by Kim Gordon
Over the years, Thurston and I always agreed on aesthetic things. We agreed about record covers pretty much all the time. For the most part we also agreed about mixes. If and when they took place, our fights mostly centered around how he treated or spoke to me. In the band’s early days, our first drummer, Richard Edson, was the first to notice the dynamic between us. He would stand up for me, saying things like, “Hey, man, there’s no call to talk to her like that.”
Lee never said a word. Whenever Thurston spoke to me sharply or bluntly, it seemed to make him uncomfortable, and it was probably hard for Lee and Steve to figure out the boundaries of where Thurston and I started as a couple and stopped as bandmates. I was allergic to making scenes and did everything possible to maintain an identity as an individual within the band. I had no interest in being just the female half of a couple. When we were starting out, I was very sensitive, a hangover from my relationship with Keller, and let Thurston take the lead in most things. In the months leading up to our split, it was gratifying to me when Thurston, listening to some old live recording of ours, remarked, “Wow, you were playing some amazing things.”
Gratifying but also strange to hear, as in our early days playing live, I had no technical ability to speak of, no knowledge of conventional chording. At the same time, I was always confident in my ability to contribute something good to our sound in at least an unconventional or minimalist way—a musicality, a sense of rhythm. All the No Wave bands, the jazz I’d listened to growing up, and the improv Keller and I had done back in our childhood living room came back to me onstage, blurring with the rock-and-roll riff or theater Thurston always wanted to convey. From the beginning, music for me was visceral. I loved playing music. When it was going well, it was an almost ecstatic experience. What could be better than sharing that feeling of transcendence with a man I was so close to in all other areas of my life, someone who was having the same experience? It was a feeling impossible to communicate with someone outside of the two of us. I wanted deliverance, the loss of myself, the capacity to be inside that music. It was the same power and sensation you feel when a wave takes you up and pushes you someplace else.
Thurston and I first met Raymond Pettibon in the early eighties during a trip to L.A., where I was visiting my parents. Someone told us about a house party in Hermosa Beach, where Black Flag was playing, so we drove down to South Bay, pulling up in front of a typical single-level house. The neighborhood was languid, slightly funky, as if it had tried and failed to become a beach resort, morphing instead into a shabby suburban neighborhood a walk away from the ocean. The house was small, the music ferocious, Henry Rollins in the kitchen, in full force, dressed in those signature small black shorts that I believe were technically an old-style nylon bathing suit. Slick with sweat, he was writhing around bumping into cabinets and people, at one point coming up to me and singing straight into my face.
Coming from the New York downtown scene, where people had no houses, or garages, and thus, no house parties, this was a completely new scene for us. The Black Flag show was one of the best gigs I’d seen before or since—scary, surreal, intimate. As the sound crashed and bounced off the refrigerator counter and shelves, and Henry Rollins twerked years before twerking existed, the performance fused hardcore punk with suburban sunlit banality, high theatre with the everyday, erasing any and all boundaries between band and audience.
At one point Thurston and I went out into the glare of the backyard, where Mike Watt from the Minutemen introduced us to Raymond Pettibon. To us, Raymond was already a semimythical figure, as a couple of years back we had become keenly interested in his zines. Raymond was shy, casually disheveled, altogether normal-looking. Still, it felt unbelievable to be hanging out with Mike and Raymond, and other musicians in bands whose records we owned. The L.A. scene!
At that point, in the mid-eighties, Ray had no relationship to the art world, and had never had a gallery show. At the time he was known exclusively for his SST covers. Later that same year, I wrote an article for Artforum about Raymond’s work, as well as Mike Kelley’s and Tony Oursler’s—how the three of them eschewed the conceptual mantle of seventies formalism and mixed high and low culture. Soon afterwards, Raymond began showing at the Ace Gallery in L.A. Like a flower, he slowly opened up, the only thing he needed was just a little attention.
That day sticks out so much in my mind not just because it was the first time I met Raymond, but because seeing Henry Rollins inspired the song “Halloween.”
