Hot Band: Sonic Youth
After a night in hell, the members of Sonic Youth have found their own version of heaven in a small record collectors’ shop outside of Atlanta.
“Some of these are really terrible,” says guitarist Thurston Moore, 30, as he wades through a stack of Sonic Youth bootlegs. “And some of ‘em… …” Before he can finish the sentence, his attention switches to a pile of Beatles, Dylan and Yardbirds boots. The store owner, perhaps relieved that this is one band that doesn’t seem to mind seeing its music circulating via contraband recordings, heaps freebies on them. They make out like bandits.
The shop owner isn’t the only one in the record business looking to curry favor with Sonic Youth. King of the American independent underground since the mid-Eighties, the band is at a critical juncture in its almost decade-long career. Founded by Thurston, his wife, bassist Kim Gordon, and guitarist Lee Ranaldo in 1981 in downtown Manhattan, Sonic Youth was originally associated with the city’s No Wave, white-noise subculture. The Sonics, who have since added drummer Steve Shelley, have evolved from dissonant, abrasive avant-garage improvisation to increasingly skillful pop craft. In the process, the band has attracted more and more attention from the major labels.
Representatives of the majors have been sniffing around the Sonics’ door since 1985, when Bad Moon Rising, released on Homestead Records, won the band its first extensive critical acclaim. “Warners and Elektra asked for copies of the record because they’d read this great review in The New York Times,” Lee says with a seen-it-all smile. “And then they got the record and called the label and said, ‘Are you sure this is the band we read about?”’ These days, things are proceeding differently: Atlantic Records head Ahmet Ertegun has been wining and dining the Sonics, and CBS is also said to be in the hunt.
Since the release of Sonic Youth’s most recent album, Daydream Nation, which topped the college-radio charts for months, the group has played in Australia, New Zealand, Japan and Europe; it recently became one of the first underground bands invited to tour the Soviet Union. But last night’s little taste of hell was a grim reminder of the price the band members are obliged to pay for refusing to give up their ferocious experimentalism.
“Last night was some kind of nightmare,” says Thurston. The gig was the last gasp of a moribund Atlanta punk-rock club where the Sonics had played several times before. “The last time we were there,” says Kim, “these gangs of kids were hanging around outside, and they slashed our tires while we were playing.”
There was no tire slashing last night — just a shadowy, cavernous, trashed club without heat, telephones or adequate sound. “They oughta pay you people for heating the place,” Kim snarled by way of testing her microphone when the Sonics finally took the stage after 2:00 a.m. Thurston, hovering like a gangly scarecrow, his shirttail flapping, his unruly blond hair hanging in his eyes, hit the clarion opening chords of “Silver Rocket,” from Daydream Nation, and began to twitch violently to the supercharged rhythm. Lee, standing as if braced against a buffeting wind, added a careening guitar riff that sawed against Thurston’s manic chording, and Steve’s drums came thundering in like an express train. Cold or no cold, P.A. or no P.A., Sonic Youth was rocking. The songs, mostly from Daydream Nation but ranging back to the sinister, stark Bad Moon Rising, were reduced to charred skeletons in an aural firestorm. The young and diverse crowd — enthusiastic despite the conditions and the hour — moved to the Sonic assault.
If you consider that Sonic Youth plays a full schedule of such dates, it’s surprising the band members have enough energy for other projects. Negotiating their first proper major-label contract is only one item on the crowded agenda. Last year, the group, under the alter-ego name of Ciccone Youth, released The Whitey Album, which includes inimitable versions of Madonna’s “Into the Groove” and Robert Palmer’s “Addicted to Love.” Kim, 36, has been working with her old friend Lydia Lunch in a band called Harry Crews, named for the crusty Southern novelist. The group has collected material from European dates for a live album, and Kim — who has written about fiction, music and other pop-culture subjects for publications such as Artforum and The Village Voice — recently shot a video interview with Crews at his Florida home. Lee Ranaldo, 30, has continued to work on the experimental electronic music that first surfaced on his SST solo album, From Here to Infinity, a project that sometimes involves 26-year-old Steve Shelley as a collaborator. Thurston recently worked in the studio with Borbetomagus, a New York noise band featuring two sax players.
Hot Band: Sonic Youth, Page 1 of 3