Girl in a Band

by Kim Gordon

  I’ll always remember, too, his smallness, his thinness, the frail appearance, like an old man, with those big, illuminated, innocent, childish, saucer-sized eyes like ringed planets. Onstage, though, he was fearless as well as something even scarier. There’s a point where fearlessness twists into self-annihilation, and he was too familiar with that space. Most people who saw Nirvana live had never before witnessed that degree of self-harm in someone, as he hurled himself into the drum set as if in some privately negotiated death dance.

  A few years ago, Frances came to see us play at the Hollywood Bowl, and afterward she came backstage. She seemed very sweet. We gave her some old photos of herself and her dad when she was little. I will forever wonder about her, how she’s doing.

  35

  X-GIRL’S SIDEWALK GUERILLA fashion show was a success in that it came off at all. A video documentary of that day exists online, which people still occasionally refer to today. In it you can see Francis Ford Coppola, who knows me only in relation to X-Girl and who is naturally proud of his daughter, Sofia, and the show she’s just put on.

  Throughout my pregnancy, I did one X-Girl–oriented photo shoot after another. Lean over a tire, on my back. Stand, seven months pregnant, on a rickety, rotting picnic table holding an umbrella. (I refused.) When I started Free Kitten, my band with Julie Cafritz, Mark Ibold, and Yoshimi, I remember having an amnio and taking the rest of the day off. When I was eight and a half months pregnant, Sonic Youth appeared on Late Night with David Letterman. The machine never stopped, even though what I really wanted to do was lie down all the time, in part because I had a fibroid tumor that grew with the baby.

  When Coco was born I took only a little time off. There were always small things happening, and even though artists are never truly on vacation, they can enjoy free time without the pressure to “enjoy themselves.” They aren’t escaping exactly, just shifting focus. And then it was on to the next thing, in this case a fashion event in Tokyo.

  Someone had asked us to put on an X-Girl show right before a Beastie Boys concert. Daisy didn’t want to go, so Sofia Coppola volunteered. Coco was five months old at the time, and Thurston came along with us. We arrived in Tokyo tired and jet-lagged, but despite that, Sofia and I went out onto the street to recruit girls for the show. My friend Yoshimi also helped in the effort, and the Beastie Boys’ Adam Yauch knew an American girl who modeled in Tokyo who helped round up a few of her friends. I remember cruising around a local department store with Adam and Coco. Adam was very sweet, and I was surprised he wanted to hang out with us instead of rushing around shopping like everybody else. He bought Coco a little hat with bunny ears, and Spike took a photo of Coco wearing it.

  Via the front desk of our hotel, I somehow managed to find a babysitter, an older woman who didn’t speak a word of English. We all drove an hour outside of Tokyo to the concert hall. As Sofia and I dressed the models, I remember the Japanese woman gazing down at Coco, who’d fallen asleep, never once taking her eyes off her. At one point she even started picking threads off the back of my shirt. It made me long to bring this woman home with me and let her take care of the entire family.

  Somehow we pulled off the event, but when I look at photos of Sofia and me from that weekend, I can’t believe I don’t have dark circles under my eyes. I was exhausted from the jet lag, still breast-feeding, and had a baby who didn’t sleep through the night. We had press responsibilities, too, where everyone asked variations of the same questions: “How did X-Girl start? What does the name mean? What’s it like to be a mom in rock?”

  Instead of a live presentation, for our next season of clothes, Daisy and I decided to make a faux-Godard-ian film filled with tongue-in-cheek Marxist references we could present to fashion magazine editors. Chloë Sevigny, Rita Ackermann, and Daisy’s friend Pumpkin Wentzel played the main characters. Phil Morrison and his writing partner wrote and directed it. Phil did an amazing job delivering everything we wanted and more. The film was fantastic and still holds up today in its YouTube incarnation. We even had an X-Girl store on Lafayette Street across from Liquid Sky, where Chloë still worked, convenient to Daisy’s loft on Crosby Street and our apartment. It was also inconvenient, because if X-Girl production was late, or something else was screwed up, we felt embarrassed to walk down the street.