Even after Bad Moon, I never felt like I had a place in the New York music scene. Artists I had no trouble conversing with, but I had no idea how to talk to musicians. I felt confused about how I “should” look, and I felt frumpy and nerdy a lot of the time. I also had no confidence, really. I don’t think artists ever feel like what they do is enough, and even though I was now part of a musical couple, I wasn’t doing as much as I thought I should be doing individually—my art career was kind of on hold—and without confidence, it doesn’t matter what you’re wearing. I once interviewed Raymond Pettibon, who spoke about having to dumb himself down whenever he talked to musicians. Not that musicians are unintelligent, he said—they just don’t intellectualize in the same way artists do. Criticize something in front of musicians, and they’ll take it personally. Criticize artists, and they’re more likely to take it intellectually. It’s just different, that’s all.
We weren’t remotely a goth band, but Evol was our faux-goth record, the one that contains “Expressway to Yr. Skull,” Sonic Youth’s first so-called long song. Evol was also the first record we put out on the indie record label SST. SST, who put out records by Black Flag, the Minutemen, Hüsker Dü, and the Meat Puppets, was ideal for us.
The name Evol came from an art video that my friend Tony Oursler made, while the cover was a film still created by filmmaker Richard Kern. Richard’s faux-horror films were dark, funny, and voyeuristic, typically shot from a height, with tongue-in-cheek gore.
The song “Shadow of a Doubt” came from an Alfred Hitchcock film. What I’m reading at the time tends to influence and inform what I’m working on—whether it’s a novel or a Hitchcock bio. I tend to write lyrics with a sense of space around them, one-liners almost, short sentences containing pauses that build tension along with the music, as if I’m awaiting some big drama or crash to occur, though it never does—the song just ends. I was always a big fan of early songs by the Shangri-Las, with their whispered, almost spoken-word approach leading up to a violent climax, such as in “Leader of the Pack” or “I Can Never Go Home Anymore.”
In “Shadow of a Doubt,” I was trying to describe the connection you feel when your eyes meet another person’s. You project all kinds of things on those eyes, feel them seeing into and past you, sometimes feel the sex behind them too. The song imagines what would happen if you acted on that feeling, with things devolving into a scene from a pulpy film noir novel, and nothing you did could stop the inevitable.
A young filmmaker named Kevin Kerslake made a video for “Shadow of a Doubt,” the first one we ever did that had the look and feel of something that could play on MTV. We had made videos before, notably for “Death Valley ’69.” For that song, in fact, there were two different videos, one more arty, one more hard-core. In the hard-core video for “Death Valley ’69,” I can remember lying on the ground, with blood everywhere, our fake guts spilling from our stomachs, while off camera Lee’s first wife, Amanda, was having actual labor contractions. A vivid contrast between fake death and incoming life. In the video I also got to wield a shotgun. Girls with guns, girls in control, girls as revolutionaries, girls acting out—why is that such a perennial turn-on to people?
Evol also had a cover of Kim Fowley’s “Bubblegum,” as well as songs like “Star Power” and of course “Expressway to Yr. Skull,” which contained what to my mind were Thurston’s best lyrics: “We’re gonna kill the California girls,” meaning, we’re from New York and we’re not pop or rock and we’re coming to get you .
. . we’re coming to California. We did “Expressway” in one take, and I remember sitting in the dark studio with Thurston, Lee, and Steve listening back to it. It was absolutely thrilling.
Those were the moments I felt closest to Thurston—when I felt that together, he and I had created something special, music that would go out into the world and take on its own life. No matter what happened to that music, I was convinced it was good and would last forever. (When I listen to Evol today, I’m amazed by the amount of reverb on it. I had so little perspective back then . . . on everything.)
When Sonic Youth toured England, journalists took to asking me a single question over and over: “What’s it like to be a girl in a band?” I’d never really thought about that, to be honest. The mostly male English music press was cowardly and nonconfrontational in person. They would then go home and write cruel, ageist, sexist things. I’d always assumed it was because they were terrified of women; the whole country had a queen complex, after all. I might have been projecting my own discomfort at acting out a prewritten role onto these writers, but I refused to play the game. I didn’t want to dress like Siouxsie Sioux or Lydia Lunch, or to act out the role of an imaginary female, someone who had more to do with them than with me. That just wasn’t who I was.
