Girl in a Band (20 page)

JULIE CAFRITZ IS
one of the funniest people I know, underacknowledged as an indie rock “girl” guitar player and singer-goddess. When Julie and I first met years earlier, her band Pussy Galore had just moved to New York and was looking for a drummer. I introduced her to Bob Bert, who had just quit Sonic Youth and seemed perfect for them. Julie and her bandmate Jon Spencer were slightly scary, I remember, all black clothes with tons of 'tude. But Thurston and I both loved their EP
SugarShit Sharp,
as well as their radical non-PC reputation as Washington, D.C., people who dissed the straight-edge subculture of hardcore punk that asked its adherents not to drink,
smoke, do drugs, engage in promiscuous sex, or even drink coffee. It wasn't some Puritan thing. Straight-edge was asking adherents to take control of their lives, not be blind consumers, and not be tricked into thinking that drinking and drugs were cool since in fact they were the tools of a previous generation. Julie turned out to be surprisingly approachable, and the two of us became friends.

It wasn't, as some people believed, that we started Free Kitten as a joke band designed to make fun of the CBGB improv scene of experimental, free noise and jazz, where people played abstract music for very long stretches of time. In spite of some great stuff, like John Zorn, and the jazz street saxophonist Charles Gayle playing alongside Thurston and other musicians from the East Village scene, we felt that men didn't always know when to stop. We were more inspired by the American alt-rock band Royal Trux, a two-piece band. At that time, Royal Trux—comprised of Neil Hagerty and Jennifer Herrema—were performing a bunch of gigs around New York, and every show was completely different. Royal Trux was rock swagger perfected, with minimum effort, and even though they were completely on drugs the whole time, the effect was both amazing and mysterious. Not to mention that Free Kitten was also an excuse for Julie and me to hang out and do something together.

When we released our first EP, no one seemed to get us. The reviews could be boiled down to “Really—is this all they can muster? They're pretending to be bad musicians?” Eventually Mark Ibold and Yoshimi joined Free Kitten. Both are amazing players, and Julie and I both liked them. We never really knew what Mark was doing and left it up to him to figure out what to play, and we would fly Yoshimi over, make up the songs in the studio, and then overdub the vocals before mixing the songs. Julie and I would have to relearn the songs before going out on tour.

Coco was seven months old when we did our first two-week tour in England. Again, thanks to the jet lag and the breast-feeding, it wasn't
easy, but Thurston came along to take care of Coco. He wouldn't have missed it anyway. He was always a very big supporter of whatever I did in and out of the band, and I loved that about him—his generosity. Creatively, I never felt any sense of competition with him. He was protective, too. Once the band was playing a gig in Switzerland, and some guy bit my ass while I was onstage, and Thurston was so pissed off he threw a bottle at the guy. Afterward, I remember someone told me, “If you were Ivy from the Cramps, you would have dug your spiked heel into that guy's head.”

I can't even tell you today what the Free Kitten records sounded like. Our only goal was to
make them and put them out without getting too self-conscious about what it was we were making. Mostly I wanted Julie to have a musical outlet and to write songs again. Having said that, being in two bands when you're a new mom is a lot of work. Naturally Sonic Youth was the priority, and Yoshimi had her hands full with her own band, Boredoms. Mark was still playing with Pavement, so Julie and I did what we could, keeping Free Kitten fun while hoping it would stand on its own and be taken seriously, too. It's always hard doing something outside a familiar context.
What are you doing exactly?
everyone wanted to know.
Is it a supergroup, a side project, an inside joke?

In 1993, Free Kitten played Lollapalooza on the tiny side stage. It was hot and dusty, and we could hear Rage Against the Machine thundering away at the same time on the big stage. As part of our antirock stance, Julie and I wore matching housewife-y shifts and Pro Keds and sweated it out in the ninety-plus-degree heat.

