by Kim Gordon
I don’t remember what Thurston said, only that it convinced me to put off ending the marriage on the spot. It was just a stupid backslide, he told me, and it wouldn’t happen again. I still wanted to believe him.
Over the previous months, I had told Thurston that as someone who had been betrayed by him, I felt I had every right to look at his laptop, especially if, as he kept saying, he had nothing to hide. It didn’t take long to find an unsent e-mail to the woman tucked away in his desktop trash. The drug that was her had turned him into a serial liar, to the point where two of our very good friends had recently told me they were so put off by what one called Thurston’s “darkness” that they didn’t want to come by our house anymore.
50
I HAD ENCOURAGED Thurston to work on the solo album with Beck. Even though it wasn’t his first solo release, my reasoning was that if Thurston had more of a solo presence as a musician, and if he could work outside his comfort zone, maybe he would feel less swallowed up by the band and be happier with his life.
He and Beck began recording in Malibu. In early January, Thurston and I flew out to L.A. for one of those sessions. During the plane ride, Thurston was extremely moody, in tears one moment and detached and distracted the next.
Two or three days later, he told me he had seen her again, that the two of them had hooked up after Christmas before he and I had flown to England to perform a New Year’s gig. Before we left for that UK concert, I had come across an incredibly disturbing photo of her in Thurston’s junk mail. The photo seemed staged, weirdly Cleopatra-like. The woman was posing in a very expensive-looking hotel room. She was wearing some kind of satin lingerie, with satin cuffs around her arms. She was saturated in light. Thurston assured me the photo had been taken a long time ago, but something about the way he was acting made me believe it had special significance to the two of them, and that if I ever found out the truth, I’d end our marriage then and there. Our entire London trip had been painful and strained.
When Thurston told me he had seen her again around Christmas, I left Beck’s house and drove to the house of my manager, Michele, who’s also a good friend, to tell her the whole story. Michele wasn’t home, and as I was waiting for her to get back, Thurston showed up at her house. He was upset. I had told him he had blown whatever chances I’d given him and that things were now over between us. He sat there in a chair as I screamed at him to leave, but for whatever reason he wouldn’t move. Finally Michele came home, and Thurston left, and then I flew back home the next day.
That night, my cell phone rang. It was Thurston, calling from Malibu. He had had a moment of clarity, he said: he did not want to lose me, or Coco, or our life together.
Thurston’s solo record, called Demolished Thoughts, was like a collection of sophomoric, self-obsessed, mostly acoustic mini suicide notes. When I first encouraged him to record it, I hadn’t given any thought to what the lyrics might be about, but hearing pieces of one or two songs, I realized I could never listen to it again. “I think the lyrics are probably about both of you,” Julie said helpfully, but to me, the lyrics, and the songs, were, and always will be, about her.
“I don’t even know what to do with this record,” Thurston told me. “I just feel like walking into the woods and disappearing.” Our management had let him know he could delay its release but instead, he simply refused to promote it, basically pretending the record, and all the songs on it, didn’t exist. Like the cigarettes. Like her.
Later someone showed me a comment posted on the Sonic Youth website. “She looks like a hot little number,” a fan wrote in. He must have seen a photo of the two of them on some website, or picked up on the gossip going around. He added, “Kim beware, men are pigs after all and more affairs happen at work than any other arena.” Finally, the fan wrote, in a catchphrase he took from The Dark Knight, the second of director Christopher Nolan’s three Batman movies, “Some men just want to watch the world burn.”
A few months later, around Coco’s seventeenth birthday, I found out Thurston had seen her again, at a concert he played in Europe, though he had promised his therapist that if she showed up again or contacted him, he would call his doctor and tell me, too. He did neither. I went back to checking his e-mail, where I found several short, porno-like videos that she had sent him. Thurston denied ever responding to them, but sometime after that I found an e-mail he’d drafted to her with a photo of him attached. Maybe he didn’t send it because his vanity got the better of him, or maybe he wanted me to find it. I asked him to move out of the house.
The official announcement of our breakup was timed so we could sit down and tell Coco before the news hit the Internet and strangers started discussing our lives. The web is trouble enough, especially when you’re in your senior year of high school and stressed out about college. Even though Thurston and I had separated in August, so far we hadn’t made any public statements, but people were starting to speculate.
It didn’t stop Coco from being angry with me for not telling her sooner. Kids believe everything is a family matter and that they should have an equal vote or some control over everything that goes on in their family’s lives. And being a teenager makes everyone doubly self conscious. We had already more than ruined her senior year of high school. As she had told us, we couldn’t possibly know what it was like to have us for parents.
I did feel some compassion for Thurston, and I still do. I was sorry for the way he had lost his marriage, his band, his daughter, his family, our life together—and himself. But that is a lot different from forgiveness.
51
THE OTHER DAY, I was thinking about where music has gone, where it’s been, how it’s evolved. The 1960s were so beloved. More than any other decade, they embodied the idea that an individual could find an identity in a music movement. Not the same identity that comes from sexual awakening—that’s more of a 1950s thing—but a group awakening, the kind involving hysterical teenage girls crying together, lighting and propelling one another, a blurred contagion of tears and desire. By the late 1960s, the chilled-out tripping hippie vibe had started to mesh with a desire for money, and with that, the music and the movement began to drift apart.
