Girl in a Band (13 page)

WHEN I FIRST
began playing onstage, I was pretty self-conscious. I was just trying to hold my own with the bass guitar, hoping the strings wouldn't snap, that the audience would have a good experience. I wasn't conscious of being a woman, and over the years I can honestly say I almost never think of “girliness” unless I'm wearing high heels, and then I'm more likely to feel like a transvestite. When I'm at my most focused onstage, I feel a sense of space with edges around it, a glow of self-confident, joyful sexiness. It feels bodiless, too, all weightless grace with no effort required. The need to be a woman out in front never entered my mind at all until we signed with Geffen.

But in the beginning, I was just trying to make it through. No one in the band ever thought about being on a major record label. None of us were thinking that far ahead. Thurston was the one who often came up with what to do next.

What do bands do after making a record? They go on tour. It seemed like the right thing to do, and somehow we got ourselves a gig at the Walker Art Center, a progressive museum in Minneapolis. We also got to tour in England for the first time. For the kind of music we were making, it was frankly easier to find an audience in Europe. Bands are treated better over there, which I chalk up to the socialist governments and the way clubs double as cultural centers that governments partially fund.

In the early eighties, the music scene in England was large for an island, chaotic and cutthroat. Musicians literally paid to get onto a bill. Via a friend, we landed a gig opening up for an industrial band, with another girl named Danielle Dax opening for us. Before the show, Danielle cornered me in the bathroom. “Look,” she said, “there are a lot of important people coming here tonight to see
me
.”

Her meanness and competitiveness were almost shocking—it was like junior high all over again. Like a lot of English acts, Danielle had a specific look about her, a mask, an almost freakish persona. For the English, rock and roll has a lot to do with climbing over that country's class structure, kicking out the bars of their birth. They saw us, four New Yorkers, as a bunch of middle-class brats who probably lived in lofts right above art galleries, who were putting on an act that wasn't real, wasn't authentic, wasn't
earned
. This is made all the more ironic by the fact that many British bands, including the Beatles, came right out of art school.

Our first London show was a semi-disaster, with one of my bass strings breaking midway through. Thurston ended up hurling his guitar into the audience, and then the metal grille that separated bands from the audience slowly lowered down and the show ended. Some people thought Sonic Youth was the best thing on the bill, while others thought
we were pretentious and arty. It wasn't a perfect introduction to England.

I also felt limited as a singer. When the band first started, I went for a vocal approach that was rhythmic and spoken, but sometimes unleashed, because of all the different guitar tunings we used. When you listen to old R&B records, the women on them sang in a really fierce, kick-ass way. In general, though, women aren't really allowed to be kick-ass. It's like the famous distinction between art and craft: Art, and wildness, and pushing against the edges, is a male thing. Craft, and control, and polish, is for women. Culturally we don't allow women to be as free as they would like, because that is frightening. We either shun those women or deem them crazy. Female singers who push too much, and too hard, don't tend to last very long. They're jags, bolts, comets: Janis Joplin, Billie Holiday. But being that woman who pushes the boundaries means you also bring in less desirable aspects of yourself. At the end of the day, women are expected to hold up the world, not annihilate it. That's why Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill is so great. The term
girl power
was coined by the Riot Grrl movement that Kathleen spearheaded in the 1990s.
Girl power:
a phrase that would later be co-opted by the Spice Girls, a group put together by men, each Spice Girl branded with a different personality, polished and stylized to be made marketable as a faux female type. Coco was one of the few girls on the playground who had never heard of them, and that's its own form of girl power, saying no to female marketing!

I've never thought of myself as a singer with a good voice, or even as a musician. I'm able to put myself out there by feeling as though I'm jumping off a cliff. Neil Young once said that it's more about having an authentic voice than a good voice, though of course Neil has a great voice. From growing up listening to jazz, I picked up another, cooler aspect of the female voice—the idea of space, and in-between-ness, and the importance of phrasing. It's worth remembering that from the beginning, rock and roll was never based in musical training or technique, just as punk rock was never about being a good musician and No Wave
was at its core about pure expression. Punk rock changed everything, including the whole idea of being a “rock star.” It's strange to look back and listen to lyrics from 1960s bands and realize they felt unease when they began to gain fame that separated them from their “brothers and sisters” and from “the movement.” I always loved “Out of My Mind,” the Buffalo Springfield song, where Neil sang about rock star entitlement, that the only sound he could hear was the screams outside his limousine.

