Happy 35th Anniversary to Sonic Youth’s sixth studio album Goo, originally released June 26, 1990.
The first time I ever heard Sonic Youth was at a country club. It was summer in the late ’80s, and every time my family would visit my grandparents in Minnesota, I’d end up staying with my cousin Gummy (née Elizabeth) for a couple weeks in Edina, one of the poshest suburbs in Minneapolis. We’d go to the Galleria and shop for Guess jeans, and then spend the afternoons slathered in baby oil around the pool at her family’s country club. If my cousin’s nickname is any indication, it was very much like the movies—Muffy, Buffy, polo shirts, the whole Ralph Lauren shebang.
Still, Gummy’s mixed tapes totally defied expectation. To the point that one afternoon I heard “Expressway to Yr. Skull” blaring from the little pastel-pink boom box next to Gummy’s deck chair as the sun skittered over the turquoise water and kids shouted and splashed. Minneapolis was apparently a small enough place, and my preteen cousin secretly a cool enough chick, that Minneapolis’ alternative scene had infiltrated even the Interlachen Country Club. Or maybe it was just a sign that back then in the late ’80s, alternative culture was pressing up against the edges, on the precipice of becoming something much bigger.
When Thurston Moore first met Kim Gordon on a summer evening a decade earlier in 1980 at Plugg, a little club tucked away on a desolate block in Chelsea, New York City was gritty and ravaged and, as Sonic Youth biographer David Browne notes, “The evening felt like the end of something rather than the beginning of anything.” The punk of the ’70s seemed dead, and rising in its wake was the dissonant rattle of No Wave, which championed an absence of melody and reflected the pock-marked squalor of the East Village. Meaning, New York of the early ’80s did not feel at all like a time of excitement, or an impending youthquake.
Moore’s band, The Coachmen, were quirky and too melodic for No Wave, so they really didn’t fit into any scene. In fact, after many fitful stops and starts, their show at the Plugg would be one of their last. Still, the night wasn’t a total bust because Moore met Gordon, who struck him as cool with the flip-up shades she wore on her glasses, and because she had a subdued yet keenly observant air about her. Still, despite her reserved nature, she’d end up pursuing him.
One night not long after their meeting at Plugg, he went out to another spot called the Ear Inn and saw her outside walking her dog. He immediately remembered her and when he stopped to say hello, she said boldly, “I knew you’d be here.” They strolled around the block, chatting about music and upcoming shows, and other “chance” meetings followed. One day, he even received a postcard from her when she was vacationing in California. He was touched and surprised by the thoughtful gesture.
Still, he had a hard time meeting her quietly daring moves halfway. One night, they found themselves near his apartment and he had an inkling that if he asked her to come upstairs, she’d take him up on the offer. But he was too shy to ask (she was five years older than he was). So he said, “See you later,” and she walked away as he berated himself for possibly blowing it for good. Eventually, though, they’d meet again and she’d invite him back to her apartment at 84 Eldridge Street. He’d move in five months later, in part because she found his neighborhood too drug-addled and scary.
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Soon, they were making music together. “It was all Thurston’s doing,” recalls artist Dan Graham, Gordon’s friend and former neighbor at Eldridge Street. “He saw her as a Patti Smith and wanted to teach her how to play music. It was his project.” Originally from California, Gordon had attended the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles. She was particularly interested in appropriation and collage, using advertisements she cut out of magazines to tell new (and wry) stories. She’d end up bringing her art-school sensibility to the music, and an overarching, sharply creative vision to what would become her and Moore’s band.
Moore had recently met a keyboardist named Anne DeMarinis, and along with Dave Keay, the Coachmen’s last drummer, they’d decided to form a new band. One day, Moore casually dropped that Gordon would be playing with them, too. She’d been teaching herself bass, plucking out notes with one finger. “Kim was learning. But right from the beginning she had the right attitude,” Keay remembers. “When you’re playing experimental music, that’s the most important thing.”
