Girl in a Band (19 page)

IN 1993,
Julie Cafritz's sister, Daisy, and I decided to launch a clothing line called X-Girl. In those days, not much was going on fashion-wise in lower New York. Downtown street-wear—a combination of vintage, punk, and oversized skatewear—was evolving in (and from) stores like A.P.C., Daryl K, Betsey Johnson, Urban Outfitters, and Liquid Sky, the rave store where Chloë Sevigny worked for a while. There was the big flea market on Twenty-Third Street in Chelsea and of course Canal Jean on Broadway, where today you can find a huge Uniqlo. Aside from Patricia Field on Eighth Street, the original shopping hub for hipsters was the East Village, with its scattered vintage stores.

At a time when oversized, shaggy-looking, grunge-inspired skate-wear was a prevailing trend, Daisy and I were forever on the hunt for a closer-fitting, cleaner, more casual look—seventies-style Levi's boot-cuts and scoop-neck seventies T's, clothes vaguely inspired by Brian Jones or Anita Pallenberg circa
Exile on Main Street,
or Anna Karina as she appeared in the Godard film
Pierrot le fou
. Through the Beastie Boys' Mike D, we were friendly with the brothers who ran the boys-only line X-Large Streetwear, and one of them asked Daisy, who was working at their East Village store at the time, if she was interested in doing a girls' line. Daisy in turn asked if I would collaborate with her.

Instead of oversized skate-wear, Daisy and I wanted to design fitted pieces in shapes that would flatter all body types. Someone later described it as “preppy-tennis meets skater-cool-girl.” Fit—that became our core struggle as we sent samples back and forth from New York to L.A. The backbone of our label was the name itself, X-Girl, and Mike Mills's amazing graphic designs. From her own teen years growing up in Washington, D.C., Daisy contributed a preppy sensibility, whereas I guess I brought the rock, though Jean-Luc Godard and Françoise Hardy were our common muses. As much as she's a stylist, Daisy is also a keen social anthropologist, and X-Girl began as a fun, informal project, with neither of us really having any idea what we were doing. We had a small budget, and no real control over production, and our clothes came out either too big or too small in the beginning.

I was four months pregnant when the first shipment arrived. The clothes were tiny. But somehow I managed to wiggle into a skirt and T-shirt for our “Bull in the Heather” video. Originally, I wanted to bring in the Knicks City Dancers to spoof traditional MTV choreography, but Kathleen Hanna made a cameo instead. Bikini Kill and other Riot Grrl bands were still enforcing their media blackout, and asking Kathleen to appear in our video came from my perverse desire to have her infiltrate the mainstream. That way, people could see her also as the playful, mischievous, charismatic girl she is—a woman who controlled the action by dancing around us as we stood stationary in a rock stance, playing the
song. It was courageous of Kathleen to appear in a mainstream MTV video and risk criticism from the huge community she'd created.

For X-Girl's first line, Spike Jonze and his then girlfriend and later wife Sofia Coppola had the idea to mount an X-Girl guerilla-style fashion show on the street during Fashion Week. At six months pregnant, I wasn't paying attention to much of anything. Spike and Sofia found the models and the site and produced the entire event. Marc Jacobs was having his first show since leaving Perry Ellis, and the X-Girl show took place in Soho directly after Marc's, with a lot of people who'd come to see Marc's show staying to see ours.

A couple of days before that, I was in Daisy's loft on Crosby Street for a meeting. I was lying on Daisy's bed when the phone rang. Daisy handed me the phone: it was Thurston. He told me he had bad news. My first thought was that he was going to tell me that Mark Arm, the lead singer for Mudhoney, had OD'd. Mark wasn't a regular user, but he'd OD'd more than once, and I was so prepared for Thurston to say the name
Mark
that I didn't process what he was saying—that Kurt had shot himself, that Kurt was dead. Of course I was totally shocked, but I wasn't entirely surprised.

