Girl in a Band

For Coco, my North Star

I'd like to thank:

My editor, Carrie Thornton, for all her patient indulgence and for initiating the project.

Also, Sean Newcott, Carrie's assistant editor.

The rest of the team at HarperCollins and Dey Street Books, including Lynn Grady, Sharyn Rosenblum, Michael Barrs, Kendra Newton, Rachel Meyers, Lorie Pagnozzi, and Paula Szafranski.

The team at Faber in the UK: Lee Brackstone, Dan Papps, Gemma Lovett, and Dave Watkins.

Special thanks to Peter Smith, who was immensely helpful in pulling this book together. I would also like to thank Henry Dunow for getting the process started.

To all the photographers who allowed me to use their images.

All my friends who helped me through the last few years: Elaine Kahn, Luisa Reichenheim, Lili Dwight, Byron Coley, Bill Nace, Julie Cafritz, Marjorie Zweizig, Daisy and Rob von Furth, Rebekah Brooks, Xian Hawkins, Don Fleming, Margaret Bodde, Lizzi Bougatsos, Jutta
Koether, John Kelsey, Isabelle Graw, Tony Oursler, Jon Wurster, Jessica Hutchins, Stephen Malkmus, Chloë Sevigny, Mel Wansbrough, Sofia Coppola, Andrew Kesin, Mathew Higgs, Elissa Schappell, Sheila McCullough, Michele Fleischli, Cameron Jamie, Dave Markey, Emma Reeves, Tamra Davis, Mike D, Adam H, Kathleen, Chris Habib, Mark Ibold, Vicki Farrell, Andrew Kesin, Richard Kern, Carlos Van Hijfte, Tom Caw, Spike Jonze, Keith Nealy, Aimee Mann, Amy P., Carrie Brownstein, Ben Estes, Juan Amaya, Jim O Rourke, J Mascis, Shana Weiss, Hilton Als, Bill Mooney, Barbara Herrington, Patrick Amory, and Jamie Brisick.

Special thanks to Steve Shelley, Lee Ranaldo, and Thurston Moore, without whom there would be no story.

Also, a grateful nod to all the Sonic Youth crew from over the years, Aaron Mullan, Eric Baecht, Nick Close, Suzanne Sasic, Jim Vincent, Jeremy Lemos, Luc Suer, Dan Mapp, Bob Lawton, Peter Van Der Velde, Maurice Menares and all the people at SAM management, Gaby Skolnek, Micheal Meisel, John Cutcliffe, Chris Kelly, John Silva, and Richard Grabel.

To Chris Stone, Nils Bernstein, Patrick Amory, Gerard Cosloy, Chris Lombardi, and the folks at Matador records for putting out the Body/Head double LP.

To Eric Dimenstein for booking us.

To my family: Keller, Kathryn, Eleanor, and Louise Erdman, and Coco Gordon Moore.

To the memory of my exceptional parents: my mother, Althea, and my father, Wayne. Their singular spirit, humor, and intelligence somehow guided me.

And to all the fans, of course, and their support that I never truly believed was there, until I needed it.

WHEN WE CAME OUT
onstage for our last show, the night was all about the boys. Outwardly, everyone looked more or less the same as they had for the last thirty years. Inside was a different story.

Thurston double-slapped our bass guitarist Mark Ibold on the shoulder and loped across the stage, followed by Lee Ranaldo, our guitarist, and then Steve Shelley, our drummer. I found that gesture so phony, so childish, such a fantasy. Thurston has many acquaintances, but with the few male friends he had he never spoke of anything personal, and he's never been the shoulder-slapping type. It was a gesture that called out,
I'm back. I'm free. I'm solo.

I was the last one to come on, making sure to mark off some distance between Thurston and me. I was exhausted and watchful. Steve took his place behind his drum set like a dad behind a desk. The rest of us armed ourselves with our instruments like a battalion, an army that just wanted the bombardment to end.

It was pouring, slanting sheets of rain. South American rain is like rain anywhere else, and it makes you feel the same too.

They say when a marriage ends that little things you never noticed before practically make your brain split open. All week that had been true for me whenever Thurston was around. Maybe he felt the same, or maybe his head was somewhere else. I didn't really want to know, to be honest. Offstage he was constantly texting and pacing around the rest of us like a manic, guilty kid.

After thirty years, tonight was Sonic Youth's final concert. The SWU Music and Arts Festival was taking place in Itu, just outside São Paulo, Brazil, five thousand miles from our home in New England. It was a three-day-long event, broadcast on Latin American television and streamed online, too, with big corporate sponsors like Coca-Cola and Heineken. The headliners were Faith No More, Kanye West, the Black Eyed Peas, Peter Gabriel, Stone Temple Pilots, Snoop Dogg, Soundgarden, people like that. We were probably the smallest act on the bill. It was a strange place for things to come to an end.

