Sonic Youth co-founder Thurston Moore discusses underground culture shaping his life and how he translated that into a magical music memoir
“I basically just wanted to be a cypher,” Thurston Moore tells me via Zoom from his home out near Hammersmith (I’m in North London, so he muses that we probably “have the same skies”). We’re here to discuss his forthcoming memoir Sonic Life, which reads like a future classic of the genre. Much more than an autobiographical summary of his days in Sonic Youth, Moore’s writing strongly evokes the magic of underground music and culture. “It’s funny, because a few people who’ve read the book say, ‘You don’t even mention the name Sonic Youth until 200 pages in,’” Moore laughs. “Well, it’s not necessarily about Sonic Youth, but Sonic Youth plays an important part.” Indeed, much of what sets Sonic Life apart from other titles in the field, lies in the pages between those describing the astonishing thirty year run of the influential and beloved experimental rock band.
The first third or so of the book details Moore’s formative years visiting New York from Connecticut, then moving to the city and embedding himself in the art rock scene – the story of a music fan’s deep engagement with the culture in the years before he was a celebrated part of that culture himself. Moore paints an evocative picture of mid-to-late 70s NYC witnessing radical rock practitioners Patti Smith, The Ramones, Suicide, The Cramps and many more. He not only sets the scene beautifully, but makes the reader feel as if they are there in the moment, mainlining punk rock history. As such, reading Sonic Life is a contact high, the pages like sheets of LSD you cannot help but absorb.
As the narrative progresses and punk morphs into no wave, Moore becomes ever more the protagonist. Yet he is notably just as excited about the music being made by his contemporaries as he was by that of his heroes. Early on he writes that the only future he “cared to dream” was “a devotional life in service to rock ‘n’ roll” and you get the impression that if he wasn’t in a band he could have quite happily stuck to being a record collector or become another Lester Bangs. Although I dread to imagine that particular alternate reality where there is no Sonic Youth.
I always existed as an obsessive about the community of music and I always thought of it as a communitarian ideal.
Thurston Moore
I ask Moore if it was a conscious decision to approach the book as a music fan in order to tell his own story. “It was pretty conscious,” he says. “I always existed as an obsessive about the community of music and I always thought of it as a communitarian ideal. It wasn’t the visionary artist locked in his room creating compositions. To me it was always about this idea of community and these ideas being generated through documents. You know, people doing fanzines or poetry books or recordings that were coming from the margins.”
Moore had known for years that he wanted to write a Sonic Youth memoir some day (“especially after we finished doing our last record [The Eternal, 2009] and all went our separate ways”), but it wasn’t until he found himself with pandemic enforced downtime that he decided to put pen to paper. “I knew that I wanted to talk about growing up in a band that had a profile that was fairly distinctive,” he tells me, and Sonic Youth certainly had that. “I wanted to document the past, be done with it. But at the same time, I realised everybody who works in a creative world – whether it’s writing or playing music – you’re so defined by your early years. Because those initial forays that you get engaged with, you’re pretty young. Then when you get into your 50s and 60s, you’re still really defined by what you did twenty years prior. So as much as I take pleasure from people saying they like my new record, I know their appeal is really generated by what they know from when you’re a young person.”
“I think about that whole idea of youth,” he continues. “Especially in a band like I had, which was called Sonic Youth and was all about this idea of that energy of youth and youth culture. That name was based on the activism of youth within reggae music (with Big Youth) and hardcore punk (with Reagan Youth etc.), and wanting to have an adjunct of it where it was an art rock band called Sonic Youth that had one foot in John Cage and one foot in MC5. That to me was always important.”
Sonic Youth’s suis generis status means Moore doesn’t need to suffer the anxiety of influence. Rather, he is free to write about his musical interests and obsessions in ways that nonetheless shed life on his inner life as an artist. “I wanted to talk about Patti Smith’s first book, Seventh Heaven, this poetry book that had this androgynous vocabulary,” he says by way of an example. “All those documents were referencing subcultures that had pre-existed, whether it was the Beat culture of Allen Ginsberg or the experimental writing of William Burroughs. It was these first punk rock documents that led you into discovering this lineage of underground culture.” He sought to write about these matters without it becoming “too much Professor Moore,” as his editor would sometimes scribble in the margins. Faber (in the UK) and Penguin Random House (in the US) are, after all, major publishing houses and they naturally wanted Moore’s “music story as opposed to too much theoretical weight.”
Why was I so interested in what was going on with the androgyny of Patti Smith on a subway platform?
