Sonic Youth: 1987 - 1995

Here's another cleaning-out-the-garage post, a not quite finished overview of a few years in the life of Sonic Youth. Enjoy.

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I first heard Sonic Youth on the way home from a high school dance in 1989. My buddy Derek – who was a few years older than me and took me under his wing at pivotal times in my adolescence, much appreciated old buddy. He had what we used to call a skater's haircut (could just as easily be called an Indy Last Crusade haircut) where you took your hat off and all your hair fell over your face, but short in back, a reverse mullet) – was giving me a ride home. 

The content is right, mostly (add The Dead Kennedys and the Circle Jerks) but the tapes were always scattered on the floor, backseat, or between the seats, never neatly put away like this.

One of them was this, which he quickly snatched out of the rubble: "You specifically will like this one."

Jeff Blehar talks on the Political Beats episode on LCD Soundsystem how when your intro to a band is "Hey, this is perfect for you" you're both flattered and worried. You want them to be right, because if they're wrong, you have to consider their misapprehension of you. ( i.e.  I thought we were friends, but you thought of me when you heard this crap? )

Luckily for me and my friendship with Derek (with whom I went on to have many adventures) the song the tape was cued up to was “Stereo Sanctity.” From there, pretty much instantaneously, I was hooked. 

Prior to this point I’d listened primarily to nothing but hair metal. 1989 was the year that changed, more or less. I was getting mix tapes from friends filled with prog rock and classic rock that were tunneling under my walls and ramparts, and then this one ride home from the dance blasted a hole in the wall big enough to move troops through in platoon strength. Anyone who has read anything at this blog knows I love me some hair metal - always have, always will, have a thousand Dokken jokes to prove it - but this was the point when things like punk, hardcore, and what was once known as "college rock" got into my ears, brain, and heart. 

I chose 1987 to 1995 because really that’s the only slice of the band’s discography that I really know. What began with Derek ended with my buddy Klum, who was getting into the band in 1994 and 1995 and whose CDs of Experimental Jet Set, Trash, and No Star and Washing Machine were the last ones I knew. 

Here’s my favorites, least to most from the eight years in question.

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(1994)

“Bull in the Heather” was the single from this one. You can hear an awful lot of the mid-90s in those chime-sounding guitar plucks at the beginning. (SY excelled at wresting cool sounds from cheap equipment.) I remember seeing them perform this on Letterman. 

It’s not a bad tune, but it’s not one of my faves.  That goes for the whole album pretty much. They wanted a more stripped-down approach than on the previous album, and that’s what they delivered. 

Favorites: “Doctor’s Orders” (which has all the Kim Gordon slasher-film ness) and “In the Mind of the Bourgeois Reader.” The last track is cool, too. I love Kim yelling “This is a chain store!” We were all very sensitive on such things back then. 

There was a hidden track of bonus noise. Remember those things? I guess it all started with Sgt. Pepper’s, right, that vinyl groove cut out that would catch your old vinyl needle, but when did these hidden track things become such a thing? The first one I remember is Nine Inch Nails' Broken EP having one. And the Stone Roses Second Coming. 

Next up:

(1995)

This came out the year they played Lollapalooza. Big exposure. “I’m thinking of all those young kids in the audience, many of whom have said this was their first concert-going experience, and wondering where their head will stray from here (…) all of it is adding up to a glorious cacophony of where music as we know it has been and where it is going. The mainstream hasn’t got a clue as to what all of this is about, or how to handle it, and that’s good: what we do is secret.” So wrote Lee Renaldo in his diary at the end of the tour. It’s interesting as Lee is a fairly prescient, insightful dude – then and now – but he was a little off here; by 1995 the alternative scene of the folks he describes was pretty much institutionalized as the mainstream. He could've written those words on Sonic Youth's late 80s tours with Dinosaur, Jr., though, and been spot-on.

I can’t hear this one – especially “Little Trouble Girl” – without thinking of my old buddy Klum and how in love he was with Kim Deal. More than Kim Gordon, I think. Something about Kim Deal really appealed to him. We were living together at this point and played a lot of whatever-version-of-Sega-Genesis-Madden was out at the time. I say “played” – Klum was one of those guys who had the ability to master any videogame he played in a couple of tries, so mainly it was his kicking my ass over and over again while the CD played out. “La la laaa…” Kim Deal lived right around the corner, allegedly - I never saw her once in my entire time in Dayton, but that doesn't mean much. 