There had been an incident in Rome, where Kurt had OD'd, but the details were never clear. Obviously, though, Kurt was headed down an even darker path, and after he hooked up with Courtney, it was only a matter of time before he completely self-destructed. But I was shattered and feeling as if I were moving slow-motion inside some strange dream. My first impulse was to go out into a clean, normal world and do regular, everyday things. I remember walking over to the Pat Hearn Gallery, where my good friend Jutta Koether was installing a show. Along with some other artists, Jutta had asked me to contribute to her installation—a show within a show. Telling Jutta what had just happened, saying the words aloud, felt bizarre. The words fell far short in conveying the feeling of loss that everyone, not just me, was feeling.

The night after Kurt's death, during a candlelight memorial service for the public, a recording of Courtney reading aloud Kurt's suicide
note was played. As the vigil continued, Courtney appeared in person and started handing out some of Kurt's clothes to fans. It was as if she were stepping out into her destiny—a platform of celebrity and infamy. A week after Kurt died, Hole released their major-label debut,
Live Through This,
which elevated Courtney to a new kind of perverse stardom. The timing couldn't have been better.

The public mourning had already begun, and I found it traumatic. The tasteless T-shirts with Kurt's face lining the sidewalks of New York, Nirvana's songs blaring from every radio station. As I write this, it has been twenty years since Kurt died. Coco will turn twenty this summer. Nineteen ninety-four, the year my daughter was born and the year Kurt died, was quite possibly the happiest year of my life, but it was also bittersweet, the most extreme year in my life for joy and for sadness.

It's funny how often I think about Kurt. He was always so susceptible to kindness, with his vulnerable, passive side. One element of his self-destructiveness was choosing Courtney in order to alienate himself from everyone around him, at the same time fame was alienating him from whatever community he had.

I'll always remember, too, his smallness, his thinness, the frail appearance, like an old man, with those big, illuminated, innocent, childish, saucer-sized eyes like ringed planets. Onstage, though, he was fearless as well as something even scarier. There's a point where fearlessness twists into self-annihilation, and he was too familiar with that space. Most people who saw Nirvana live had never before witnessed that degree of self-harm in someone, as he hurled himself into the drum set as if in some privately negotiated death dance.

A few years ago, Frances came to see us play at the Hollywood Bowl, and afterward she came backstage. She seemed very sweet. We gave her some old photos of herself and her dad when she was little. I will forever wonder about her, how she's doing.

X-GIRL'S SIDEWALK GUERILLA
fashion show was a success in that it came off at all. A video documentary of that day exists online, which people still occasionally refer to today. In it you can see Francis Ford Coppola, who knows me only in relation to X-Girl and who is naturally proud of his daughter, Sofia, and the show she's just put on.

Throughout my pregnancy, I did one X-Girl–oriented photo shoot after another. Lean over a tire, on my back. Stand, seven months pregnant, on a rickety, rotting picnic table holding an umbrella. (I refused.) When I started Free Kitten, my band with Julie Cafritz, Mark Ibold, and Yoshimi, I remember having an amnio and taking the rest of the
day off. When I was eight and a half months pregnant, Sonic Youth appeared on
Late Night with David Letterman
. The machine never stopped, even though what I really wanted to do was lie down all the time, in part because I had a fibroid tumor that grew with the baby.

When Coco was born I took only a little time off. There were always small things happening, and even though artists are never truly on vacation, they can enjoy free time without the pressure to “enjoy themselves.” They aren't escaping exactly, just shifting focus. And then it was on to the next thing, in this case a fashion event in Tokyo.

Someone had asked us to put on an X-Girl show right before a Beastie Boys concert. Daisy didn't want to go, so Sofia Coppola volunteered. Coco was five months old at the time, and Thurston came along with us. We arrived in Tokyo tired and jet-lagged, but despite that, Sofia and I went out onto the street to recruit girls for the show. My friend Yoshimi also helped in the effort, and the Beastie Boys' Adam Yauch knew an American girl who modeled in Tokyo who helped round up a few of her friends. I remember cruising around a local department store with Adam and Coco. Adam was very sweet, and I was surprised he wanted to hang out with us instead of rushing around shopping like everybody else. He bought Coco a little hat with bunny ears, and Spike took a photo of Coco wearing it.