  Daisy dealt with the day-to-day stuff of the business, and we hired someone to manage the store and sketch our ideas. It was more a burden for Daisy, and in time, both of us felt X-Girl had run its course. We sold the company to a Japanese firm and made some money in the process. Afterward, we could walk along Lafayette Street with our heads held high again.

  We assumed that as a relic of its time X-Girl would die out, but it hasn’t, and the brand still exists in Japan. It’s weird when you sell a name, or a brand, and it no longer has anything to do with the original or with you. In a way X-Girl gave me far more notoriety than Sonic Youth ever did.

  36

  Washing Machine: “Little Trouble Girl”

  Photo courtesy of Universal Music Enterprises, a Division of IMG Recordings, Inc.

  COCO HAYLEY GORDON MOORE, born July 1, 1994. Yes, she changed our lives, and no one is more important to me. But the band played on.

  When Coco was two months old, Thurston and I flew to L.A. to shoot a video for our cover of the Carpenters song “Superstar,” shot by Lance Accord—who brought in a gold microphone that, to my mind, made the whole video—with Dave Markey directing. I loved Thurston’s singing, and the whole production looked gorgeous. (“Superstar” has some of the best lyrics ever.) I was still feeling heavy with extra baby weight and managed somehow to fit into a giant red velvet prom dress. Traveling to California with a two-month-old baby was another “new mom” thing to have to worry about; dripping breast milk during a video shoot is not very rock!

  Then, in the spring of 1995, when Coco was ten months old, we all flew to Memphis to work on our new record.

  Feeling we had too much baggage now as a band, we wanted to change the name Sonic Youth to Washing Machine. People always like to discover something new, and we’d been around awhile, plus Washing Machine seemed like a good “indie rock” name. Our record company naturally thought we were insane, so instead we used it for the title of the new album. We had T-shirts printed before the record was done. Two adorable thirteen-year-old boys wearing them came to one of our shows with their dad, and I took a picture of them, believing it would make a great album cover. Unfortunately, when the time came, we didn’t know their names, or where to reach them, so for legal reasons we had to cut off their heads!

  Memphis, I remember, was warm and green, and we took countless trips for barbecue sandwiches from Payne’s, a sagging, shuttered building with two ancient Jaguars parked out front. On Easter Sunday we went to Al Green’s church and on another night to a juke joint in the middle of a cornfield, where they made moonshine, and the walls were hung with amazing black-velvet paintings of Michael Jackson and other popular African American celebrities and heroes. Maurice Menares accompanied us to help take care of Coco, and I still have a great picture of Coco perched on the studio recording console. One afternoon Maurice and I took Coco to the Memphis Zoo. It was without a doubt the most depressing zoo I’d ever been to in my life. There was next to no foliage or, for that matter, animals, which for the animals at least was probably a good thing. Coco probably doesn’t remember, but she’s visited more zoos and aquariums around the world than any other kid, though her favorite places have always been hotels.

  Having Coco made me think of the Shangri-Las again, with their overdramatic songs with morbid scenarios and unhealthy relationships. “Little Trouble Girl” was my ultimate homage to the Shangri-Las’ half singing, half speaking style.

  At the time I was reading a book called Mother Daughter Revolution, about first-wave seventies feminism. It’s about how feminism fails to address the relationship between mothers and daughters because of its emphasis on escaping the house. I didn’t finish it—who has
the time or the energy to read when you’re a new mom?—but I remember how the book talked about the pressure to please and be perfect that every woman falls into and then projects onto her daughter. Nothing is ever good enough. No woman can ever outrun what she has to do. No one can be all things—a mother, a good partner, a lover, as well as a competitor in the workplace. “Little Trouble Girl” is about wanting to be seen for who you really are, being able to express those parts of yourself that aren’t “good girl” but that are just as real and true.

  If you want me to

  I will be the one

  That is always good

  And you’ll love me too

  But you’ll never know

  What I feel inside

  That I’m really bad

  Little trouble girl

  I asked Kim Deal of the Pixies to sing the melodic part. Why? Because I couldn’t! Her voice was perfect.

