by Kim Gordon
As we were recording A Thousand Leaves, my father died, having contracted pneumonia in a nursing home. I still feel sad whenever he comes into my mind. Even though he could be one of the “distant dads,” as a lot of men of his generation were, he was always kind and understanding, a very gentle soul. I wasn’t with him when he died, a big regret of mine. By the time I made it to L.A., he was gone. Even today, I feel protective of him. It is my guilt-driven impulse, as well as my pattern with men, starting with Keller, ending with Thurston.
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Photo courtesy of Home Box Office, Inc.
A FRIEND OF MINE once described Cannes as a giant gift shop, but because it’s in France, along a beautiful blue ocean, it’s better than that, the peak of fabulousness, the place where the red carpet was invented. Walking up the stairs to the Palais—as if it’s the highest achievement anyone could ever attain—is as good as they say.
In 2005 Thurston and I were in Cannes for the screening of Last Days, Gus Van Sant’s film based on the mysterious end of Kurt’s life. In the ten years since Kurt had died, neither Thurston nor I had ever done an interview about him. Now, suddenly, in the two days leading up to the screening, we were doing a lot of them, in between cocktail parties and dinners. Thurston joined the film as a consultant to make sure Gus got the music parts right and also to debrief the movie’s star, Michael Pitt.
It had come as a surprise when Gus called and asked me to play a part in the movie. The role was a small cameo—I played an empathetic record company executive, if such a person exists—but it’s also the only time the Michael Pitt character interacts with anyone in the film. Before we shot it, Gus discussed the scene with me and asked me what I would say. I based the character on Rosemary Carroll, who was Courtney’s lawyer and also the wife of Danny Goldberg, the head of the management company that represented us both. Rosemary is an eccentric, unconventional woman who at one point early in her life was married to the poet Jim Carroll.
We ran through the improvised dialogue several times, shooting it more than once. At the end of each take, Gus would toss out slight suggestions like, “Make it shorter.” Michael Pitt bore an amazing resemblance to Kurt, though when I stood facing him I was taken aback by his height, remembering Kurt’s smallness, the fragility contrasting with the explosiveness.
I did the film because I trusted that Gus would make something interesting, and he did. Overall it was a painless, positive experience that spoiled me for other film experiences, since after all, I’ve worked only with the best—Gus, Olivier Assayas, and Todd Haynes! Haha! Acting is something I always thought I might have a natural ability for doing. It connects to some odd three-dimensional sense I’ve always had, a spatial confidence of knowing where things are at all times, of being able to move around a stage without looking, always knowing where the audience is, or in this case, the camera. When I write lyrics sometimes I’ve pretended to be someone else, a character, tried to put myself in her head or situation, while drawing from some real-life emotion I’ve experienced, as I did in “The Sprawl” and “Pacific Coast Highway.” I’ve always gotten inspiration from the movies, whether for lyrics or fashion ideas, and I could watch films for hours. As an actor I don’t think I could ever be great, but maybe I bring something different, strange, new.
When we arrived at the stairs to the Palais, a song kicked in from a seven-inch that Thurston and I did together under the band name Mirror/Dash—a lo-fi, intimate, melancholy song—and it blew my mind that they would play it at such a public and glorified event as the Cannes film festival.
Going up the stairs involves an intricate choreography that gets repeated over and over with each film that makes it to the Palais. Guards flanked the sides of the stairs, holding—I’m not kidding—guns. The cast members linked arms, all in a row. Asia Argento, Gus, Michael, Michael’s girlfriend Jamie, and I took a few steps together. We paused. We took a few more steps, paused again. I assume this was to add even more ceremony and ritual to the pomp, the constellation of flashbulbs. Oddly enough, the experience was calming, especially as the sun was setting into dusk. Honestly, it was one of the highlights of my career.
