All Noisy on the New York Front

” data-lazy-type=”iframe” src=”data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODdhAQABAPAAAP///wAAACwAAAAAAQABAEACAkQBADs=”>

(This, while Kim’s 2015 Girl in a Band memoir brands Thurston “a serial liar,” and a “coward” who turned their lives into “another cliché of middle-aged relationship failure”.) 

However, like all autobios worth their print stock, Sonic Life’s enthralling anecdotal content should easily earn it a spot on your bookshelf—especially its main course: a vivid and elaborate slideshow of Thurston’s coming of age in late-70s No Wave Manhattan. A more mythic artistic adolescence-slash-storybook New York success story couldn’t be imagined.

THE RISING

What better way of discovering one’s rock-star calling than fleeing suburban Connecticut in dad’s white Volkswagen Beetle, strapped in with your best friend and four packs of smokes, barreling down the Henry Hudson Parkway, onto the Westside Highway, and into the altered dimension of Ed Koch’s NYC to see bands you’ve gazed at in Creem, Hit Parader, and Rock Scene play live—

The Ramones, Television, Talking Heads, Patti Smith, New York Dolls, The Cramps, Siouxsie & the Banshees, Blondie, Richard Hell—at now-immortal venues—CBGB, Max’s Kansas City, Mudd Club—multiple nights per week, throughout your entire senior year.

Formative experiences for an impressionable suburban teen, ones that Sonic Life shares in great detail. Behold these and other timeless moments in time—

Thurston and pal’s first CBGB visit, sliding into the Patti Smith show on Joey Ramone’s tail, posing as his friends to gain entry, ending up elbow-to-elbow with William Burroughs. Later, entering the city the moment the ’77 Summer of Sam blackouts hit, reaching CBGB as all order disintegrates, finding owner Hilly Krystal out front with a candle, reversing course and racing out of the city, swerving around moon-eyed looters, watching as the Bronx becomes a bonfire.

Returning to CBGBs a week later for the Dead Boys show, seeing lead Stiv Bators go mental, blowing his nose into bologna slices all night, rubbing them on the floor and eating them.  Shoving a massive vibrator down his crusty leather slacks and working himself to orgasm while singing. Kicking in the head of the kick drum and crawling through it, vomiting. Tearing a random girl’s shirt in half, slathering her in peanut butter, and biting it off. 

At Max’s Kansas City, mortified by Suicide’s nightmare proto-electro, watching singer Alan Vega in a bright old-lady wig grabbing fans by the hair, choking them out with his mic cord, spitting and screaming in their faces. Stomping chairs apart, throwing a drink in the eyes of a smiling girl from Long Island one table over, then smashing the glass and carving his chest open with it (sending Thurston and pal sprinting for the Volkswagen.)

Full-time college followed, though he and best pal’s big city abscondences continued, in force. Merely a bedroom guitarist to that point, the rabid simplicity of the punk being encountered gradually led Moore to consider musicianship, and after one semester, he dove headfirst into the amalgam of punk, new and no wave, hip-hop, graffiti, film and poetry manifesting in lower New York. Securing a near-condemned East Village apartment, the sonic life began.

The downtown art world was lawless, infected and immensely inspiring: drugs and sex and poverty and manic imagination equaling freedom for many reckless madcaps. For some artists, shows and life became blurred, performance identities bled into selves, resulting in the gradual immolation of birth names, pasts, and identities. On the bright side, some of modern man’s most imaginative music and artwork was being birthed downtown—available for appreciation to those who learned to walk the razor.

Thurston’s first band in the dregs was The Coachmen, a clean, comely 4-piece trafficking in palatable, Televisionesque new wave. Save for some half-ass spaz-outs, their ’79 “Failure to Thrive” EP was a toe in the pond artistically, but nonetheless, scene-worthy. Case in point, Moore tells of the Coachmen playing with something called Jean Michael Basquiat’s Homemade Jazz Band at a Xerox Art exposition of pieces by Basquiat and Kenny Scharf.

After about a year in the downtown trenches squeezed the last of drops of normalcy from his creative urge, Thurston met Kim, left the Coachmen, snatched Lee Renaldo from Glenn Branca’s Guitar Orchestra and local all-purpose drummer Bob Bert, and decreed Sonic Youth a thing—not as much a band as a sound-making art project, based around, as Moore writes, “three guitars melding, chasing, and spiraling into one another.” 

THE RAGING

The early Youth approach was brutal and primordial. Guitars with drumsticks under their strings, pounded instead of played. Power drills raging through cranked amps. Basses hanging from ropes, being beaten with mallets, generating the gargantuan thrum of infinite Buddhist monks in mid-chant. What Moore calls “extended noise-paintings” were the result: songs less about their chords, melodies and arrangements than the roaring fjords of sonic babel that colored them.