The rock star thing has always felt dishonest to me—stylized and gestural, even goofy. I've always felt uncomfortable giving people what they want or expect. Dan Graham once described Lydia Lunch onstage to me, how Lydia just stood there, refusing to move. “Lydia Lunch is a genius!” Dan said. “She is really frigid—see how she doesn't move her body at all? She doesn't want to give anything to the audience.” Even though Lydia had a much scarier persona than I ever did, I could relate to that. Later I grew to really enjoy playing bass; it was a physical thing that connected to my love of dance, though when you're playing an instrument onstage, it's hard to feel that it can really move people. Eventually, when Jim O'Rourke joined the band, I was freed up to just sing, and move around more.

When Sonic Youth started out, I really made an effort to punk myself out, to lose any and all associations with my middle-class West L.A. appearance and femininity. When I first arrived in New York, Rhys Chatham would always say to me, “You know, Kim, you're
always
going to look middle-class.” To be more punk, he was implying, you had to be somehow uglier, as if there was an authenticity to be found in looking like an underdog. What Rhys meant, I think, was that I was who I was.

There was a popular look at the time—the vintage dress, the makeup—that just wasn't me, nor was that the way people dressed in the art world. I didn't fit into the downtown scene, and I knew I was never going to be like Lydia Lunch. I was, and still am, more of the push-everything-else-under-and-let-it-all-out-in-the-music kind of girl. Otherwise I'd probably be a sociopath.

A lot has been written about Sonic Youth, so what follows are the songs, or the albums, or the times that I have the most to say about or remember the best. “Addicted to Love,” for example, wasn't and isn't a song I liked, but the conceptual approach we took made the whole thing work. “The Sprawl” was fun to perform, and the music was always enveloping, whereas, for example, the lyrics of “Tunic” had a much broader meaning than I ever realized at the time. Here is what stands out for me.

IN LATE 1982,
the year we came out with our first full-length album,
Confusion Is Sex,
Dan Graham was researching the Shakers. This cultish religion that came out of the early days of America's religious-freedom-seeking escapists fascinated Dan, especially the practice of female members dancing themselves into a frenzied, almost orgasmic hysteria. The juxtaposition of this with what were otherwise very conservative beliefs and rituals was bizarre to him.

Dan wondered what rock-and-roll music and the Shaker sect had in common. Both were variations of ecstatic worship to his mind. Shakerism, he wrote, was akin to early American hardcore, with the shaven heads of
the boys in the audience at punk rock concerts resembling the heads of some exotic monastic tribe. Dan was fascinated by Patti Smith and the intensity and sorcery of her performances, as was Thurston. Dan eventually made a documentary art film called
Rock My Religion,
and in it he included a live clip of Sonic Youth performing our song “Shaking Hell.”

The lyrics—“
She finally discovered she's a . . . He told her so . . .”
—related to the idea of women as creations of film and advertising. I'd been reading the great feminist writer/filmmaker Julia Kristeva's essays about the “male gaze,” as well as other books related to the idea of the always-passive woman and the always-active male protagonist.

On a more personal level, “Shaking Hell” mirrors my struggle with my own identity and the anger I felt at who I was. Every woman knows what I'm talking about when I say girls grow up with a desire to please, to cede their power to other people. At the same time everyone knows about the sometimes aggressive and manipulative ways men often exert power in the world, and how by using the word
empowered
to describe women, men are simply maintaining their own power and control. Years after I'd left L.A., I could still hear my crazy brother's voice in my ear, whispering,
I'm going to tell all your friends that you cried
.

Back then, and even now, I wonder: Am I “empowered”? If you have to hide your hypersensitivity, are you really a “strong woman”? Sometimes another voice enters my head, shooing these thoughts aside. This one tells me that the only really good performance is one where you make yourself vulnerable while pushing beyond your familiar comfort zone. I liken it to having an intense, hyper-real dream, where you step off a cliff but don't fall to your death.

