This story is true, more or less.
And this is where it happens, upstairs from the writhing and grinding of
the New York Dolls strip club, up here in rooms crowded with the
frustrated young cannibals of wall street and the nearby World Trade center
towers. They come slouching in after work, to remove their neckties,
to plug in their electric guitars, to shout and rumble with overwrought
fury through endless renditions of "Sympathy For the Devil" or something
by the Doobie Brothers or Fleetwood Mac or
some other faded icon.
And for some that is enough. This is paradise.
This is also home to Sonic Youth,
veterans of the avant-garde and punk and No Wave
and wild improvisational noise. The quartet's new studio and headquarters
is sandwiched in this ancient brick building between floors
rented to Manhattan's
rock'n'roll' hobbyists.
Its a sign of the band's unity after more than 16 years together, making
music equally profound and grating, monstrous and pure, even if they can't
agree on what to call the place: Tribecca Recording Studio? Echo
Canyun? Second Home? Steve's Place?
But now, all Sonic Youth operations momentarily stop as sound engineer Wharton Teirs pauses to listen to the shouting and labored drum rolls coming from the floor below. "Is that the chick singer," he asks with a wicked grin, "or the guy who sounds like a chick singer?"
Not that it matters. Guitarist
Lee Ranaldo is just hoping it stops, as he prepares
to overdub another delicate layer of noise onto "Woodland Ode," a song
destined to appear on Sonic Youth's next album, A Thousand
Leaves. He untangles
a cable and plugs it into an
electric guitar. "One of the worst things about this
place is that you have to hear the worst fucking riffs over and over,"
says Ranaldo, "both below and above you."
He's not complaining exactly, since the hapless playing here every weeknight is more amusing than irritating. Much of the building acts like a kind of dating service, putting like-minded musicians together to live out their adolescent rock fantasies after a long day chasing profits. A fine idea, really, and one that rarely conflicts with the serious work of Sonic Youth, who do their recording in the daylight hours. But the band's self-imposed deadline for finishing the album is only weeks away, with most of the vocals and the usual tinkering yet to be done. Which suggests things are somehow no different now than when Sonic Youth began as a quartet of young, atonal punks playing cheap pawnshop guitars.
"In some ways we're just as inept now as we were then, and it might be a saving grace," says Ranaldo, graying now at the temples. "We know how to work together pretty well, but it never seems to get formulaic." He describes the band's creative trajectory as "a really jagged line. We're not, in some sense, professional technicians at what we do. We work off what's in our heads. So it comes out different every time."
Different, but recognizable.
In a moment, Ranaldo is bent over his guitar, picking and strumming, working
out the song's final bits of inflection, mood and cascading melody, built
upon an exotic alternate guitar tuning known only to himself and
the note book at his feet.
With a sound both contemplative and aggressive, Sonic
Youth still trades in the same kind of howling feedback, the same tangled
chaos of electric guitars that launched them at the beginning
of the 1980s.
Sonic Youth had its brief fling with mainstream, back when the confusing success of Nirvana seemed to open a door for rock rooted in the raw esthetic of punk. Sonic Youth flirted with traditional song structures, toured with Neil Young & Crazy Horse, headlined Lollapalooza and even scored a modest hit with "Kool Thing." But the pop breakthrough never came. So now guitarists Ranaldo and Thuston Moore, guitarist/bassist Kim Gordon and drummer Steve Shelly have set all that aside, returning casually to the bold exploration of their earliest days. With most of them now in their forties, the band is crafting some of the most challenging music of their career.
Clues to their present direction first emerged over the last year on a trio of self-produced EPs quietly released on their own SYR label. The music was impossibly jagged and frayed, all white noise and harmonic intensity, somehow managing to sound both twisted and rollicking on wayward instrumental tracks that often stretched beyond 20 minutes.