Forever-drummer Steve Shelley’s arrival in mid-’85 saw more songs being written premised upon the singular voices of altered and damaged instruments they owned. Due to the approach, each specific guitar became irreplaceable, such that if any were broken or lost, songs that involved them simply couldn’t be played—not using entirely different guitars, or even different copies of the same guitar. As a result, Thurston and Lee toured with 50+ guitars during the band’s prime.

An exhaustive career-gear database on the band’s website logs 157 guitars and 26 basses owned, many set to tunings so peculiar that once dialed in they were never again adjusted, and at shows they were used only during songs that involved those tunings (as retuning a standard guitar mid-show could take minutes, not to mention snap strings and dislodge parts due to extreme changes in guitar neck tension.)

In 1990, the band committed a cardinal sin by signing a major label deal for the Goo LP, but then, by charting singles without compromising chaos, flipped the ‘selling out’ thing on its head. Their major move opened the doors for bands like labelmates Nirvana to go pop but stay sloppy, and thus, the great grunge rush commenced.  But we’ll pause the history lesson there and leave the rest for the Sonic Life reader. 

Actually, never mind, let’s have some more anecdotes:

Early ‘80s, on smoke breaks as a dishwasher at a diner, Thurston always filling Keith Haring’s wheatpaste bucket with water for his graffiti runs. A pre-Def Jam Rick Rubin screaming spit in Thurston’s ear about his punk band Hose at a deafening East Village show. In ’94, Meeting Beck playing a leaf blower through a bass amp at an LA backyard folk fest. At fame’s peak, Thurston learning from Paul McCartney the Ramones were named after the name he checked into hotels with as a Beatle in the ‘60s, “Paul Ramon”. I mean, c’mon. That’s some cool shit.

THE REFERENCING

But that’s also not it. Much more than just a fly-on-the-stall anecdotal gold mine, Sonic Life is a punk, hardcore, no- and new wave Library of Alexandria: absolutely splitting its seams with the names of every obscure group and artist Thurston has subsisted on for 50-some years—and we’re not talking bands any rocker worth his salt should know already. We’re talking arcane bands, bizarre bands, bands that played live but never recorded, bands that recorded but never played live, bands that only played once, and bands that broke up before playing. 

Thurston knows of bands named FOOT, Jbala Sufi, Nurse with Wound, The Dead C, Hair Police, 8 Eyed Spy, 16 Bitch Pile-Up, Crass, Ut, the Dils, the Screamers, the Offs, the Mutants, the Adverts, the Mumps, the Weirdos, the Nuns, the Feelies, Room Tone, Theoretical Girls, Crime, Bags, Circus Mort, Test Pattern, Pulsullama, Liquid Idiot, Double Leopards, the No-Neck Blues Band and Cul de Sac.

He’s heard and seen bands named The Fluks, A Band, U-Men, V-Effect, Y Pants, DC3, Save Republic, the Erasers, Dark Day, Don King, Panther Burns, Mo-Fungo, Necros, Chinese Puzzle, Rat at Rat R, Red Milk, the Arcardians, Body, Avant Squares, Borbetomagus, Discharge, The Young & the Useless, Nihilistics, Urban Waste, Trigger & the Thrill Kings, the Mob, Mon Ton Son and Rubber City Rebels.

Thurston is well aware of Psi Com, the Diagram Brothers, the Leaving Trains, The Ex, Biting Tongues, Ludus, God’s Gift, Math Bats, Agitpop, Squirrel Bait, Viv Akauldren, Appliances-SFB, Hell Cows, Happy Flowers, Stiff Legged Sheep, Bramble Grit, Live Skull,  and the Head of David. He doesn’t neglect Yoko Ono-ish ‘sound poets’ like Kurt Schwitters, Henri Chopin, and Jaap Blonk.

He pinpoints the origins and genres of enigmatic bands—Massachusets punk acts Sunburned Hand of the Man, Moving Targets, Sorry, the Outpatients, Busted Statues, and Deep Wound. He shouts out Soho No Wave bands in bulk–the Gynecologists, Arsenal, Tone Death, and high-risk performance artist Boris Policeband, a man strapped with blaring police scanners and an electric violin, who ‘played’ everywhere he went, but never played a show. 

Thurston performs deep-dives into the mega-niche. How about Japanese noise cassette artists? Of course there’s Masonna, Monde Bruits, Merzbow, Hijokaidan, Incapacants, Aube, C.C.C.C., Hanatarash, Keija Haino, MSBR, Gerogerigegege, and Violent Onsen Geisha, all whom true to their genre name, only release creations on tapes, specifically, the Type I kind, the first cassettes that existed, the age-old kind with ferrous-oxide tape material.