The crack of idealism between the performer and the audience signaled the end of the 1960s. Altamont, inner-city riots, Watts, Detroit, the Manson murders, the Isle of Wight Festival. There, the audience broke through the makeshift walls, walls that didn’t used to exist. In the huge outdoor space came chants of “Rip-off!” Expecting free music, they wreaked havoc on the festival vibes and caused some performers to cancel, and others to fear for their safety. At one point, Joni Mitchell quit playing in the middle of a song and began crying. The audience wasn’t really listening, and she must have realized in that moment that it—the sixties, that freedom—was over.
I once saw another documentary, made right after Woodstock, this one at a small festival called the Big Sur Folk Festival. The festival took place at Esalen, a hippie spa whose mission was to develop self-awareness through the body. This festival was a mix of rock, folk, and soul, with the audience on one side of a swimming pool and the performers on the other. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young came on. During their set, a member of the audience got up and trespassed onto the band’s side. He began ranting about the fur coats they were wearing, accusing them of being sellouts. There was an altercation, a scuffle, with Stills trying to calm the guy down and using the incident as both a lesson and an intro to the next song—how we can all fall into the trap of money. But what was he really saying? Whose side was he really on?
The 1970s was the first era that learned how to exploit youth culture, and it was the birthplace of corporate rock. It didn’t last long. By 1977 the Clash had written a song with the lyrics “No Elvis, Beatles, or the Rolling Stones” and Iggy Pop and the Stooges had burst forward as the first punk rockers. But Iggy had been there all along, rumbling under the beatific skies of the 1960s—a disruption into what was supposed to be entertainment and positive vibes. Iggy
walked out into the audience, broke glass, smeared himself with peanut butter. Was it a stage show? Was it rock music? Was it real life? Iggy gave audiences something they had never seen, and his estrangement from their expectations created something wild and new. “We’re gonna have a real good time tonight,” he said, almost forcing the idea down the audience’s throats. I give Iggy credit for deconstructing the very idea of entertainment. What is a star? Is stardom a kind of suspended adulthood? Is it a place beyond good and evil? Is a star a person you need to believe in—a daredevil, a risk-taker, a person who goes close to the edge without falling?
There were others of course—the Velvet Underground, the Doors—who took risks in the 1960s, when no one knew where any of it was going. Before them were the Beats and before the Beats the avant-garde artists, the futurists, Fluxus, and before that, the blues, outsider music, a mourning for what’s expected but will never happen, so why not dance and play and forget for a few moments that we’re all alone anyway?
Cut now to Public Image Ltd. performing at the Ritz in 1981 in New York City. Sid Vicious was dead and the Sex Pistols were over. Public Image Ltd. had made an impact and their third album, The Flowers of Romance, had mystery, with its girl on the cover. The Ritz crowd anxiously awaited the band’s appearance. The huge movie-scale screen where videos were projected before bands appeared was still down. The screen was a natural barrier, used to create and motivate the crowd’s reaction. First up came a huge image of John Lydon’s face, laughing. Then he began to sing. Projected onto the screen was a strange film of a dark alley and the girl from the cover of The Flowers of Romance getting out of a garbage can. The film stopped, but the screen stayed in place, and suddenly behind it, the shadows of the three band members appeared. The screen stayed still. Furious at seeing the ghostlike, ritualistic figures of the group out of reach behind the screen, the audience became agitated; they couldn’t see the band in the flesh. They started yelling. A few of them threw metal chairs. The band ran offstage and the audience proceeded to destroy the screen.
Public Image didn’t go out there intending to cause a riot. They were simply trying something new. The audience’s expectations were dashed. The band’s pure audacity had drawn crowds to the Ritz in the first place, but then the audience couldn’t accept what the band was offering. It was too much. And that experience, that feeling, will never appear on YouTube, will never be downloaded onto anyone’s laptop or phone. Today you will never find a picture of it, because the Internet didn’t exist, and no one was paying attention, or bothering to document what was taking place right before their eyes, with the exception of a zine started by a bunch of fifteen-year-old New York girls called The Decline of Western Civilization.
Elvis Presley, Eddie Cochran, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Sid Vicious, Darby Crash, Ian Curtis, Michael Jackson, and others all died, after a fashion, because of our need for “heroics.” Using their egos to sculpt their music—in some cases believing in their own media-created selves—they used their own images to destroy the standard of what had gone before while giving rise to new forms. The audience paid to watch. They also paid to watch the destruction of the artists’ own lives—that illusory freedom becoming an actual freedom.
For that reason, the 1980s were similar to the 1960s. Now they’re all part of the same pre-Internet era. Today, the nostalgia for pre-Internet life is pervasive. What was it like back then, wandering around in an eternally unknowing state, scrounging for bits of information? Is what we get out of a performance today any different now than it was then? No, it’s the same thing: the need for transcendence, or maybe just a distraction—a day at the beach, a trip to the mountains—from humdrum life, boredom, pain, loneliness. Maybe that’s all performance ever was, really. An unending kiss—that’s all we ever wanted to feel when we paid money to hear someone play.
