Girl in a Band (15 page)

IN 1987, THURSTON
and I were both reading Philip K. Dick, whose writing has more in common with philosophy than science fiction, and whose descriptions of schizophrenia were better than those of any medical journal. Philip Dick had a twin sister who died shortly after she was born and whose memory plagued him his whole life—which is maybe how and why our new album ended up being called
Sister
. We never decided this, of course; everything between us always had an air of undiscussed ambiguity about it.

In high school, one of my English teachers told our class that the entire world was “schizophrenic.” He rambled on about semantics and
about the power of words, and even in the acid-soaked days of the late 1960s, I was never sure what he meant. I desperately wanted to be the smart one in the class and push the teacher, but being suffocated by social anxiety and self-consciousness, I never was.

As always, it started with Keller. The outsized rebel, the attention taker, at times so funny and charming, before the disease engulfed his head. If Keller was the problem child, the fire threatening always to burn our family to the ground, what did that make me? The one who never made waves. The one who, if she was good enough, could make our family normal.

“Pacific Coast Highway” from
Sister
is a twisted love story about hitchhiking up to Malibu and getting picked up by a sociopath. “
Come on get in the car . . . Let's go for a ride somewhere . . . I won't hurt you . . . As much as you hurt me.
” It was a direct pull from the fears of my teenage years when I was focused on the lore surrounding Charlie Manson, who mirrored the darkness and swirl lying beneath West L.A.'s Disney-green lawns and movie-perfect foliage.

Thurston and I had been married for three years and together for seven, and by now he knew me so well it was as though the two of us were joined in both our bodies and brains. Oddly enough, he was the one who wrote the lyrics to “Schizophrenia,” somehow making the words sound as though they were mine. Even though the song wasn't explicitly about Keller, the Philip K. Dick references throughout
Sister
always made me feel they were.

I loved making
Sister,
and Sear Sound in midtown Manhattan—the oldest recording studio in New York—was the perfect place to record it. Following
Evol,
we wanted a rawer, more immediate sound, and Sear, with its huge collection of vintage analog tube equipment, including a great two-inch sixteen-track, was the fulfillment of our sound fantasies. Still, we ended up in a deteriorating studio that backed up onto the old Paramount Hotel, and the lousy acoustics of the room were good for the guitars but muffled the drums, which disappointed Steve to no end.

Walter Sear ran the studio and was a classical tuba player who, with
Robert Moog, developed the Moog synthesizer. As well as recording music, Walter and his partner Roberta were also in the B-movie business. Hanging from Sear Sound's walls were great B horror movie posters, and you could snack there all day long on sugary doughnuts, bagels, cream cheese, lox, and day-old popcorn, though despite the snacks it wasn't a movie theater, just a great old-school recording studio. Walter and Roberta were old-timey, chain-smoking New Yorkers. During our recording session, Walter was also casting a movie, and every day the band would pass by a line of hopeful actors and actresses. At night, when the studio emptied out, we sat around flipping through their headshots. Walter and Roberta lived a way of life that will soon be wiped out entirely from the Disney version of New York's theater district. First-generation bohemians were a dying breed even then.

Sister
's cover was a loose collage of images that each band member individually chose. In the downtown art world, appropriation was commonplace, which is why we felt this was an acceptable approach. By collecting those images, we believed we were creating something new out of them. Among them was a Richard Avedon photo of a prepubescent girl and an image of Disney's Magic Kingdom. When Avedon threatened to sue us, followed by Disney's legal department, we responded by subsequently blacking out the offending images, a reminder forever that we'd been censored by people who had more money to spend on lawyers than we did.

CICCONE YOUTH
was a side project, consisting of Steve, Lee, Thurston, and me. The four of us decided to do a record where we simply went into the studio and made it there, the way hip-hop is made: start with a beat or a loop, then build on it. Ciccone Youth is so different from any Sonic Youth music, we thought it was a good idea to confuse people, so we created this separate identity.