The band went through a few different names—Male Bonding, Red Milk, The Arcadians—and began playing at a little club called A’s on Broome Street, surrounded by drug dealers and sex workers. In fact, one night, Arleen Schloss, A’s owner, grabbed her Super 8 and filmed a blowjob in progress, mostly because it was just so commonplace. Still, despite its sketchy surroundings, A’s was the type of club where you could go wild musically. The band began to get better gigs, notably CBGB, but it soon became apparent that DeMarinis wanted to quit in favor of forming something more conventional.
Around that time, Moore came up with a new name for the band, inspired both by Fred “Sonic” Smith, the guitarist for the MC5, as well as the Jamaican deejay Big Youth. Since DeMarinis seemed to be on the verge of leaving, Moore felt the name Sonic Youth better encapsulated a band with a dangerous guitar-based sound.
It would actually be drummer Dave Keay who ended up quitting first, and then DeMarinis announced she’d stay on for only one more gig. So, Sonic Youth was collapsing. The Noise Festival, DeMarinis’ last gig, was a celebration of dissonance that fused the downtown art and music scenes and was held at a gallery called White Columns. It was outside White Columns that Gordon noticed Lee Ranaldo, a guitarist who’d attended one of their shows. In a timid but assertive way, Gordon approached him and suggested that Ranaldo talk to Moore—after all, the two seemed to share a similar aesthetic.
Growing up on Long Island, Ranaldo had started playing guitar in early high school, dabbled in LSD, and liked Jimi Hendrix and the Grateful Dead. However, he abandoned the hippie stuff as soon as a friend introduced him to Patti Smith. It further changed when Ranaldo saw Talking Heads at a local club during college. Eventually, he moved to New York and formed a band called Fluks, which played a show one night at CBGB with the Coachmen. He later joined up with avant-garde composer Glenn Branca, who created high-volume, multi-guitar symphonies based on alternate tunings and walls of imposing sound. Moore himself had played with Branca and was also enthralled by this new approach to noise, so he and Ranaldo seemed tailor-made to play together. They then temporarily hooked up with a drummer named Richard Edson, who would always be a little bit wary of their art-school approach to music—hence his temporariness.
As Sonic Youth began shaping and stretching their noise along with scrapes of melody, they found a supporter in Glenn Branca. “l liked their candy-coated version of my music,” he says. “I loved it. I came in my fucking pants.” Branca started a modest label called Neutral, and gave the band enough money to record their first EP, which they simply titled Sonic Youth.
Sonic Youth would go through a couple more drummers—namely Jim Sclavunos and Bob Bert—until they eventually found a permanent one. Craving stability when so much about their lifestyle was unstable, Moore and Gordon had gotten married in 1984, though they were always careful to not be physically affectionate around their bandmates; they wanted to foster a professional atmosphere. Still, no matter, Bert began missing his wife whenever the band went on tour, it eventually got to be too much, and he quit after a long tour in Europe.
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Fortunately, Gordon and Moore had sublet their apartment to Steve Shelley, former drummer for the Crucifucks, and when they returned they asked him if he wanted to join their band. He said yes.
Throughout the 1980s, Sonic Youth blazed through albums. They’d record a total of five as Sonic Youth, as well as a sample-heavy record, The Whitey Album, under the name Ciccone Youth. In 1988, they received significant acclaim for Daydream Nation, although it didn’t sell as well as they would have liked. In spite of how prolific they were and despite their fierce commitment to independent labels, there were often difficulties. “We met with a lot of labels after Daydream Nation,” Shelley told SPIN. “We were having a problem with the labels that we’d been on keeping up with us. It was hard to get paid for the records that you sold.”
As the ’90s loomed, Sonic Youth contemplated a corporate move, courting talks with Atlantic, A&M Records, and Mute Records. Minneapolis bands like Hüsker Dü and The Replacements had already made the switch to the majors, and so Sonic Youth began thinking that maybe it wasn’t such a crazy idea. The band signed with Geffen imprint DGC, and they soon brought along with them another fledgling band, Nirvana.
