Girl in a Band

by Kim Gordon

  Before we’d even moved in, a local newspaper, the Gazette, ran a front-page story about Thurston’s and my moving to Northampton, which bugged me, because now everybody in town knew where we lived. One night, I remember, someone dropped a demo tape on our front porch. Another night two Smith students who lived in senior housing across the street from us left a note taped to our screen door asking if Julie Cafritz and I would deejay at a Smith College radio show. Julie and her husband, Bob, had moved to the area a few years after we did. Julie and I ended up doing it, and we had fun, too.

  Compared to New York, everything felt more affordable in Massachusetts, and the house gave us a whole new feeling of space and freedom. The basement was ideal for playing, and also provided storage for Thurston’s huge LP collection. Over time it would fill up with books, cassettes, and VHS tapes, plus assorted Sonic Youth archival material and merchandise, all sharing the stage with family furniture I’d inherited from my parents, as well as other souvenirs, including clay figurines I’d made when I was a teenager.

  Over time I grew to like living in Northampton. It was New York–centric rather than Boston-centric—people read the New York Times, not the Boston Globe—even though New York was a three-hour drive south and Boston less than ninety miles to the east. It was also rural and beautiful, a small town with the sophistication of a bigger city. The last thing in the world I ever wanted was to live in suburbia, but with its students, academia, hippies, farmers, New York transplants, and old Yankees, Northampton was something else entirely. A few years after Thurston and I moved, I ran into Lawrence Weiner, the artist, at an exhibition in New York. “Are you still living in Massachusetts?” he asked. “Then why are you here? Don’t you need a passport to leave?” Lawrence’s fantasy of Northampton, and of all of New England, was that the Puritans were still running the show. I laughed.

  Whatever fantasy I had about living in Northampton couldn’t make me overcome the fear any ex–New Yorker would feel of being surrounded by blandness and conformity. But no place gives you everything. I’m equally mistrustful of the energy bursts New York gives you, which fragment and exhaust you. Living there gives you a phony sense of self-importance and confidence. If you’re at all anxious, the city acts out your anxiety for you, leaving you feeling strangely peaceful.

  43

  THAT FIRST NEW ENGLAND winter was hard. Snowstorms, then more snowstorms, with long icicles dripping from the gutters like swords or freeze-frames of lightning, and the responsibility of taking care of things we’d never had to think about before, like shoveling the back stairs or the walkway. Sometimes when I drove along Route 9 into Amherst in January or February, everything looked so gray and ugly, especially the shut-down vegetable stands and of course the mall, filled with suburban big-box stores like Home Depot, Chipotle, Target, Walmart, just like in every suburb in America.

  We’d wanted a change, something different, and now we had it. But when I look back, maybe we’d moved in an attempt to get away not from New York but from an unspoken tension that had been growing in our marriage since Coco was born. The game Thurston and I seemed to be playing, without saying a single word, was, Who’s the adult here?

  Coco had started kindergarten at the local lab school affiliated with Smith College, less a true lab school than a small private school with a few progressive ideas. It was only a block from our house, an easy stroll in the mornings and afternoons, and it reminded me of the UCLA Lab School I’d attended at that age, the one with the beautiful campus and the gully.

  Other family matters were taking up space, too. On the next-to-last day of a tour we were doing with Pearl Jam in 2000, the same year Al Gore lost the presidential election to Bush, my mother was involved in a serious car accident. Her caretaker was driving her on various errands when she made a left turn at the wrong time. Heroic measures were taken to revive her. My old L.A. friend Margie, who was almost an older sister to me, called to give me the news a few minutes before we went onstage in Washington, D.C. Ian MacKaye, the iconic performer from Minor Threat and Fugazi, was there. He said to me, “There’s tour reality, and then there’s reality.” Thurston and I got on a plane to L.A. I was sobbing the whole plane ride.