At the same time, during an era where I’d grown used to averting my eyes to the most grossly commercial aspects of Kurt’s legacy—bootlegs, sidewalk drawings, T-shirts, posters, magazine covers—here I was in a film that took poetic license with Kurt’s last days. Some people, I knew, would hate the film, mostly those ardent fans who wanted a more literal, less abstract, or sordid interpretation. I had never wanted to exploit whatever friendship or kinship Kurt and I had, and even in his death I wanted to protect him, which is why I feel weird even writing what I have in this book. But as I wrote earlier, I think about Kurt quite often. As with many people who die violently, and too young, there is never any resolution or closure. Kurt still moves along inside me, and outside, too, with his music.
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Murray Street . . . and Beyond
BY NOW OUR official studio was Murray Street, and Jim O’Rourke was officially playing with us and helping us engineer and mix our records. On Murray Street, I’d switched over to playing guitar more than I ever had before. It was great having Jim play bass—he was a much more facile bass player than I was—and it automatically altered the songwriting process. It was probably more fun for Steve, too, drumming along with someone less minimal.
Everyone in New York has his or her own 9/11 story. At the time Jim was basically living at the Murray Street studio, which was only a couple of blocks from the Twin Towers. I was at our apartment on Lafayette Street getting ready to go to Paris to perform with an improv quartet that I was part of at a party thrown by the Gap. We were supposed to fly out that night. Thurston was at our new house in Northampton with Coco. The night before, I’d attended a huge Marc Jacobs party on one of the piers off the West Side Highway following his Fashion Week show. Marc was launching his first perfume line, and thousands of white gardenias formed an archway into the party, which was pitch-black in contrast to the pier’s sparkling lights. It had rained recently, and my high heels kept sinking into the soft gravelly ground. It couldn’t have been a more decadent, over-the-top but still-beautiful fashion moment.
The next morning Daisy called and told me to turn on the TV because a plane had just flown into the World Trade Center. Daisy’s husband, Rob, worked in a building across from the Towers but hadn’t left for the office yet. I called Jim and told him to leave the studio, and then I called Thurston. Jim knew nothing but told me that dust was starting to gather through the open windows. It was difficult for me—for everybody—to make any sense of what was happening. I had no TV or radio, but the phone worked, at least at first. By the time the second plane hit, phone service was crackling away to nothing, and when I called Thurston a second time, I couldn’t reach him, but I finally convinced Jim to come to our apartment. As Jim was leaving Murray Street, the second tower was collapsing and people were jumping out of windows. Lee, his wife, Leah, and their kids, who lived downtown, showed up at our apartment, too. Below us, literally right outside our door, Houston Street and Lafayette were barricaded, and police weren’t letting anyone go south of Houston without ID and proof of residence.
It was a surreal, terrifying day. People—stranded models, people who’d come to town for Fashion Week—were wandering around Nolita and Soho in a daze. Jim arrived finally, completely traumatized. We all slept there that night.
The next morning, I remember walking down Bleecker Street to Daisy and Rob’s apartment. The streets were empty. I got very emotional thinking about New York as I looked down to where the towers once were and saw a big nothing. It felt like the end. The five of us, Daisy, Rob, their two children, and I, wound our way up the island, not knowing what streets we could drive on and what streets would be barricaded. Both FDR Drive on the East Side and the West Side Highway were closed. That day, Daisy and Rob took their two kids to Northampton, and I hitched a ride with them. That was it for them and New York. Lee and his
family drove out to Long Island. Jim caught a later ride to Northampton.
For the next week eight people from New York lived in our house. Jim stayed there for over a month. He was too shaken to go back. I was still shaken too—who wouldn’t be? Every morning I got up early and turned on CNN just to make sure nothing else had happened, and I woke up in the middle of the night, too. This is still my sleep pattern. It took a while before the band was able to return to the studio and when we did, we had to get permission to pass through Chambers Street. Later I found out that most of the power downtown in the financial district ran directly underneath Murray Street, and the plane crashes had fried our mixing board. Murray Street itself had chain-link fencing on both sides of the sidewalk, and for months it was one big gaping hole, with the sidewalks and pavement regularly wetted down to dissolve the dust still permeating the air. Is this to wash away the dust of all the people killed in the towers? I kept thinking.
