Unlike most hardcore kids, the members of Sonic Youth had firsthand experience of virtually the entire history of rock music, with the exception of the early rock & rollers. “We had real ties to Sixties music in a firsthand way, both British Invasion and San Francisco psychedelia—that stuff made a big impression on us,” says Ranaldo. “Which set us apart from young kids who were seventeen in 1980 that had really only heard about it from their parents’ record collection, if at all.”
But no wave was just as resolutely antihistorical as hardcore, which meant that Sonic Youth didn’t speak up about their Sixties roots. “You didn’t want to be associated with the excesses of hippie music or any of the spiritual yearning side of it,” says Ranaldo. “The fact that it was involved with drugs and the questing that went hand in hand with the music at that point, people, didn’t want to be associated with that—and yet so many of the parallels are obvious. I would assume that with a lot of those people, it was only later that they were able to admit being really involved in a lot of that music. I know in the early days of our group, when I would admit to having a thing for the Grateful Dead at one period, it almost felt like a blasphemous thing to say.”
The band also had no strong connections to either hardcore or the New York art rock establishment. “We were,” Moore said, “a part of nothing.
“We just said fuck it,” he continued, “and got cheap guitars and screwdrivers and turned the amps up to ten.”
Edson left the band in the summer of ’82. (He continued playing with the hip art-funk band Konk and soon became an actor, appearing in Desperately Seeking Susan, Stranger than Paradise, Platoon, and even an episode of Miami Vice.) The band made a flyer that said simply “Sonic Youth needs drummer” and stuck it on the wall at SoHo’s Rocks in Your Head, one of the city’s few underground record shops.
Bob Bert had drummed in a noise band called Drunk Driving and studied painting at the School of Visual Arts. A familiar face on the New York punk scene almost from the beginning, Bert was a big Branca fan, so when he heard the maestro had started a label, he picked up its first release, the Sonic Youth mini-LP. “I loved it,” says Bert. “It was like PiL’s Second Edition—only better, more extreme.” When he saw their flyer, he called Moore right away and got the gig. Bert traded Edson’s busy little syncopations for an explosive tribal stomp—it wasn’t the manic hardcore style Moore had envisioned, but it merged with Gordon’s simple bass lines for a much more visceral impact.
In the mainstream world of the early Eighties, it was still novel for a woman to play a leading role in a band. But not in punk rock.
Both Moore and Ranaldo had been playing guitar since high school, but Gordon was just learning how to play bass and it took a bit of a leap for her to get onstage. “I thought of it more emotionally, not in terms of trying to play music,” says Gordon. “I couldn’t do anything if I thought in terms like that—I always have to make a different picture for myself.
“As a woman I felt kind of invisible in the middle of it anyway,” Gordon continues. “I was there as a voyeur, pretty much,” she adds with a little laugh. Not entirely comfortable with the spotlight, Gordon preferred having a key role that wasn’t obviously key, which precisely describes the bass guitar. “It’s so important—it’s supporting but it’s…,” she says, trailing off. “I like things like that. It fits my personality.” Gordon preferred being a subtle but decisive force offstage as well, so while Moore often instigated everything from songwriting to record deals and Ranaldo was the musical maestro, Gordon was often the band’s aesthetic (and business) conscience.
Early on Moore taught her simple bass parts; he’d play reggae records for her, to show how effective even just a few notes could be. The simple approach worked in their favor anyway—busy bass lines would have cluttered up the already teeming music.
While Moore and Ranaldo didn’t possess tremendous technique either, that didn’t prevent them from tossing off dense torrents of sound. “And she never plays like that,” Ranaldo says of Gordon. “Her stuff is all very spare and minimal and yet it’s very intricate. There’s something about the way she thinks harmonically, rhythmically, that’s really amazing to me.” As a vocalist, Gordon developed a sort of insouciant holler, like a kid calling to her friends about something great she’d found but trying not to seem too excited about it.
Gordon was an artist who simply transferred her highly refined aesthetic skills to rock music, a genre that, as punk proved, required a sensibility more than chops anyway. “She was totally coming from an art school background,” says Bert. “That’s what made the band.”