Anyway: they both probably dodged a bullet there. That would've been an interesting timeline. 

Some other thoughts:

- The end of “Junkie’s Promise” is pretty metal.

- “Becuz” is like some Mirror Universe version of “Because the Night.” I can't be the only person to say that, can I?

- “Panty Lines” and “No Queen Blues” are kinda cool.

- “Skip Tracer” is probably my favorite on this album. Because songs like this got in my head at a pivotal age, whenever I heard (or hear) certain types of poetry, I always think “This is missing the rest of the band, isn’t it? Where’s Lee Ranaldo?” Hello 2015! he yells from 1995. 

- “Diamond Sea” This one ends with a gratuitous amount of feedback and noise, probably due to their not wanting their newfound fans to get too comfortable with them. (Indeed, in Psychic Confusion, the Sonic Youth bio by Stevie Chick, it’s written that after the whole Lollapalooza tour, “It seemed as if they’d taken their incursion into the malls of America as far as they could. It was time for a return to some kind of underground, dragging curious listeners they’d seduced from the mainstream with them. Sonic Youth may have helped ‘break’ grunge, but it wasn’t going to break them.”) The rest is kind of a perfect Nirvana song, which makes sense since Kurt Cobain was so influenced by Thurston’s songwriting and approach. (Kim’s too. Among others.) There was a time in my life when the gratuitous noise not just made sense but would crack me up. Now it’s just noise. I’ve gotten old.

(1988)

“In the lazy shadow of J Mascis.” That guy comes up a lot when it comes to this period of Sonic Youth, as Steve Malkmus does later. Pavement and Dinosaur, Jr. (and the Pixies) were three bands I never got into during this period of my life; Sonic Youth kind of satisfied all of my noise-rock/ alterna pre-grunge itchings. I can admire what those guys were doing (and ditto for Husker Du and the Meat Puppets and the Minutemen) but none of it really landed with me, then or now. I've always planned some kind of deep dive on all of the above, but it has yet to happen.

This seems to be the “classic” Sonic Youth record to a lot of people. I can totally see why – there’s really not a bad song on it, and they’re all kind of iconic, both for the band and for indie-ethos in general. It’s generally known as the album where the Youth “came into their own,” and I mostly agree. What can I say? I like the ones below more. 

“Cross the Breeze” is pretty metal. “Rain King” and “Kissability” are probably my favorites but let me single three out for special notation:

- “The Sprawl” – That chorus, like so many of Kim’s from this stretch of years, has haunted me ever since I first heard it.

- “Eric’s Trip” – I love this one. As close as they ever got to doing a Monkees tune, right here. “My head’s on straight / my girlfriend’s beautiful / it looks all good to me.” Lyrics lifted from Andy Warhol’s Chelsea Girls. The album cover is Gerhard Richter’s The Candle, as well. I despise political virtue signaling, but I don't mind artsy virtue signaling. Such poses fit Sonic Youth better than, say, Guns N Roses. Anyway, listen to the demo after you listen to the studio album. It’s pretty wild to hear some of these songs broken down on an acoustic; it almost seems like all their stuff would be impossible to translate to acoustic, but beneath all the bells and whistles, it’s rooted in traditional singer/songwriter craft.

- Finally, “Providence” is fun: recorded on a piano in somebody’s living room while (someone from something) left a message on an answering machine. I was so unused to anyone ever mentioning Rhode Island that it took me until the CD came along and had proper liner notes to discover it was referring the state capital. Anyway, this is an interlude track centered around a pair of phone messages left on Thurston Moore's answering machine by Mike Watt, whose band Firehose had played with Sonic Youth the night before in New York City.