"It's always been important to us to keep challenging ourselves," Gordon says. "Every band, when they start writing new songs, there is a certain amount of suspended disbelief that goes on, where you have to feel like you're starting for the first time. This record, I really felt like we were in our first rehearsal space and just playing with that certain amount of freedom and lack of self-consciousness."
Look no further than Sonic Youth's new clubhouse for signs of growing independence from the rock'n'roll marketplace. They've been here less than a year, but the place already feels like home. A row of 29 battered electric guitars is stacked against one corner. Christmas lights shaped like chili peppers dangle above Shelly's drumkit. And the walls are covered in posters and flyers: of a young and inscrutable Joni Mitchell, of punk heroines Patti Smith and Lydia Lunch, of a vintage Jermaine Jackson in full afro, shirtless and reclining on the beach. In the bathroom is a signed portrait of damaged Beach Boy Brian Wilson, looking typically uncomfortable: "To Thurston, Many thanks for all the kind words in my movie!"
A Thousand Leaves slowly emerged here amidst the scattered cables, amplifiers, microphones and the band's 16-track recording equipment. It's a scene that was unimaginable a decade ago, when the band rehearsed in grim isolation for the acclaimed Evol album in an eight-by-ten concrete bunker. And it reflects the rare economic freedom Sonic Youth enjoys as proud members of the Geffen Records roster. They've survived at the label largely as a prestige act even as other bands of their ilk and sales figures (never more than 300,000 worldwide) have been let go elsewhere. The strength of Sonic Youth's influence, reputation and longevity now allows them this headlong return towards the most dissonant of pop, recently earning them standing ovations during a mostly instrumental performance at New York's prestigious Lincoln Center.
The usual pop music venues hardly seem appropriate, not for Sonic Youth or the generation of art-damaged punks that have followed them. "Sleater-Kinney doesn't need MTV. Sonic Youth doesn't need MTV at this point," insists Ranaldo, though his own 12-year-old son is a dedicated follower of the Wu-Tang Clan. "It's just a different thing. There was a time when success meant selling a lot of records, and having songs that everybody knew. At this point, a lot of people have come to realize that it doesn't matter."
Noise. This is noise. Thurston Moore is in the midst of a freeform jam without pause or explanation, sitting in during a visit to Los Angeles with a band led by guitarist Nels Cline. Also on stage is Mike Watt, in bushy beard and buttoned up pea coat, plucking at his bass in sweaty ecstasy. The sound is confrontational, painful, self-absorbed , loud.
"I don't understand it," says a cocktail waitress with a shrug. Near the back of this small club, one man is taking it all in from a fetal position, curled up on a couch. And maybe there is nothing to understand anyway. Here beneath the mirror ball, and facing a crowd of mostly mute, blank faces, the quintet is playing a jarring, perhaps unlistenable racket. Some of the elements are recognizable from the work of Moore and Watt, but it's not what earned these players their reputations or what probably drew this sold-out crowd. This isn't pop or punk or even songs. And when it's over, half the crowd is already gone.
"I had no idea it was going to be so relentless," Moore says with a smile after stepping off the stage, his straight blond bangs hanging over his eyes. "Mike Watt just wanted to play all night."
Here was the old approach of free-form improvisation via electric guitars that Moore has embraced again. It's an important part of his repertoire, during his occasional live sessions with the likes of Nels Cline, or when playing with his own trio in New York, unraveling his guitar against the beat of two drummers. For Moore, these moments are less about the jam and more about instant composition, finding a harsh beauty within the chaos. But he's not surprised that much of tonight's L.A. crowd drifted off. "Regardless of whether they loved it or hated it or it didn't mean anything to them, it was a different musical experience than they would have had otherwise," he says. "So I didn't feel bad about it."
Weeks later, Moore is still thinking about all this in a room filled with book cases devoted to volumes on the Beat generation and punk rock, in the Soho apartment he shares' with his wife Kim Gordon and their daughter, Coco. He's watched this music develop across two decades. Now sitting at a table and sipping water from a plastic Winnie the Pooh cup, he can still talk excitedly about the early New York punk scene he witnessed as A: Television [the short hair!] and Patti Smith [the poetry!] and the Ramones [the sound of the street!]. The wrecked ambiance of CBGBs was home then.