Thurston Moore
Moore gets the balance just right by embodying both fan(zine writer) and musician throughout the narrative. Every textual digression from his own work therefore serves to illustrate what makes him tick. It’s Moore’s fandom that allows him the means to ask pertinent questions of himself. “You knew that you were in this place of being attracted to the more subversive signals coming out of the culture,” he says. “Why? For me that question is something I wanted to approach in my book. Like, why was I so interested in what was going on with the androgyny of Patti Smith on a subway platform or a picture of Johnny Rotten spitting beer into the audience?” he wonders. “I was the only one in my community and my school that was attracted to that.” But it turns out he wasn’t completely alone. “I realised in my history that there was one other person and we were kind of a duo. I wanted to write about that person, which I do in the book quite a bit. It’s a young gentleman named Harold Paris. I thought I would make that the primary narrative.” Thurston and Harold made those formative excursions into New York City to experience the underground nightlife, however their friendship ultimately didn’t survive the formation of Sonic Youth. According to Moore, “the story changes when I meet Lee [Ranaldo] and Kim [Gordon] and the succession of different drummers. That becomes its own story.” The book nonetheless allows Moore to pay tribute to his old friend and I suspect the writing of it offered some sense of closure for him too.
Sonic Life stakes out unique territory with a series of smaller, more personal counter cultural moments that are bursting with life in the telling. The reader subsequently feels like they are witnessing history in the margins, which makes Moore’s story more relatable even as it feels conjured from the aether. There’s a wonderful moment in the book where Moore describes William Burroughs making quite the entrance at a Patti Smith CBGB show:
It was like Moses parting the Red Sea. They picked one of the tables up into the air and slammed it down, right next to where Harold and I sat cowering, then banged a candle in a fat red jar onto the empty table. Then, through the violent wake, came William Burroughs and his assistant James Grauerholz, special guests of their friend Patti.
I even feel a vicarious thrill mentioning this scene to Moore. “Well, it’s a remarkable event,” he says. “For me, it was also this thing of, ‘Who am I to write a book?’ Most music memoirs are based on the fact that you have these incredible meetings with remarkable people and these events that happen in your life, whether it becomes your addiction to drugs and alcohol or whatever. And I don’t have those eruptions. I mean, there’s familial death, there’s relationship breakups, but there’s nothing huge and monstrous. My life is fairly ‘tame’ in that respect. I did realise that what’s interesting are these smaller magical moments that happen, such as the table being crashed next to you and then all of a sudden: William Burroughs! And realising that ninety-nine percent of the people around you have no idea what’s going on. They don’t know that’s William Burroughs, but I do and I’m sort of studying it, I’m looking at it. There’s something really magical about that. Or just walking into CBGB and a beer bottle whizzing by my head as I’m entering. Or Richard Hell trying to rub his entry stamp onto the back of my hand. These tiny events are where the charms are. So I wanted to let those be my major events.”
My book was about ten times longer than it is. I had to chop it down.
Thurston Moore
“My book was about ten times longer than it is,” Moore admits. “I had to chop it down. I was a little afraid of content, because I didn’t think I had enough personal content to make it that worthwhile. So I really wanted to have it be journalistic and write about the documents. I was reviewing almost every single record that came out from like, 74 onwards. And every band we played with, I would give them a potted backstory. A lot of that is shorn,” he says. “When I handed in the first manuscript, my senior editor in New York was extremely congratulatory, but said, ‘It’s too long. This is not like a three volume Churchill biography.’” Moore laughs at the memory. “He said, ‘Have you ever read Ulysses?’ And I was like, ‘No.’ ‘Well, you wrote two of ’em!’ It’s a good problem to have, I suppose,” he adds. My disappointment at not getting to read the uncut version of Sonic Life is assuaged by Moore’s suggestion that there’s “another book out there waiting.”
I ask him whether he was inspired by any other music histories. Having recently reread Michael Azerrad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life, which features a chapter on Sonic Youth, I offer that as a point of reference. “I remember when it came out, it was the first book that was dealing with the initial alternative rock culture of the USA that had come to play during the 1980s with these bands like us, Hüsker Dü, Minutemen and Black Flag,” he explains. “What I realised from reading that book was that the writer wasn’t in the audience at the time. It was him discovering it as a writer researching and then being really interested in it. There was something entirely lacking in the text for me: What was it like actually being there in the audience when that band was on stage? It’s interesting you brought that book up,” Moore continues, “because I thought right away after reading it so many years ago, if I ever do write about these bands in that time period of which I was so involved with, I would want to write about the feelings of it, what it was like to be in that kind of ineffable place that almost is beyond words. So I appreciate that book because of its wanting to detail this history, but there was something emotionally removed from it.”