A year earlier, we had done a Madonna Ciccone “cover” called “Into the Groovey,” as a twelve-inch, with Mike Watt doing another cover, “Burnin' Up,” on the B-side. Madonna was cool in the eighties—her dance pop was minimal and fresh—and we were all fans. She was slightly fleshy in
the beginning, and her main talents were pluck, willpower, and moving her body around. Her voice wasn't strong, and she wasn't an obvious diva, but she had a knack for knowing how to entertain, singing, “
Like a virgin / Touched for the very first time,
” with a heart-shaped pout and beckoning eyes perfect for MTV. Reagan, orange cheeked, was in office; Nancy, his wife, wore red; and Madonna rocked white like no one else. Her “Like a Virgin” video was shot in Italy, a combination of honeymoon ideal and Catholic bastion, with her riding down a Venice canal in a gondola. In the unsteady boat Madonna gazed up at the camera, turning us all into her lover.

It's hard thinking back on her now and seeing what critics called her “shocking sexuality.” They rushed to embrace her sexualized image-branding as self-empowerment as well as marketing sophistication, and therefore feminist. To me, she seemed joyful, celebrating her own body. Most fun of all was her plucky attitude. She didn't have a perfect body. She was a little soft, but sexy-soft, not overweight but not as sculpted or as hard as she would later become. She was realistic about her body type, and she flaunted it, and you could feel how happy she was inhabiting that body. I admired what she was doing, though I was also skeptical about where it would all eventually lead. In retrospect Madonna was riding a cultural wave that has evolved into a landscape where porn is everywhere, where women are openly using their sexuality to sell their art in ways that before the 1980s would have been a male's idea of marketing. Porn, of course, is also a male fantasy of the world. When a woman does what a man used to do, I can't help but wonder if it leads us back in a circle.

Today we have someone like Lana Del Rey, who doesn't even know what feminism is, who believes it means women can do whatever they want, which, in her world, tilts toward self-destruction, whether it's sleeping with gross older men or being a transient biker queen. Equal pay and equal rights would be nice. Naturally, it's just a persona. Does she truly believe it's beautiful when young musicians go out on a hot flame of drugs and depression, or is it just her persona?

With Ciccone Youth, we wanted to go into the studio and work with drum machines, without any towering expectations. More than anything, we were interested in playing in the style of 1970s German prog rock, like Neu! and Can. I got frustrated sitting around the studio while the guys took turns manning the mixing board, so I took off, deciding to make a couple of songs outside the studio. One, “Two Cool Rock Chicks Listening to Neu,” was created by Suzanne Sasic and me at 84 Eldridge. We simply recorded ourselves listening to Neu! while we talked about J Mascis's guitar playing. Later I took it to the studio, and J agreed to play a lead over a very minimal drum machine.

The other song we did was my cover of “Addicted to Love.” There used to be a sort of karaoke booth on Saint Mark's, where anyone could go in and record themselves. I chose “Addicted to Love” because I liked Robert Palmer's video, with its background cast of zombie models identically dressed and holding guitars. I took the tape with the canned version of the song back to the studio, and we sped up the vocal to make it sound higher in pitch. Later I brought the cassette mix to Macy's, where they had a video version of the karaoke sound booth. You could customize a background while two cameras filmed you. For my backdrop I picked jungle fighters, and I wore my Black Flag earrings. The entire bill came to $19.99, and in a slick, commercial MTV world, it felt gratifying and empowering to pay for the whole thing with a credit card.

EVERY TIME WE
created a new record, the band ended up rehearsing it in an entirely new practice space. The best place we ever rehearsed was a place on Sixth Street and Avenue B that belonged to Mike Gira of the Swans—a storefront shell that Mike had cut in half, with his living quarters on one side and a rehearsal space on the other. The place was windowless, the entrance double bolted, a fortress against the racket of street gunfire at night. Inside it was dead sounding, with carpet-covered walls, making dissonance a nonissue and contributing to the end impression that each band member had
brought in a vocabulary of sounds that melded together to create a unity—in other words, a song.

Parts of
Daydream
still sound that way to me today. We were on a tight deadline, I remember, and Thurston, Steve, Lee, and I wrote most of the album in an old building on Mott Street in Little Italy. I recall a long narrow corridor, sectioned off with equipment belonging to others bands, in rooms that looked like ships' dungeons. By now, we had changed labels and were on Blast First in the U.S. through a subsidiary of Capitol Records called Mute/Enigma, which is to say almost, but not quite, a major label. The last songs on the album we actually wrote in the Blast First office, just upstairs.