For that reason, I found the British band the Raincoats both cool and inspirational. They were an all-girl post-punk band, playing noncommercial music—rhythmic and off-kilter. They came across as ordinary people playing extraordinary music. They didn’t use typical instrumentation, either. After their drummer Palmolive left, the experimental rock drummer Charlie Hayward joined them, adding to a sound that included the violin and a bunch of exotic secondhand instruments from Africa and Bali, like the balafon, the kalimba, and the gamelan. Here were women playing and singing against every stereotype there was, but doing it subtly and musically, gently and mystically, without the traditional aggression of rock and punk and without flying a freak flag. I’d spent my entire life never doing what was easy, never doing what was expected. I had no idea what image I projected onstage or off, but I was willing to let myself be unknown forever. Self-consciousness was the beginning of creative death to me. I felt at ease only when I’d recorded something I felt good about, or was in the middle of a gig and the sound swirling from the stage was so amazing that time stopped and I could feel the audience in the dark breathing as a single unit. That is all a fantasy, yes, but everyone needs to pretend. As J Mascis of Dinosaur Jr. liked to say when asked about being in a band, “It’s not fun. It’s not about having fun.”
25
Sister: “Schizophrenia”
IN 1987, THURSTON and I were both reading Philip K. Dick, whose writing has more in common with philosophy than science fiction, and whose descriptions of schizophrenia were better than those of any medical journal. Philip Dick had a twin sister who died shortly after she was born and whose memory plagued him his whole life—which is maybe how and why our new album ended up being called Sister. We never decided this, of course; everything between us always had an air of undiscussed ambiguity about it.
In high school, one of my English teachers told our class that the entire world was “schizophrenic.” He rambled on about semantics and about the power of words, and even in the acid-soaked days of the late 1960s, I was never sure what he meant. I desperately wanted to be the smart one in the class and push the teacher, but being suffocated by social anxiety and self-consciousness, I never was.
As always, it started with Keller. The outsized rebel, the attention taker, at times so funny and charming, before the disease engulfed his head. If Keller was the problem child, the fire threatening always to burn our family to the ground, what did that make me? The one who never made waves. The one who, if she was good enough, could make our family normal.
“Pacific Coast Highway” from Sister is a twisted love story about hitchhiking up to Malibu and getting picked up by a sociopath. “Come on get in the car . . . Let’s go for a ride somewhere . . . I won’t hurt you . . . As much as you hurt me.” It was a direct pull from the fears of my teenage years when I was focused on the lore surrounding Charlie Manson, who mirrored the darkness and swirl lying beneath West L.A.’s Disney-green lawns and movie-perfect foliage.
Thurston and I had been married for three years and together for seven, and by now he knew me so well it was as though the two of us were joined in both our bodies and brains. Oddly enough, he was the one who wrote the lyrics to “Schizophrenia,” somehow making the words sound as though they were mine. Even though the song wasn’t explicitly about Keller, the Philip K. Dick references throughout Sister always made me feel they were.
I loved making Sister, and Sear Sound in midtown Manhattan—the oldest recording studio in New York—was the perfect place to record it. Following Evol, we wanted a rawer, more immediate sound, and Sear, with its huge collection of vintage analog tube equipment, including a great two-inch sixteen-track, was the fulfillment of our sound fantasies. Still, we ended up in a deteriorating studio that backed up onto the old Paramount Hotel, and the lousy acoustics of the room were good for the guitars but muffled the drums, which disappointed Steve to no end.
Walter Sear ran the studio and was a classical tuba player who, with Robert Moog, developed the Moog synthesizer. As well as recording music, Walter and his partner Roberta were also in the B-movie business. Hanging from Sear Sound’s walls were great B horror movie posters, and you could snack there all day long on sugary doughnuts, bagels, cream cheese, lox, and day-old popcorn, though despite the snacks it wasn’t a movie theater, just a great old-school recording studio. Walter and Roberta were old-timey, chain-smoking New Yorkers. During our recording session, Walter was also casting a movie, and every day the band would pass by a line of hopeful actors and actresses. At night, when the studio emptied out, we sat around flipping through their headshots. Walter and Roberta lived a way of life that will soon be wiped out entirely from the Disney version of New York’s theater district. First-generation bohemians were a dying breed even then.
