by Kim Gordon
Sonic Youth may not have won over any fans while touring with Neil, but our profile rose. Suddenly magazines like Spin were approaching me to do photo shoots, and later that year Neil asked us to perform at his Bridge School benefit concert. Neil and his wife, Pegi Young, started the Bridge School benefit in the mid-1980s to help found and fund the Bridge School in Hillsborough, California, which helps children with communication problems and physical disabilities. Neil has two sons, Zeke and Ben, who both have cerebral palsy. It’s an acoustic-only charity event, and Sonic Youth had never played acoustically before. I’d brought along a guitar to smash, as I had a strange feeling that night that things were doomed to fail.
During sound check, we could hear our guitars, but when we came out to play, we heard nothing. For us, a band that relies on the interplay of the guitars, it was the worst possible situation, plus, we were playing for a mainstream rock audience. We got only halfway through a cover version of “Personality Crisis” before I yelled, “Fuck!” into the microphone and smashed the acoustic guitar standing nearby. Willie Nelson then came out to perform a medley of his songs, followed by Don Henley, accompanied by a full electric band. I felt terrible that I’d yelled out “Fuck!” especially when we walked offstage and I saw a row of kids in their wheelchairs sitting at the back of the stage. I had forgotten they were there. Later, Ben, Neil’s son, came up to me in his wheelchair. “Everyone has a bad day sometimes,” he said to me.
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Goo: “Tunic (Song for Karen)” and “Kool Thing”
Photo courtesy of Universal Music Enterprises, a Division of IMG Recordings, Inc.
ONE OF THE SONGS off Goo was “Tunic (Song for Karen).” Karen Carpenter had interested me for a long time. The Carpenters were such a sun-drenched American dream, such a feel-good family success story like the Beach Boys, but with the same roiling darkness going on underneath. Obviously Karen Carpenter had a strange relationship with her brother, Richard, a great producer but also a tyrannical control freak. The only autonomy Karen felt she had in her life she exerted over her own body. She was an extreme version of what a lot of women suffer from—a lack of control over things other than their bodies, which turns the female body into a tool for power—good, bad, or ugly.
It began, as it always does with women, with a single remark: one night someone told Karen that she looked “hip-py” onstage. In the end I think she wanted to make herself disappear, and did that by unleashing destruction on herself. I always found Karen’s voice incredibly sexy and soulful. She made every word and syllable her own, and if you listen to those lyrics, you go, Wow. But at the same time, was there any band ever more white-bread than the Carpenters? I didn’t always appreciate their music. When they first had radio hits they were considered ultra-conservative, so “establishment” that their melodies could have been used in bank commercials. They were almost the definition of easy listening. But twenty years later, in another context, their music sounded beautiful to me, though it might have been concurrent with the release of Todd Haynes’s bootleg video about Karen’s life called, simply, Superstar, and starring Barbie and Ken.
I could make up a lot of reasons why the song was called “Tunic.” The most obvious is that Karen was so thin from starving herself that her clothes hung on her bones like flowing biblical robes. She couldn’t make peace with her own body’s curves. She would never get the love she craved from her mother, who favored her brother, or from her brother himself. Their approval meant everything. How was she not the quintessential woman in our culture, compulsively pleasing others in order to achieve some degree of perfection and power that’s forever just around the corner, out of reach? It was easier for her to disappear, to free herself finally from that body, to find a perfection in dying.
Tony Oursler shot a video for us of “Tunic,” and Thurston had scored a reel of Carpenters videos, which were actually pretty funny. In the middle of the dreamy part of the song, we inserted snippets of video, but because we were on a major label, we weren’t allowed to do that without permission. So to get around it, we blurred the Carpenters parts of that video.
I wrote this open letter to Karen once, for a magazine, I can’t remember which one.
