY TAKE A CHANCE?
The Butthole Surfers really seemed like they were from another planet. Upon first hearing, their music inspired the nearly universal reaction, “What the hell is this?” It was creepy and dark and ugly and weird. Admitting you liked it would probably lose you some friends. And that was nothing compared to their live shows, depraved acid hallucinations of transgression and horror that were often physically dangerous to band and audience alike.
And in a way, the Buttholes really were from another planet: Texas, to be exact. The Lone Star State was largely out of the cultural loop, even the underground loop. But that didn’t mean it didn’t have its fair share of artists, misfits, and rebels; more than most places in the country, bands made their own fun there, and thanks to the vast quantities of sunshine, both liquid and otherwise, the fun wound up being pretty bizarre. By the time the rest of the country found out about what was going on there, the underground scene in Texas had become a weird, inbred mutation.
Although they were galvanized by bands like Black Flag and Public Image, Ltd., the Butthole Surfers weren’t punk rock in the generally accepted sense of the term. Their music was too eclectic and acid-fried for that, largely free of the rage and angst that typified the genre. In fact, it had a lot to do with the newly coined genre of performance art that had begun to sweep the art world in the early Eighties. But in terms of doing-it-yourself, being confrontational, and assuming an overall damn-the-torpedoes attitude, they were punk rock 100 percent. It was a completely self-invented, self-willed band—they produced their own records, booked their own tours, designed their own album covers, and staged their own increasingly ornate stage shows.
And yet this enigmatic band would never reveal their motives. Were they out to frighten? Insult? Seduce? Repel? Rebel? Or merely to entertain? It was hard to tell, which may have been precisely the point: the underground had noted the fate of painfully sincere, classically oriented bands like Hüsker Dü and the Replacements and begun championing bands who favored sensationalism over emotion, experimentation over classicism. The Buttholes, always up for a good submersion in the fetid cesspools of the psyche, were a reminder that the underground was still the rightful preserve of some of the culture’s most bizarre manifestations.
With vocals hollered incomprehensibly through bullhorns, wild jungle drumming summoning up an unholy blend of violence and lust, gory films, dry-ice foggers, strobes, and a naked dancer short-circuiting every last brain cell of every last member of the audience, the Butthole Surfers were the real deal: while many underground bands tried to express insanity by making meticulously insane music, the Butthole Surfers allowed their genuine perversity to dismantle their music completely.
When the Butthole Surfers played, it was like a twisted circus had come to town. It was a low-budget performance art spectacle that Spin’s Dean Kuipers once called “a gypsy commune of killer clowns reveling in their own morbid fascinations.” And yet, Kuipers went on to point out, the band was disgusting but not offensive. This was probably because their grotesquerie was at once so inward-looking and yet universal—everyone appreciates a good doody joke.
In 1982 Jeffrey “King” Coffey was “a friendly, goofy, sixteen-year-old kid” playing in a Fort Worth hardcore band called the Hugh Beaumont Experience and publishing a fanzine called Throbbing Cattle. In the midst of the infernal Texas summer, he and a buddy took a Greyhound bus down to Austin to check out a crazy band they’d been hearing about.
When they walked into the Ritz club on Austin’s rowdy Sixth Street, they were blown away. It wasn’t just the fact that the place was packed with punk rockers, which was an amazing thing to see in Texas in 19
82—it was the people onstage. “Here was this band that didn’t really look like a punk rock band—they just looked weird,” says Coffey. “It was more of a performance art kind of thing. And they were playing this weird, hideous music.”
The singer had dozens of clothespins stuck in his hair and was wearing nothing but underpants and occasionally making unspeakable noises with a saxophone. The guitarist was rocking back and forth, glaring psychotically at a wall of the club like he was going to kill it. The bass player had his hair in a pompadour the shape of the Alamo. “They just looked like dweebs,” Coffey recalls, “but really fuckin’ scary dweebs.”
The singer was Gibson “Gibby” Haynes and he was no stranger to show biz. He happened to be the son of Jerry Haynes, better known as Mr. Peppermint, longtime host of a popular kiddie TV show in the Dallas–Fort Worth area. Although he was a “freak” in high school, the six-foot-four Haynes had also been a top student and star basketball player; on an athletic scholarship to San Antonio’s Trinity University, he studied economics, was named “Accountant of the Year,” was captain of the basketball team, and graduated with honors. After graduating in 1981, he got a job with the prestigious accounting firm Peat, Marwick and Mitchell and was on track for a lucrative career.
But by then he had hooked up with Trinity art and business student and Frank Zappa fan Paul Leary Walthall, who soon shortened his name to Paul Leary. Leary had grown up on proletarian rock like Creedence Clearwater Revival and his beloved Grand Funk Railroad, but his tastes broadened once he got to art school. Besides punk rock, one of his favorite discoveries was Sixties conceptual artist Yves Klein, who once put on a performance that involved a ten-piece orchestra playing a C-major chord for twenty minutes while three naked women, covered in blue paint, rolled around on a canvas under his direction.
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