Sonic Youth’s small hipster following was very much in force when Bert debuted with the band at CBGB in the fall of ’82. “I was on cloud nine,” Bert says. “Just seeing Arto Lindsay and Lydia Lunch in the audience, that, to me, was like, ‘I can die tomorrow and my life will have been wonderful.’ ”
Sonic Youth had also struck up a friendship with the Swans, a dire, noisy East Village band that was as brutally slow as it was slowly brutal. “We connected with them because it was safety in numbers almost,” says Moore. “And it just became who could be more intense.” Soon they were rehearsing in the Swans’ rehearsal space—singer Michael Gira’s dank, windowless basement apartment in the drug-infested no-man’s-land of Sixth Street and Avenue B.
A month after Bert joined, they embarked on a two-week tour of the South with the Swans. In retrospect, the idea seems preposterous—both bands were barely known even in New York. “It was just an adventure,” Moore explains. “We just wanted to see what would happen. What do bands do? They go on tour.” The only underground booking agent in town wasn’t interested in the still obscure Sonic Youth, so Ranaldo simply called up clubs and got the shows himself.
The Savage Blunder tour kicked off in November ’82, with the Swans headlining—“Next to our friends the Swans, who were very loud and had a percussionist who pounded metal,” Gordon explained, “we were total wimps.”
Unsurprisingly, the tour was less than a resounding success—they usually played to around a dozen people. At a show at the Cat’s Cradle in Chapel Hill, the Swans played their set to, as Gordon put it, “six jeering cowboys” who kept chanting, “ ‘Freebird… Freebird… Freebird….’ ”
All ten members of the touring party shared the same van, which prompted the title of Gordon’s tour memoir, a 1988 Village Voice piece called “Boys Are Smelly.” Tensions ran high, mostly within the volatile Swans. At one point the tempestuous Gira and the band’s drummer got into a huge fight in the crowded van and after some preliminary name-calling (“Dickhead!” “Asshole!”) began strangling each other. “Meanwhile,” wrote Gordon, “everyone else is crammed around them trying to mind his or her own business, being really cool.”
SONIC YOUTH AT THE SIN CLUB, NEW YORK, SEPTEMBER ’83. LEFT TO RIGHT: BOB BERT, LEE RANALDO, THURSTON MOORE, KIM GORDON.
CATHERINE CERESOLE
They did another tour with the Swans in December, this time through the Midwest, and it was just as miserable, perhaps more so. “I don’t think we should have done it,” Moore said. “Because we were still kind of filthy at the time.” Low turnouts, no pay, little food, constant cold, and cramped conditions put everybody in a foul mood. Moore vented his frustrations by continually castigating Bert about his drumming, which he felt was not, as Moore puts it, “in the pocket.”
As soon as they got back, Moore decided Bert should go. Gordon got the unenviable job of delivering the news. New drummer Jim Sclavunos had gained substantial downtown cred playing in the no wave bands Teenage Jesus and the Jerks and Eight-Eyed Spy. While Bert was an inspired pounder, Sclavunos was a lighter but technically better player.
Meanwhile they were all holding down subsistence-level day jobs; at various points Moore sold Chipwiches on the streets of New York, peddled fruit from a sidewalk cart, sold furniture, and was a janitor at a record mastering studio, never holding down any job for very long. In order to pay for their nex
t recording, they borrowed money from a wealthy, somewhat eccentric Swiss couple named Catherine and Nicholas Ceresole, who held a weekly salon for downtown artists and musicians. The Ceresoles went on to help bankroll several more Sonic Youth albums and frequently put up the band in their luxurious home on Lake Geneva, just down the street from Jean-Luc Godard.
In early ’83 they arranged to record a single with Branca alumnus Wharton Tiers, who had a primitive studio, Fun City, in the basement of a Gramercy Park brownstone. But the band had so much material that the single was eventually bumped up to a whole album. Things got off to a bad start when the temperamental Sclavunos walked in, saw Fun City’s rudimentary setup, learned that Tiers had never made a record before, and walked out, only to return after much coaxing.
As Sclavunos had no doubt predicted, the sessions were a comedy of technical errors. Someone inadvertently erased the instrumental tracks of “Shaking Hell” so they used a cassette tape that had the music on it; when the tape machine munched another track, Tiers repaired it with cellophane tape. Entire sessions were wiped out by what Moore once described as “accidents with magnets”; one tape was nearly lost when someone accidentally poured cola on it.
