Girl in a Band (16 page)

IN 1990, SONIC YOUTH
had been together for ten years, and we'd finally signed to a major label. We weren't happy with the job Blast First and Capitol did with
Daydream,
so we decided to look at major labels. At the time, we had no manager, so our lawyer, Richard Grabel, put the word out. We had seen other independent bands sign with majors—the Replacements, Hüsker Dü—and crash and burn, so we were cautious. But we felt confident that our band had been together long enough to ensure that if for some reason the major deal didn't work out, we'd survive, and that anyone who signed us knew who and what they were getting—a not-especially-commercial band with strong critical
cred who could just maybe bring something to a label aside from top-ten hits. We were also frankly curious to see how more production money would affect our unconventional sound.

Soon the criticism started. We had sold out. How could Sonic Youth sign with a label as big and corporate as Geffen? It wasn't as if we hadn't heard all the stories about David Geffen himself, up to and including the fight he'd had with Neil Young after the release of Neil's records,
Trans
, and
Everybody's Rockin'
. Geffen had sued Neil for violating his contract by releasing albums that were “musically uncharacteristic of Young's previous recordings” or something to that effect. The suit was settled, finally, with Geffen apologizing. Right after we signed, Geffen sold the company, eventually founding DreamWorks with Jeffrey Katzenberg and Steven Spielberg. It was the beginning of real corporate ownership for Geffen Records.

The record advance we received from Geffen meant it was time to think about putting down some roots. Thurston and I bought a bigger place, on Lafayette Street, across from the Puck Building. It was the middle of the recession, so we got a great deal. It was time, too: our Eldridge Street landlord had sold the building, and a Chinese restaurant was taking over the ground floor.

In 1991, grunge was hitting the mainstream, thanks to Sub Pop Records and Nirvana. The
New York Times
published a famous interview with Megan Jasper, then a secretary at the Seattle record label Sub Pop, about the phenomenon and culture of the Seattle sound. The article said that the designer Marc Jacobs, who was working for Perry Ellis at the time, had been hailed by
Women's Wear Daily
as “the guru of grunge” when Marc exhibited models with carefully unwashed-looking hair and untied combat boots. Megan gave the
Times
the new lexicon of grunge. Old ripped jeans, she said, were “wack slacks.” Sweaters were “fuzz.” Hanging out was “swingin' on the flippity-flop.” And if you were drunk, you were a “big bag of bloatation.”

Megan made the whole thing up, much to the embarrassment of the
New York Times
and to the delight of folks in the scene out in Seattle.
But if anyone had any doubts about the power of music over fashion, Kate Moss was as much a poster child for grunge as any Nirvana performance, and musically pigmented fashion was sprouting up all over the place. But the East Coast never bought into the grunge aesthetic. In New York, there were stores like Patricia Field's on Eighth Street in the East Village that sold glitter, platforms, feathers, and silver leather hot pants. All the local trannies shopped there. I recently came across a photo of myself from that era, taken by Laura Levine for
Detour
magazine. In the photo, I am wearing one of Patricia Field's floral unitards, one I bought because it reminded me of my mother in the 1950s. Not that my mother ever wore florals, but the unitard had a vibrancy about it that reminded me of how beautiful my mother looked when she and my dad were leaving the house at night to go to a party. Like a lot of clothes Patricia Field sold, it was more club-trendy than fashion-forward. I always found it ironic that Pat Fields later became the costume designer for
Sex and the City,
importing a transvestite camp sensibility to middle America via Carrie Bradshaw.

Gary Gersh, our A&R guy at Geffen, was disappointed when we chose a black-and-white Raymond Pettibon drawing for the cover of
Goo
. I'm sure he was hoping for a glamorous picture of the band, something very of the moment, with me front and center. Raymond's drawings had been slapped on record covers for many bands on the SST label, especially Black Flag's. We loved Ray's zines and drawings and in the mideighties I had written about his work in
Artforum;
the black-and-white cover was based on the couple in Terrence Malick's film
Badlands,
while the inside was colorful, a riot of faux-glam goofiness.

In the early nineties I was slowly embracing a new idea: that if you wore sexier clothes, you could sell dissonant music more easily. I started creating a look for myself that had a campy late-sixties and early-seventies vibe. At a store in Cleveland, I found flared pants with green and white stars and stripes, and I wore them when we opened for Neil Young that year on his “Ragged Glory” tour during the Gulf War. Neil always hung the American flag from the stage. Still, I was always much
more a visual person than a fashionable one, and my look was intended to be slightly humorous. I always liked the way Debbie Harry had a twist of humor about her, even when she was looking sexy and glam. It fit the genius of her guise as the female front person, the “Blondie” cartoon character, a doll who could dress up in different looks and styles.

The Neil Young tour was set up through Gold Mountain, but I also think Neil had some knowledge of Sonic Youth, even though the other opening acts were bands from his booking agent's or manager's roster. Opening for Neil was an amazing, eye-opening experience. We were all big longtime fans of his, and it felt like our first real brush with the mainstream. Of course, this prompted every music journalist to ask us, “So what's it like to finally be in the mainstream?” In reply I can say that Neil Young tour proved that Sonic Youth actually wasn't
in
the mainstream, and that if we were, the mainstream hated us!