With
Daydream,
we had slightly more money for recording, which we did in a studio owned by Philip Glass, on Greene Street in Soho. At the time, Public Enemy and their producer, Hank Shocklee, were working there on the other board. Our engineer, Nick Sansano, had almost no experience working with electric guitars or rock music, but this bothered no one, and Nick seemed to understand precisely what we were after. When I recently ran into Nick, he told me how much he remembered the vibe of innocence and idealism in those sessions, as well as his visceral reaction to the music. “It's hard to believe so much time has gone by,” he told me, “because some of those memories live as if it were yesterday.” He said his students at NYU, where he teaches, ask him about
Daydream
all the time—“and I mean
all the time
.”

Daydream Nation
came out in late 1988 as a double LP, at the end of Reagan's second term, and we were completely surprised when it became number one in the
Village Voice
Pazz and Jop poll that year. The record got a lot of attention. As always, critical appeal never completely translated into record sales but it ensured that our band never disappeared from view. Before
Daydream
came out, we did a shoot with Michael Lavine, and I remember walking around New York with the rest of the band in the hot, spongy summer. Michael had a panoramic camera, and in the photos he took I can still feel the dank, dirty moisture of the urban August.

“Do you want to look cool, or do you want to look attractive?” Michael asked me, as if the two were mutually exclusive. The silver paint; glitter-dabbed, faded cutoff jeans; and crop top with the sheer jeweled panel marked a turning point for me and my look. I decided I didn't want to just look cool, or just look rock and roll; I wanted to look more
girl
. Looking back, I was trying to make more of a definite statement about what my look was and how I wanted to present myself. Tomboy, but more ambiguous than tomboy, too. The increased media attention, and seeing more photos of myself, and of Sonic Youth as a band, had made me more self-conscious.

“Looking cool” has many different meanings and interpretations for people. For a girl, cool has a lot to do with androgyny, and after all I played with boys, and also played with other boy bands. The hardcore scene was extremely male, and in the post-punk American hardcore scene you didn't see many girls onstage. Kira Roessler, the bass player for Black Flag, was one of them. She was one of the most startling and great things I'd seen in a long time. For the band's second live album,
Who's Got the 10½?,
Kira wore a bra and garter belt with stockings onstage. It was such a contrast to Henry Rollins in his nylon workout shorts and sweaty, shirtless, tattooed torso, his growling, torturedly aggressive, hypermale vocals. She must have been playing off the Madonna thing, and it worked, too.

Until that point, Sonic Youth still toured mostly outside the U.S., and
Daydream Nation
brought us for the first time to Australia, Japan, and the Soviet Union. On a previous tour I remember reading the Denis Johnson book
Fiskadoro,
a haze-filled dream world of a novel about the survivors of nuclear fallout attempting to rebuild their lives and society. In my head,
Fiskadoro
mingled with old 1960s movie themes of young women growing up in small towns, wanting to leave their hometowns behind and be somewhere, anywhere, and someone, anyone, else. Maybe they'd glimpsed a highway billboard that advertised clothes, a car, a golden future, a possibility. Maybe, thanks to the machine of consumerism, they felt they were missing out on something they hadn't even known existed.

When I wrote the lyrics for “The Sprawl,” a song from
Daydream,
I took on a character, a voice within a song. The whole time I was writing it, I was thinking back on what it felt like being a teenager in Southern California, paralyzed by the still, unending sprawl of L.A., feeling all alone on the sidewalk, the pavement's plainness so dull and ugly it almost made me nauseous, the sun and good weather so assembly-line unchanging it made my whole body tense. The nutmeg headband of smog floating above my hometown reminded me of
Fiskadoro,
as if L.A. were already surviving its own nuclear fallout. “
I grew up in a shotgun house / Sliding down the hill / Out front were the big machines / Still and rusty now, I guess / Out back was the river . . . And that big sign on the road—that's where it all started
.”

Photo by Tony Mott