It took three months to complete, but Confusion Is Sex was profoundly original, with few touchstones of conventional rock music other than volume, distortion, and bludgeoning syncopation. The songs, wrote critic Greil Marcus, “resembled nothing so much as the sort of chants little kids come up with when they’ve been sent to their rooms without supper.” Practically a concept album about urban dread, Confusion was difficult listening, especially in early 1983, and much more violent than the mini-LP.
With its rattletrap drumming, ominous bass drone, profoundly dissonant guitars that sound like they’re strung with chicken wire, and Moore’s dire, caterwauling vocals, “(She’s in a) Bad Mood” typifies the album’s desolate sense of menace, with long, bleak, droning sections interrupted by convulsive outbursts of guitar. Gordon sings a few genuinely disturbing songs: “Protect Me You” is a child’s prayer to “demons” whose whispering “sends the night away”; the lengthy introduction to “Shaking Hell” is the embodiment of anxiety, the song rife with eerie but elliptical images of abuse: “I’ll take off your dress / Shake off your flesh.” Even with no real verse or chorus, the song is an indelible experience.
Except for a couple of favorable reviews, Confusion received scant notice. But Sonic Youth was forming a new language for the electric guitar. Throughout the record the guitars make uncannily unique sounds and chords; on the drumless instrumental “Lee Is Free,” the guitars resemble the tuned gongs of Balinese gamelan music. “Our feeling is that the guitar is an unlimited instrument and for the most part people have not taken it to full advantage,” Ranaldo said.
In order to obtain unusual effects, Moore and Ranaldo stuck drumsticks and screwdrivers under the guitar strings, an approach that dated from at least the forties, when John Cage used metal screws, rubber erasers, and strips of paper to attain new sounds for his “prepared piano” compositions. But the main weapon in Sonic Youth’s arsenal was alternative guitar tunings, departing from the standard E-A-D-G-B-E for whatever sounded good. “It’s just that when you’re playing in standard tuning all the time,” Moore explained, “you’re sounding pretty… standard.”
Glenn Branca had also based his music on unique tunings, but Moore and Ranaldo both say they’d been investigating the technique before they even arrived in New York, trying to replicate music by the likes of Crosby, Stills & Nash, Hot Tuna, and Joni Mitchell. Blues, folk, and country musicians had been using alternative tunings for decades. Still, although there is a practically infinite number of tunings, Sonic Youth’s clanging, metallic chords bore more than a passing resemblance to Branca’s.
Much to the band’s chagrin, it would be years before an article about Sonic Youth didn’t mention Glenn Branca’s name. Moore protested, but the connection was obvious—Moore had joined Branca’s guitar orchestra in the summer of ’81, and he and Ranaldo both appear on the recordings of the maestro’s first three symphonies; after that they released their first recordings on his label. “It was just an obvious influence,” says Bert. “ ‘Hey, we can take this approach that Glenn and Rhys Chatham are doing and blend it with the MC5 and have a whole new thing.’ Which is what they did. Which is why they’re great.”
With Sonic Youth, the approach to tuning stemmed partly from lack of technique—it’s easy to get cool sounds out of an open-tuned guitar—and lack of funds. They could only afford cheap guitars, and cheap guitars sounded like cheap guitars. But with weird new tunings or something jammed under a particular fret, then those humble instruments could sound rather amazing—bang a drumstick on a cheap Japanese Stratocaster copy in the right tuning, crank the amplifier to within an inch of its life, and it will sound like church bells.
Not only did the radical approach make Sonic Youth sound like no other band; it also provided a bottomless wellspring of compositional ideas. “When you tuned a guitar a new way, you were a beginner all over again and you could discover all sorts of new things,” says Ranaldo. “It allowed us to throw out a whole broad body of knowledge about how to play the guitar.”
“Their vocabulary in the beginning was really wide,” says Steve Albini, an early fan of the band. “When you’d see them live around that time, it was borderline psychedelic, that’s how weird it was.”