Though it's hard to recall a time when she wasn't a part of the scene, I remember when Madonna made her entrance into the world of pop culture. Madonna was exploiting her own sexuality, willingly packaging and altering herself to please audiences. Me, I was a mutt, tucking my California style under East Coast plainness—“the librarian type hee, hee,” as Mike Kelley would later describe my look back then.

With “Shaking Hell,” I was trying to push my inner self out, with an
edge that matched who I had become in New York. I bleached my hair unevenly, then dyed it magenta. In retrospect, it's ridiculous that anyone saw me as a fashion icon, since all I was trying to do was to dumb down my middle-class look by messing with my hair. Throughout the eighties I was invariably half-sure and half-confident about whatever it was I wore. I was going for a punky look, without really feeling I owned it. Later my look evolved into tomboy mixed with a slightly sexy Françoise Hardy cool—oversized indie rock T-shirts with boots, or corduroy shorts with seventies Jane Birkin–like tees on top, scoop-necked, flocked, with printed letters. My favorite one said
GRACIAS
. Still, I've always believed—still do—that the radical is far more interesting when it looks benign and ordinary on the outside.

The emotional intensity of the vocals in that song matched the music in a shamanistic way I don't think I've ever repeated. “Shaking Hell” was messy and bone-chilling to sing, especially when the music dropped to a low rumble during the “
Shake, shake, shake
” ending. It was as if the ground had dropped out from beneath me, and I was left floating, until my voice shot out and carried me. I wanted to take the audience with me, knowing, as I did, that the crowd wanted to believe in me, and us, as we created something that had never existed before.

We recorded
Confusion Is Sex
in the basement studio belonging to our friend Wharton Tiers. Wharton was the building superintendent, and whenever we recorded, he was professional enough to shut off the boiler. Years later, Julie Cafritz from Pussy Galore and I did an interview promoting an album from the side project we did together, Free Kitten. One of us made the mistake of mentioning Wharton and the boiler. We assumed no one would ever read the interview, but unfortunately one of the tenants did, and Wharton lost his job. I still feel bad about that.

Confusion Is Sex
was recorded with an eight-track, or rather with four-tracks locked together. We did absolutely everything wrong while making that record, including mangling the tape during a crucial take of “Shaking Hell.” In the end, we had to splice in the end of another tape to create the song.

The lyrics sprung from real life. “Making the Nature Scene” came from walking past the hookers lined up on Grand Street. In the dead cold of winter, they would flock there most nights, standing in a circle around a makeshift oilcan bonfire in leg warmers and stilettos. They were staples of the neighborhood landscape, standing tall like funky trees, leaning back, single hands on their hips, standing in a column “making the nature scene.”

The gold sparkle of the ladies' leg warmers caught the light of passing cars, flashed in the dark spaces around nearby buildings. I'd been reading about the Italian architect and designer Aldo Rossi, who believed that cities never shake their histories, that they preserve the ghosts of their pasts through time. Rossi wanted to reclaim the small areas in between buildings to make the idea of a city human again, against the prevailing backdrop of large, looming, faintly fascistic architecture. In the early 1980s, the Lower East Side with its modest tenement and railroad apartments was still a small village. No one really cared that the hookers were there; they were part of the landscape. That is, until the new mayor decided to clean up his city and shoo them along.

After our first EP, we embarked on a mini-tour with the Swans. We played D.C., Virginia, Chapel Hill, and Raleigh, North Carolina. The Swans were a harsh, hard-to-listen-to band—they were all about plodding, minimal music, over which Mike Gira's nihilistically romantic vocals could perch—and Mike, whom I'd known slightly at Otis Art School, was a complete dictator in his band. A friend of ours who'd just got dumped by his girlfriend offered to drive us for free, so both Sonic Youth and the Swans squeezed into the back of an old van with an attached U-Haul. Mike, I remember, spent the entire ride fighting with his bandmate Sue Hanel. Mike was the leader of the Swans, after all, and having convinced himself he was uncompromising and hyperdisciplined in all things, he would scream and carry on at his bandmates if they didn't toe the line. Compared to the Swans, Sonic Youth was mild.