In high school, Coco started her own band, Big Nils. On the rare occasion I hear a Free Kitten song somewhere, usually I don't recognize it. I think, “Hey, who is this—Coco?” and then I realize . . .
Oh yeah, right
. It's the strangest feeling, rediscovering your own self and, if enough time has gone by, listening to it without hating it. It is sort of like
looking at old photos of yourself and realizing you looked pretty good after all. Recently I came across a photo that my old friend Felipe took the first time he and I visited New York on a break from college in Toronto. I'm on the subway with a backdrop of graffiti; my hair is dark; my coat, once my mom's, is frumpy; and I look dazed. Reading Rachel Kushner's novel
The Flamethrowers,
I could relate to the sensation of being young in New York, living on the outside of the art world, and that photo sums up that uncertainty, and that time, exactly. I love it.

BY THE LATE 1990s,
the underground experimental music scene had mushroomed, thanks in part to the Internet. After Nirvana, mainstream music nosedived back to its default level of blandness, with “grunge” just another way of marketing big, boring rock music. Still, the underground was alive, growing. Music was getting interesting again, thanks to noise bands like Wolf Eyes and Lightning Bolt, and more women showing up in what had once been an all-male record-collector scene. When Sonic Youth played Detroit, a trio named Universal Indians opened for us, and a girl in the band strummed her guitar with a big rock—one of the sexiest moves I've ever seen in music.

Sonic Youth took some of the money we made from Lollapalooza and got our own studio down on Murray Street. Around that time, we began releasing our music on our own label, Sonic Youth Records, or SYR. Our goal was to release less commercial, more experimental music that we wouldn't have to promote. I was listening to a lot of Brigitte Fontaine, the French chanteuse from the sixties and seventies, and at one point, we ended up recording on her new record with her partner Areski Belkacem. The Sonic Youth song “Contre Le Sexisme” is inspired by her. That was the beginning of Jim O'Rourke's musical involvement with Sonic Youth. Jim played on our
Goodbye 20th Century
record, which my old childhood friend Willie Winant spearheaded, leading us through the scores, which can be pretty abstract.

As we were recording
A Thousand Leaves,
my father died, having contracted pneumonia in a nursing home. I still feel sad whenever he comes into my mind. Even though he could be one of the “distant dads,” as a lot of men of his generation were, he was always kind and understanding, a very gentle soul. I wasn't with him when he died, a big regret of mine. By the time I made it to L.A., he was gone. Even today, I feel protective of him. It is my guilt-driven impulse, as well as my pattern with men, starting with Keller, ending with Thurston.

A FRIEND OF MINE
once described Cannes as a giant gift shop, but because it's in France, along a beautiful blue ocean, it's better than that, the peak of fabulousness, the place where the red carpet was invented. Walking up the stairs to the Palais—as if it's the highest achievement anyone could ever attain—is as good as they say.

In 2005 Thurston and I were in Cannes for the screening of
Last Days,
Gus Van Sant's film based on the mysterious end of Kurt's life. In the ten years since Kurt had died, neither Thurston nor I had ever done an interview about him. Now, suddenly, in the two days leading up to the screening, we were doing a lot of them, in between cocktail
parties and dinners. Thurston joined the film as a consultant to make sure Gus got the music parts right and also to debrief the movie's star, Michael Pitt.

It had come as a surprise when Gus called and asked me to play a part in the movie. The role was a small cameo—I played an empathetic record company executive, if such a person exists—but it's also the only time the Michael Pitt character interacts with anyone in the film. Before we shot it, Gus discussed the scene with me and asked me what I would say. I based the character on Rosemary Carroll, who was Courtney's lawyer and also the wife of Danny Goldberg, the head of the management company that represented us both. Rosemary is an eccentric, unconventional woman who at one point early in her life was married to the poet Jim Carroll.

We ran through the improvised dialogue several times, shooting it more than once. At the end of each take, Gus would toss out slight suggestions like, “Make it shorter.” Michael Pitt bore an amazing resemblance to Kurt, though when I stood facing him I was taken aback by his height, remembering Kurt's smallness, the fragility contrasting with the explosiveness.

