Sonic Life - Thurston Moore (2023)

Sonic Life was a fascinating read. Mostly because I have been listening to Sonic Youth since 2000, and routinely included them whenever anyone asked me my "top 3" bands. I've watched The Year Punk Broke countless times. I've listened to many of their albums--Daydream Nation, Sister, Goo, Dirty, Washing Machine, Sonic Nurse, Rather Ripped, The Eternal--rather frequently over the years. I met Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon once, and wrote about it in a zine, and gave it to Kim the next time I saw them (at Tonic). I was very intimidated and I approached Kim and she accepted the zine and spoke back to me in a German accent, perhaps a defense mechanism, or a deflecting one, which mirrored my anxiety. I saw them play live many times--perhaps not a dozen, but more than half a dozen. I picked up Girl in a Band on the day it was released (actually just tried to--it was sold out; I read it in March 2015, exactly 9 years ago; also the above details are largely repeated in the linked review, and I do think I have gotten slightly better here). 

I was not nearly as excited for Sonic Life, perhaps because so much time had passed, and because I had already managed my expectations. Sonic Youth had played their final show in November 2011, and Girl in a Band was released in February 2015. For those unfamiliar, Sonic Youth started in roughly 1981, so they lasted 30 years. Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore had been married in 1984, and the end of their marriage spelled the end of their band. One imagines Kim Gordon starting the book in 2012 or 2013, delivering the finished product in 2014; on re-perusal, it is raw and emotional, written when the pain of the unraveling was still fresh. 

There was no question, however, that I would read Sonic Life as well, and I asked for it for Christmas. For all of his iconic glory and presence as a singular Thurston, a certain mystery pervades his band's recorded output. The songs are rarely personal--they are more often about friends than themselves. Lyrics, while important, often take a backseat to the noise. The language of their music is atonal, and inaccessible to a great deal of people. It almost feels like there is a resistance towards wanting to be understood. 

Coming from this perspective, Sonic Life is a revelation of sorts. As a person that spent their teenage years in Connecticut and adopted New York City as a home (albeit only temporarily), I felt a certain kinship with him, even as I struggled to understand his modus operandi. I was there in 2001. I would say that things were not that different from 1981, then. In 2021, I would not say the same thing. So while I was not there for the 70s and 80s, when New York was dangerous and somewhat affordable, I came when Giuliani was Mayor, and the city had been "cleaned up" to a degree, but still had many areas yet to gentrify. CBGB was still open and a new subset of bands attempted to recapture the magic of the scene in the late 70s. I was more influenced by Sonic Youth than the Strokes or the Yeah Yeah Yeahs (though a band I managed owed a fair debt to Interpol), but those bands held a place for me that Patti Smith or Televsion might have held for Thurston, when he moved there in the late 70s. There are definitely overlaps.

Thurston "gets it":

"The only affordable alternatives were to be had along East Houston Street, either the Yonnah Schimmel Bakery on the corner of Forsyth Street, for a knish jammed with yellow mustard and sauerkraut, or Katz's Delicatessen, a couple of blocks east, for a split grilled frankfurter with the 'works' on a toasted bun, ideally downed with a Dr. Brown's cream soda. If you were feeling flush, a couple more bucks could get you either a hot pastrami or a corned beef sandwich on rye bread, doused with mustard and coupled with a large sour green dill pickle. The pickle was key, as it helped you digest all those cured meats. At times a pickle was all that was needed, and the pickle stores on the Lowest East Side's Essex Street--huge barrels of briny vinegar pickles set up on the sidewalk, sometimes so acrid your eyes would water--were perfect for an emergency crunch fix." (120)

I took a summer course at NYU called "Writing New York City," and our professor, Nettie Jones, took us on field trips around the city, one of which was to a certain pickle merchant on the Lower East Side. This remains the best pickle I have had in my life. So he gets it. Dr. Brown's cream soda is also the credited beverage of choice at Katz's (even if that establishment is an institution that hardly feels like the "secret tip" on the pickles). There are other revelatory food passages, such as praise for the frites in Amsterdam, and I loved them because I could relate, but I digress.