Over the years we had played lots of rock festivals. The band saw them as a necessary evil, although the do-or-die aspect of having no sound check before you played made them sort of thrilling, too. Festivals mean backstage trailers and tents, gear and power cords everywhere, smelly porta-potties, and sometimes running into musicians whom you like personally or professionally but never get to see or meet or talk to. Equipment can break, delays happen, the weather is unpredictable. There are times you can't hear a thing in the monitors but you just go for it and try to get the music across to a sea of people.

Festivals also mean a shorter set. Tonight we would close things out
with seventy minutes of adrenaline, just as we'd done the past few days at festivals in Peru, Uruguay, Buenos Aires, and Chile.

What was different from past tours and festivals was that Thurston and I weren't speaking to each other. We had exchanged maybe fifteen words all week. After twenty-seven years of marriage, things had fallen apart between us. In August I'd had to ask him to move out of our house in Massachusetts, and he had. He was renting an apartment a mile away and commuting back and forth to New York.

The couple everyone believed was golden and normal and eternally intact, who gave younger musicians hope they could outlast a crazy rock-and-roll world, was now just another cliché of middle-aged relationship failure—a male midlife crisis, another woman, a double life.

Thurston mimed a mock-startled reaction as a tech passed him his guitar. At fifty-three, he was still the shaggy, skinny kid from Connecticut I first met at a downtown New York club when he was twenty-two and I was twenty-seven. He told me later he liked my flip-up sunglass shades. In his jeans, old-school Pumas, and un-tucked-in white button-down oxford, he looked like a boy frozen in some diorama, a seventeen-year-old who didn't want to be seen in the company of his mother, or any woman for that matter. He had the Mick Jagger lips, and the lanky arms and legs he didn't seem to know what to do with, and the wariness you see in tall men who don't want to overpower other people with their height. His long brown hair camouflaged his face, and he seemed to like it that way.

That week, it was as if he'd wound back time, erased our nearly thirty years together. “Our life” had turned back into “my life” for him. He was an adolescent lost in fantasy again, and the rock star showboating he was doing onstage got under my skin.

Sonic Youth had always been a democracy, but we all had our roles, too. I took my place in the center of the stage. It didn't start out that way and I'm not sure when it changed. It was a choreography that dated back twenty years, to when Sonic Youth first signed with Geffen Records.
It was then that we learned that for high-end music labels, the music matters, but a lot comes down to how the girl looks. The girl anchors the stage, sucks in the male gaze, and, depending on who she is, throws her own gaze back out into the audience.

Since our music can be weird and dissonant, having me center stage also makes it that much easier to sell the band.
Look, it's a girl, she's wearing a dress, and she's with those guys, so things must be okay.
But that's not how we had ever operated as an indie band, so I was always conscious not to be too much out front.

I could barely hold it together during the first song, “Brave Men Run.” At one point my voice fell like it was scraping against its own bottom, and then the bottom fell out. It was an old, very early song from our album
Bad Moon Rising
. I wrote the lyrics on Eldridge Street in New York City in a tenement railroad apartment where Thurston and I were living at the time. The song always makes me think of the pioneer women in my mother's family slogging their way out to California through Panama, and my grandmother being a single parent during the Depression with no real income. Lyrically, the song reminded me of how I first brought together my art influences into my music. I took the title from an Ed Ruscha painting that shows a clipper ship angling through waves and whitecaps.

But that was three decades ago. Tonight Thurston and I didn't look at each other once, and when the song was done, I turned my shoulders to the audience so no one in the audience or the band could see my face, though it had little effect. Everything I did and said was broadcast from one of the two forty-foot-high onstage video screens.

For whatever reasons—sympathy, or sadness, or the headlines and articles about Thurston's and my breakup that followed us wherever we went that week in Spanish, Portuguese, and English—we had the passionate support of South American audiences. Tonight's crowd stretched out in front of us and blurred with the dark clouds around the stadium—thousands of rain-soaked kids, wet hair, naked backs, tank tops, raised hands holding cell phones and girls on dark boys' shoulders.

The bad weather had followed us through South America, from Lima
to Uruguay to Chile and now to São Paulo—a corny movie-mirror of the strangeness between Thurston and me. The festival stages were like musical versions of awkward domestic tableaux—a living room, or a kitchen, or a dining room, where the husband and the wife pass each other in the morning and make themselves separate cups of coffee with neither one acknowledging the other, or any kind of shared history, in the room.

After tonight, Sonic Youth was done. Our life as a couple, and as a family, was already done. We still had our apartment on Lafayette Street in New York—though not for much longer—and I would keep on living with our daughter, Coco, in our house in western Massachusetts that we'd bought in 1999 from a local school.

