Girl in a Band (14 page)

I WOULDN'T DESCRIBE
Lydia Lunch as a friend, since friendship requires trust. I was a big fan of Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, and when Thurston and I got to know Lydia better, she was always trying to seduce Thurston. I always found her an interesting figure, and I liked her early music, but that doesn't mean I was a fan of everything she did. She was a little predatory, and she scared me somewhat. Still, Lydia was responsible for introducing Thurston and me to Paul Smith, who had previously managed a label for the English band Cabaret Voltaire. We sent Paul a tape—maybe they would like it enough to put out
Bad Moon Rising
. They weren't interested, but that's when Paul decided to find a
backer via Rough Trade, a huge distribution company, who released the album on a new label Paul called Blast First.

Licensing advances meant a new beginning, one where I didn't have to work full-time and could focus instead on the new album. For the most part we were happy, though a little nervous, to lose our day jobs. Before writing the songs, Lee, Thurston, Bob Bert (our second drummer after Richard Edson), and I were passing around a book about the Velvet Underground. That book, for some unknown reason, brought everyone in the band together. We were now all in the same mood, which shows when you listen. We ended up calling the album
Bad Moon Rising,
after the Creedence Clearwater Revival song. We may have been preoccupied by the Velvets, but that's just the way we did things—borrowing something from a pop culture landscape and giving it a different meaning. Creedence Clearwater Revival was a faux–Southern country band in the same way we were a faux–Velvet Underground band. Plus, the title was badass.

Bad Moon Rising
was the first record we ever recorded on twenty-four tracks. Every song flows into the next, with no gaps or spaces in between. When we played our music live, we were forced to create miniature segues onstage between songs. In those days, we had no guitar techs to help tune our instruments, and our twelve to fifteen guitars, each one tuned differently, constantly had to be retuned, or rechecked, or swapped out, which necessitated short breaks. Over time we developed an elaborate system for making those changes as seamless and fluid as possible.

We decided to re-create that illusion of seamlessness on
Bad Moon Rising
. At the time I was reading a book by the early postmodernist critic Leslie Fiedler called
Love and Death in the American Novel
. Naturally, Dan Graham turned me on to it, telling me how seminal a book it was for music critics like Lester Bangs, Robert Christgau, and Greil Marcus. Whether he was telling the truth or not, I really responded to the book.

Among other things, Fiedler talked about the homoerotic relationship between the early American settlers and the so-called savage male
American Indian. The title of the song “Brave Men Run (in My Family)” was taken from an Ed Ruscha painting that showed a tall ship. Ruscha's painting seemed to make ironic reference to the early heroics of American settlers. But as someone with gold rush traces in her own DNA, I could relate. From the few stories I'd heard, the women in my family were incomprehensibly strong. My great-grandmother who sold sewing patterns up and down the West Coast in the 1800s. My grandmother, traveling all over with a brood of five kids, finally landing in Kansas during the Great Depression. Stoic, enduring, no questions, no complaints.

When I sang “Brave Men Run (in My Family),” I was singing about those women. The song's phrase “
Into the setting sun
” refers to the westward pull, the American romance with death. And then there was “Death Valley '69.”

When I was a girl growing up in Southern California, death, or the idea of it, kept pushing its way into my life, especially in 1969, when the 1960s hippie utopia merged with the Manson murders and bled into Altamont. So many people I ran into as a teenager had had brief encounters with the charismatic, wild-eyed little man who talked about “Revolution 9” and the desert and a future bliss of destruction. Peace and love had turned sordid, as the Stooges had written in their own sixties anthem: “
1969, okay, all across the USA.
” “Make love not war” looked better on film than it did in real life, where cops killed college students and riots busted out in D.C., Chicago, and Baltimore. “Death Valley '69” has sometimes been misinterpreted as a pro-Manson song, especially by younger fans. Nothing is farther from the truth.

In 1985, when
Bad Moon
came out, hardcore groups were singing songs about Ronald Reagan. I wasn't interested in this and preferred to sing about the darkness shimmering beneath the shiny quilt of American pop culture.

I suppose you could say that Sonic Youth was always trying to defy people's expectations. We'd come out of a New York art context—though sideways—and merged with the rock scene. Just being a band
from New York City who played
outside
of New York City messed with people's expectations. Audiences were expecting to come face-to-face with a bunch of squalid junkies attired in black.