Dear Karen,
Thru the years of The Carpenters TV specials I saw you change from the Innocent Oreo-cookie-and-milk-eyed girl next door to hollowed eyes and a lank body adrift on a candy-colored stage set. You and Richard, by the end, looked drugged—there’s so little energy. The words come out of yr mouth but yr eyes say other things, “Help me, please, I’m lost in my own passive resistance, something went wrong. I wanted to make myself disappear from their control. My parents, Richard, the writers who call me ‘hip-py, fat.’ Since I was, like most girls, brought up to be polite and considerate, I figured no one would notice anything wrong—as long as, outwardly, I continued to do what was expected of me. Maybe they could control all the outward aspects of my life, but my body is all in my control. I can make myself smaller. I can disappear. I can starve myself to death and they won’t know it. My voice will never give me away. They’re not my words. No one will guess my pain. But I will make the words my own because I have to express myself somehow. Pain is not perfect so there is no place in Richard’s life for it. I have to be perfect too. I must be thin so I’m perfect. Was I a teenager once? I forget. Now I look middle-aged, with a bad perm and country-western clothes.”
I must ask you, Karen, who were your role models? Was it yr mother? What kind of books did you like to read? Did anyone ever ask you that question—what’s it like being a girl in music? What were yr dreams? Did you have any female friends or was it just you and Richard, mom and dad, A&M? Did you ever go running along the sand, feeling the ocean rush up between yr legs? Who is Karen Carpenter, really, besides the sad girl with the extraordinarily beautiful, soulful voice?
your fan—love, kim
“Kool Thing” was a complex song, influenced by everybody from Jane Fonda to Raymond Pettibon to Bootsy Collins and Funkadelic to an interview I’d done once with LL Cool J. A few years earlier, Raymond had shot a film about the Weather Underground, called The Whole World Is Watching: Weatherman ’69, which, like most of Raymond’s drawings, was full of dark humor and satire. Thurston and I both appeared in the film, reading Raymond’s brilliant script off cue cards. I played Bernadine Dohrn, and in Raymond’s script, I, or rather Bernadine, was drawn to leftist politics because I had a thing for male Black Panthers. I also loved LL Cool J’s first record, Radio, which was produced by Rick Rubin, and when I interviewed him for Spin magazine, I asked him if he’d had anything to do with the samples and what kind of rock music he liked. I couldn’t hide my disappointment when he said, “Bon Jovi.” Then again, it makes sense that big, fat power chords would be ideal for sampling.
The band recorded “Kool Thing” at Greene Street. Chuck D from Public Enemy was also working there that week, waiting sometimes for Flavor Flav to arrive at the studio. You’d always know he’d come when you heard his big oversized shoes slapping down the stairs. We asked Chuck D if he would contribute to the call-and-response middle section of “Kool Thing,” and he agreed. Having Chuck D work with us was amazing, as both Thurston and I felt he “got us” a little bit.
“Kool Thing” was also the first big-budget video Sonic Youth ever filmed. We chose Tamra Davis to direct, because we had all liked her “Funky Cold Medina” video for Tone Lôc. That video had a clean, fresh, minimal approach, with none of the excess of most major-label videos. In a funny, small-world link, I had met Tamra through her sister Melodie, whom I’d crossed paths with years earlier when I first moved to New York. When she introduced us, Melodie said, “This is my sister Tamra—maybe she’ll make a video for you someday.” It was one of those remarks you smile at and never think about again, but here was Tamra, now living with Mike D from the Beastie Boys, back in our lives.
I told Tamra that I somehow wanted to reference one of my favorite videos ever—LL Cool J’s video for “Going
Back to Cali.” Released around the time of the East Coast–versus–West Coast rap wars, “Going Back to Cali” was a perfect song and video, with its Russ Meyer–like camera angles and jagged cuts, and the humorous way it made fun of the 1960s archetypal Southern California sexy white-girl aesthetic. The video was shot in stark black and white, so you really get a sense of the glare of the sun and the whiteness of the women’s bodies, in contrast to the color of LL Cool J’s skin, all against the backdrop of L.A.’s intense body-consciousness. By refusing to buy into that sensibility, LL comes off as a hero. I’m a sucker for any movie or TV show about L.A.