Although they’d always favored a scrappy DIY approach, the band took the recording of Goo, their first album for DGC, very seriously. “It was the first record for the major label and we wanted it to be really good,” recalls Renaldo. “We were getting five or ten times the amount of money to make a record than we’ve ever spent before. How good can we make a record sound compared to Aerosmith, who spends that much money on every record? We did tons and tons of overdubs.”
The band brought on Nicholas Sansano, the engineer they’d worked with on Daydream Nation, and enlisted J. Mascis of Dinosaur Jr. and Don Fleming of Gumball to help create the demos. “Everyone was nervous. They were delivering this thing to a major label,” says Fleming. “So they wanted to have a certain buffer around them, people they knew well who they could turn to and say, ‘Is this working?’” However, this buffer caused outsized stress for Sansano, who felt like the arrangement became too complicated and formalized. It also started to become nerve-racking for the bandmembers; no one knew who wanted what on any given day. “It was arduous,” Gordon recalls. “It was hard to tell what the record sounded like.”
Sensing that he no longer had the band’s full trust, Sansano decided to leave the project, and the label brought on Ron Saint Germain, who was known for his heavy sonic gloss. The band went along with the decision, and Gordon later confided to a friend that she’d cried when she heard the final mixes, feeling “that’s not us.” However, the band hardly sounded like anything remotely mainstream, and Goo does remain true to the gritty blueprint of what makes Sonic Youth, well, Sonic Youth. It might have just been the $150,000 price tag—five times the cost of Daydream Nation—that left them feeling like they had sold out.
At first, Goo’s cover was supposed to feature a black-and-white drawing of Joan Crawford by Raymond Pettibon, an artist Kim Gordon had met at a house party in Los Angeles. “Henry Rollins was singing in the kitchen. He came right up to me and sang in my face,” she remembers. Gordon being an artist herself meant that she naturally sought out Pettibon’s quirky black-ink illustrations. Ultimately, instead of using the Crawford drawing, the band chose another piece: an illustration of two British mods in sunglasses, based on a photograph of David Smith and Maureen Hindley, who were on their way to the Moors Murders trial in 1966.
Not long after we started dating, my now-ex-husband Nick and I would end up going to a Raymond Pettibon exhibition at the Whitney Museum. By that point, Pettibon was a serious artist feted by the New York art world. Also, in an unacknowledged way, Goo had sort of become Nick’s and my thing.
The first time Nick and I met, he was on his way to Central Park to do shrooms. It was the early 2000s not long after 9/11, I had just moved to New York with my friend Kara, and Nick was part of a group of friends with whom she’d gone to high school. We’d settled in Williamsburg and were hanging out a lot with Nick, Tom, and Corrie, who lived in a rickety house at the back of an alleyway near the Graham Avenue subway stop. During that era, that part of Brooklyn was industrial, dirty, and a little desolate. Whenever we’d navigate the alleyway at night, rats would jump out from the metal trashcans and scurry across the pavement like the plague. It wasn’t uncommon to hear of friends getting mugged, and one night, while walking alone, I was followed by a man who repeatedly told me he was going to rape me until I ducked into a bodega and waited for him to go away.
The sole attractions in the neighborhood were a White Castle and a dive bar on the corner called The Pourhouse. The Pourhouse was working class, still virtually untouched by the hipsters who had begun to plague nearby Bedford Avenue, and yet despite that it had a very decent jukebox. Ever since Nick and I had first met on his way to the park, he and I had regarded each other shyly. However one night, after many nights of going out as little crew, I sauntered over to the jukebox and made some selections. Soon, “Mildred Pierce” came on. As Thurston Moore began shrieking “MILDRED! MILDRED PIERCE!!!!” and the plumbers and electricians glanced around the Pourhouse like What the fuck?, Nick cracked up. “Who picked this?” he asked. “I did,” I said. And for the first time we had a real conversation.