*

Overall, this is a great book. The primary criticism is the front-loading. This is roughly 500 pages long, about twice as long as Girl in a Band. At page 400, we are somewhere around 1993. So you have 400 pages covering 1976-1993, and 100 pages covering 1993-Present. 1987-1993 are covered rather quickly as well. Really, the majority of this book is about the beginning of Sonic Youth, roughly 1980-1985, with a strong emphasis on the Confusion is Sex/Kill Yr Idols and Bad Moon Rising era, which is when the band began to ascend. I always found the earlier material somewhat unlistenable, and Sonic Life lent a greater appreciation for those albums. For how difficult the listening may have been, it is clear from the book that they were trying to be more of an accessible "rock band" than the vast majority of their peers in the No-Wave Scene. 

To give a specific example, consider the song "Ghost Bitch," a song that almost never registered to me, ensconced deep in the muck of Bad Moon Rising, which shows up on many more setlists than I previously perceived. And while there is a lot of noise in it, it turns into a more traditional "song" and actually kind of exemplifies what was great about their earlier material--that transition from pure noise and feedback bleeding into a song and the feeling that the moment has arrived. This is much more noticeable on live recordings, and a reminder that Sonic Youth was one of the great live bands, their noise jamming akin to the "noodling" of the Grateful Dead.

They do actually have an opportunity to meet the Grateful Dead, but it is passed up and Jerry Garcia dies shortly thereafter and regret is pronounced. In the early days of punk, hippies were the enemy, but that facade fell away in short order. Greg Ginn was a huge Deadhead and Black Flag became a jam band right after Damaged. Lee Ranaldo was also a bit of a Deadhead, though it's clear Thurston's heart is with the Stooges. Neil Young asked Sonic Youth to open for him in 1990 and their experience on that tour was somewhat transformative. They would soon have their "pop" moment, becoming leading mentors to Nirvana, influencing their decision to sign to a major label imprint and the consequent explosion of Nevermind. And they would realize not long after, that massive success was not in the cards, and settled comfortably into their niche around 1995 on Washing Machine, which was good enough for a fairly nice living. 

*

The chapter on Sonic Youth in Our Band Could Be Your Life underwhelmed me at the time, perhaps because the members of the band all seemed to act like adults, and drama was minimal. Until the end of their career, the biggest drama seemed to be the way they jerked aroud Bob Bert. Bert was their primary drummer before Steve Shelley took over, and after Richard Edson, who became an actor (in Stranger Than Paradise, the director of which was Jim Jarmusch, also a figure in the "scene"). But I had no idea how many times Bert was fired and rehired (at least three or four times). He never did anything wrong, the band just wanted a different "style" of drumming, but they had trouble finding a suitable replacement, so they kept asking him back. So he may be considered an unsung hero, for providing stability even when they did not offer the same.

Of course, the drama came at the end, and Moore dodges it to an extent. He claims that he does not want to capitalize on pain. Which feels like something of a shot at Girl in a Band, because that book basically took the dissolution of the relationship as a framing mechanism. Moore does explain how he fell in love with his "soulmate," to an extent, but the salacious details have already been printed elsewhere, and apparently do not merit refutation. And even if they did, it would not be a good look to respond to 8-year-old grievances after all this time. Thurston has said that he is totally open to a reunion, and the book is in the spirit of that, a celebration of all they accomplished--so it makes sense not to dwell on the past, once everyone has put it behind them. Regardless, while it is not our business to tell people how to write meaningfully about divorce, I have to believe there could have been a way to offer an effective mea culpa and maintain dignity, and that absence feels like a missed opportunity. 

More generally, there is not a great deal of emotion in this book. There are plenty of rhapsodic flourishes about the power of music. Iggy Pop once said (memorialized by Mogwai), "when I'm in the grips of it, I don't feel pleasure and I don't feel pain, either physically or emotionally." One could say the same about this book. It just kind of washes over you. 

* 

There's so much information. Moore may have an excellent memory, or kept diligent journals, but the book required significant research as well. It seems like the entire book is a recitation of all of the tours that the band ever did. There are far more anecdotes from these performances than from the recording of their albums or anything else in their lives, apart from the birth of their daughter Coco. 

