Sonic Youth - Girl in a band: a memoir

For Coco, my North Star

Id like to thank:

My editor, Carrie Thornton, for all her patient indulgence and for initiating the project.

Also, Sean Newcott, Carries assistant editor.

The rest of the team at HarperCollins and Dey Street Books, including Lynn Grady, Sharyn Rosenblum, Michael Barrs, Kendra Newton, Rachel Meyers, Lorie Pagnozzi, and Paula Szafranski.

The team at Faber in the UK: Lee Brackstone, Dan Papps, Gemma Lovett, and Dave Watkins.

Special thanks to Peter Smith, who was immensely helpful in pulling this book together. I would also like to thank Henry Dunow for getting the process started.

To all the photographers who allowed me to use their images.

All my friends who helped me through the last few years: Elaine Kahn, Luisa Reichenheim, Lili Dwight, Byron Coley, Bill Nace, Julie Cafritz, Marjorie Zweizig, Daisy and Rob von Furth, Rebekah Brooks, Xian Hawkins, Don Fleming, Margaret Bodde, Lizzi Bougatsos, Jutta Koether, John Kelsey, Isabelle Graw, Tony Oursler, Jon Wurster, Jessica Hutchins, Stephen Malkmus, Chlo Sevigny, Mel Wansbrough, Sofia Coppola, Andrew Kesin, Mathew Higgs, Elissa Schappell, Sheila McCullough, Michele Fleischli, Cameron Jamie, Dave Markey, Emma Reeves, Tamra Davis, Mike D, Adam H, Kathleen, Chris Habib, Mark Ibold, Vicki Farrell, Andrew Kesin, Richard Kern, Carlos Van Hijfte, Tom Caw, Spike Jonze, Keith Nealy, Aimee Mann, Amy P., Carrie Brownstein, Ben Estes, Juan Amaya, Jim O Rourke, J Mascis, Shana Weiss, Hilton Als, Bill Mooney, Barbara Herrington, Patrick Amory, and Jamie Brisick.

Special thanks to Steve Shelley, Lee Ranaldo, and Thurston Moore, without whom there would be no story.

Also, a grateful nod to all the Sonic Youth crew from over the years, Aaron Mullan, Eric Baecht, Nick Close, Suzanne Sasic, Jim Vincent, Jeremy Lemos, Luc Suer, Dan Mapp, Bob Lawton, Peter Van Der Velde, Maurice Menares and all the people at SAM management, Gaby Skolnek, Micheal Meisel, John Cutcliffe, Chris Kelly, John Silva, and Richard Grabel.

To Chris Stone, Nils Bernstein, Patrick Amory, Gerard Cosloy, Chris Lombardi, and the folks at Matador records for putting out the Body/Head double LP.

To Eric Dimenstein for booking us.

To my family: Keller, Kathryn, Eleanor, and Louise Erdman, and Coco Gordon Moore.

To the memory of my exceptional parents: my mother, Althea, and my father, Wayne. Their singular spirit, humor, and intelligence somehow guided me.

And to all the fans, of course, and their support that I never truly believed was there, until I needed it.

Photo by Robert Balazik

WHEN WE CAME OUT onstage for our last show, the night was all about the boys. Outwardly, everyone looked more or less the same as they had for the last thirty years. Inside was a different story.

Thurston double-slapped our bass guitarist Mark Ibold on the shoulder and loped across the stage, followed by Lee Ranaldo, our guitarist, and then Steve Shelley, our drummer. I found that gesture so phony, so childish, such a fantasy. Thurston has many acquaintances, but with the few male friends he had he never spoke of anything personal, and hes never been the shoulder-slapping type. It was a gesture that called out, Im back. Im free. Im solo.

I was the last one to come on, making sure to mark off some distance between Thurston and me. I was exhausted and watchful. Steve took his place behind his drum set like a dad behind a desk. The rest of us armed ourselves with our instruments like a battalion, an army that just wanted the bombardment to end.

It was pouring, slanting sheets of rain. South American rain is like rain anywhere else, and it makes you feel the same too.

They say when a marriage ends that little things you never noticed before practically make your brain split open. All week that had been true for me whenever Thurston was around. Maybe he felt the same, or maybe his head was somewhere else. I didnt really want to know, to be honest. Offstage he was constantly texting and pacing around the rest of us like a manic, guilty kid.

After thirty years, tonight was Sonic Youths final concert. The SWU Music and Arts Festival was taking place in Itu, just outside So Paulo, Brazil, five thousand miles from our home in New England. It was a three-day-long event, broadcast on Latin American television and streamed online, too, with big corporate sponsors like Coca-Cola and Heineken. The headliners were Faith No More, Kanye West, the Black Eyed Peas, Peter Gabriel, Stone Temple Pilots, Snoop Dogg, Soundgarden, people like that. We were probably the smallest act on the bill. It was a strange place for things to come to an end.

Over the years we had played lots of rock festivals. The band saw them as a necessary evil, although the do-or-die aspect of having no sound check before you played made them sort of thrilling, too. Festivals mean backstage trailers and tents, gear and power cords everywhere, smelly porta-potties, and sometimes running into musicians whom you like personally or professionally but never get to see or meet or talk to. Equipment can break, delays happen, the weather is unpredictable. There are times you cant hear a thing in the monitors but you just go for it and try to get the music across to a sea of people.

Festivals also mean a shorter set. Tonight we would close things out with seventy minutes of adrenaline, just as wed done the past few days at festivals in Peru, Uruguay, Buenos Aires, and Chile.

What was different from past tours and festivals was that Thurston and I werent speaking to each other. We had exchanged maybe fifteen words all week. After twenty-seven years of marriage, things had fallen apart between us. In August Id had to ask him to move out of our house in Massachusetts, and he had. He was renting an apartment a mile away and commuting back and forth to New York.

The couple everyone believed was golden and normal and eternally intact, who gave younger musicians hope they could outlast a crazy rock-and-roll world, was now just another clich of middle-aged relationship failurea male midlife crisis, another woman, a double life.

Thurston mimed a mock-startled reaction as a tech passed him his guitar. At fifty-three, he was still the shaggy, skinny kid from Connecticut I first met at a downtown New York club when he was twenty-two and I was twenty-seven. He told me later he liked my flip-up sunglass shades. In his jeans, old-school Pumas, and un-tucked-in white button-down oxford, he looked like a boy frozen in some diorama, a seventeen-year-old who didnt want to be seen in the company of his mother, or any woman for that matter. He had the Mick Jagger lips, and the lanky arms and legs he didnt seem to know what to do with, and the wariness you see in tall men who dont want to overpower other people with their height. His long brown hair camouflaged his face, and he seemed to like it that way.

That week, it was as if hed wound back time, erased our nearly thirty years together. Our life had turned back into my life for him. He was an adolescent lost in fantasy again, and the rock star showboating he was doing onstage got under my skin.

Sonic Youth had always been a democracy, but we all had our roles, too. I took my place in the center of the stage. It didnt start out that way and Im not sure when it changed. It was a choreography that dated back twenty years, to when Sonic Youth first signed with Geffen Records. It was then that we learned that for high-end music labels, the music matters, but a lot comes down to how the girl looks. The girl anchors the stage, sucks in the male gaze, and, depending on who she is, throws her own gaze back out into the audience.