  My mom had suffered a severe head injury and was in a Los Angeles ICU for more than a month. Thurston could stay only a few days, and then he had to fly back east to take care of Coco, whom we’d left with her babysitter. I was still in Los Angeles when Coco went to her first day of first grade. Thurston took a sweet photograph of the two of them on their way to school, and my heart broke not to be there, to feel split in half between the joy of seeing Coco starting first grade and keeping vigil over my mom. But I also felt lucky and secure that Thurston was a good dad who could give our daughter everything she needed even if I couldn’t physically be there.

  My mom remained in the hospital for another two months. She ended up with a feeding tube, unable to communicate during the last three years of her life. But she was lucid, knew who everyone around her was, and her personality was intact. Sometimes I wondered if she was looking at me with bitterness or reproach about her condition—had it been the right decision to consent to heroic efforts to save her? Hard to say, and I’ll never know.

  Eventually, my mom returned home with a cast of caregivers. I flew back and forth every two months to see her and check on her progress, and when I couldn’t be there, Margie was there, filling me in on her progress. I could never have survived that period without Margie. My mother had worked so hard in her later years to make sure she never ended up in a wheelchair—she did yoga, played golf, and walked every day—so it was crushing for me to see her like this. Plus, it was painful to me that she’d lived her entire life in Los Angeles without having a major car accident, only to be brought down by someone else, a caretaker, at the wheel.

  44

  Photo by Sofia Coppola

  IT WAS ONE THING to leave New York, still another to get used to a new town, a new house, a new daily rhythm. In the morning, either Thurston or I would drop Coco off at school and mill around with the other parents. Many, as I said, were city transplants, sophisticated and smart, but none came from our rock-and-roll world. That world was one I’d never identified with myself much anyway. No matter how local the two of us felt, or how engaged we were in the town, our lives were different from other people’s. No one else was going out on tour, then coming back home to figure out what was next.

  One morning after dropping Coco off at school, I stood around chatting with one of the dads. He was sharp and funny, a scientist. “I’m going to go to the gym,” he said to me. “What do you have going on for the day?”

  “I have to go home and interview Yoko Ono over the phone,” I said. The words came out before I could edit them.

  “Wow,” he said, “you lead a pretty glamorous life, don’t you?” I didn’t, though. Interviewing Yoko Ono was just another thing I ended up doing that fell into my lap, in its own way stressful.

  The hardest part of being a mother in a band had to do with logistics. For the most part, Sonic Youth toured around Coco’s school and holiday schedules. Until she was about ten, Coco always came along with us. After this, she would stay home and spend the few weeks we were gone with a babysitter. At one point, Thurston’s niece Katie started accompanying us on tour to help take care of Coco. Coco adored her, and Katie got to see a little bit of the world. During the nontour weeks, Thurston, I, or both of us had to go to New York for rehearsals, recording, interviews, and photo shoots, and all that schlepping wasn’t easy on a child. Depending on her mood that day, Coco was either the most flexible or the least flexible child on earth. When we needed her to get up early and board a plane, she was great, especially for a kid who could be hard to rouse in the mornings. But if you walked into a hotel room, and for some reason it wasn’t right, even though she hated it she would stubbornly refuse to leave.

  Even with Katie along to help, touring with a child was nerve-wracking. Packing, unpacking, rushing to catch pla
nes, boarding a van to the hotel and then to sound check. In airports, Beanie Babies call out every fifty feet. Disciplining a child in public is no picnic, especially when a few eyes are on you. Accidentally forgetting a treasured stuffed animal can create hours and even days of anguish. Once when Coco was eighteen months old, we were touring Southeast Asia with the Beastie Boys. Coco had a Zoe stuffed animal—Zoe is Elmo’s sister. As we were barreling across endless streams of traffic in Jakarta, we dropped Zoe, and she got run over. By some miracle, a taxi driver stopped his car, picked Zoe up, and returned her to us, streaked with mud marks. That same trip, we left Zoe behind in Auckland, and our amazing tour manager, Peter, shipped her to the next gig we were playing in Wellington.