Via the front desk of our hotel, I somehow managed to find a babysitter, an older woman who didn't speak a word of English. We all drove an hour outside of Tokyo to the concert hall. As Sofia and I dressed the models, I remember the Japanese woman gazing down at Coco, who'd fallen asleep, never once taking her eyes off her. At one point she even started picking threads off the back of my shirt. It made me long to bring this woman home with me and let her take care of the entire family.

Somehow we pulled off the event, but when I look at photos of Sofia and me from that weekend, I can't believe I don't have dark circles under my eyes. I was exhausted from the jet lag, still breast-feeding, and had a baby who didn't sleep through the night. We had press
responsibilities, too, where everyone asked variations of the same questions: “How did X-Girl start? What does the name mean? What's it like to be a mom in rock?”

Instead of a live presentation, for our next season of clothes, Daisy and I decided to make a faux-Godard-ian film filled with tongue-in-cheek Marxist references we could present to fashion magazine editors. Chloë Sevigny, Rita Ackermann, and Daisy's friend Pumpkin Wentzel played the main characters. Phil Morrison and his writing partner wrote and directed it. Phil did an amazing job delivering everything we wanted and more. The film was fantastic and still holds up today in its YouTube incarnation. We even had an X-Girl store on Lafayette Street across from Liquid Sky, where Chloë still worked, convenient to Daisy's loft on Crosby Street and our apartment. It was also inconvenient, because if X-Girl production was late, or something else was screwed up, we felt embarrassed to walk down the street.

Daisy dealt with the day-to-day stuff of the business, and we hired someone to manage the store and sketch our ideas. It was more a burden for Daisy, and in time, both of us felt X-Girl had run its course. We sold the company to a Japanese firm and made some money in the process. Afterward, we could walk along Lafayette Street with our heads held high again.

We assumed that as a relic of its time X-Girl would die out, but it hasn't, and the brand still exists in Japan. It's weird when you sell a name, or a brand, and it no longer has anything to do with the original or with you. In a way X-Girl gave me far more notoriety than Sonic Youth ever did.

COCO HAYLEY GORDON MOORE,
born July 1, 1994. Yes, she changed our lives, and no one is more important to me. But the band played on.

When Coco was two months old, Thurston and I flew to L.A. to shoot a video for our cover of the Carpenters song “Superstar,” shot by Lance Accord—who brought in a gold microphone that, to my mind, made the whole video—with Dave Markey directing. I loved Thurston's singing, and the whole production looked gorgeous. (“Superstar” has some of the best lyrics ever.) I was still feeling heavy with extra baby weight and managed somehow to fit into a giant red velvet prom dress.
Traveling to California with a two-month-old baby was another “new mom” thing to have to worry about; dripping breast milk during a video shoot is not very rock!

Then, in the spring of 1995, when Coco was ten months old, we all flew to Memphis to work on our new record.

Feeling we had too much baggage now as a band, we wanted to change the name Sonic Youth to Washing Machine. People always like to discover something new, and we'd been around awhile, plus
Washing Machine
seemed like a good “indie rock” name. Our record company naturally thought we were insane, so instead we used it for the title of the new album. We had T-shirts printed before the record was done. Two adorable thirteen-year-old boys wearing them came to one of our shows with their dad, and I took a picture of them, believing it would make a great album cover. Unfortunately, when the time came, we didn't know their names, or where to reach them, so for legal reasons we had to cut off their heads!

