Sonic Youth have been around for 21 years—god knows how long that is in dog years. A generation of music listeners have grown up never knowing a world without Sonic Youth, and for the duration of the band’s existence, Thurston Moore, Kim Gordon, Lee Ranaldo, Steve Shelley and newest member Jim O’Rourke have defined artistic credibility and independence. Their newest album, Murray Street, has been hailed by many as one of their best, and certainly it’s their most accessible since Dirty, or perhaps Goo, or maybe Daydream Nation. The songs’ structures feel natural, the improvisations are lovely, and the lyrics focus on people in middle of hard times. Guitarist Thurston Moore sings, “Have you got your disconnection notice?” with the compassion and bonding of someone who “got mine/ in the mail today.” As it turns out, the members of Sonic Youth were in the middle of hard times when making the album.
Byron Coley’s press notes for Murray Street refer to it as “an operetta of place.” What does that mean?
I think he’s talking about our last two records, Murray Street and NYC Ghosts & Flowers, which thematically were dealing with our lifestyle, our world and lineage of being in New York City, and part of that history, part of that culture. Coley came to this idea that it’s an “operetta of place.” That was his perception of what we’re up to, and I enjoy reading people’s ideas of what we’re doing because it’s as valid as what we think. We’re putting it out here for the public and the public can apply their own personal reasoning to what they’re hearing and seeing to music and art anyway. And it seemed to make sense to me. A lot of it has to do with the fact that we’re charged by our environment.
What’s particularly important about that environment?
NYC Ghosts & Flowers is us singing more about the fact that we’re a part of this New York cultural lifestyle that has its lineage through ’50s and ’60s beat era New York with [Allen] Ginsberg and [William S.] Burroughs, and these are people we had interaction with. When we moved to New York in the ’70s, that was what we were responding to through Patti Smith and Tom Verlaine and Richard Hell. We got involved with that. That was what we wanted to do as teenagers, and now that we’re in our forties, seeing a lot of these transitions and people passing on, people coming up, living in the city that’s always in flux—we were reflecting on that.
Murray Street is more specific. I took a picture of the street sign on the corner of our street which is down in the Wall Street area. The sign said “Murray Street” so we called the record Murray Street, which is weird because we usually name our records after more far-out, literary vibes. To name it after something so specific was weird and unorthodox for us, which is maybe the reason why we went for it. It also—with a smile—has connotations toward classic rock album titles. Morrison Hotel or whatever.
It was also very personal for us because our studio has been on Murray Street for the last eight years, and I never really considered it. It was just this street down in the Wall Street area, but it became very personal this winter because the street was completely destroyed. It’s two blocks away from the World Trade Center, and to actually get back to work there after being prohibited to work there for a two month period, we needed special paperwork and to get behind barricades to get down to our street, which was completely ravaged, torn up, boarded over. We had to walk down these narrow concrete abutments to get to the building to get into our place. The whole area was devastated and evacuated, so we were the only people there working through the night in the studio.
So all the other buildings were empty and the stores shut down?
Yeah, there was nobody living there. When we decided to go back to work, we were told, “Nobody’s living there.” And we said, “We’re not nine-to-fivers. We have a recording studio of our own, and if we can get it up and running, we’d like to continue working there.” That environment was very profound for us, to go down there to this completely altered world that we had once taken for granted that was the site of such devastation. I went around taking pictures of the streets, so I took a picture of the street sign on the corner of where we worked and it became something that had a lot of personal resonance for us.
The picture was taken after September 11?
Yeah. I had a lot of pictures of street signs with smoking ruins around it, but we had no intention of using imagery like that that’s exploitational of disaster. This image that we use doesn’t denote anything like that, but it does in a way because the street sign is bent out of shape.
My girlfriend and I used to try to guess at the size of the disaster by trying to compare it to New Orleans.
It’s like if the whole French Quarter just sunk. It’s huge. Through the years, that was my subway stop and when I got out—this is the weirdest thing—I used to think, “What if a plane hit this thing?” It is gargantuan. That morning when I saw it on the news, I said, “Jesus, a plane did hit that thing,” then it became apparent it was way worse than just a plane hitting. And then when they came down – I still can’t wrap my mind around it, even being down there now.
It has to be perverse to go down there now and find it turned into a tourist attraction.
It was perverse all through the winter. It was kind of a conflict. At one level, there’s a certain morbidity that was turning me off as all the disaster junkies wanted to hang out. The closer they let people to it, the worse it got. People coming up to me on the way to the studio asking, “Excuse me. Which way is Ground Zero?” That was really annoying, but at the same time I can relate to the feeling of wanting to go there and be there and offer something, just a witness. I think most people were fairly sensitive to it and wanted to see the reality of it.
Was the album finished by September 11?
No, no. We were just beginning. We were just starting. Jim O’Rourke, who plays with us, was sleeping on the couch that morning and was very rudely awakened. He barely made it out of there. Lee [Ranaldo] lives just down the block and his whole family was evacuated immediately.
