Girl in a Band (12 page)

ONE SUNDAY AFTERNOON,
before I met Thurston, I went to a place I'd been hearing about a lot, the Mudd Club. The Mudd Club was owned by Ross Bleckner, a successful artist who was a member of the Mary Boone stable. It was on White Street, a couple of blocks below Canal, and named after the doctor who treated John Wilkes Booth after he shot Abe Lincoln. The Mudd Club had no sign or awning, bore no indication whatsoever that it was more than just another doorway, but inside was another universe, one that hosted No Wave, New Wave, experimental music, poetry readings, and even catwalk shows. There was a column placed before the stage and a bar that sat in the center
of the room like a dry island. I got there early and hardly anyone was there. An hour later, people started showing up. A fashion show was happening, with a young girl strutting onstage to the sounds of a barely visible band. It all seemed so decadent, especially as it was taking place on a sunlit Sunday afternoon in New York.

The Mudd Club was technically illegal, in that it skirted New York's cabaret license laws—but in those days no one cared so long as the proper authorities were being paid off. I also found out that nothing at the Mudd Club ever started when it was supposed to. That was just the way it worked there. If a show was scheduled to begin at three
P.M.
, you knew it wouldn't get under way until five
P.M.
, with the crowd assembling at around four forty-five. In the ragged, pre-gentrification, pre-art-boom landscapes of downtown New York, the Mudd Club had an anything-can-happen-and-no-one-would-care air, mixed with a touch of glamorous ennui. Sometimes the place would be jammed and other times dead, with only a few upright bodies dancing in syrupy slow motion or in a hyperactive frenzy, depending on what drugs they were taking or the music playing overhead.

As it got better known, the door policy got stricter. Unless you knew the guy at the door, you might have to stand out in the cold for a long time. The only club that rivaled the Mudd in terms of great music was Tier 3, where English bands would play along with their bigger-venue gigs at Hurrah's or the Ritz. Joy Division was scheduled to play at Tier 3, but Ian Curtis killed himself a week before the gig. Tier 3 is where I saw 8 Eyed Spy—the band Lydia Lunch formed after Teenage Jesus—as well as DNA, Malaria!, Young Marble Giants, and a whole bunch of other No Wave acts. And these days the Mudd Club is just a throwaway line in an old Talking Heads song.

But by the time I got to New York in 1980, No Wave was almost gone, and New Wave acts like Blondie and the Talking Heads had already hit it big. I'd missed out on Lydia Lunch and Teenage Jesus. One of the original No Wave bands, DNA, was still performing, as was Mars, and they were a big influence on me, too. I was especially drawn to the way
that Tim Wright played bass. He would appear in his socks, walking the stage in balletic motion like an insect folding backward, cutting and jabbing the air with his instrument, etching out space as he went, as if every single second had been choreographed. I never saw anyone play that way before or since.

What killed No Wave? Probably a famous show at Artists Space that Michael Zwack organized put the final nail in the coffin. Brian Eno had been invited to come, and he decided to produce a No Wave compilation. Since only some bands could be included on the compilation and not all, a rift was created in the scene. By the time Sonic Youth started in 1981, No Wave was essentially over. Maybe it was time to start something new.

In the early eighties, there weren't a lot of restaurants in Soho, outside of Fanelli's, the bar
on Prince Street. On the corner of Prince and Wooster Streets was Food, a cooperative restaurant that the artist Gordon Matta-Clark began as an ongoing art happening that later evolved into an actual restaurant. Gordon was best known for his “building cuts,” in which he would lop off sections of floor and ceiling within abandoned buildings. From my perspective, there was nothing better than this—nothing.

For a while in the early eighties Thurston worked at Food as a dishwasher and brought back giant slices of cake to Eldridge Street. Between the two of us, we had so little money that those slices felt absurd in our hands and obscene in our mouths. Food served everything from borscht to rabbit stew and also holds the honor of being the first New York restaurant to serve sushi and sashimi.

Back then, almost every building in Soho was caked over with band posters. Thurston and I used to go out at night and plaster over other bands' posters with ours, unless it was a band or a musician one of us knew and liked. The poster war was a battle to stand out, though the enemy, if we'd ever thought about it, was the union guys whose job it was to publicize more mainstream entertainment. In the early eighties, you
could land an actual
gig
putting up posters at the Kitchen on Broome Street, where a lot of No Wave and new music performances took place. But you had to be fast, you had to know what you were doing, and you had to have mastered one of two tools. The first was Elmer's Glue, which was hasty and easy to conceal under your shirt. The other involved wheat paste in an oversized bucket, which could be messy, especially in the winter, when the paste froze on your hands and fingers.

Despite the number of bands playing around the city, clubs were closing down left and right. Hurrah, a club on West Sixty-Second Street that was one of the first big New York City dance clubs ever to showcase punk and industrial music, shut its doors in 1980. The owner, thinking he owed the world an elegy, said, “Oh, there aren't any good bands anymore anyway. They all sound like noise.”

Back then,
noise
was an insult, a derogatory word, the most scornful word you could throw at music. But it was from Hurrah's owner that Thurston got the name for the nine-day-long festival he launched in June of 1981 at White Columns. Thurston said he wanted to reclaim the word
noise,
even though nobody really knew what a “noise band” was or was supposed to sound like.