While Moore may not want to berate himself or hold himself up as a target, he is more than willing to make fun of himself. The band always came off as very cool and hipper than thou, so it is endearing to read about the awkward beginnings:

"Together we walked across downtown to the East Village. We found some late-night food at a diner on Second Avenue, Egan [Kim's dog] tied up outside, attentively waiting for his master, once in a while issuing a bark to let her know what time it was. Kim told me she had been staying far uptown at the apartment of the SoHo gallerist Annina Nosei. Leaving the diner, I asked how she was going to get up to Annina's with Egan so late at night, as animals weren't permitted on the subway unless they were Seeing Eye dogs. A taxi seemed luxurious. She said she was okay. I was too shy to kiss her, even politely on the cheek, though I wanted to. So I simply said--

'Okay, see ya around.' 
--and stuck my hand out, feeling immediately foolish. She cocked her head slightly, half-smiling, before returning my handshake.  
I walked to my apartment smitten and a bit mortified, my desire overwhelmed by my lack of confidence. I was clearly no Lothario. I was twenty-two years old but with a teenage brain, slow to transition to adulthood." (145)

*

The beginning of this book is as good a primer on the New York City music scene in the late 70s as I have read. The book as a whole is not as good as Please Kill Me, but the beginning of it eclipses that, at times, because it is funneled through Moore himself. Similarly, I cannot say it is better overall than Girl in a Band, though many aspects of it are better. Moore is excellent as a historian. The sheer amount of information is overwhelming and the narrative is amusing. Girl in a Band is more artistic, the prose is often more clipped and spare, and it progresses along an emotional arc. There is no real arc to this book--rather, there are Books, six of them, comprised of 71 chapters.

The arc of Sonic Life is in Books 1-3. That is where Moore realizes his dream and vision of the future and goes about manifesting the band and its unlikely success. There is something deeply inspiring about these pages, a tone that Our Band Could Be Your Life maintained throughout, about not having any idea of how to play music but wanting to anyways, and doing it. 

So when this book captures that energy, it is at its best. I do think it needs an index. Any book that required significant research and lobs hundreds of names of famous, semi-famous and non-famous artists at the reader should get an index. There is a real "scene" that gets captured here, in full-fledged glory (punk), which eventually dies and turns into something else (no wave), which then dies and turns into something else (college rock), before branching off into nether realms (grunge). There may be a greater testament to the No Wave scene than Sonic Life but I've yet to see it. Moore's observation of it and life within it is the strongest part of the book. 

 

Those were simpler times, and they are treated lovingly. The real memoir of the book is Moore's early life. By the time the band is charting a course towards greater accessibility with Sister, the book is about Sonic Youth, and no longer about Thurston Moore, and emotional truth does not apply to entities the same way (i.e., it was nice of John Lydon to show the band what seemed genuine concern when their gear got stolen before a gig they did with Public Image Ltd.). He sums it all up rather nicely, it just ends too abruptly. 

Grade: A-

 

****

Is that really all I have to say? No. But I can't write a perfect review of this book. I thought it might be an interesting exercise to provide two excerpts--one from Sonic Life and one from Girl in a Band--about the same event, which is a performance by Public Image Ltd. Perhaps that will provide a window into how these two artists remember details:

"There were others of course--the Velvet Underground, the Door--who took risks in the 1960s, when no one knew where any of it was going. Before them were the Beats and before the Beats the avant-garde artists, the futurists, Fluxus, and before that, the blues, outsider music, a mourning for what's expected but will never happen, so why not dance and play and forget for a few moments that we're all alone anyway?

Cut now to Public Image Ltd. performing at the Ritz in 1981 in New York City. Sid Vicious was dead and the Sex Pistols were over. Public Image Ltd. had made an impact and their third album, The Flowers of Romance, had mystery, with its girl on the cover. The Ritz crowd anxiously awaited the band's appearance. The huge movie-scale screen where videos were projected before bands was still down. The screen was a natural barrier, used to create and motivate the crowd's reaction. First up came a huge image of John Lydon's face, laughing. Then he began to sing. Projected onto the screen was a strange film of a dark alley and the girl from the cover of The Flowers of Romance getting out of a garbage can. The film stopped, but the screen stayed in place, and suddenly behind it, the shadows of the three band members appeared. The screen stayed still. Furious at seeing the ghostlike, ritualistic figures of the group out of reach behind the screen, the audience became agitated; they couldn't see the band in the flesh. They started yelling. A few of them threw metal chairs. The band ran offstage and the audience proceeded to destroy the screen. 