Tamra was a fantastic collaborator. She filmed us against a silver foil backdrop, a nod to Warhol Factory–era East Coast–ness. The video opened with Sonic Youth playing in a silver room. There were quicksilver shots of leather, black cats, lips, and juxtapositions of white skin and black skin, of the black struggle and the female struggle. The fashion is pretty 1960s-era, and the video has no clear story or message, really, but despite its style it was still a little controversial.
I suppose African-Americans could watch “Kool Thing” and say, “This is the way white people see us—as objects.” But we were careful to make sure that everyone looked good and was photographed well. It disturbed me that many critics didn’t understand that I was not talking to Chuck D—who was playing himself—but instead to an unseen third party. If the song made people uneasy, or if it caused them to question things, well, good, even if they got it wrong. I deliberately wanted there to be some ambiguity about who exactly in the song was saying, “I don’t want to.” Was it the woman? Or was it the guy saying, “I don’t want anything to do with you, white bitch!”
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Photo by Charles Peterson
THE FIRST TIME Thurston and I ever saw Nirvana was at the famous music venue Maxwell’s, in Hoboken, New Jersey. Bruce Pavitt, who founded the record label Sub Pop, told me that if I liked Mudhoney, which I did, then, I’d “love Nirvana.” He added, “You have to see them live. Kurt Cobain is like Jesus. People love him. He practically walks on the audience.”
Bruce had started Sub Pop as a cassette-subscription service before moving on to seven-inch singles, including Nirvana’s, which was called “Love Buzz.” Sonic Youth had done a “split single” with Mudhoney, covering their “Touch Me I’m Sick” while Mudhoney covered our song “Hallowe’en.” Thurston and I had both heard “Love Buzz,” and our friend Suzanne had done the artwork for it. Nirvana was already popular in Seattle and we were curious to see what they were all about.
Nirvana was a great live band, and Thurston and I, like everybody else in the world, immediately responded to the mixture of good melodies and dissonance. Nirvana seemed part-hardcore, part-Stooges, but with a cheesy chorus-pedal effect that was more New Wave than punk. No one else could use that chorus pedal—which gives the shimmer effect you hear on the guitar in the intro to “Come as You Are,” for example—and still be punk rock. As a performer, Kurt Cobain was both incredibly charismatic and extremely conflicted. One minute he would be playing a pretty melody, and the next he’d be trashing all the equipment. Personally, I like when things fall apart—that’s real entertainment, deconstructed.
Maxwell’s could be sleepy during the week, and there weren’t a lot of people in attendance the night we showed up—maybe ten to fifteen. Aside from Kurt, Nirvana had a second guitar player, and I knew from Bruce that Kurt wasn’t that happy with him. You could tell the band wasn’t having the best gig, but it was also obvious something interesting was going on. The next night, we went to see them again at the Pyramid Club in the East Village. The club was practically full. I was surprised to run into Iggy Pop, but I guess he wanted to see what all the hype was about, too. Kurt ended up trashing the drums and almost managed to knock an amp down the spiral stairs on the stage leading to the dressing room below. Thurston and I both agreed it was an amazing show. Iggy, I remember, wasn’t quite as impressed. We later went backstage. Kurt told us that he’d just fired his guitar player and his drummer. Standing in front of me, Kurt seemed small, close to my height, though he was actually five foot nine and I’m only five foot five. He had big, watery eyes, slightly hunted looking. I’m not sure why, but I felt an immediate kinship with him, one of those mutual I-can-tell-you-are-a-super-sensitive-and-emotional-person-too sorts of connections. Thurston didn’t have the same thing going with Kurt; he’d be the first to say Kurt and I had some sort of good, inexplicable connection. We weren’t close the way he was to Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill, or Tobi Vail, who was his girlfriend, or any of his male friends that he grew up with. I didn’t know Kurt all that well—two tours’ worth—but our friendship was unusual.
Onstage it was amazing to see how much emotional power came from the depths of his body—a gravelly stream of vocal sound. It wasn’t screaming, or shrieking, or even punk vitriol, although that’s what it sounded like the most. There were also quiet parts, low, moan-ish, when you’d half believe Kurt’s voice was hoarse, and then he’d throw himself on the drum set, which in his anger and frustration he seemed to want to annihilate. He seemed always to be working against himself.