Did the 1990s ever exist? Mainstream American music today is just as conservative as it was back in the 1980s. Experimental music has become a genre. Late-night TV ads for music compilations mix and merge the eighties and nineties in a way that makes me nervous. For Sonic Youth, there was almost something hard-won and unself-conscious about fighting our way through the obstacles of drugs and greed, past clubs of overly burnished bodies and buffed teeth. Then, as the millennium neared, music became all about repentance and atonement for everybody’s thoughtless and decadent climb to success.
Sometime last year I went to see the comedian Dave Chappelle performing at the Oddball Festival in Hartford. It was the first time someone, in this case Live Nation, had put together a traveling festival made up entirely of stand-up comics. Before Chappelle came on, Demetri Martin and Flight of the Conchords performed, and while each one had a bit of a hard time with the audience, who were coming in and out and talking loudly, they handled it with humorous aplomb.
Stand-up comedians hate nothing more than people talking during their sets. No one is more vulnerable than comedians. They aren’t like actors doing a skit. They use their personalities. They like to control and squash the situation, to own the space, and if they lose an audience, they’ll try to win them back.
When Dave Chappelle came out to loud, glorious, much-anticipated applause, it was a great moment, and I almost teared up. After about ten minutes, Chappelle started asking people to stop talking, to let him do his act. But no one listened. They just stepped up the banter, yelling things out to him. Chappelle then took out his pack of cigarettes and announced he was a patient man and would simply wait out the twenty-five minutes his contract called for.
He did just that. He hung in there. He even stayed longer than his time, continuing to talk to the audience, whose behavior by that point had gotten even messier. Then he said good night and walked offstage. The next night, in Pittsburgh, I heard he killed it.
52
Photo by Vice Cooler
THE FIRST TIME Jutta Koether and I met, she was an editor and writer at Spex magazine. She was interviewing Thurston and me during our European tour for Daydream Nation and seemed confounded by the fact that Sonic Youth, known as a sort of punk rock band, would use the Gerhard Richter candle image for our album cover. In Germany, Gerhard was and is their biggest contemporary artist, but it felt to Jutta as though we’d made a banal, status-quo-oriented artistic decision. After weeks of doing interviews where for the most part journalists asked the same three or four questions, it was great having someone challenge us. To me, Gerhard’s cover was an aesthetic Trojan horse decision—disguising subversion under a benign exterior, just as the Reagan eighties concealed torment and volatility.
Jutta and I became friends. A day after she’d moved to New York, I bumped into her as she was walking down St. Mark’s Place, and the two of us started hanging out. She was practicing art but also doing music and art performances.
Over the years Jutta and I began what would become a series of collaborative installations and performances. The first was called Club in the Shadow at Kenny Schachter’s gallery in the West Village, an unconventional space designed by Vito Acconci. The location was made funnier to me for being situated in an alleyway next to Richard Meier towers filled with multimillion-dollar Hudson River–facing condos owned by people like Calvin Klein and Martha Stewart.
We also did performances—one-act plays, we called them—where we combined text and improvisational noise music. Recently we collaborated on a show at PS1 in New York, for the last night of Mike Kelley’s retrospective, and again at the Geffen Contemporary, where Mike’s show was opening in L.A. In 2012 Mike was found dead in his home in South Pasadena, an apparent suicide. At PS1, we showed one of Mike’s videos behind us in the big dome tent alongside the PS1 buildings. Early on in his career, Mike formed a band with Tony Oursler and others called the Poetics, whose songs boomed from a cassette player onstage, and Jutta and I improvised around them. The text we used came from an old interview Mike once did with me, and Jutta and I switched off being Mike and being me halfway through the performance. It was a pleasur
e to be able to riff off something Mike had done. It helped make his death seem less final, more a continuation of a dialogue with his work and his ideas, and his sense of humor. It’s difficult to think of Mike so defeated and giving up, when for all his life, he never gave up, always wanted to succeed.
I started another band, too. From the beginning, Body/Head, the group I formed with the musician Bill Nace, was a strange concept. Most people have a really hard time with the idea of improvisation, believing it must not be any good or that it doesn’t mean anything. A year after my marriage, and the group, ended, Coco left to attend art school in the Midwest. There were still people living in our house, but it was time to do other things. Starting a new group seemed like an interesting thing to do.
Bill had played in a duo with Thurston, and the three of us had played together a few times. Later, Bill and I started playing in our basement as a duo, recording ourselves on cassettes. The second we came up with a name, we knew we were a band instead of some one-off. I wasn’t necessarily trying to get away from Sonic Youth, and I sometimes used Sonic Youth guitar tuning, but as soon as you omit the drums, everything sounds different. I had no desire to do anything that sounded explicitly rock. I’d taken the rock musician thing as far as I could take it. It was more about creating what Bill and I wanted to hear—modern music, noisy, dynamic, emotive, and free. We gave Sonic Youth’s label, Matador, the right of first refusal, not really thinking they would want to put it out. But they did, and it was a double LP.