Public Image didn't go out there intending to cause a riot. They were simply trying something new. The audience's expectations were dashed. The band's pure audacity had drawn crowds to the Ritz in the first place, but then the audience couldn't accept what the band was offering. It was too much. And that experience, that feeling, will never appear on YouTube, will never be downloaded onto anyone's laptop or phone. Today you will never find a picture of it, because the Internet didn't exist, and no one was paying attention, or bothering to document what was taking place right before their eyes, with the exception of a zine started by a bunch of fifteen-year-old New York girls called The Decline of Western Civilization." (261-262)

This comes near the end of Girl in a Band, and goes onto to discuss our need for heroics from musical icons that died too young, how the 80s were like the 60s, questioning whether the 90s actually happened, and then ends with her seeing Dave Chappelle at the Oddball Festival in Hartford in 2012 or so, comparing the audience to that show to the one for PiL at the Ritz, and how Chappelle couldn't get the audience to stop talking and so opted to spend 25 minutes on the stage, smoking a cigarette and waiting in silence, to their escalating dismay. It's kind of a great mini-essay on what it means to be in the audience and what we expect to get out of the experience. She had written famously before about how audiences want to see themselves on stage, and so the performer should be a mirror to them in a way, serving as a conduit for their energy. It appears that Sonic Youth took this concept to their stage show, in their waning years, as they would project a video of the live audience itself, being captured from the front of the stage, behind them on a screen as they performed. I have to think this is a callback to the PiL screen, and Gordon's and the band's own notions of how to frame the audience experience.

In contrast, the 28th chapter of Sonic Life, "The Electric Dread," is 3 pages long: 

"Public Image Ltd, in May 1981, set up shop in New York City. Their idea was not to perform gigs like any other rock 'n' roll group, but to make recordings, books, and films--to be a 'company' of sorts, a brand as opposed to a band. 

Less than a year earlier John Lydon and PiL guitarist Keith Levene had appeared on the program Tomorrow, a late-night network talk show with an engaging, funny, take-no-guff interlocutor named Tom Snyder. Lydon and Levene attempted to state their case of being an 'anti-band' to Snyder, only to become argumentative when he didn't take the bait.

The band had already shaken up the North American airwaves earlier that year by lip-synching on the weekly music show and institution American Bandstand, Lydon making no pretense of going along with the pretense, walking among and dancing around the live TV audience, reavealing PiL's music to be nothing but a canned recording.

On the Tomorrow show, Snyder was surprised, even astounded, at how rude and aggressive Lydon could be. At one point he admonished the punk lord, only for Lydon to accuse the host of having a 'tantrum.' Lydon and Levene kept getting out of their chairs to lean across the table and cadge cigarettes from Snyder's pack. 

The episode was explosive for us, energizing the entire scene in its defiance of the mainstream.

The Ritz nightclub on East Eleventh Street had a cancellation by the London band Bow Wow Wow (who were managed by the ex-Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren, whom Lydon was then suing). Lydon and Levene accepted an offer for their new anti-band to play the gig instead, but only if they could perform behind the Ritz's monolithic video screen, touted as the largest in the world. Rolled down, it filled the entire stage. They had the idea to illuminate the screen and stage from behind with high-intensity PAR can lights, creating monstrous silhouettes, while Super 8 film footage of the group bopping around Manhattan was shown.........

[The queue outside the Ritz is described, the rain that began crashing down, and the extended wait for the band to set up their unorthodox arrangement, and the hapless opening band that was booed off the stage...]

Before too long the silhouettes of Lydon, Levene, and their bandmates rose high on the screen, inciting cheers from the audience. The opening salvos of the band's just released album, The Flowers of Romance, with Lydon yodeling an unholy atonal yowl, blasted through the PA.