  The video, directed by Mark Romanek and shot by Harris Savides, was the first time the band went with someone else’s idea without coming up with it ourselves. Later, I got to work with Harris Savides on Last Days, the film Gus Van Sant made about Kurt. Harris was an incredibly sweet, talented man who sadly enough died a few years ago. Shooting the “Little Trouble Girl” video was the first time I’d ever been away from Coco, and I remember panicking when the video shoot went late, making me miss the red-eye back to New York, where Thurston was taking care of her.

  At the same time, I loved hanging out with Kim Deal, and when I rewatch the video, my favorite part is seeing the two of us together singing and looking hot. Maybe everything always looks better twenty years later. When Kim showed up in Memphis to record the song, she had the engineer play it back into the big room, and she sang without any headphones. Then and now Kim’s voice has an incredibly cakelike quality—like the sound when you say cake, a lightness, its body thinned out—that’s so classic pop.

  Washing Machine is one of my favorite-sounding records, and “Washing Machine” and “The Diamond Sea” were fun songs to record. The latter we performed in one take, and later, when Sonic Youth went on tour first with R.E.M., then with the Lollapalooza festival, Spike created a video shot from various live performances of that song.

  When we started the R.E.M. tour, Coco had just learned to walk, and it was during a visit to Kansas that Thurston, Michael Stipe, and I drove out to visit William Burroughs. I remember William began asking Michael about Kurt—“What about the boy?” he said. “So sad . . .” Michael, slightly embarrassed, deferred to Thurston and me since we had more of a history with Kurt and Nirvana.

  For Lollapalooza, the band traveled on a bus with a port-a-crib strapped down in the back, where Coco fell asleep to the giant roar of the engine. She was a great bus sleeper. The first night took us to the Gorge, in Washington State. That night we were unofficially co-headlining with Hole and a bunch of our friends were in the lineup, too: Pavement, Beck, Jesus Lizard, Cypress Hill, Elastica, Mike Watt, Superchunk, and Yo La Tengo. That was the night Courtney came up to Kathleen Hanna and punched her in the face. It set the tone for the rest of the tour, with Courtney being someone to avoid and ignore, even more than ever before.

  37

  Free Kitten

  Photo by Jim Spring Yenzee and Jens Jurgensen

  JULIE CAFRITZ IS one of the funniest people I know, underacknowledged as an indie rock “girl” guitar player and singer-goddess. When Julie and I first met years earlier, her band Pussy Galore had just moved to New York and was looking for a drummer. I introduced her to Bob Bert, who had just quit Sonic Youth and seemed perfect for them. Julie and her bandmate Jon Spencer were slightly scary, I remember, all black clothes with tons of ’tude. But Thurston and I both loved their EP SugarShit Sharp, as well as their radical non-PC reputation as Washington, D.C., people who dissed the straight-edge subculture of hardcore punk that asked its adherents not to drink, smoke, do drugs, engage in promiscuous sex, or even drink coffee. It wasn’t some Puritan thing. Straight-edge was asking adherents to take control of their lives, not be blind consumers, and not be tricked into thinking that drinking and drugs were cool since in fact they were the tools of a previous generation. Julie turned out to be surprisingly approachable, and the two of us became friends.

  It wasn’t, as some people believed, that we started Free Kitten as a joke band designed to make fun of the CBGB improv scene of experimental, free noise and jazz, where people played abstract music for very long stretches of time. In spite of some great stuff, like John Zorn, and the jazz street saxophonist Charles Gayle playing alongside Thurston and other musicians from the East Village scene, we felt that men didn’t always know when to stop. We were more inspired by the American alt-rock band Royal Trux, a two-piece band. At that time, Royal Trux—comprised of Neil Hagerty and Jennifer Herrema—were performing a bunch of gigs around New York, and every show was completely different. Royal Trux was rock swagger perfected, with minimum effort, and even though they were completely on drugs the whole time, the effect was both amazing and mysterious. Not to mention that Free Kitten was also an excuse for Julie and me to hang out and do something together.