Memphis, I remember, was warm and green, and we took countless trips for barbecue sandwiches from Payne's, a sagging, shuttered building with two ancient Jaguars parked out front. On Easter Sunday we went to Al Green's church and on another night to a juke joint in the middle of a cornfield, where they made moonshine, and the walls were hung with amazing black-velvet paintings of Michael Jackson and other popular African American celebrities and heroes. Maurice Menares accompanied us to help take care of Coco, and I still have a great picture of Coco perched on the studio recording console. One afternoon Maurice and I took Coco to the Memphis Zoo. It was without a doubt the most depressing zoo I'd ever been to in my life. There was next to no foliage or, for that matter, animals, which for the animals at least was probably a good thing. Coco probably doesn't remember, but she's visited more zoos and aquariums around the world than any other kid, though her favorite places have always been hotels.

Having Coco made me think of the Shangri-Las again, with their overdramatic songs with morbid scenarios and unhealthy relationships.
“Little Trouble Girl” was my ultimate homage to the Shangri-Las' half singing, half speaking style.

At the time I was reading a book called
Mother Daughter Revolution,
about first-wave seventies feminism. It's about how feminism fails to address the relationship between mothers and daughters because of its emphasis on escaping the house. I didn't finish it—who has the time or the energy to read when you're a new mom?—but I remember how the book talked about the pressure to please and be perfect that every woman falls into and then projects onto her daughter. Nothing is ever good enough. No woman can ever outrun what she has to do. No one can be all things—a mother, a good partner, a lover, as well as a competitor in the workplace. “Little Trouble Girl” is about wanting to be seen for who you really are, being able to express those parts of yourself that aren't “good girl” but that are just as real and true.

If you want me to

I will be the one

That is always good

And you'll love me too

But you'll never know

What I feel inside

That I'm really bad

Little trouble girl

I asked Kim Deal of the Pixies to sing the melodic part. Why? Because I couldn't! Her voice was perfect.

The video, directed by Mark Romanek and shot by Harris Savides, was the first time the band went with someone else's idea without coming up with it ourselves. Later, I got to work with Harris Savides on
Last Days,
the film Gus Van Sant made about Kurt. Harris was an incredibly sweet, talented man who sadly enough died a few years ago. Shooting the “Little Trouble Girl” video was the first time I'd ever been away
from Coco, and I remember panicking when the video shoot went late, making me miss the red-eye back to New York, where Thurston was taking care of her.

At the same time, I loved hanging out with Kim Deal, and when I rewatch the video, my favorite part is seeing the two of us together singing and looking hot. Maybe everything always looks better twenty years later. When Kim showed up in Memphis to record the song, she had the engineer play it back into the big room, and she sang without any headphones. Then and now Kim's voice has an incredibly cakelike quality—like the sound when you say
cake,
a lightness, its body thinned out—that's so classic pop.

Washing Machine
is one of my favorite-sounding records, and “Washing Machine” and “The Diamond Sea” were fun songs to record. The latter we performed in one take, and later, when Sonic Youth went on tour first with R.E.M., then with the Lollapalooza festival, Spike created a video shot from various live performances of that song.

When we started the R.E.M. tour, Coco had just learned to walk, and it was during a visit to Kansas that Thurston, Michael Stipe, and I drove out to visit William Burroughs. I remember William began asking Michael about Kurt—“What about the boy?” he said. “So sad . . .” Michael, slightly embarrassed, deferred to Thurston and me since we had more of a history with Kurt and Nirvana.

For Lollapalooza, the band traveled on a bus with a port-a-crib strapped down in the back, where Coco fell asleep to the giant roar of the engine. She was a great bus sleeper. The first night took us to the Gorge, in Washington State. That night we were unofficially co-headlining with Hole and a bunch of our friends were in the lineup, too: Pavement, Beck, Jesus Lizard, Cypress Hill, Elastica, Mike Watt, Superchunk, and Yo La Tengo. That was the night Courtney came up to Kathleen Hanna and punched her in the face. It set the tone for the rest of the tour, with Courtney being someone to avoid and ignore, even more than ever before.