Bad Moon Rising
also kicked open the doors to England, which, for an unknown experimental rock band, was fairly unapproachable. After all, we weren't “gothy” like Lydia Lunch, and we had no “rock look” to speak of either. In that sense, by not caring about dressing up before we went onstage, we appeared more like the denizens of the American hardcore scene. Touring for the album, we played at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. Thurston had a cold, I remember, and was feverish. He did the show wearing his thick winter coat. Paul Smith had decorated the stage with carved jack-o'-lanterns with lit candles inside, creating a spooky, ghostly atmosphere, and as the band played harder, the stage got hotter and Thurston began peeling off his clothes. He even kicked one of the pumpkins off the stage. It was a classic punk rock move, one that affected the Brits so much that when one of the maintenance guys found a syringe backstage, he assumed it belonged to one of us. It didn't.

When
Bad Moon
hit, people frankly started looking at us differently, and college radio stations began playing our songs. The rock journalist Byron Coley interviewed us for
Forced Exposure,
and Sonic Youth made the cover of a popular indie-rock zine called
Matter
. In England, people had been loudly proclaiming the death of the guitar and the birth of the synthesizer, but Sonic Youth and other American guitar bands started to create a buzz. Most if not all of the other guitar bands were a lot more conventional than we were, but it seemed that together they, and we, were making an impact. The Australian band the Birthday Party had broken up and morphed into the Bad Seeds, and we were lucky enough to be asked to support them on a tour. Things were looking up but changing too.

Bob Bert, our drummer for this period, left the band and was replaced by Steve Shelley. Thurston and Lee had seen Steve play at CBGB with a Michigan hardcore band called the Crucifucks. Both of them
believed Steve had something special that set him apart from other hardcore drummers. While Sonic Youth was on tour in the UK, Steve sublet our Eldridge Street apartment. When Bob left at the end of the tour, we asked Steve if he wanted to join the band and without hesitation he said, “Sure.” Having struggled with different drummers over the course of our first two records, it felt like magic or destiny that Steve was right there in front of us. He was younger and didn't share in the band's collective New York history, but we had other musical influences and appreciations in common, the Birthday Party being one of them. Steve brought a power to Sonic Youth that we'd never had before.

Thurston had the idea of releasing “Death Valley '69” as a single, and contacted Stuart Swezey at Iridescence Records, who initiated a show we played in the middle of the Mojave Desert at a festival called the Gila Monster Jamboree. It was a dream bill, including Redd Kross, the Meat Puppets, and us, as well as Perry Farrell's first band, Psy Com. It was a magical night, one of my favorite shows ever. The venue, I remember, was kept a secret until the last minute. The moon was full and huge, the stage surrounded by a large pile of rocks that served as a kind of acoustic enhancement to the sounds coming off the amps. There was no stage, so we set up in the sand. The Meat Puppets sounded amazing, clear and mellifluous, and Redd Kross's set was just as good, their fur-and-glitter glam appearance making a surreal contrast to the desert's ritualistic campfire vibe. We just went for it. We had no monitors, only amps and a small P.A. system, which ultimately made our sound chaotic and hard to hear. Mike Kelley was there that night, dancing and drunk, having a great time. Someone shot the whole night on video, and if you know who you're looking for, you can make out Mike in the film. At one point during our set, I asked, “Does anyone have a beer? One beer for the band? Just one?” but since practically everyone in the crowd seemed to be on LSD or mushrooms, there was not a drop to be had in the desert.

The cover of “Death Valley '69” was a postcard of one of Gerhard Richter's paintings. It was Thurston's idea to use that postcard, of
course. I would have been too shy to ask our friend if we could use his work. It didn't matter—the result was beautiful, a dark sinking sunset, perfect for the song and for the pure feeling of being out in the desert in California.

In 1984, Thurston and I got married. Frankly, I was afraid I wouldn't be able to commit to
a long-term relationship. When I moved into 84 Eldridge, Dan kept teasing me about what a hippie I was, and even though I wasn't, his words had haunted me. By marrying Thurston, I was committing to something permanent, instead of always attempting to balance art with music, music with art, one or the other, back and forth. For someone so young Thurston was much more attracted to domesticity than I was. His faith made me believe our marriage could work.

Looking back, it's hard to believe how young we were. I was thirty-one, Thurston twenty-six. We were two creative people, and creative people usually delay becoming responsible adults unless there's a child involved. “I approach adulthood sideways,” a film-director friend told me once. “I'm responsible to my legacy of work and I'm also responsible to my family, but it's hard.” He added, “No one wants to lose the innocence they have for creativity.” I held on as tight as I could to that innocence, but so did Thurston.

THE WAY THE BAND
composed songs was pretty much always the same. Thurston or Lee would usually sing the poppy, more melodic things from riffs one of them wrote; I sang the weirder, more abstract things that came out of all of us playing together and rearranging until everything jelled. My voice has always had a fairly limited range, and when you're writing a melody, you tend to write it for your own voice. Lee, on the other hand, usually brought in songs that were complete and ready to go, then we layered dissonance over.