I did the film because I trusted that Gus would make something interesting, and he did. Overall it was a painless, positive experience that spoiled me for other film experiences, since after all, I've worked only with the best—Gus, Olivier Assayas, and Todd Haynes! Haha! Acting is something I always thought I might have a natural ability for doing. It connects to some odd three-dimensional sense I've always had, a spatial confidence of knowing where things are at all times, of being able to move around a stage without looking, always knowing where the audience is, or in this case, the camera. When I write lyrics sometimes I've pretended to be someone else, a character, tried to put myself in her head or situation, while drawing from some real-life emotion I've experienced, as I did in “The Sprawl” and “Pacific Coast Highway.” I've always gotten inspiration from the movies, whether for lyrics or fashion
ideas, and I could watch films for hours. As an actor I don't think I could ever be great, but maybe I bring something different, strange, new.

When we arrived at the stairs to the Palais, a song kicked in from a seven-inch that Thurston and I did together under the band name Mirror/Dash—a lo-fi, intimate, melancholy song—and it blew my mind that they would play it at such a public and glorified event as the Cannes film festival.

Going up the stairs involves an intricate choreography that gets repeated over and over with each film that makes it to the Palais. Guards flanked the sides of the stairs, holding—I'm not kidding—
guns
. The cast members linked arms, all in a row. Asia Argento, Gus, Michael, Michael's girlfriend Jamie, and I took a few steps together. We paused. We took a few more steps, paused again. I assume this was to add even more ceremony and ritual to the pomp, the constellation of flashbulbs. Oddly enough, the experience was calming, especially as the sun was setting into dusk. Honestly, it was one of the highlights of my career.

At the same time, during an era where I'd grown used to averting my eyes to the most grossly commercial aspects of Kurt's legacy—bootlegs, sidewalk drawings, T-shirts, posters, magazine covers—here I was in a film that took poetic license with Kurt's last days. Some people, I knew, would hate the film, mostly those ardent fans who wanted a more literal, less abstract, or sordid interpretation. I had never wanted to exploit whatever friendship or kinship Kurt and I had, and even in his death I wanted to protect him, which is why I feel weird even writing what I have in this book. But as I wrote earlier, I think about Kurt quite often. As with many people who die violently, and too young, there is never any resolution or closure. Kurt still moves along inside me, and outside, too, with his music.

BY NOW OUR
official studio was Murray Street, and Jim O'Rourke was officially playing with us and helping us engineer and mix our records. On
Murray Street,
I'd switched over to playing guitar more than I ever had before. It was great having Jim play bass—he was a much more facile bass player than I was—and it automatically altered the songwriting process. It was probably more fun for Steve, too, drumming along with someone less minimal.

Everyone in New York has his or her own 9/11 story. At the time Jim was basically living at the Murray Street studio, which was only a couple of blocks from the Twin Towers. I was at our apartment on Lafayette
Street getting ready to go to Paris to perform with an improv quartet that I was part of at a party thrown by the Gap. We were supposed to fly out that night. Thurston was at our new house in Northampton with Coco. The night before, I'd attended a huge Marc Jacobs party on one of the piers off the West Side Highway following his Fashion Week show. Marc was launching his first perfume line, and thousands of white gardenias formed an archway into the party, which was pitch-black in contrast to the pier's sparkling lights. It had rained recently, and my high heels kept sinking into the soft gravelly ground. It couldn't have been a more decadent, over-the-top but still-beautiful fashion moment.

The next morning Daisy called and told me to turn on the TV because a plane had just flown into the World Trade Center. Daisy's husband, Rob, worked in a building across from the Towers but hadn't left for the office yet. I called Jim and told him to leave the studio, and then I called Thurston. Jim knew nothing but told me that dust was starting to gather through the open windows. It was difficult for me—for everybody—to make any sense of what was happening. I had no TV or radio, but the phone worked, at least at first. By the time the second plane hit, phone service was crackling away to nothing, and when I called Thurston a second time, I couldn't reach him, but I finally convinced Jim to come to our apartment. As Jim was leaving Murray Street, the second tower was collapsing and people were jumping out of windows. Lee, his wife, Leah, and their kids, who lived downtown, showed up at our apartment, too. Below us, literally right outside our door, Houston Street and Lafayette were barricaded, and police weren't letting anyone go south of Houston without ID and proof of residence.

