Although the band was fascinated with California, they didn’t play a West Coast show until the Gila Monster Jamboree, a mini-festival in the Mojave Desert outside L.A. on January 5, 1985. Topping the bill were the Meat Puppets, along with Redd Kross and Psi Com. The band borrowed some comically oversize drums and amps from Psi Com, which they picked up at the home of their singer, a guy named Perry Farrell. “He was just this gothy guy with all these lizards all over the house,” recalls Bert.
It turned out to be a wild gig: someone associated with the festival also dealt LSD and sold about three hundred hits that night—and there were only about 350 people there. “All these people were out there and they were all taking acid,” says Moore. “I had not expected that to happen—I had forgotten acid even existed, let alone people taking it.”
They played Seattle a week or so later, and a very blown-away Seattle DJ, rock critic, and indie entrepreneur named Bruce Pavitt paid them $100 for the right to include “Kill Yr. Idols” on a compilation record he was putting together called Sub Pop 100.
They began a long European tour in March ’85, beginning and ending in England, where the populace was convinced that the synthesizer was the future of rock music. Sonic Youth proceeded to change a lot of influential minds. By this time Sonic Youth was refining its approach—instead of gales of noise and aggression, both the songs and the way they were arranged became more considered or, as writer Guido Chiesa put it, “a gem of textures on the edge of atonality.” Sometimes the band made downright pretty sounds, and sometimes they’d go off into lengthy instrumental sections packed with tension and drama, like a Grand Prix car race through narrow city streets.
The first show of the tour was at London’s ICA, and it was packed with press. All too aware of the show’s importance, Moore was so nervous that he was nearly incapacitated by stomach cramps and chills; he lay on a couch, shivering in a parka until show time. Miraculously, the pain disappeared midway through their first song. Some of the assembled British music press liked the show; most hated it. But few had seen anything so intense.
Sonic Youth helped get other noisy American guitar bands like Big Black and the Butthole Surfers over to the U.K. as well; those visits helped further the revolution. Both Big Black and the Butthole Surfers soon signed with Blast First, making the label the preeminent booster of this dark, loud new music from America. “Once Sonic Youth became stars over there, everybody wanted to do it,” says Craig Marks, who co-managed Homestead Records at the time, “because you got your picture in color on the cover of a big music paper. It was like playing rock star within a small circle. It was very, very ‘fab.’ ”
The American bands were quite different from the foppish prima donnas many of the premier English bands had become. “What it reinforced was the work ethic that American bands had,” says Ranaldo. “You’d play fifty shows in forty days, and it was really like punching a clock every day in terms of how much time and energy you were putting into it. You’d go to Europe and meet the Mary Chain and they’d play like once every two months and there’d be a big riot and they’d play for fifteen minutes and they’d make a big deal out of how hard it was. And you’d just be like, ‘You’ve got to be kidding!’ Musicians here weren’t afraid to go out and work really hard for satisfaction more than for success. That’s what it came down to—you were working for some other notion of glory than financial.”
Bert, Moore, and Ranaldo in particular were all avid consumers of rock magazines, books, and documentaries. They’d studied the mistakes everyone from Chuck Berry to Neil Young had made and weren’t about to repeat them if they could help it. But Moore was deeply uninterested in the business end, leaving it to Gordon and Ranaldo. Ranaldo was the de facto tour manager, holding the cash, advancing the shows, and arranging places to stay. But no one in the band was expert in music business negotiations. “The business aspect was really hairball back then,” says Bert. “They would sign anything.” Bert says the band got in a legal hassle after signing the contract for Kill Yr. Idols with Zensor, only to get a call from Rough Trade’s lawyers, pointing out that they had already signed another contract giving Rough Trade the same rights.
Fortunately, the band was savvy about a lot of other extramusical matters. Moore had begun publishing a fanzine called Killer in 1983, interviewing Ian MacKaye in the first issue; Killer #2 featured Gordon on the cover and pieces on Black Flag, Minutemen, DNA, and Flipper. It was an excellent way to network and to plug his friends’ bands: connections were made, small IOU’s accumulated; it was a way in to the flourishing post-hardcore community. Moore sent a copy of Killer to Jimmy Johnson, who had just started a hardcore fanzine called Forced Exposure, and struck up a correspondence with Johnson and his outspoken, musically omnivorous partner Byron Coley. It would prove to be an invaluable connection.