(1987)

It’s hard for me to talk about this album objectively, since it’s such a personal affair for me. I know every word, every riff, every sound, every mood from start to finish. Nothing could have been better suited to me to be listening to over and over in the summer of 1990, for example, while reading Stephen King’s unabridged version of The Stand. But how to translate that into anything sensible? I know it when I hear it. The other album I listened to a lot that summer was King Crimson’s Red and that one does translate a little better, i.e. I can say “Oh ‘Starless’ is what's playing for the whole Holland Tunnel scene” and it's probably easier to see than something like "Schizophrenia." But both are interchangeable for me for the Holland Tunnel scene, or at least pivotal for the soundtrack. Sister is my private head canon soundtrack to my own Magic Viewfinder version of the book.

Actually, what it is probably is the soundtrack to "Night Surf," while King Crimson's is The Stand. At least parts of it. Maybe it's Sister that's "Night Surf." One of these days I'll work it out; I've only been fitting the three things together in my head since 1990. 

I have some personal memory or Chris Farley sentiment about each track, but let me just focus on three:

- “Pipeline/ Kill Me” This song epitomizes the Youth to me. Unless it’s:

- “Pacific Coast Highway” – man! Kim Gordon was such a horrorshow. I mean that in the most affectionate, bad-ass way possible. Nothing matches this one for mood for me; it’s everything. And to think they can even pull it off live. It’s not one you’d think would make sense in concert.

- “White Cross” – Sonic Youth does not get credit for the amount of cool riffs they have. Somewhat traditional-metal-y with a decided non-metal influence. Black Sabbath on drugs that only appear in Philip K Dick novels. Print that on the special Dog Star Omnibus re-edition of the album, people!

I only had this on cassette back in the day so I never heard the bonus track featuring a Gene Simmons sample and Thurston’s alter-ego rap persona. I do kind of remember my buddy Derek having it, or hearing something from it. Worth mentioning. 

(1992)

Produced by Butch Vig, architect of the 90s sound in so many ways. (Later, his work with Garbage seemed to me like perfectly-commercialized Sonic Youth, like he alchemized the perfect-sounding radio-friendly/ still-alterna-cool sound from all the elements that had come before.) He’s got a new-ish project these days called 5 Billion in Diamonds – worth checking out. I really should've put together some kind of post on all of Butch's projects, that would've been fun. Ah well. 

Dirty was a hell of a record to have in my head when I was seventeen/ eighteen. Looking over my score-sheet (as always this post began with a spreadsheet) and I have eight tracks at four-and-a-half-stars or better. Awesome record. Let me just focus on a few, though:

- “Swimsuit Issue” “Don’t touch my breasts/ I’m just working at the desk” and rhyming “Encino” with “mean-o” have always stuck with me. Kim Gordon later leaned harder and harder into that sort of one-note nth-wave feminism perspective. None of that penetrated my consciousness at the time, though. We're all encouraged - sometimes by her - to look at her or her songs only one way, but I just thought they were cool-sounding and that she was cool. Still do.

- Pretty much all the above for “Drunken Butterfly” and “Shoot,” as well. That bass line for the latter has been echoing round my head for years. Pretty intense theater of the mind. I think there were more than a few radio-friendly 90s hits that later ripped this tune off, but nothing’s coming to mind.

- “Sugar Kane” On a short list of Best Songs of the 90s for me, up there with “Common People’ or “Euro Trash Girl” or any number of others.

- “On the Strip” I can’t imagine the end of my teen years or most of my 20-s without having had this song to escape dreamily into. How many times did I listen to this while driving back and forth to Cambridge, Mass, or to Dayton, OH, or to Poughkeepsie, NY? Hundreds? Probably more like dozens. Still. Another one where the lyrics were kind of immaterial to my own personal experience of it. 

And finally:

Oh man, Blogger is working overtime tonight. Can't get these side by side or even to paste where I want no matter what I do. So it goes. The above is the back cover, below is the front. Artwork by Raymond Pettibon.

(1990)

My buddy Derek and I caught them on this tour at the Living Room. Stone Temple Pilots was apparently opening – I think I missed them, though. I spent a good bit of time out in the parking lot, smoking Kools (the only cigarettes in the machine) and mingling with people from my high school that were surprised to see me at the show. (You know the scene in the movie where the cool kids say “Oh you’re here? Guess you’re all right” and give you a beer or something? That was this night in my life.) 

The title comes for “Sir Drone,” some indie film by Ray Pettibon that I’ve never seen. That’s where “Scooter and Jinx” comes from, too.  