Wow. So you had band members who were part of the running throng?
Yeah. It was bad. I wasn’t there; I was up in Western Massachusetts, but Kim [Gordon] was there at our apartment which is 20 blocks away. I had talked to her early in the morning and told her she should call the studio to get Jim out of there because the buildings are on fire. Then when they came down I couldn’t get through anymore on the phones and wasn’t able to communicate with Kim, Jim or anybody all day.
How did September 11 affect the recording?
After two months we were able to get back in. We decided set up and if things were working, continue. We really felt it was the right thing to do to reclaim our neighborhood in a way where we were doing some positive, creative work. There was a certain holistic thing about that in the face of such destruction. And we had been changed. It was a very close thing for us, and the music just came out. Everything seemed to be self-animated in a way, and even now the whole session feels like a dream.
On a very different note, does the rave-up in “Rain on Tin” refer to Television and “Marquee Moon” at all?
No, but I know why you say that because there are some gestures in there that are very “Marquee Moon”-like. There’s nothing we can do about it. When we started writing that song and it started becoming what it became, we looked at each other and said, “It’s kind of ‘Marquee Moon’-ish.” And we went, “Yeah, great!”
That’s a nice problem to have.
Yeah, I’m not going to change that! To us, it’s like doing a Chuck Berry riff.
Whyadd [saxophonists] Jim Sauter and Don Dietrich to “Radical Adults Lick Godhead Style”?
We were mixing that song and Jim said, “We really need something here that will really tear into the song,” and I said, “Yeah, like some free jazz saxophone playing.” There are some players we know in New York that are classic free jazz men, but we thought that might be a little too predictable and corny in a way. Then we looked at each other and said, “Sauter and Dietrich from Borbetomagus would just destroy on this,” and we’re both real enthusiasts of their music. I have known those guys since the ’70s, and they were so radical. They were this group that belonged to no contingent at all. It’s this two hard-blowing screamers, not playing any jazz idiom at all—it’s all just frequency and noise—and this guitar player, and they’d all play through the same amplifier, so nobody had any kind of control. It was just this whole united thing; it was nuts. They took on a new cache of importance I never thought they’d take in the ’90s when the Japanese noise underground scene started celebrating them, and they became this really hip thing for underground music in New York.
Caption: “Free jazz is way before punk rock. Punk rock is nothing new. If it thinks it is, it’s kidding itself.”
After the free jazz primer you wrote for Grand Royal, you’re one of the genre’s more prominent fans. What’s the appeal of free jazz, and do we hear free jazz in your music?
The idea that you can actually play music and be completely, freely liberated in invention. I never even knew what free jazz was—I got into jazz through Kim, who introduced me to ’60s classic modal jazz of Coltrane, Miles, and from there I went backwards to Lester Young and Coleman Hawkins, and then I went forward and started getting into the avant-garde, and I really responded to that. Then it became really apparent how connected it was to what I really loved about high energy Detroit music of the Stooges and MC5, and Archie Shepp and Sun Ra and the Art Ensemble of Chicago would be doing the same gigs as these guys. I sort of had known that, but I could never really put it together. Then when I got a historical perspective of it and got inside of what they were doing philosophically, it completely blew my mind how much more intensified as an independent music they were, whereas the whole punk rock scene I had come out of was so proud of its independence and do-it-yourself aesthetic, but you’ve got to be kidding me. This is way before punk rock. Punk rock is nothing new. If it thinks it is, it’s kidding itself.
There were people who weren’t even doing free jazz; it was just free improvisation, people like Derek Bailey and [Peter] Brotzmann, etc. who are creating these records on these small little bedroom labels just so they can communicate to each other these ideas of pure, instant, spontaneous composition ideas. It was to me a great enlightenment to know that existed.
Are you conscious of free jazz artists in New Orleans?
You mean like Kidd Jordan? Yeah, he’s heavy. There’s one cat down there who I like a lot who books gigs down there.
Rob Cambre?
Yeah, I want to get together and do a guitar duo gig with Rob at his place, and every time I come to New Orleans we talk about doing it. Of course, when we get there, we get in, we set up, we soundcheck, play, then we get on the bus and leave. I think this time it may be possible, but I’ll have to look at my calendar.
I find Sonic Youth soulful, but it isn’t soulful in conventional ways. How is it soulful?
It’s never primarily an exercise in structure, even though experimental structure remains a main preoccupation of the band. To me, it’s all about being spirit music. And, a lot of our songs are sad songs with a celebratory notion of hopefulness in there.
As a band noted for improvisation, does it get weird reading about jambands?
There are people who tie those things together, but jamming is something I never liked, so jambands I have no time for. I think there’s a distinction between playing music with the idea that it is spontaneous improvisation into composition, and maybe that’s an elitist, intellectual approach as opposed to just jamming. I’m not really familiar with their sound except for some stuff I’ve heard from Phish, and I find it really uninvolving. I find it cultist at best.