Neil always drew big crowds, including legions of hippies loyal to his music. Those same crowds were incredibly put off by us, to the degree that if fans sitting among them appreciated or applauded one of our songs, they were aggressively shouted down. The Cow Palace in San Francisco is one of the only arena venues with an open floor, allowing the audience to surge forward during the opening act. Usually during what felt like an excruciatingly long twenty-minute set, we played to empty seats in front. Another band, Social Distortion, went onstage before us, and they had the favor of Neil's stage manager, Tim, since their tattoos, cut-off leather vests, and greasy styled hair screamed “rock,” whereas Tim looked upon us as foreign pond scum. Our music disturbed him, and he was clearly uncomfortable that a woman was in the band. He kept referring to us as “kids” or “punks” and always seemed to be waiting for us to act the part, but we never gave him the satisfaction. I'll never forget the first show we played in Minneapolis. The band was in the catering room, in line, waiting our turn to eat, when Tim came up behind us and said, “Move along—you're holding everything up. What do you think you're doing anyway?” We literally felt like we were in a high school cafeteria, getting picked on by a bully. Throughout the tour,
we were almost never allowed a sound check, so there were many nights when every guitar Thurston picked up was out of tune, since Keith, a friend who became our first roadie, had no experience with our tunings and unconventional stringing. Sometimes onstage Thurston got so frustrated he smashed his guitar.

But Neil's guitar guy, Larry, was amazing, and by the next day, Thurston's guitar would always be put back together. Since the bass is the only instrument with a normal tuning, I escaped the guitar drama, praying instead that I'd never break a string and that during the show Thurston's guitar wouldn't fly up and hit me. I lived in fear he would fall and hurt himself climbing up on an amp, and sometimes it distracted me from playing, wondering if he was going to have a good or a bad show. Duh, so I'm codependent, because when I look back on that tour, I realize I simply wanted everything to
work
to the best of our ability, but maybe that's rock, too.

The tour with Neil Young was grueling: the dead of winter, a frozen ocean of endless arena locker rooms. At one point we brought in a record player and a lamp, to make things more homey in our dressing room areas, which helped. And there was always the hope that Neil would burst in on his way to the stage, which did happen a couple of times. But the person who hung out with us the most was Neil's long-time guitarist, Frank Sampedro, better known as Poncho. Poncho was Neil's ears, and pretty much everything we said in his presence found its way back to Neil. Here's an example. Our friend Suzanne had become our lighting person, and Poncho overheard us commenting that we both thought Neil could use a haircut. One day during the tour, Poncho came up to Suzanne and asked if she was up for giving Neil a trim.

There are two particular things I remember about Poncho. The first is how much he liked “the ladies,” which meant every time someone in Neil's crew or band had a birthday, strippers would materialize by the side of the stage. The second is that after every show, Poncho cooked dinner for Neil on his bus. One night I told him I'd do it—Poncho could pick when. Neil's longtime bus driver, who was always friendly to us,
offered to fetch the ingredients for the chicken dish I planned on making. Unfortunately he forgot and ended up making an emergency trip to KFC to score a batch of uncooked chicken wings. I was nervous they would make Neil sick, but luckily they didn't.

That night, Thurston and I went onto Neil's bus to cook and hang out. Thurston was in his element: Neil and he talked about punk rock, which Thurston could talk about for days on end. Neil was lovely. He sat there tuning the sound of a cow mooing for one of his electric train cars. “Do you think it sounds too high?” he said. “How about this? Is that better?” and then he took the screwdriver and tweaked it. Neil was really into our song “Expressway to Yr. Skull”—he later said he thought it was the best guitar song ever written—and mentioned he went under the stage now and again to stretch out during that song's long ending. This may sound lame, and like a total understatement, but Neil was always incredibly supportive of us.

That night he also showed us his unreleased film from his European comeback tour, “Muddy Tracks,” which he had shot himself with a camera he took everywhere. He called the camera “Auto,” which I found adorable. During the shows, Neil set it atop his amp. In the bus, he sat it in the windshield as they drove from gig to gig, capturing the look and feel of the road at night. As you might expect, the audio was noisy but great. Thurston told Neil he should release a seven-inch that sounded just like that, a whirring industrial sound, like feedback in the wind. In response, Neil ended up recording an entire album of live feedback called
Arc
.

I thought back to Bruce Berry, the Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young roadie who OD'd, and how he'd been the inspiration for Neil's song “Tonight's the Night” and its eponymous LP. It blew my mind to realize how small the world was. Icons I never imagined I'd meet were now a part of my life. When Social Distortion left the tour, Thurston and I gave Neil cassette tapes of both Nirvana and Dinosaur Jr. I don't know if Neil ever listened to them, but six months later, Nirvana's album
Nevermind
broke big. True to the way big corporate rock operated, another band
from Neil's booking agency, Drivin' N' Cryin', joined the tour instead.

Sonic Youth may not have won over any fans while touring with Neil, but our profile rose. Suddenly magazines like
Spin
were approaching me to do photo shoots, and later that year Neil asked us to perform at his Bridge School benefit concert. Neil and his wife, Pegi Young, started the Bridge School benefit in the mid-1980s to help found and fund the Bridge School in Hillsborough, California, which helps children with communication problems and physical disabilities. Neil has two sons, Zeke and Ben, who both have cerebral palsy. It's an acoustic-only charity event, and Sonic Youth had never played acoustically before. I'd brought along a guitar to smash, as I had a strange feeling that night that things were doomed to fail.

During sound check, we could hear our guitars, but when we came out to play, we heard nothing. For us, a band that relies on the interplay of the guitars, it was the worst possible situation, plus, we were playing for a mainstream rock audience. We got only halfway through a cover version of “Personality Crisis” before I yelled, “Fuck!” into the microphone and smashed the acoustic guitar standing nearby. Willie Nelson then came out to perform a medley of his songs, followed by Don Henley, accompanied by a full electric band. I felt terrible that I'd yelled out “Fuck!” especially when we walked offstage and I saw a row of kids in their wheelchairs sitting at the back of the stage. I had forgotten they were there. Later, Ben, Neil's son, came up to me in his wheelchair. “Everyone has a bad day sometimes,” he said to me.