The door slams and there she is, barely 3 ft. tall and trailed by her nanny. "Hey, Coco!" her father says cheerfully. Coco Gordan Moore steps into the room chewing on a granola bar after her first day of roller skating. Three years old, she wears a red bow in her bright blond hair and a faux-leopard skin coat over a pink shirt. "You didn't fall?" Moore asks her. "You know what, Coco, we can go ice skating, too."
She seems to take the suggestion well, even if that's a minor thrill for a toddler who's already seen the road from a Lollapalooza tour bus. Later, she's running back into the room, shouting "Daddy, watch this!" as she attempts her splits, and she slides slowly to the floor. "Uh-oh."
Lollapalooza is a prized gig for any young band. But headlining the 1995 festival proved a strange quandary for Sonic Youth. As pioneers of the indie underground that had made the career's of Jane's Addiction and Nirvana possible, Sonic Youth was an obvious, proper choice. But even after the MTV success of "Kool thing," the band was still better known among critics than casual rock fans. So in some cities, many fans exited after watching the exploding celebrity spectacle of Courtney Love and Hole, leaving the mighty Sonic Youth to face a less than packed house.
"Each step of the way I go in not expecting very much," Shelley says of the bands career. "And when something bad, like people leaving during your show, happens, it's like: 'Oh well, I wasn't really supposed to be here in the first place.' It's sort of like we got into the music business as spies."
Lollapalooza was also the band's last version of a straight rock show, with lights, effects and stage decorations. It was also the last time fans will likely hear the bands earlier work performed live. "We will never, ever, ever play 'Kool Thing.' Just never." insists Moore. "A lot of it has nothing to do with disliking the material, but it's just not feeling relevant to our current life. We're not a Las Vegas band that does all the hits.
"Another factor is that we have to relearn the songs, and the songs are really unorthodox. They're in different guitar tunings, we use weird guitars, and we hot-rod our stuff. Sometimes it's really hard to figure out what the fuck you were playing. God, which guitar was I using? What the hell notes are those?"
Now Moore uses words like bubblegum, cornball, and tacky to describe the music labeled "alternative," whether it's the empty rehash of brit-pop or the prefab grunge of Bush and the like. The music Moore helped usher into the 90's is unrecognizable, leading veterans like Sonic Youth to seek new inspiration.
"That has a lot to do," Moore observes, "with giving up on punk rock as any sort of identity, and going towards more radical and sophisticated musical ideas, such as free improvisation, jazz and 20th century classical stylings - and also absurdia. We've become more influenced by this whole development in the underground of more experimental ideas. When we first started out, that's completely breaking down any rock convention. We became more conventional as time went by because it was interesting to become conventional." He laughs. "But now we've gone through it and we can do whatever we want."
Sonic Youth landed at Geffen at the end of the 80's after releasing numerous ground breaking albums on a variety of independent labels. Following a trio of acclaimed transitional LPs for the once great SST - home to a roster that included Black Flag, Husker Du, the Minutemen and the Meat Puppets - Sonic Youth recorded Daydream Nation for Blast First. Their most sophisticated and strangely accessible album yet, it demonstrated a searing, ambitious voice that the major labels could no longer ignore.
In 1991, Geffen released Goo, which continued the band's movement towards containable song structures. The follow-up, Dirty, was the first Sonic Youth album to be released in the wake of Nirvana's breakthrough, when it still seemed possible to connect with a larger audience. By now, Moore was himself under the spell of Nirvana's balls-out approach, and reminiscing about his pre-teen love for Black Sabbath and vintage hard rock. "I was trying to explain to Lee about it: when I write chord changes I have Sabbath on my mind as well as the Velvet Underground," says Moore. "He's like 'No you don't! How can you say that!'"