  When we released our first EP, no one seemed to get us. The reviews could be boiled down to “Really—is this all they can muster? They’re pretending to be bad musicians?” Eventually Mark Ibold and Yoshimi joined Free Kitten. Both are amazing players, and Julie and I both liked them. We never really knew what Mark was doing and left it up to him to figure out what to play, and we would fly Yoshimi over, make up the songs in the studio, and then overdub the vocals before mixing the songs. Julie and I would have to relearn the songs before going out on tour.

  Coco was seven months old when we did our first two-week tour in England. Again, thanks to the jet lag and the breast-feeding, it wasn’t easy, but Thurston came along to take care of Coco. He wouldn’t have missed it anyway. He was always a very big supporter of whatever I did in and out of the band, and I loved that about him—his generosity. Creatively, I never felt any sense of competition with him. He was protective, too. Once the band was playing a gig in Switzerland, and some guy bit my ass while I was onstage, and Thurston was so pissed off he threw a bottle at the guy. Afterward, I remember someone told me, “If you were Ivy from the Cramps, you would have dug your spiked heel into that guy’s head.”

  I can’t even tell you today what the Free Kitten records sounded like. Our only goal was to make them and put them out without getting too self-conscious about what it was we were making. Mostly I wanted Julie to have a musical outlet and to write songs again. Having said that, being in two bands when you’re a new mom is a lot of work. Naturally Sonic Youth was the priority, and Yoshimi had her hands full with her own band, Boredoms. Mark was still playing with Pavement, so Julie and I did what we could, keeping Free Kitten fun while hoping it would stand on its own and be taken seriously, too. It’s always hard doing something outside a familiar context. What are you doing exactly? everyone wanted to know. Is it a supergroup, a side project, an inside joke?

  In 1993, Free Kitten played Lollapalooza on the tiny side stage. It was hot and dusty, and we could hear Rage Against the Machine thundering away at the same time on the big stage. As part of our antirock stance, Julie and I wore matching housewife-y shifts and Pro Keds and sweated it out in the ninety-plus-degree heat.

  In high school, Coco started her own band, Big Nils. On the rare occasion I hear a Free Kitten song somewhere, usually I don’t recognize it. I think, “Hey, who is this—Coco?” and then I realize . . . Oh yeah, right. It’s the strangest feeling, rediscovering your own self and, if enough time has gone by, listening to it without hating it. It is sort of like looking at old photos of yourself and realizing you looked pretty good after all. Recently I came across a photo that my old friend Felipe took the first time he and I visited New York on a break from college in Toronto. I’m on the subway with a backdrop of graffiti; my hair is dark; my coat, once my mom’s, is frumpy; and I look dazed. Reading Rachel Kushner’s
novel The Flamethrowers, I could relate to the sensation of being young in New York, living on the outside of the art world, and that photo sums up that uncertainty, and that time, exactly. I love it.

  38

  BY THE LATE 1990s, the underground experimental music scene had mushroomed, thanks in part to the Internet. After Nirvana, mainstream music nosedived back to its default level of blandness, with “grunge” just another way of marketing big, boring rock music. Still, the underground was alive, growing. Music was getting interesting again, thanks to noise bands like Wolf Eyes and Lightning Bolt, and more women showing up in what had once been an all-male record-collector scene. When Sonic Youth played Detroit, a trio named Universal Indians opened for us, and a girl in the band strummed her guitar with a big rock—one of the sexiest moves I’ve ever seen in music.

  Sonic Youth took some of the money we made from Lollapalooza and got our own studio down on Murray Street. Around that time, we began releasing our music on our own label, Sonic Youth Records, or SYR. Our goal was to release less commercial, more experimental music that we wouldn’t have to promote. I was listening to a lot of Brigitte Fontaine, the French chanteuse from the sixties and seventies, and at one point, we ended up recording on her new record with her partner Areski Belkacem. The Sonic Youth song “Contre Le Sexisme” is inspired by her. That was the beginning of Jim O’Rourke’s musical involvement with Sonic Youth. Jim played on our Goodbye 20th Century record, which my old childhood friend Willie Winant spearheaded, leading us through the scores, which can be pretty abstract.