“Hello!” Thurston called out genially to the crowd just before the band launched into “Death Valley '69.” Two nights earlier in Uruguay, Thurston and I had to duet together on another early song, “Cotton Crown.” Its lyrics were about love, and mystery, and chemistry, and dreaming, and staying together. It was basically an ode to New York City. In Uruguay I was too upset to sing it, and Thurston had to finish by himself.

But I would make it through “Death Valley.” Lee, Thurston, and I, and then just the two of us, stood there. My about-to-be-ex husband and I faced that mass of bobbing wet Brazilians, our voices together spell-checking the old words, and for me it was a staccato soundtrack of surreal raw energy and anger and pain:
Hit it. Hit it
.
Hit it.
I don't think I had ever felt so alone in my whole life.

The press release issued a month earlier from our record label, Matador, didn't say much:

Musicians Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore, married in 1984, are announcing they have separated. Sonic Youth, with both Kim and Thurston involved, will proceed with its South American tour dates in November. Plans beyond that tour are uncertain. The couple has requested respect for their personal privacy and does not wish to issue further comment.

“Brave Men Run,” “Death Valley '69,” “Sacred Trickster,” “Calming the Snake,” “Mote,” “Cross the Breeze,” “Schizophrenia,” “Drunken Butterfly,” “Starfield Road,” “Flower,” “Sugar Kane,” and closing out with “Teen Age Riot.” The São Paulo set list borrowed from when we first started out, lyrics Thurston and I had written apart or together, songs that took Sonic Youth through the eighties and the nineties, and our most recent albums.

The set list may have seemed like a best-of compilation but it was carefully thought through. During rehearsal and all that week, I remember Thurston making a point of telling the band he didn't want to perform this or that Sonic Youth song. It eventually hit me that certain songs he wanted to leave out were about
her
.

We could have canceled the tour, but we'd signed a contract. Performing live is how bands make a living, and we all had families and bills to pay, and in my and Thurston's case, college tuition for Coco to think about. At the same time, I wasn't sure how good it looked to be playing these gigs. I didn't want people to assume that whatever stuff had gone down between Thurston and me, I was playing a supportive, stand-by-your-man role. I wasn't. And outside of our immediate circle no one really knew what had happened.

Before flying to South America, Sonic Youth rehearsed for a week at a studio in New York. Somehow I made it through, with the help of a Xanax, the first time I'd ever taken one during the day. Instead of staying at our apartment, which now felt tainted to me, the others agreed to put me up in a hotel.

True to band form, everyone pretended things were the same. I knew the others were too nervous about how things were between Thurston and me to interact with me much, considering they all knew the circumstances of our breakup, and even knew the woman in question. I didn't want anyone to feel uncomfortable, and after all, I'd agreed to go along with the tour. I knew everyone had his own private judgments and sympathies, but I was surprised at how jovial everyone was acting. Maybe everyone was just too overwhelmed by the unreality. The same went in South America.

Someone later showed me a
Salon
article called “How Could Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore Divorce?” The writer, Elissa Schappell, wrote that we had shown an entire generation how to grow up. She said she cried when she first heard the news.

Look at them, I thought: They were in love and married and making art. They were cool and hardcore, with a profound seriousness about their art, and they hadn't sold out or gotten soft. In an age of irony, where I'd feign indifference and cover up my insecurity with mockery, they weren't too cool to care . . . What's scarier than a couple deciding—after 30 years of being in a band they created, 27 years of marriage, 17 years spent raising a child—that now they're done with it? As they succeeded, we succeeded.

She closed with the question “Why should they be different than the rest of us?”

Good question, and we weren't, and what had happened was probably the most conventional story ever.

We flew separately to South America. I flew in with the band, and Thurston traveled with
Aaron, our front-of-house sound guy.

On tour, after the airplane touches down, vans speed you to your hotel. People scatter, sleep, read, eat, exercise, go for a walk, watch TV, e-mail, text. That week in South America, though, everyone in the band, including the crew and the tech guys, came together for meals. A lot of the crew had worked with us for years and were like family members. Thurston sat at one end of the table, with me at the other end. It was like dining out with the folks, except Mom and Dad were ignoring each other. Everyone ordered up big platters of food and drink, and most of our conversations centered on what we were eating and drinking as a way to avoid talking about what was really going on. What was going on was the silent, unwelcome guest in the room.

Our first show was in Buenos Aires. Sonic Youth hadn't played Argentina in a while, and the audiences were expressive and enthusiastic, and seemed to know every lyric to every song. For the first couple of days, I had my wall up around Thurston, but as the tour went on, I softened a little. With all the history between us, it made me incredibly anxious to hold so much anger toward him. A couple of times he and I found ourselves taking photos outside the hotel, and I made a conscious decision to be friendly, and Thurston did too.