At first Moore and Ranaldo played in identical tunings, but later on they started to tune their guitars differently from each other in order to achieve even wilder effects. “I’d be strumming something and he’d be listening to it and if there was something that didn’t sound right, [we’d adjust] it until they sounded harmonically pleasing,” says Ranaldo. “Whatever ‘harmonic’ meant to you at that time.”
Each song was based on a particular tuning, which in turn was based on the unique properties of the particular guitar it was being played on. Finding those tunings was not just a painstaking process of trial and error for the unschooled Moore and Ranaldo, but an exercise in patience for the rest of the band, who would wait while the guitarists retuned, restrung, and sometimes even rewired their guitars.
Rather than individual members bringing in complete ideas for the rest to flesh out, songs were jammed into existence during lengthy rehearsals. Then they’d take the best bits of their improvisations and knit them together. “It wasn’t just a one singer-songwriter type of thing,” Gordon says. “You get a different kind of music that way.” It certainly made for music that relied less on melody and conventional song structure and more on mood and texture. It was also an arduous process, especially since every member of the band had to like every part or it would be discarded. “We really had a much stronger work ethic from the beginning than a lot of people we knew,” says Ranaldo. “We rehearsed diligently and regularly.”
Another problem was that most of those cheap guitars sounded good only in a certain tuning or with a drumstick jammed under the strings at a certain fret—so Sonic Youth needed a lot of guitars. Fortunately, it was easy to get a used cheapo guitar for $50, and often people would just give the band guitars, knowing they’d make good use of them. Soon the band was toting around upward of a dozen guitars to every gig.
At first Ranaldo and Moore tuned their instruments backstage like everyone else, but after a while there were too many guitars, so after the previous band played, they’d start tuning onstage. A cheer would inevitably go up as the crowd thought the set was starting. But it soon subsided as Moore and Ranaldo did nothing but methodically tune one instrument after another for fifteen minutes or more, then leave the stage. In a way, the band considered it all part of the act. “It opened up to the audience this notion of what we were all about,” says Ranaldo. “They’d see all the guitars and the fact that… they were all differently tuned. I always thought it was a cool prelude to the beginning of the set—it was like a briefing.”
When Moore and Ranaldo played a two-week Europe
an tour with Branca’s ensemble in May ’83, performing Branca’s Symphony No. 3, they figured out a scam to help their own band. “Every venue we played with Glenn,” says Ranaldo, “we sidled up to the promoter at some point and said, ‘Hey, we’ve got a band, too, we’re going to come to Europe next month—can we get a gig?’ ” Pretty soon they’d booked a whole two-week tour.
There was only one problem: Sclavunos had quit. So they asked Bert back. (Once again Gordon was given the difficult task.) Luckily, the affable Bert had remained cordial with the band and had even kept going to their shows. Even better, his drumming had considerably sharpened in the six months he’d been away. But now that the shoe was on the other foot, he had some demands, namely that (a) the tour wouldn’t cost him anything and (b) they wouldn’t fire him again when they got back.
The first show of the tour was June 11, 1983, in Lausanne, Switzerland. Bert flew six hours to Paris, waited another six hours for the train, then rode eight hours to Lausanne (Gordon had already flown to Europe for the last few dates of the Branca tour) and went straight from the train station to the stage (via a quick stop at McDonald’s). The band was wildly received by the drunken crowd. “The kids were just freaked,” Bert recalls. “They had never heard anything like this before.” At the end of the set, Moore and Ranaldo’s extended feedback duel sparked a minor riot. “There were fires and people screaming and fighting,” says Bert. “It was just total pandemonium.” Sonic Youth obligingly encored with a twenty-minute rendition of the Stooges’ “I Wanna Be Your Dog.”
They traveled not by van but the excellent Eurail train system, often having to cram guitars through train windows when they were late to the station. The band often played government-sponsored youth centers, a common institution in Europe, and attracting a crowd was easy: “You could say ‘underground from New York’ and the place would be crowded no matter who’s playing,” Bert said. Everywhere they played, they were a smashing success—even if the band played badly, the music was so radical that everyone had their minds blown. Still, the best record deal the band could line up was with the tiny German label Zensor, which released their first two records.
Our Band Could Be Your Life Page 31