Sister’s cover was a loose collage of images that each band member individually chose. In the downtown art world, appropriation was commonplace, which is why we felt this was an acceptable approach. By collecting those images, we believed we were creating something new out of them. Among them was a Richard Avedon photo of a prepubescent girl and an image of Disney’s Magic Kingdom. When Avedon threatened to sue us, followed by Disney’s legal department, we responded by subsequently blacking out the offending images, a reminder forever that we’d been censored by people who had more money to spend on lawyers than we did.
26
Ciccone Youth: “Addicted to Love”
CICCONE YOUTH was a side project, consisting of Steve, Lee, Thurston, and me. The four of us decided to do a record where we simply went into the studio and made it there, the way hip-hop is made: start with a beat or a loop, then build on it. Ciccone Youth is so different from any Sonic Youth music, we thought it was a good idea to confuse people, so we created this separate identity.
A year earlier, we had done a Madonna Ciccone “cover” called “Into the Groovey,” as a twelve-inch, with Mike Watt doing another cover, “Burnin’ Up,” on the B-side. Madonna was cool in the eighties—her dance pop was minimal and fresh—and we were all fans. She was slightly fleshy in the beginning, and her main talents were pluck, willpower, and moving her body around. Her voice wasn’t strong, and she wasn’t an obvious diva, but she had a knack for knowing how to entertain, singing, “Like a virgin / Touched for the very first time,” with a heart-shaped pout and beckoning eyes perfect for MTV. Reagan, orange cheeked, was in office; Nancy, his wife, wore red; and Madonna rocked white like no one else. Her “Like a Virgin” video was shot in Italy, a combination of honeymoon ideal and Catholic bastion, with her riding down a Venice canal in a gondola. In the unsteady boat Madonna gazed up at the camera, turning us all into her lover.
It’s hard thinking back on her now and seeing what cri
tics called her “shocking sexuality.” They rushed to embrace her sexualized image-branding as self-empowerment as well as marketing sophistication, and therefore feminist. To me, she seemed joyful, celebrating her own body. Most fun of all was her plucky attitude. She didn’t have a perfect body. She was a little soft, but sexy-soft, not overweight but not as sculpted or as hard as she would later become. She was realistic about her body type, and she flaunted it, and you could feel how happy she was inhabiting that body. I admired what she was doing, though I was also skeptical about where it would all eventually lead. In retrospect Madonna was riding a cultural wave that has evolved into a landscape where porn is everywhere, where women are openly using their sexuality to sell their art in ways that before the 1980s would have been a male’s idea of marketing. Porn, of course, is also a male fantasy of the world. When a woman does what a man used to do, I can’t help but wonder if it leads us back in a circle.
Today we have someone like Lana Del Rey, who doesn’t even know what feminism is, who believes it means women can do whatever they want, which, in her world, tilts toward self-destruction, whether it’s sleeping with gross older men or being a transient biker queen. Equal pay and equal rights would be nice. Naturally, it’s just a persona. Does she truly believe it’s beautiful when young musicians go out on a hot flame of drugs and depression, or is it just her persona?
With Ciccone Youth, we wanted to go into the studio and work with drum machines, without any towering expectations. More than anything, we were interested in playing in the style of 1970s German prog rock, like Neu! and Can. I got frustrated sitting around the studio while the guys took turns manning the mixing board, so I took off, deciding to make a couple of songs outside the studio. One, “Two Cool Rock Chicks Listening to Neu,” was created by Suzanne Sasic and me at 84 Eldridge. We simply recorded ourselves listening to Neu! while we talked about J Mascis’s guitar playing. Later I took it to the studio, and J agreed to play a lead over a very minimal drum machine.