Sonic Life successfully grants the reader access to the emotional reality of gigs and events that journalists’ histories are unequipped to allow. For example, a particular show in LA takes on strange significance as Ranaldo was using an amp he had borrowed from The Minutemen’s D. Boon. Later that night, Boon died in a horrific van accident. The amp is then a symbol of friendship, as well as a talisman of death. “Those kinds of things you’re only going to find in my book,” says Moore. “I think Lee probably might have mentioned that to other people through the years, but it’s not in any history books.”
Sonic Youth were a band who wore their literary inspirations on their sleeves in thrilling fashion, weaving the worlds of Philip K. Dick, William Gibson or the Beats into their sonic tapestry. Now that Moore has written a long-form narrative himself, I wonder how important literature was to Sonic Youth. “Funnily enough, that was never something that I thought brought us together. When I met Kim and Lee, it wasn’t like we were meeting at a place where we all had the same kind of library. Lee started really getting into reading a lot of the Beat canon early on in the band’s formation, but it’s not what brought us together. It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, I’m really into Burroughs.’ Everybody in some sense was aware of this radical literature that was around us at any given time. But the fact that we would also share, like, Philip K. Dick books, it was a real familial dynamic. It was just like, ‘Have you read this?’ And Lee was really responsive to it and I was very responsive to what he was doing. The fact that Lee became very engaged with his own aspects of literature and publishing himself, that was just happenstance. Certainly Bob Bert and Steve Shelley weren’t like that. I mean, they’re readers, but they’re not like Lee, where he’s actually fully engaged. Kim’s thing was a little different, always very aware and involved with contemporary literature.”
Moore talks about going on the road with Mudhoney and how the differences between their touring lifestyles manifested. “Like, the back seat of their van was full of beer bottles and the back seat of our van was full of paperbacks,” he recalls. “It changes when we meet a band like Pavement. Malkmus is very literary conscious and that is something new. In some ways it’s the first people we connect with and they’re definitely a generation younger than us. They were the kids who were in the front row, and then they start a band like Pavement and then they get involved with us. That was a big shift, these relationships we’d have with younger musicians. We became by the late 80s, early 90s, the big brother, big sister band.” Not least of which to a little band known as Nirvana.
The Nirvana material in the book is insightful and heartfelt, with Moore uniquely placed to articulate what made the band so special. He writes “that there would never be anything as beautiful as what my bandmates and I had witnessed while on tour with Nirvana, that month before Nevermind hit. Each night was a spiritual communion between musician and audience, each night a reminder of why we chose this life.” Moore is open about the fact that the Nirvana part of his story helped make Sonic Life a reality. Although he had considered publishing the book himself via him and his wife Eva Prinz’s Ecstatic Peace Library imprint, he ultimately “wanted it to exist within that strata of aboveboard music memoirs.” This meant getting a book agent, who asked him for a few strong chapters, including one about Nirvana, reasoning that they’re “the highest profile band since the Beatles” and Moore had “some intimacy” with them. Moore agreed, producing a rough draft of a chapter about first seeing Nirvana at Maxwell’s. “That’s what generated this book being published by a corporate publisher.”
“I didn’t feel it was disingenuous,” Moore continues. “For me, first seeing that band, it was very catalytic. But at the same time, I didn’t want to monetise Kurt Cobain and Nirvana in my story at all. After all that’s been said and written about that band and about him, I knew that the only thing I could add to the narrative was my own personal feelings about it, without getting too weepy or anything, because I never really felt that weepy about it anyway. I did know that I had content there and I did know that it was very personal and I cherished it. I was,” he notes, “somewhat careful about how I shared it. There’s certainly things I hold back in this book, like how I feel about certain people, whether it be Kim or Lee or Steve or Bob, or Richard Edson, or this person or that person, or even Kurt or Courtney. It changes the patina of the book quite a bit once you start getting into peccadilloes and you start divulging personal asides about people and relationships. Especially when they’re really intimate like in a marriage and in the context of a band. In some ways, I do know that’s something that a lot of people would like to read,” he laughs. In all seriousness though, Sonic Life is all the better for avoiding such matters.
“I wasn’t really interested in defining myself at all with Sonic Life,” Moore explains, returning to the idea of being a cypher in his own story. “I just really wanted to talk about the magic moments of other bands and events and records and magazines.” He’s achieved that and then some, for Sonic Life is as intimate as it needs to be, right where it counts: about the music.
Main feature image by Ebet Roberts (Thurston Moore at the Tibetan Freedom Concert on Randall’s Island, New York City 1997)
Sonic Life: A Memoir is published by Faber on 26 October 2023
Thurston Moore’s UK book tour in November includes stops at Monorail (Glasgow) and the Southbank Centre (London)
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