Here is a bit from a tour memoir I wrote about that period, entitled “Boys Are Smelly”:

Chapel Hill: It was raining and sad as hell and the Swans played their set to jeering cowboys. Chapel Hill is one of the hippest places on earth to play, but in 1982 we were underground even for this place . . . In the van the Swans fought among themselves. Morale was very low and tempers were short. Our expectations were not as high as Mike's maybe, and we never fight among ourselves when we're traveling with another band that does; they do it for us.

Georgia: In Athens, Mike Gira jumped off the stage and pushed someone who was pogoing to their music, then he returned to the stage and apologized . . . Mike thought the guy was a poser who was making fun of him. In reality he was a nerd and Mike had never seen a nerd before. Thurston tried to discourage his sister, Susan, from coming to the show, because either he thought we were gonna suck or he thought he might have to protect her. He told her she'd be raped and murdered if she came, and at the time I thought it was just a ploy because she's so gullible, but now I realize he probably half believed it.

A few years later, from another tour, but the entries have the same feel:

Dallas: On our way to Dallas, we just melt, sleep, and nag our drummer Steve Shelley about driving too slow, and Thurston for driving too much like he plays guitar.

Boston: There was a point where I started getting sickened by the violence onstage. Thurston's fingers would swell up all purple and thick from banging his guitar. Usually I never know what's happening onstage, I would just see guitar-like objects whizzing through the air out of the corner of my eye. A couple of times Thurston pushed Lee into the audience, as the only way to end a song, but that was harmless fun.

Naugatuck, Connecticut: There's nothing like Naugatuck on a Saturday night . . . The club is next to a Chinese restaurant in a shopping plaza. River's Edge could have been filmed here.
I've never seen so many metalheads cruising the roads. They make perfect sense, though, when you look at the barren trees, the discount store, all this desolation and quietness—you want to crank up something really loud and ugly. I couldn't help wondering what the girls did while the boys were off playing with Satan. And I wondered if they were like me and craved the feeling of electricity and sound mixed together, swirling around my head and thru my legs. I always fantasized what it would be like to be right under the pinnacle of energy, beneath two guys who have crossed their guitars together, two thunderfoxes in the throes of self-love and combat, that powerful form of intimacy only achieved onstage in front of other people, known as male bonding.

We may have been in our infancy as a band, but our psychology was already beginning to form. The band gave us all new identities, thrilling but protected. None of us were alone anymore. Sometimes in a band it can feel as though you're together because you collectively suffer from a psychological disease none of you can name or acknowledge. Logic proceeds from a kind of group psychosis, but the force of the collective makes everything work. You're like a family who does what they do for ingrained, habitual reasons—except no one remembers why or what started the behavior. A band almost defines the word
dysfunction,
except that rather than explaining motivations or discussing anything, you play music, acting out your issues via adrenaline.

Greil Marcus, the music critic, wrote about our cover of Iggy and the Stooges' “I Wanna Be Your Dog” in his monthly
Artforum
column. His pieces were made up of small, and to Greil's mind meaningful, gestures that propelled the culture forward. Later Greil told an interviewer that
Confusion Is Sex
had gotten to him. It was a mess, he said, with some terrible singing, but he said he'd never heard anyone pull out her guts and throw them into the audience the way I had in “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” and that Iggy Pop would be either ashamed or thrilled. “I Wanna Be Your Dog” was a song that had been covered so many times by so
many people, but until then, Greil said, he'd never really known what it meant for one lover to say to another that she wanted to be his dog. “This woman knows stuff that I don't know,” Greil wrote. In his opinion, Sonic Youth was a band that was taking big chances, really
pushing
. Greil was one of the earliest witnesses to understand what we were trying to do—maybe the only one.

It was the first time anyone had paid any real attention to us, and in
Artforum
no less. Thurston and I interpreted it as Greil's saying: “This small gesture is important and significant.” Later, Greil and I got to be friends.

In fact, the lyrics for the song “Brother James” came after I read about the blues in Greil's book
Mystery Train
. “Brother James” appeared on an EP the band put out after
Confusion Is Sex
called
Kill Yr Idols,
a name we took from a Robert Christgau quote. Robert was the other big music critic of the time along with Greil, but he basically ignored us. Robert and the
Village Voice,
the downtown New York City weekly he wrote for, were never sympathetic to Sonic Youth or to the local rock scene in general, and the one night he came to one of our shows, someone in the audience tried to light him on fire. Playfully, though.