It was a surreal, terrifying day. People—stranded models, people who'd come to town for Fashion Week—were wandering around Nolita and Soho in a daze. Jim arrived finally, completely traumatized. We all slept there that night.

The next morning, I remember walking down Bleecker Street to Daisy and Rob's apartment. The streets were empty. I got very emotional thinking about New York as I looked down to where the towers
once were and saw a big nothing. It felt like the end. The five of us, Daisy, Rob, their two children, and I, wound our way up the island, not knowing what streets we could drive on and what streets would be barricaded. Both FDR Drive on the East Side and the West Side Highway were closed. That day, Daisy and Rob took their two kids to Northampton, and I hitched a ride with them. That was it for them and New York. Lee and his family drove out to Long Island. Jim caught a later ride to Northampton.

For the next week eight people from New York lived in our house. Jim stayed there for over a month. He was too shaken to go back. I was still shaken too—who wouldn't be? Every morning I got up early and turned on CNN just to make sure nothing else had happened, and I woke up in the middle of the night, too. This is still my sleep pattern. It took a while before the band was able to return to the studio and when we did, we had to get permission to pass through Chambers Street. Later I found out that most of the power downtown in the financial district ran directly underneath Murray Street, and the plane crashes had fried our mixing board. Murray Street itself had chain-link fencing on both sides of the sidewalk, and for months it was one big gaping hole, with the sidewalks and pavement regularly wetted down to dissolve the dust still permeating the air.
Is this to wash away the dust of all the people killed in the towers?
I kept thinking.

There was nothing else to do but return to work. Despite the circumstances under which we made it, the album
Murray Street
is still one of my favorite records, containing the nine-minute-long “Sympathy for the Strawberry.” I remember what a challenge it was coming up with vocal ideas over large masses of abstract music. As a non-singer singer, it was probably easier for me than it would have been for a more conventional singer, but I gravitated to what I thought I could pull off, and more and more I went with emotionality. With his more natural approach to mixing, Jim didn't try to make me sound like a singer.

Sonic Nurse,
the next record Sonic Youth put out, we did with Jim too. The song “Pattern Recognition” was based on a William Gibson
book I'd read and liked. It wasn't one of his sci-fi titles but a thriller set in an extremely contemporary present about a woman who is a “cool hunter”—an amazing term, I thought, to describe a person hired by corporations to smoke out trends for brands. “Pattern Recognition” was one of my favorite songs to play live, a sexy song with a lot of moves that traveled to multiple places. I also loved singing “I Love You Golden Blue,” though I was often on the verge of tears whenever I sang it. It's a song about someone who believes he can't show himself to the world. Believing he'll only destroy the people he cares about, he avoids all intimacy. He's stuck. I couldn't help thinking that was true about a lot of boy-men I'd known in my life.

After Jim left the band and moved to Japan, we began working on our album
Rather Ripped,
the last of our so-called trilogy, with John Agnello. John brought a bigger, more concise sound to the band—not better, just different. After years of trying to mix as a group, it came as a relief to have first Jim and then John in our midst. By then Mark Ibold had started playing bass with us full-time. “Jams Run Free” off
Rather Ripped
was a much more natural song for my voice. Whirling around in the middle of the stage, with Mark on the bass, I was freed up, and it became my favorite song to sing live. I could swirl around so fast that everything blurred, the lights and the sounds colliding and smashing together. That's a point where you lose all sense of your body and feel carried completely by the music, a moment that makes all the drudgery, exhaustion, and boredom of touring worthwhile.

For our next record, Thurston chose the title
The Eternal
. Maybe he knew it would be our last record as a band. “Massage the History” was the only song I wrote about our relationship. It has the line “
I dreamed
” in it, maybe because I was dreaming of the first record we ever made. It was before I found out what the dark cloud following Thurston around consisted of, but I had already felt it.