Sonic Youth recognized two things: One, that without substantial radio airplay, press was the main promotional outlet for underground bands, and two, that underground music fans paid particular attention to music criticism. The band also knew a thing or two about critics. “One thing Sonic Youth always did, almost to a gross point, was that they always knew who the hot journalists were and they always became really close,” says Bert. “You’d go to a party and Kim would know who the Village Voice writer was in the corner of the room and she’d make sure she went over there. They were really good at schmoozing in every respect. They always made sure they met as many popular, famous people as they could, whether it be the art world or the music world. They were always really good at that—they always knew who to meet, who to know.”
Bert recalls when former Branca musician Tim Sommer began to make a name for himself with the legendary WNYU hardcore radio program Noise the Show. “He was starting to be a big deal and they were best friends with him,” Bert says, “and all of a sudden two years later they wouldn’t give him the time of day.” Bert also points to Moore’s connection to Forced Exposure, which soon became perhaps the most influential zine in America. “He totally got himself in there,” says Bert, “and we got on the cover.”
The Forced Exposure connection later paid off even more handsomely for Sonic Youth, as they, the Butthole Surfers, and Big Black all appeared there regularly, forming an aesthetic cabal of sorts that got dubbed “pigfuck” by the Village Voice’s Robert Christgau (New York’s nonpareil Pussy Galore also belonged to the club). While Ranaldo detests the term, he does acknowledge that those bands had things in common. “I think all of us were of a generation slightly older than the kids making hardcore music, old enough to have seen a little bit more of the Sixties music in a sort of firsthand way,” he says. “It was just people trying to figure out how to do a life involving music at a time when there was no infrastructure at that level to do it.”
The other thing they had in common was their fierce dedication to sculpting a kind of ugly beauty, and that notion of “negation” that Greil Marcus had identified a couple of years earlier. These were the qualities that tied together so many of the bands Sonic Youth respected, from the Velvets to the Pistols. This was also a time when relatively conventional bands like R.E.M. and the Replacements were taking the avant edge off the underground. Someone had to come in and do something weird before things got too normal.
The members of Sonic Youth realized that “a life involving music” depended on cooperation—if bands worked for each other, everybody would benefit. They became dedicated networkers, corresponding not just with press and fellow bands but labels and promoters as well. “They made themselves available to help people out,” says former Big Black leader Steve Albini. “When we’d go to New York, if they couldn’t set up a show, they would give us advice about where to go.” Sonic Youth became respected gurus of the indie scene, the band that everybody else went to for advice, information, and inspiration. They were a little older and they were from New York City, which gave them an air of authority, and the fact that they were one of the few indie bands with a woman playing a prominent role signaled that they were
perhaps a bit more cultured than the rest. And Gordon and Moore being a couple lent the feeling that Sonic Youth was in some sense a family—steady, grounded, and wise. By coming to the aid of promising new bands like Dinosaur Jr, Die Kreuzen, Mudhoney, and Nirvana among countless others, Sonic Youth made itself a linchpin of the indie community—and as the scene’s premier tastemakers, they also became its kingmakers.
Although all the schmoozing surely helped advance the band’s career, Ranaldo insists it was mostly done to sate the band members’ inquisitive natures. “You figured if you met the right people, it would be helpful to get the band gigs and all that stuff, but more than that, you felt like you were part of something that was happening and you wanted to know other people that were part of it and what they were doing and what their little piece in the puzzle was,” says Ranaldo. “It’s part of just a natural curiosity and enthusiasm that we have and a lot of people have…. We’re all voracious acquirers of information, whether it be books or movies or whatever, we’re just really vastly into what’s going on in culture and trying to synthesize what’s going on. I think that was just a natural impetus, a natural tendency.”