Basically, the Noise Fest came about because there was nowhere else for downtown bands to go onstage and play. I organized an exhibition of visual art by some of the musicians playing the festival. Over a nine-day period, three to five bands performed nightly, one of which was Sonic Youth. Later, a cassette was put out, documenting the performance.

THERE WERE SO
many moments of formation for Sonic Youth; it's hard to pinpoint one. In the beginning, the band was just Thurston, Lee Ranaldo, and me, with different drummers entering and exiting like pedestrians stopping to stare briefly at a shop window. We had many different names before deciding on Sonic Youth: Male Bonding, Red Milk, and the Arcadians. These were phrases taken from current passions, names that vanished as fast as moods. But as soon as Thurston came up with the name Sonic Youth, we simultaneously knew how we wanted the music to sound.

Lee had played with David Linton at the Noise Fest. We had seen
him before, playing around the city, and asked him to join us. We lined up a couple of gigs as Sonic Youth. The first practices were us sitting in a loose circle playing with no drummer at all. It wasn't exactly what you'd call “playing,” to be honest. We strummed and made droning sounds on our guitars. That's when Thurston came up with the idea of playing his guitar percussively, with a drumstick. We didn't have a drummer, and there was no other way to keep a beat.

We were a baby band and, as such, had no idea what we were doing. Thurston, as I said, was a longtime student of CBGB. CBGB was his chapel, his temple, and so, with concrete logic, Thurston said he would go ask the owner, Hilly Kristal, for a gig. Just by showing up at CBGB so often, Thurston felt he'd established a relationship with Hilly, or that at the very least Hilly would recognize him as the tall, lanky kid who said hi to him almost every night. Thurston was successful, and Sonic Youth got a slot at CBGB as the first of four bands on a bill. There is no worse positioning for a band. But we approached what we were doing as the first in a series of stepping stones, one of which included recording our first album.

It was an EP, recorded in 1981. Five songs total. You could listen to the whole thing in less than half an hour.
Sonic Youth,
the EP—I'm not sure what it was to be honest. We recorded it for Glenn Branca's label. Josh Baer, the director of White Columns, had asked Glenn to create a record label. Glenn said yes, the label was christened Neutral Records, and Sonic Youth was its very first artist.

To put it mildly, we didn't have a lot of money for recording. Finally we scored a deal at a place called Plaza Sound, a big, old, spectacular room in Rockefeller Center where Blondie, the Ramones, and entire symphony orchestras had recorded, as rumor had it the place was owned by Columbia Records. We were allotted two eight-hour sessions. Our then drummer, Richard Edson, had a big hand in helping structure our music before we got started. Richard also played in a band called Konk, which was considered “cool” in the downtown scene but was stylistically very different from us. Konk was rhythmic and minimal, and
Sonic Youth was dissonant and wild, but first records succeed now and again because you don't quite know what you're doing but you go ahead and do it anyway.

First we recorded all the basics, coming back later to do the vocals and mix. We had no specific tunings—they were either regular ones or else we detuned. From start to finish, the entire process took about two days. It was the first time I saw how our big loud sound was transformed in the end into something relatively contained. It was a complaint we would hear from many over the years—that Sonic Youth's sound wasn't nearly as intense recorded as it was live.

A lot of the first songs we all wrote and recorded were droning, with vague middles and even vaguer endings. “
I dreamed, I dream . . .”
was originally done as an instrumental. The lyrics were random. All of us, I remember, wrote down lines on a piece of paper, and when it came time to overdub the vocal, I randomly cherry-picked from the list. It's a way of working I sometimes still use. We told the sound engineer we wanted a big bass sound, like Johnny Rotten's post–Sex Pistols band, Public Image Ltd. I whispered my vocals and Lee Ranaldo added his own vocal accompaniment.

“
The days we spend go on and on.
” Those lyrics somehow became a foreshadowing of all the events, all the music, to come. Sonic Youth would go on for three decades, and our first record was reissued twenty-five years after its initial release. Critics would point out how meaningful the lyrics were, not realizing how randomly they came about in the first place.

When Thurston and I finally left the Rockefeller Center studio, it was four
A.M.
A blizzard was coming in, the sidewalks and streets piling up with snow. It was New York at its most muted and beautiful. We had our big amps with us, but we couldn't find a taxi. Back then New York still had its fleet of checker cabs, big boxy things, tailor-made for moving equipment, and we eventually flagged one and shoved our lo-fi gear into the trunk and backseat and squeezed ourselves in. There we were, two transplanted downtowners, immigrants amid the hard bones
of those tall, unlit skyscrapers, as the heavy snow padded down. For a few moments, I felt like I belonged to some grown-up uptown showbiz world, and then the cab prowled home through the snow back down to Eldridge Street.

That studio worked like a good-luck charm for us. When the master came in, Glenn was pleasantly surprised by how good we sounded. The EP's cover was taken from a self-portrait the artist Jeff Wall made where he basically created a doppelgänger of himself in an enlarged print light box. We copied the idea, adding our picture twice over, so we came across as a band of eight instead of just four. Later, when Sonic Youth played Ann Arbor, Michigan, for the first time, and I met Niagara, the lead singer of Mike Kelley's Destroy All Monsters, she said to me, “I can't believe you let yourself be photographed without lipstick.”