In contrast to Kurt, who was so physically small, Krist, Nirvana’s bass player, was enormous. He was also seemingly unfazed by whatever played out onstage—Krist who I’ll always remember hurling his bass up into the air and never once getting clobbered (except at the MTV Video Music Awards) or damaging his instrument. Kurt, who played left-handed, wrecked so many guitars that he ended up forced to play a lot of regular right-hand ones. But his destructiveness was different from when Pete Townshend or Jimi Hendrix smashed his guitar. Kurt was vulnerable where they weren’t, mixed in with an edge of enormous explosiveness and a desire to say and connect more with the audience beyond music.
When Nirvana toured with us in 1991 before Nevermind broke, no one in Europe knew who they were. They were often the first band onstage at festivals, playing amazing shows filmed by Dave Markey, the filmmaker who came along with us to document the tour that later became the film 1991: The Year Punk Broke. The movie had a lot of humorous moments of over-the-top self-indulgence—it was basically a spoof of rockumentaries. Kurt was always funny and fun to be around, and seemed to soak up any kind of personal attention. I felt very big-sisterly, almost maternal, whenever the two of us were together, and it shows in that film.
Later, soon after Kurt and Courtney got together and had their baby, Frances Bean, we were playing in Seattle, and the two of them came to see us. After the show, Kurt cornered me in the dressing room. “I don’t know what to do,” he said. “Courtney thinks Frances likes me more than her.” Someone took a photo of us right at that moment. My back is turned to the camera, and I remember that conversation vividly, so telling in so many ways, the first being that Kurt had no one he felt comfortable asking for advice; the second being that yes, Courtney was utterly self-absorbed; and finally, that Kurt probably did spend more time with Frances than Courtney did.
Looking back, I can’t imagine what life was like in the chaos of their drug-fueled life, and it’s hard for me to remember that they were together for only a couple of years. It takes so little time to forge a life, or in this case, a brand.
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Photo by Chris Morret
BEFORE THE INTERNET was born and if you weren’t a mainstream band, it was nearly impossible to get your music heard on the radio. Sure, there was public radio and lots of little college radio stations, but it was mostly a winners’ game. Touring was the only way to get a label to market your music. It may sound simple and obvious, but unless you were making commercial music, outlets like radio were beyond your control. Your band lived and died by the road.
In the nineties, people liked to talk about how American bands were so much better live than English bands. Why? Because the U.S. was and is a huge fucking country with no single focused media outlet—forcing American bands to tour constantly. England, by contrast, was a little island with three weekly music pa
pers covering majors, indies, and faux-indies backed by major labels. The U.S. had Rolling Stone, a biweekly that even back then sold copies by plastering sexy female entertainers on the cover and whose big progressive moment was to release a “Women in Rock” issue highlighting pop singers like Madonna. If I ever appeared in Rolling Stone, it was to answer questions like “What do you think of women in rock, like Madonna?”
Because I’d written about art in the 1980s, the Village Voice asked me to do a tour diary. I called it “Boys Are Smelly.”
Before picking up a bass I was just another girl with a fantasy. What would it be like to be right under the pinnacle of energy, beneath two guys crossing their guitars, two thunderfoxes in the throes of self-love and male bonding? How sick, but what desire could be more ordinary? How many grannies once wanted to rub their faces in Elvis’s crotch, and how many boys want to be whipped by Steve Albini’s guitar?
In the middle of the stage, where I stand as a bass player of Sonic Youth, the music comes at me from all directions. The most heightened state of being female is watching people watch you. Manipulating that stage, without breaking the spell of performing, is what makes someone like Madonna all the more brilliant. Simple pop structures sustain her image, allowing her real self to remain a mystery—is she really that sexy? Loud dissonance and blurred melody create their own ambiguity—are we really that violent?—a context that allows me to be anonymous. For many purposes, being obsessed with boys playing guitars, being as ordinary as possible, being a girl bass player is ideal, because the swirl of Sonic Youth music makes me forget about being a girl. I like being in a weak position and making it strong.