The band would never waste an opportunity to plug musicians past and present: over the course of a rambling 1985 Forced Exposure interview, the band name-checked Bachman-Turner Overdrive, Alice Cooper, the Swans, John Fogerty, William Burroughs, Steppenwolf, the Meat Puppets, Minor Threat, Chuck Berry, and an extremely obscure album track by Sixties one-hit wonders Shocking Blue called “Love Buzz,” which, by some strange coincidence, Nirvana would cover as the A-side of their first single.
“To me, their ‘strategy’ of always staying in touch with the very new was possibly motivated by a pure desire to constantly learn,” says Sub Pop cofounder Bruce Pavitt, “and perhaps also, instinctively, as a solid marketing approach. By staying so close to their roots at all times, they managed to get through the Eighties—and Nineties—with barely a scratch. I can’t think of any other group that garnered such ubiquitous political support. They somehow managed to never burn any bridges—which, for rock & roll, is a minor miracle.”
Moore and Gordon had no problem hitting the road—unlike the other two, they got to be with their spouse on tour; but Bert and Ranaldo, who had both married in 1984, the same year Gordon and Moore did, didn’t have that luxury. It was especially hard on Bert, who worked a day job making fine art silk screens on top of rehearsing three times a week and touring. Since the best they’d ever done on a European tour was break even, Bert was just barely eking out a living. The rest of the band wasn’t as worried about making the rent because Ranaldo had a well-paying job assisting a metal sculptor; Gordon and Moore of course split their expenses.
At the end of the spring ’85 tour, they returned to London, where they had become the toast of the English hipster set; members of important U.K. bands like the Fall and the Jesus and Mary Chain attended their shows, and the band responded with a pair of legendary performances.
Afterward, they met with Paul Smith to plan the year ahead. But Bert already knew what his plans were—he announced his resignation to his stunned bandmates. “I was getting kind of bored,” Bert explained to Flipside. “I was really broke and I just wanted to change the scene.”
The boredom mostly stemmed from the fact that they’d been playing the same set—Bad Moon Rising in its entirety—for over a year. Bert may well have also been frustrated by second-class-citizen status. The balance of power always lay in the original trio of Gordon, Moore, and Ranaldo. “We just drove the group a lot more,” Ranaldo says of those days. “The drummers have always sort of brought up the rear in a certain sense.”
In retrospect, Moore completely understood Bert’s exit. “We were still unknown,” Moore said in a 1994 interview. “I mean, people were coming to see us and we were freaking ’em out, having a great time, but we were sleeping on floors covered with cat piss every night. So he split.”
Fortunately, a new drummer couldn’t have appeared more readily. Steve Shelley played in the Crucifucks, who had an album on Alternative Tentacles and some touring under their belt. The Michigan band played a lurching variation on hardcore and specialized in the usual mix of alienation and blunt political ranting. One lyric rails against religious fundamentalists: “I wanna take the president / Chop off his head, and mail it to them in a garbage bag” goes a song called “Hinkley Had a Vision.”
Moore and Ranaldo were impressed when they saw Shelley with the Crucifucks at a 1985 CBGB Rock Against Reagan benefit. When Shelley left the Crucifucks, he asked Ranaldo about living in Manhattan; this led to Shelley’s subletting Moore and Gordon’s apartment while they were off in Europe. When Sonic Youth returned, they hired their house sitter without so much as an audition.
Besides being a fantastic drummer (the fact that he owned a van didn’t hurt, either), Shelley represented a direct link to hardcore. The mild-mannered drummer, several years younger than the rest of the band, did make for an unlikely punk veteran—he wore studious-looking wire-rim glasses, bowl-cut hair, and attire that tended toward the wholesomely preppy, leading Matter writer Glenn Kenny to declare Shelley “positively cute, in a ‘My Three Sons’ kind of way.” But looks were deceiving—Shelley played with shuddering force, a very musical wallop that propelled the band more intensely than ever before.
Shelley also had a somewhat more conservative attitude than Moore—once they began touring, Shelley would always want to get to sound check promptly; Moore preferred to go thrift shopping. “Steve is super responsible and only would drive fifty-five,” recalls Gordon. “Thurston would speed and then stop, like, five times.”