Over the years, Thurston and I always agreed on aesthetic things. We agreed about record covers pretty much all the time. For the most
part we also agreed about mixes. If and when they took place, our fights mostly centered around how he treated or spoke to me. In the band's early days, our first drummer, Richard Edson, was the first to notice the dynamic between us. He would stand up for me, saying things like, “Hey, man, there's no call to talk to her like that.”

Lee never said a word. Whenever Thurston spoke to me sharply or bluntly, it seemed to make him uncomfortable, and it was probably hard for Lee and Steve to figure out the boundaries of where Thurston and I started as a couple and stopped as bandmates. I was allergic to making scenes and did everything possible to maintain an identity as an individual within the band. I had no interest in being just the female half of a couple. When we were starting out, I was very sensitive, a hangover from my relationship with Keller, and let Thurston take the lead in most things. In the months leading up to our split, it was gratifying to me when Thurston, listening to some old live recording of ours, remarked, “Wow, you were playing some amazing things.”

Gratifying but also strange to hear, as in our early days playing live, I had no technical ability to speak of, no knowledge of conventional chording. At the same time, I was always confident in my ability to contribute something good to our sound in at least an unconventional or minimalist way—a musicality, a sense of rhythm. All the No Wave bands, the jazz I'd listened to growing up, and the improv Keller and I had done back in our childhood living room came back to me onstage, blurring with the rock-and-roll riff or theater Thurston always wanted to convey. From the beginning, music for me was visceral. I
loved
playing music. When it was going well, it was an almost ecstatic experience. What could be better than sharing that feeling of transcendence with a man I was so close to in all other areas of my life, someone who was having the same experience? It was a feeling impossible to communicate with someone outside of the two of us. I wanted deliverance, the loss of myself, the capacity to be
inside
that music. It was the same power and sensation you feel when a wave takes you up and pushes you someplace else.

Thurston and I first met Raymond Pettibon in the early eighties during a trip to L.A., where I was visiting my parents. Someone told us about a house party in Hermosa Beach, where Black Flag was playing, so we drove down to South Bay, pulling up in front of a typical single-level house. The neighborhood was languid, slightly funky, as if it had tried and failed to become a beach resort, morphing instead into a shabby suburban neighborhood a walk away from the ocean. The house was small, the music ferocious, Henry Rollins in the kitchen, in full force, dressed in those signature small black shorts that I believe were technically an old-style nylon bathing suit. Slick with sweat, he was writhing around bumping into cabinets and people, at one point coming up to me and singing straight into my face.

Coming from the New York downtown scene, where people had no houses, or garages, and thus, no house parties, this was a completely new scene for us. The Black Flag show was one of the best gigs I'd seen before or since—scary, surreal, intimate. As the sound crashed and bounced off the refrigerator counter and shelves, and Henry Rollins twerked years before twerking existed, the performance fused hardcore punk with suburban sunlit banality, high theatre with the everyday, erasing any and all boundaries between band and audience.

At one point Thurston and I went out into the glare of the backyard, where Mike Watt from the Minutemen introduced us to Raymond Pettibon. To us, Raymond was already a semimythical figure, as a couple of years back we had become keenly interested in his zines. Raymond was shy, casually disheveled, altogether normal-looking. Still, it felt unbelievable to be hanging out with Mike and Raymond, and other musicians in bands whose records we owned. The L.A. scene!

At that point, in the mid-eighties, Ray had no relationship to the art world, and had never had a gallery show. At the time he was known exclusively for his SST covers. Later that same year, I wrote an article for
Artforum
about Raymond's work, as well as Mike Kelley's and Tony Oursler's—how the three of them eschewed the conceptual mantle of seventies formalism and mixed high and low culture. Soon afterwards,
Raymond began showing at the Ace Gallery in L.A. Like a flower, he slowly opened up, the only thing he needed was just a little attention.

That day sticks out so much in my mind not just because it was the first time I met Raymond, but because seeing Henry Rollins inspired the song “Halloween.”

Even after
Bad Moon,
I never felt like I had a place in the New York music scene. Artists I
had no trouble conversing with, but I had no idea how to talk to musicians. I felt confused about how I “should” look, and I felt frumpy and nerdy a lot of the time. I also had no confidence, really. I don't think artists ever feel like what they do is enough, and even though I was now part of a musical couple, I wasn't doing as much as I thought I should be doing individually—my art career was kind of on hold—and without confidence, it doesn't matter what you're wearing. I once interviewed Raymond Pettibon, who spoke about having to dumb himself down whenever he talked to musicians. Not that musicians are unintelligent, he said—they just don't intellectualize in the same way artists do. Criticize something in front of musicians, and they'll take it personally. Criticize artists, and they're more likely to take it intellectually. It's just different, that's all.