There was nothing else to do but return to work. Despite the circumstances under which we made it, the album Murray Street is still one of my favorite records, containing the nine-minute-long “Sympathy for the Strawberry.” I remember what a challenge it was coming up with vocal ideas over large masses of abstract music. As a non-singer singer, it was probably easier for me than it would have been for a more conventional singer, but I gravitated to what I thought I could pull off, and more and more I went with emotionality. With his more natural approach to mixing, Jim didn’t try to make me sound like a singer.
Sonic Nurse, the next record Sonic Youth put out, we did with Jim too. The song “Pattern Recognition” was based on a William Gibson book I’d read and liked. It wasn’t one of his sci-fi titles but a thriller set in an extremely contemporary present about a woman who is a “cool hunter”—an amazing term, I thought, to describe a person hired by corporations to smoke out trends for brands. “Pattern Recognition” was one of my favorite songs to play live, a sexy song with a lot of moves that traveled to multiple places. I also loved singing “I Love You Golden Blue,” though I was often on the verge of tears whenever I sang it. It’s a song about someone who believes he can’t show himself to the world. Believing he’ll only destroy the people he cares about, he avoids all intimacy. He’s stuck. I couldn’t help thinking that was true about a lot of boy-men I’d known in my life.
After Jim left the band and moved to Japan, we began working on our album Rather Ripped, the last of our so-called trilogy, with John Agnello. John brought a bigger, more concise sound to the band—not better, just different. After years of trying to mix as a group, it came as a relief to have first Jim and then John in our midst. By then Mark Ibold had started playing bass with us full-time. “Jams Run Free” off Rather Ripped was a much more natural song for my voice. Whirling around in the middle of the stage, with Mark on the bass, I was freed up, and it became my favorite song to sing live. I could swirl around so fast that everything blurred, the lights and the sounds colliding and smashing together. That’s a point where you lose all sense of your body and feel carried completely by the music, a moment that makes all the drudgery, exhaustion, and boredom of touring worthwhile.
For our next record, Thurston chose the title The Eternal. Maybe he knew it would be our last record as a band. “Massage the History” was the only song I wrote about our relationship. It has the line “I dreamed” in it, maybe because I was dreaming of the first record we ever made. It was before I found out what the dark cloud following Thurston around consisted of, but I had already felt it.
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SOMETIME IN MY late thirties I’d begun looking at babies. Babies on the sidewalk, in strollers, on shoulders. The problem was, I could never figure out the best time to start a family. Thurston’s and my life as a couple, and as a band, was all about writing, recording, doing press, endlessly touring. Still, once the idea came into my head it was hard to push back.
As always, Thurston’s self-assuredness and outward confidence helped convince me we could carry the parenting thing off. He didn’t talk much about having a child, but he didn’t discuss much of anything at length—the music connected us, taking the place of words, and we ended up in agreement about most things.
But after Coco was born, I realized we had never talked about what kind of parents or partners we wanted to be. I’d simply assumed Thurston was supportive of feminist issues, like equal participation in child care, equal responsibilities around the house, and so forth.
Like most new moms, I found that no matter how just and shared you expect the experience to be, or how equal the man thinks parenting should be, it isn’t. It can’t be. Most child-raising falls on women’s shoulders. Some things, like the laundry, are just easier to do yourself than to have to explain in detail to someone else. Other things were biological. As a baby, whenever Coco cried I felt it immediately, physically, because my breasts began to leak. Thurston, and any man for that matter, would never feel that same kind of urgency, that desire to make the crying stop not only to comfort your baby but for your own body’s sake. This doesn’t make men bad parents, though it can make women feel alone in what they’d hoped would be an equal division of labor. This is a dynamic that carried over to other parts of our relationship.