The “Death Valley ’69” single was doing so well that they decided to make a video. Although Shelley was now their drummer, Bert had played on the song, so they simply included them both in the video. Director Richard Kern made wildly brutal low-budget art films, and “Death Valley ’69” was no different. The video intercuts decidedly phallic-looking nuclear missiles, the feral dancing of avant actress Lung Leg, and intense live footage, but the most memorable scenes are of the band lying around a house brutally slaughtered, apparently by Mansonesque killers.
Ranaldo’s wife was about to give birth at the time; the call came that she was going into labor just as Ranaldo was getting ready for his scene. “As soon as Richard got the shot,” Bert recalls, “Lee swipped all these cow guts off himself, jumped up, and took a taxi to the hospital, totally covered in blood.”
As before, Bert remained on cordial terms with the band and played a show with them that June at tiny Folk City (Moore’s poster offered “free admission if you’re naked”) as part of the Music for Dozens series, along with Butthole Surfers drummers King Coffey and Teresa Taylor. One drummer pounded in each corner of the room while film projectors and strobe lights went off all over the place—just like a Butthole Surfers show.
Flexing her art school muscles, Gordon had begun writing trenchant articles about rock and related subjects for the prestigious Artforum. “People pay to see others believe in themselves,” Gordon wrote in one 1983 essay. “As a performer you sacrifice yourself, you go through the motions and emotions of sexuality for all the people who pay to see it, to believe that it exists. The better and more convincing the performance, the more an audience can identify with the exterior involved in such an expenditure of energy.”
Sonic Youth’s demonstrative performance style amply bore out that statement, and yet it’s easy to imagine the self-consciousness of a band with that level of objective insight into their own craft. They could well have been paralyzed at the thought of going onstage, but Sonic Youth never let a little knowledge get in the way of a good catharsis. “[Performing] was always the high point of the day,” Ranaldo says. “We’d go through long drives and no sleep and bad food just in order to get to that moment where you can release. Rock in general is about that emotional release, so we never let the knowledge on the one hand contradict the idea of release on the other.”
/> But for all the band’s physical intensity, they could also seem emotionally aloof. Even their intensity functioned as a shield. “If you put out a certain amount of energy while you’re doing something,” says Gordon, “it’s almost like a buffer so nothing else can come in.” Even the lyrics are guarded—often, they are opaque, even nonsensical; when they are personal, they are heavily veiled.
Their self-consciousness came out most in interviews, where the band knew mystiques are made (and unmade). Moore could be profoundly goofy and quick with absurdist wisecracks, almost fundamentally incapable of giving a straight answer to anything. The glacially cool Gordon would not suffer fools gladly—one writer said Gordon’s “deadpan, icy stare could stop stampeding buffalo”; those closer to her recognized it as the defense mechanism of a shy person. Ranaldo, on the other hand, was deeply earnest and as the most candid member of the band didn’t qualify his enthusiasm for anything.
But if no one could decide exactly how detached the band’s approach was, it may have been because the band couldn’t decide either. In a 1985 interview, they recalled an NME writer who didn’t believe that their infernal version of “I Wanna Be Your Dog” was “sincere.” “They thought that was totally tongue-in-cheek,” said Ranaldo.
“But it was,” Gordon protested.
“Not totally,” Ranaldo replied.
“It was tongue,” Moore said, settling it.
By 1985, thanks to SST, R.E.M., and countless local bands, there was finally some sort of underground club circuit, making it possible for Sonic Youth to play throughout their native country, and Gerard Cosloy booked their first U.S. tour for that summer.
All the European roadwork paid off. The band had toured the Continent five times and worked up their live show before wildly appreciative audiences. By the time of the first U.S. tour, the band was a fearsome live force, phantom harmonics and stunning riff volleys ricocheting around the room in a breathtaking cross fire of sound. At peak moments Gordon, Moore, and Ranaldo would all be lunging and swooping and jerking in completely different rhythms, like some grungy version of a Peanuts dance scene.
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