  Then there were the dressing rooms and bathrooms. Every female musician who has ever toured has a mental history ingrained of what the tour was like, based on the dressing rooms backstage and the dingy bathrooms. CBGB is a good early example. The bathrooms had no doors or toilet seats. The sinks were broken, and graffiti plastered the walls and the mirrors. Most rock clubs don’t have bathrooms backstage for the musicians. You have to pass through the hot, sweaty club before you go on, in order to change or pee, trying always to keep your clothes or feet from touching the floor. Usually you have to wait in line for one of the two available stalls, which a lot of the time are stuffed with toilet paper and can’t be flushed. Festivals have their own version of bad bathrooms, a row of disgusting porta-potties. This is how I know I’m old, because today I have a very real intolerance for crappy, ugly, badly lit dressing rooms and dilapidated toilets. At a certain age, your brain just says, No.

  It always felt good to come home. We had our group of unconventional friends in Northampton. Byron Coley and his wife, Lili Dwight, had two kids, one Coco’s age. There was J Mascis and his girlfriend and later wife, Luisa, who’d become one of my closest friends. Julie Cafritz was also there, with her then husband Bob Lawton, Sonic Youth’s longtime booking agent. Julie moved to Northampton a year or two after we did, and a day after 9/11, Julie’s sister and my X-Girl business partner Daisy and her family drove to Northampton and never left. Daisy wouldn’t return to New York for years, even for a visit.

  For me, it was hard, working on art projects, running the house, raising a daughter, and having a full-time music career. I’ve never had any domestic talents or hobbies. I’m a good cook and could fill the house with art supplies, but that was pretty much the extent of my homemaking side. Coco once repeated to me something a friend’s mother had said to her, that the reason I couldn’t do anything—by which I assumed she meant domestic things like crafts, sewing, or baking—was because I was a musician. It hurt my feelings that her friend’s mother, who I liked, would say that. Maybe Coco had misinterpreted it, or maybe I had, or maybe neither of us had. Truth was, I never wanted to be a housewife. I never wanted to be anything other than who I was.

  Thurston had more going on around Northampton than I did, including performing. There was and is a fairly healthy experimental music scene around Northampton—“the Happy Valley,” as the locals called it. Thurston and Byron Coley had also embarked on a bunch of record and book projects. They put out a book about the No Wave scene and started their own record label, Ecstatic Yod. Me, I didn’t mind being less busy. I was in Northampton for Coco’s sake, even if that meant that with travel, artwork, and other responsibilities, I couldn’t be around some of the time.

  Byron’s daughter, Addie, and Coco grew up together, and in third grade, the two of them began attending another local school, the Center School, a progressive place a half hour to the north. As Coco entered middle school, she started getting much more self-conscious about having Thurston and me as parents. She was wary of anyone—teachers, other students—who expressed any interest in us or told her they liked our music. She worried about leaving her core group of friends and going into high school with the shadow of her parents hanging over her. “You don’t know what it’s like to be your daughter,” Coco said more than once, and it was true, we didn’t, mostly because I never thought of Sonic Youth as being that well-known.

  Still, references to the band came up here and there. Someone would mention the Simpsons episode Thurston and I had appeared in, or I’d run into a parent at the local grocery store who would tell me how impressed he was that “Kool Thing” had ended up on the latest Guitar Hero. The Jason Bateman character in the movie Juno mentioned us, and we also showed up on episodes of Gossip Girl and Gilmore Girls.

  At home, because we had extra rooms to fill, we’d created a mock extended family of sorts. First there was Keith, who worked as an unofficial caretaker before we moved in and who lived on our big third floor while we remodeled the house. Keith was an interior designer, incredibly helpful in finding local workers and an architect. During the summers when we went on tour, he looked after the place for us. There was Thurston’s other niece, Louise, who moved to Northampton to attend high school and to live with us when Coco was around eight. Louise wanted to escape the confines of Bethel, Connecticut, where her mother had moved the rest of the family to be closer to Thurston’s mother. Louise turned out to be a great companion for Coco, but no matter how self-sufficient she was, it was another person to nurture, and take care of, and worry about, if only at a distance.