Being pregnant made me nervous. In my third trimester, I remember going to a party where I ran into Peter Buck of R.E.M. and his then wife Stephanie. They’d just had twin babies, Zelda and Zoe, and I was frightened when Stephanie asked me if I wanted to hold one. I also had a series of anxiety dreams. In one, Coco was a baby who talked and went out to lunch without me. In another, right after Kurt killed himself, someone left Frances Bean in my charge. (In real life, whenever Courtney had visited New York, her nanny Jackie brought Frances over to play with Coco. I have photos of Frances curled up in our disgusting cat bed. Crawling babies seem to gravitate to the places you least want them to go.)
Thurston immediately took to fatherhood. He was a natural, in fact. I’d read my share of parenting and baby books, but he was much more experienced around kids, having done a lot of babysitting when he was younger. He was never awkward holding Coco or getting down on the floor and playing with her.
At the same time, it was hard to tell him anything I was feeling without his getting offended, since he took everything so personally. I wish he had sometimes said, “Tell me what I can do to help out,” but he never did. That’s no slam; it’s just the way it was. But it made me feel like I was the only one in control, the only one looking out for us as a family, the lighthouse keeper. I wasn’t always comfortable in that role, but I had little choice. I had to do what was right for our family.
Having a baby also created a huge identity crisis inside of me. It didn’t help that during press interviews, journalists always said, “What’s it like to be a rock-and-roll mom?” just as over the last decades they couldn’t help asking, “What’s it like to be a girl in a band?” I’m sure Thurston got the same question, but at least on the surface it didn’t appear to bother him as much. Like a lot of guys, he was the “cool, fun dad,” which was great for Coco in many ways. In the end he was probably a better dad than he was a partner, as more and more he’d begun pulling away from me, wanting to do everything his way. Looking back, I think it was probably because he didn’t want to be with me anymore.
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IT WASN’T THAT our apartment on Lafayette was all that cramped, more that it was simply time for a change. Anyone who leaves New York knows that when the city isn’t working for them the way it used to, the only question is where to go. Portland, Oregon. Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina. We considered both those places, and we also scoped out Brooklyn—Carroll Gardens and Cobble Hill—but outer-borough prices were more than we wanted to pay, and I didn’t want to live any farther out in the New York suburbs.
I was thinking ahead, too. I didn’t want to raise Coco on Lafayette Street. Not on the fringes of Soho, not with giraffe-packs of skinny models on every sidewalk within the Soho pedestrian mall of high-end consumerism. The
New York nanny culture also bugged me, both parents working all day to be able to afford to pay a stranger to take care of a child they never got to see. The expense and the inconvenience, and later down the line, schools and tests and applications and micromanaging your child in a city where no kid can walk around unaccompanied, where there are no yards and no real neighbors to speak of—all of these were factors in our decision to go.
Northampton, Massachusetts, was a longtime secondary market for us. It was a student town. Smith was there, and close by were Amherst, UMass Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke. Williams was an hour away, too. It was filled with lots of New York City transplants, so it didn’t feel like a traditional suburb or a commuter town. Northampton is also one of the most liberal small cities in America. The main drag was a spiky blur of coffee shops, tattoo parlors, vegetarian restaurants, yoga studios, and therapists’ offices. Underlying the decision to move there was the hope that maybe Thurston, Coco, and I could become more family centered, more unified, less scattered. Helping to smooth things were the good friends we had in the area, like Byron Coley and his family, and J Mascis, who lived in Amherst.
But moving from the city to the country still felt exotic. A Realtor showed us a few properties, mostly farmhouses with rectangular unlit rooms and ceilings that grazed your scalp. Thurston had grown up in an extremely old house with ceilings so low he couldn’t stand all the way up in his own bedroom. When we found a big rangy brick house with three floors and a backyard for sale close to the Smith College campus, we jumped on it, or rather Thurston did. He approached things with a kid-like overconfidence, unlike me, who stood back and questioned things more. In the end, using the money I’d gotten from the sale of X-Girl, we bought the house. We held on to the Lafayette Street apartment, but we were now New Englanders.