We weren't remotely a goth band, but
Evol
was our faux-goth record, the one that contains “Expressway to Yr. Skull,” Sonic Youth's first so-called long song.
Evol
was also the first record we put out on the indie record label SST. SST, who put out records by Black Flag, the Minutemen, Hüsker Dü, and the Meat Puppets, was ideal for us.

The name
Evol
came from an art video that my friend Tony Oursler made, while the cover was a film still created by filmmaker Richard Kern. Richard's faux-horror films were dark, funny, and voyeuristic, typically shot from a height, with tongue-in-cheek gore.

The song “Shadow of a Doubt” came from an Alfred Hitchcock film. What I'm reading at the time tends to influence and inform what I'm working on—whether it's a novel or a Hitchcock bio. I tend to write lyrics with a sense of space around them, one-liners almost, short sentences containing pauses that build tension along with the music, as if
I'm awaiting some big drama or crash to occur, though it never does—the song just ends. I was always a big fan of early songs by the Shangri-Las, with their whispered, almost spoken-word approach leading up to a violent climax, such as in “Leader of the Pack” or “I Can Never Go Home Anymore.”

In “Shadow of a Doubt,” I was trying to describe the connection you feel when your eyes meet another person's. You project all kinds of things on those eyes, feel them seeing into and past you, sometimes feel the sex behind them too. The song imagines what would happen if you acted on that feeling, with things devolving into a scene from a pulpy film noir novel, and nothing you did could stop the inevitable.

A young filmmaker named Kevin Kerslake made a video for “Shadow of a Doubt,” the first one we ever did that had the look and feel of something that could play on MTV. We had made videos before, notably for “Death Valley '69.” For that song, in fact, there were two different videos, one more arty, one more hard-core. In the hard-core video for “Death Valley '69,” I can remember lying on the ground, with blood everywhere, our fake guts spilling from our stomachs, while off camera Lee's first wife, Amanda, was having actual labor contractions. A vivid contrast between fake death and incoming life. In the video I also got to wield a shotgun. Girls with guns, girls in control, girls as revolutionaries, girls acting out—why is that such a perennial turn-on to people?

Evol
also had a cover of Kim Fowley's “Bubblegum,” as well as songs like “Star Power” and of course “Expressway to Yr. Skull,” which contained what to my mind were Thurston's best lyrics: “
We're gonna kill the California girls,”
meaning, we're from New York and we're not pop or rock and we're coming to get you . . . we're coming to California. We did “Expressway” in one take, and I remember sitting in the dark studio with Thurston, Lee, and Steve listening back to it. It was absolutely thrilling.

Those were the moments I felt closest to Thurston—when I felt that together, he and I had created something special, music that would go out into the world and take on its own life. No matter what happened to that music, I was convinced it was good and would last forever. (When I
listen to
Evol
today, I'm amazed by the amount of reverb on it. I had so little perspective back then . . . on everything.)

When Sonic Youth toured England, journalists took to asking me a single question over and over: “What's it like to be a girl in a band?” I'd never really thought about that, to be honest. The mostly male English music press was cowardly and nonconfrontational in person. They would then go home and write cruel, ageist, sexist things. I'd always assumed it was because they were terrified of women; the whole country had a queen complex, after all. I might have been projecting my own discomfort at acting out a prewritten role onto these writers, but I refused to play the game. I didn't want to dress like Siouxsie Sioux or Lydia Lunch, or to act out the role of an imaginary female, someone who had more to do with them than with me. That just wasn't who I was.

For that reason, I found the British band the Raincoats both cool and inspirational. They were an all-girl post-punk band, playing noncommercial music—rhythmic and off-kilter. They came across as ordinary people playing extraordinary music. They didn't use typical instrumentation, either. After their drummer Palmolive left, the experimental rock drummer Charlie Hayward joined them, adding to a sound that included the violin and a bunch of exotic secondhand instruments from Africa and Bali, like the balafon, the kalimba, and the gamelan. Here were women playing and singing against every stereotype there was, but doing it subtly and musically, gently and mystically, without the traditional aggression of rock and punk and without flying a freak flag. I'd spent my entire life never doing what was easy, never doing what was expected. I had no idea what image I projected onstage or off, but I was willing to let myself be unknown forever. Self-consciousness was the beginning of creative death to me. I felt at ease only when I'd recorded something I felt good about, or was in the middle of a gig and the sound swirling from the stage was so amazing that time stopped and I could feel the audience in the dark breathing as a single unit. That is all a fantasy, yes, but everyone needs to pretend. As J Mascis of Dinosaur Jr. liked to say when asked about being in a band, “It's not fun. It's not about having fun.”