Like Nevermind, Dirty was produced by Butch Vig and mixed by Andy Wallace. After the album was finished, Sonic Youth got a call from Courtney Love, who heard an advanced copy with Cobain. "Oh, man, this is going to be massive," she told them. "That's so great you guys did this record! It's going to be huge!"
In the end, even Sonic Youth's attempts at traditional song structures were inevitably yanked back towards the avant-garde through their relentless use of bizarre tunings and a detached vocal style. Time demonstrated that Nirvana had not opened a door for the kind of music Cobain identified with at all, but for a post-Nirvana ocean of grunge led by the likes of Alice in Chains.
"There were certain expectations which were so ridiculous," Gordon says now. "Maybe it was because Dirty was our most produced record. But every interview was like 'Well, do you think your record is going to be really big?' And we were like, no." She laughs. "We've always had our own niche."
Like the rest of the band, Gordon reveals no hint of frustration on this subject. By now, she's taken Moore's seat at the dining table, smiling through her weariness from a party the night before. In a few days, Gordon would be out again in her ruby slippers, joining her husband for a gathering hosted by the New York subculture magazine Index, which just put the couple on its cover. The mainstream, she suggests, is not necessarily a friendly place, as Sonic Youth discovered while touring with Neil Young in 1991. During three months on the road, audiences and even some road members reacted against them.
"That was the first time we really felt confronted by the mainstream, and it was ugly," Gordon says. "There'd be these guys with long hair and beards sticking their tongue out at you, giving you the finger, or holding their ears. Some of them were smiling. Friends of ours in the audience would tell us that people would get really angry at them for clapping for us. It was really interesting. It was the hardest half-hour. It was exhausting. It was kind of a blast in a way, we'd just go out there and explode.
"It was really intense. And there were a couple of people on Neil's crew who really didn't like us, were just freaked out by us. Most people were really nice, but they looked at us like we were kids, which was funny. They thought we were these punks who were going to give them attitude, and they kept waiting for it."
After years of being sheltered within the mostly gender-blind culture of indie rock, Gordon had her eyes opened during the arena tour, where crew birthdays were invariably celebrated with the appearance of a local stripper. "That was pretty typical, rock'n'roll sexist kind of stuff going on," she says. "It was eye-opening for me. It really made me think of Joni Mitchell; those songs were all about those guys, and she was in such a boy's club and totally alone in a way."
The afternoon ferry from Hobokon, New Jersey, to Manhattan is nearly empty of passengers. Just a handful of commuters and Steve Shelley, bundled up in a thick wool coat, his straight brown hair cut into a neat bowl shape. He carries a canvas bag filled with papers and other businesses for Sonic Youth and the label he runs out of apartment, Smells Like Records. Outside, the silhouette of New York grows even closer.
Shelly first hit New York from Michigan in early 1985 with a couple of pals. "We didn't know if we'd be staying or not," he says. "We all knew we wanted to play music, but didn't know how to go about it."
That chemistry has so far survived, even as each member has busily pursued a crowded schedule apart from the band. Gordon maintains another active group, Free Kitten, with Julia Cafritz; they've just put out an album, Sentimental Education (Kill Rock Stars). Ranaldo has released two solo discs just in the last few months: Amarillo Ramp (Starlight), a collection of archival ephemera and Clouds (Victo), a live recording with drummer William Hooker. And both Moore and Shelley keep busy with a variety of side projects, most of them recorded in Sonic Youth's new studio.
"It definitely benefits more than anything, because it gives everyone an outlet for things they feel they can't do in the band," says Gordon. "It's hard for the band to be everything. It's like a relationship with someone; you can't expect one person to fulfill everything. But it's really healthy to integrate all that stuff back into the band, and not to keep it separate."
Which indicates
that as the band nears completing its second decade together, Sonic Youth
is only preparing for more. "It's gone on long enough that, why would
it end next year? Or why would it go on another ten years?" says
Ranaldo. "It's really hard to say. I think we're going to try
to put ourselves in a position where we can continue.