An essential album by any definition I know. I could go on about every track but just a couple of thoughts and links:

“Tunic (Song for Karen)” – "You ain’t never goin’ anywhere…” Awesome. 

“Mary Christ” – listen to this jam in the middle and picture a caper-comedy scene with 90s-era folks or from The Real World. Fits like a glove.

“Kool Thing” Such an awesome tune. That one hit on the snare drum right before one of the choruses is the coolest (koolest?) thing ever. Every song here got a music video on the “Dollar Baby” model. i.e. here’s $1500, make a video, resulting in some interesting work. The official video, for “Kool Thing”, was made with a proper studio budget. I never saw it once on MTV, though. “Kool Thing” is such a, well, cool tune. Apparently Kim interviewed LL Cool J and he was less than gentlemanlike. Rather than cancel-culture him, though, she wrote a song that satirized white people like herself and their infatuation with black radicals. (Her words/ interpretation, not mine. I don't think she's saying LL Cool J was a black radical, if that's how I'm making it sound, mistake's mine.) Chuck Dee, with whom LLCJ had beef apparently, provides some rap-noises. 

All of this was over my head at the time. Still is, probably. I always liked this side of SY, too, they made fun of themselves and everybody. It was a very Gen-x-y thing to do: we were just very ironic. And we made fun of ourselves. And everyone else, too.

“Mote” – here’s Lee coming in. He really owned that last song of side one spot on SY’s records. “Put me in the equation, it’s all right…” The ding space-jam stuff is as Sonic-Youth-space-jammy as ever. Great track.

“My Friend Goo” – another perfect one. That “hey Goo what’s new?” and “p.u.!” still makes me crack a smile years later. It’s funny – between Girlschool and Sonic Youth I had, at 18 through 21 or so, a totally different idea of how feminism was going to play out in music. The 90s seemed like people were just going to stop making a big deal out of such things as more bands went co-ed. Boy was I wrong. 

“Disappearer” – ahhh one of my favorite songs now for 30 years. The mood/ ambiguity of the lyrics, all of it furthered and deepened the ambiance that Sister brought into my adolescence. 

I could go on and on. “Mildred Pierce” and “Scooter and Jinx” bookend a memorable tune of Kim’s, “Cinderella’s Big Score.” She is such a horrorshow. I mean that in the most affectionate way possible. That riff/mood of “Mildred Pierce” is fantastic, and I love that “Scooter” is the sound of an amp going into a death spiral after shorting out the studio. And “Titanium Expose” is one of the more metal songs done by a non-metal band. That riff is so unique, and bad-ass. Great tune. Great song structure to this one, perfect end to the album. Pretty cool video, too - I never saw any of these, practically until I did this blog.

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And there you have it. If you were worried I was going to leave Blogtown without another post with a whole bunch of hyperlinks and an arbitrary window placed around a band's output, fret not, friends.

I definitely need to catch up with all my old friends got up to after Washing Machine. It's silly that I never did. How does such a thing happen, when a band is such a favorite as Sonic Youth was in this period of my life? I have no idea. And such a pivotal period, too, the kind that casts long and meandering shadows across timespace. Ah well. Great stuff up there (the albums I mean) and thanks for reading. 

From Novel to Film pt. 38: The Secret of Terror Castle

As a child, my favorite reading was Marvel Comics. In close second: the Three Investigators series of books.

The frontispiece for the hardcovers.

This won’t be a long post. Most of the story is explaining the story, and there are enough sites out there already doing that. Quick version: it was a series of boy adventure detective stories from fifty-ish years ago that had the interesting wrinkle of Alfred Hitchcock introducing the stories and playing himself in at least one chapter. Until he died and the estate re-shuffled its licensing and tie-in-media needs. At that point “Hector Sebastian,” a fictional mystery writer, stepped in. At that point, the Hitch profile in the corner changed to a keyhole, so you always had to look for which one (at the library) - I was a stickler for the originals.

When my family moved in 1986 the books became scarce. Not sure why. This was before the days of lending libraries, yadda yadda, any/all of the original run of books I had run a pretty penny on eBay these days, yadda yadda - same old song and dance. In my own experience, if you find a T3I fan, usually you find someone who spent time outside the US in their childhood sometime in the 70s or 80s. Usually I say - I know of at least one exception. 