A live feed of the group behind the screen would intermittently cut into the preshot Super 8 footage. Each time an actual image of Lydon or Levene would appear, the crowd would lift its voice in approval, but the effect soon became redundant and annoying. 

Bottles began to be hurled as chants of---

'Lift the screen! Lift the screen!'

---filled the room. 

[The audience's pulling of a tarp on the stage that was under all the band's equipment is described.]

Keith Levene ran in front of the screen, waving his arms at the audience to stop the madness, but it was entirely ineffectual as bottles whizzed past his head, nearly braining him. Stagehands ran out to rescue Keith as a pretaped image of Lydon appeared on the screen, warbling and strumming tunelessly on an acoustic guitar, singing a piss take on an old folkie tune---

I've got a hole in my heart

Levene proceeded to put on a recording of The Flowers of Romance. He played some kind of feedback guitar with it, which sounded excellent to me--though my appreciation for it may have been in the minority. More chants of---

'Lift the screen!'

---came, mixed with yelling and laughter, bottles lobbed endlessly towards the stage. Lydon again appeared on the screen, this time singing an actual live and in-person version of the same song---

I've got a ho-o-ole in my heart

The audience lost it.

This was not a concert; it was an insane asylum.

With the pulling of the tarp having fully dismantled the band's gear, Lydon's silhouette loomed across the screen as a giant demon, haranguing into his microphone a singsong tease---

'Silly fucking audience, silly fucking audience!'

It was the final straw.

Bottles now rained over the room and onto the stage, splattering, smashing, and staining the screen, the crazed audience grabbing at it, attempting to tear the offending obstruction down. The pride and joy of the Ritz, its world-famous video screen, hung precariously from its moorings. 

In an instant all the houselights flared up, a Wizard of Oz voice booming from the PA---

'THE SHOW IS OVER!! EVERYONE LEAVE!! NOW!!'

Furious security guards began to forcibly push the audience out of the room. No one really fought back; everyone was simply too bewildered, too giddy even, at how messed up and chaotic this gig had become. There were laughs and a few shouts of---

'I want my money back!'...(183-185)

Maybe you can see the difference. Gordon's is like an essay, from a distance; Moore's is like a short story, experienced moment by moment. It's likely both were at that PiL show at the Ritz in 1981 together, but you can't totally tell from Gordon's.  I didn't fully copy the entire text of "The Electric Dread," but I hope the lawyers at Penguin Random House are willing to dote on me, and see that this is its own form of publicity, and that it can only help keep conversations about the book going. Book reviews should be able to include long excerpts, and this has been a foundational rule on Flying Houses. It helps the reader decide if they want to take the deeper dive.

*

I'm not sure what else to say. Both of these artists and their band have meant and continue to mean a great deal to me. They do not get their due respect. Perhaps they did, briefly, 30 years ago, and Daydream Nation is in the Library of Congress and they are still famous, in the sense that they stood for the vanguard of their time, and persist today as solo artists that keep pushing themselves in new and sometimes exciting directions (Gordon's two solo records have both been remarkably good; Moore's work has become a behemoth, less suited for the type of rambunctious live performances of Gordon on recent tours--really appearing to me like a female-fronted version of the Fall, her onstage persona reimagined and reinvigorated--and more suited to jazz lounges and study lounges, playing instrumental music for productivity, and naps). Their books are a "study in contrasts," and each is certainly worth reading for any fan of the band. Gordon's is the more affective story, and the reader will feel more after finishing hers; Moore's is the nerdier, more emotionally-distanced one. Arguably, the first half of Sonic Life eclipses Girl in a Band, and if it had continued in that vein, might have been better overall. It doesn't fall of the rails exactly, but it loses some verve and sense of wonder along the way, and turns into bulletpoint-like prose summing up their final years (the chapter on 9/11 is the last great part of the book). Much of it is extremely readable and amusing and thought-provoking and educational. And that really should be good enough for a book. We need not require that musicians open up and bleed in their memoirs--it just feels like that would be more true to the spirit of punk--but there are other sub-genres and other aesthetics.