  Photo by Ton van Gool

  After Keith left, two musician friends, Christina Carter and Andrew Macgregor, moved into the third floor. Andrew was helping Byron out at a record store he had opened and needed a cheap place to live. Christina, who recorded beautiful music in her bedroom, lived off her music by touring. Andrew and Christina kept their own hours and were lovely to have in the house. One summer when Thurston and I were on tour, Andrew took our dog, Merzbow, to an experimental music festival he was performing at, where people were camping out. When Andrew recorded his set, you could hear Merzbow barking in the background.

  Keith, Andrew, and Christina kicked off our tradition of always having someone living on our third floor. It was helpful when Thurston or I had to go to New York, and though none of our tenants had much experience around children, they were responsible people, and I have to think they liked being around a kid, too.

  It was always hard leaving. We usually left to tour right as the weather was turning nice, meaning we had to miss the entire summer. When June came around, we’d have a week or two off, but then we’d be gone until just before Labor Day, when Coco’s school started. I never felt like I got anything close to a vacation, maybe because I never did.

  Still, we tried to make overseas travel as fun for Coco as we could, and later, when she was in middle school, she would invite a friend along for part of the tour. I think she was happy to show her friends once and for all how unglamorous the whole rock star life really was.

  45

  GOING DOWN THE stairs, the basement smelled musty, its darkness broken up only by a single lightbulb hanging on a long cord in the middle of the room. An old carpet covered part of the cement floor. Toward the back of the room, a small bass amp and a guitar amp were set up, along with a small drum kit and a single mike on a stand directly underneath the swinging bulb.

  Teenagers drifted down into the room. Three girls and a young boy made their way over to the instruments. A petite girl with purplish-red hair cut into a long, curly Mohawk picked up the guitar, while another girl, tall and big-boned, plugged in the bass. The drummer was skinny and unassuming as he took his seat behind the drum kit, looking like a shorn kitten, sleepy and oblivious.

  The singer was tall, with shoulder-length blond hair cut bluntly, as though she’d taken scissors to it herself. She wore tight gray jeans and a circa-1980s Mudhoney T-shirt that read, TOUCH ME I’M SICK. The drummer clicked off the song, and the girl leaned into the mic to belt out the words “Wake up, wake up, wake up . . . ,” moving the mic stand slightly side to side, not with a lot of movement, just enough to show she was self-assured and not trying too hard.

  The voice was familiar, reminiscent of my own. Th
e singer’s moves, too, were like mine, but more confident. She wasn’t giving away much, but enough to show that if she wanted to, she could.

  A small mosh pit formed around the group, two teenage boys with Mohawks dancing around in front, though the singer towered over them. At one point, she leaned over to a friend of mine, who was filming the whole thing, and whispered, “I hate those two boys, they’re so annoying.”

  The girl was my sixteen-year-old daughter, and I wasn’t actually there in person but instead watched the video at home in my living room because Coco didn’t want Thurston or me seeing her play. The lightbulb swung overhead, casting weird shadows across the screen before blaring white into the lens. It sent chills of pure joy up and down my spine.

  Since I became a mother, journalists always threw out the question “What’s it like being a rock musician who’s also a mom?” It’s a question I could never answer to my, or anyone else’s, satisfaction without giving one of those “Like any woman balancing a family and a job . . .” answers—the most boring one I could think of, which only seems appropriate.

  Maybe for me this moment was like seeing your child graduate from high school. I couldn’t put it into words. It wasn’t something I dreamed about or hoped would happen, or ever thought Coco had any interest in doing. The fact that she was so good blew my mind, and the fact that her band, which began as a laugh, a bunch of friends hanging out and having fun, came together almost magically was just so rock.

  A few weeks later, Thurston and I went to their show and hid out in back. They were opening for a band called Yuck, a band supposedly influenced by Dinosaur Jr., Teenage Fanclub, and Sonic Youth. Through the club sound system, Coco’s band sounded amazing. The guitar player seemed perched to jump off, or onto, something, creating genuine tension. Her playing was linear, like Pavement’s, and the bass player sounded like early Public Image. Their sound was curling, all splattering dissonance, the drummer swingy and energetic. I would have killed to play with him myself. Again, the singer, my daughter, was fearless in her non-singer punk style that haunted me like a song I couldn’t recall.