Even though I’d been listening to Goo since high school in the ’90s, it’s an album that, in hindsight, always sounded distinctly like New York. It was Sonic Youth bringing a brash, underground sound cultivated over a difficult decade to the next decade’s alternative-thirsty masses, and still a part of me will always associate it with my own early days in New York, my own love story as an idealistic twentysomething, and my own initiation in a rough neighborhood. That sound carried across two decades, and into the 21st century. And it still carries today.
If there’s any album opener that teems with anticipation and the promise of something big, it’s “Dirty Boots.” It’s shimmer and electrical strut, describing a California vacation—not the one from which Gordon sent Moore a postcard as a bold flirt, but one they took together later, in 1989. More overarchingly, however, it’s about being young and moving unapologetically through situations in dirty boots as a metaphor for punk-rock grit.
“Tunic (Song For Karen)” begins ominously and then turns an empathetic gaze on Karen Carpenter, who suffered from anorexia—I feel like I’m disappearing, getting smaller every day. “It was Thurston who turned me onto how beautiful Karen’s voice was actually in their songs,” says Gordon. “Then I started thinking about how, basically, women started feeling like we only have control over our bodies. The fact was that, tragically, she wanted to make herself disappear.”
With its swagger and roll, “Mary-Christ” is Moore’s imagining “what punk-rock Catholic girls would be like.” Meanwhile, “Kool Thing” was inspired by an awkward interview Gordon did with LL Cool J for SPIN, where the two just couldn’t vibe. Public Enemy happened to be recording Fear of a Black Planet (1990) at Greene Street when Sonic Youth were recording Goo, and so Chuck D stopped by and recorded his part in five minutes. “Kool Thing” would end up reaching a respectable No. 7 on the Billboard Modern Rock chart.
Feedback-laden but sunny and bouncy, “Mote” is based on the Sylvia Plath poem “The Eye Mote,” which made a big impression on Ranaldo, and he tried to capture the feeling of getting something stuck in your eye. “I just got started and began free-associating off the imagery I picked up out of the poem and just kind of made it my own in a way,” he recalls. “It’s been really heartening to see how popular the song has been over the years.”
Bursting with rumbly bass and bratty vocals, “My Friend Goo” is based on a video series by Raymond Pettibon called Sir Drone, with Goo as the girlfriend of one of the punk-rock characters. Next up, “Disappearer” is dreamy and diaphanous. “A lot of that song has to do with ‘don’t let people tell you who you are no matter what,’” asserts Moore, adding that he chose an image of Traci Lords for the single’s cover to signify “somebody who was rising above it and changing to become her own dignified self.”
“Mildred Pierce,” is amazing for its screaming freakout at song’s end, and it’s named for the 1945 film starring Joan Crawford. Sonic Youth’s video for the song features a young Sofia Coppola, not yet famous for her own filmmaking, in Joan Crawford’s role. “Cinderella’s Big Score,” according to Moore, “is a winding dark tune with lyrics by Kim about her troubled brother,” who suffered from schizophrenia. It’s followed by “Scooter + Jinx,” one full minute of grating guitar brutality.
The album ends with the liquid-metallic “Titanium Exposé,” which is pretty much about how Sonic Youth began. “I wanted to write a straight-ahead urban love song, and when I say urban I mean I always love ideas about two people living within their means,” Moore said. “Artists in a place of poverty, but you’re completely enriched by the creative connection you have.”
After the arduous recording of Goo, Sonic Youth toured on the back of the album by opening for their hero Neil Young (Young loved “Expressway To Yr. Skull” and played it in his dressing room before he went on stage every night), and then they’d embark on a tour of Europe with Nirvana the following year—1991, the year punk broke. And suddenly, it really did feel like a time of excitement, and an impending youthquake.
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