Anyway. On to:

THE NOVEL

Jupiter Jones has won a contest which allows him the use of a Rolls Royce with driver. He and his friends – Pete Crenshaw and Bob Andrews, the muscle and the microfiche-reader – bluff their way into Alfred Hitchcock’s office and convince the director to hire their juvenile detective agency to find a haunted house for his announced filmmaking needs in the paper. Jupe has just the house: Terror Castle, once the home of a silent actor rumored to be haunting the premises.

The Three Investigators have several motifs – leaving question marks around them, Jupiter’s uncle’s junkyard (with its two Bavarian handymen who, like the English Rolls chauffer, complete the odd aristocratic fantasy: boy-genius-heir to a junk empire), a “ghost to ghost hook-up” which involved the primitive use of dozens of dial-phones working in unison – and even more in subsequent books.

Written by Robert Arthur with interior illustrations by Harry Kane, Terror Castle casts the mold for the series to come. 

As a kid this held my imagination start to finish. This was the age of read a chapter before you go to sleep and try to sneak one more with a flashlight under the bed. 

Subsequent re-reads of all the others – I think you get the sense from all these posts that I’m a bit of a collector, a bit of a re-vister – never connected me to the childhood magic I got from the others: except for this one. Well, a couple of others, but this is the big one. The Secret of Terror Castle IS the Three Investigators, at least the mk-1 version. I doubt any of my kids will want to read them or even know what to make of them if they did. There’s a you-had-to-be-there vibe to a lot of it. If any of them were ever going to land, it would be this one. 

THE FILM

(2009)

I’ll give the film (a South African-German co-production; the books always sold well in both markets) credit for making sincere attempts to reach fans of the mk-1 set-up. Rocky Beach looks pretty cool. They got rid of Hans and Konrad and Alfred Hitchcock, but Worthington's here, and Aunt Mathilda and Uncle Titus (who get a German accent to sort of compensate for the loss of Hans and Konrad, I guess.) A few other things here and there seem like genuine efforts to reach across the years, and it'd be bad manners not to appreciate them. The casting of the kids was pretty good if you accept that the strokes are both broad and – in the case of Jupiter – fairly loose/ outside the lines.

Plotwise, well, they keep the haunted house. And it looks pretty cool.  

But everything else is invented for the film.

And how! A romance for Bob, a connecting plot to Jupiter's parents, you name it. 

Plus plenty of updated (but already dated) tech and tactics to replace their hopelessly analog aesthetic.

"Get out of my house."

And more. I can’t fault them for any of the attempts. The result is… unsuccessful? Harmless? Actually kind of fun? Sort of lame? Not sure. Probably some of all that. I watched both of the attempts with this cast, and I kind of liked The Skeleton Isle. And I kind of liked this one, too, even while not enjoying either, really. I mostly rolled my eyes. It’s complicated.

It could be as simple as part of me really thrills seeing a familiar Three Investigators on screen. Even with all the changes. Most of me, though, thinks it was a nice attempt and a pretty slick production, but ultimately unsuccessful, as an adaptation or as a franchise-starter. 

There’s a bit towards the beginning that cracked me up. It works to establish both the edgier Jupiter Jones and the more paramilitary T3I, but as the beginning of the movie, it's a start-and-stopper. A planned surprise birthday party for Jupiter falls flat because Jupiter hates birthdays. (His parents, duh!) Oh okay, everyone kind of shuffles off. But wait, who's the clown? It's a plant? Attack pattern delta! Okay, he got away. That was weird, right? What was he after? A very conspicuous clue to the whole mystery? Like the clue/ mystery was here the whole time, it just took some clown to come try to get it? Worked for The Goonies, I guess.

Wait, is that Hans and Konrad? It's got be. I guess they are here. 
I don't see them at the IMDB, though.

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This will be the last From Novel to Film entry. I didn’t plan this, I swear, but I’ve somehow ended on my literal first favorite book. Tiens! I suppose it could have been Bunnicula. Or Superfudge. And there’s a movie, too… hmmm… for both. Should I… ? Nah, better stick with that plan. 

Thanks for reading, folks.

Not mine, alas.