THURSTON MOORE INTERVIEW (2020): “Were Sonic Youth really that well-known?”
In July 2020 I interviewed Thurston Moore over the telephone for a short Q&A which was to run alongside my five-star review of his latest album, By The Fire, for the September issue of Record Collector [#509]. Both of those bits are available on the magazine’s website: https://recordcollectormag.com/reviews/album/by-the-fire
Moore is hardly the most taciturn interviewee in the music world and Sonic Youth are my favourite band of all time, so we ended up chatting for quite a while. Inevitably I ended up with reams of copy that couldn’t make the short word count for the Q&A. Had I had been savvier with my content, I would’ve hawked the unused sections to a different publication. But I, erm, didn’t.
This was during the pandemic and with no live work on the cards, Moore was busy working on what would turn out to be his memoir, Sonic Life, now set to be published by Faber & Faber in October 2023. In anticipation of that tome and also in honour of the incredible Sonic Youth archive album, Live In Brooklyn 2011 (which documents the art-rockers’ final US concert), I thought I would publish parts of the interview that didn’t make it into the pages of Record Collector.
I have edited the conversation down, here and there. But not that much. As such, it ought to contain plenty of material for Moore’s fans to enjoy, including his positive outlook (past and present), the introduction of Viv Albertine to the music of Dinosaur Jr (much to the ex-Slits guitarist’s horror), Sonic Youth’s infamous appearance at All Tomorrow’s Parties festival, and a slight dig at the conservative music of Fat White Family.
Enjoy!
How has 2020 been for you so far?
Well, you know. It’s a bit of a conflicted situation, as it is for most people. I don’t really think there’s anything good to say about a virus like this that is sort of attacking humanity. But I’ve been making the best of it, as I think a lot of people have. I think it is creating situations that are curious and interesting that probably wouldn’t be happening if there wasn’t such a situation. It’s certainly prohibited me from travelling, which is where most of my work is. Touring. That’s what I do. I’ve done that for 30-plus years. To not tour means to try to find other ways to stay working. I’ve been doing a lot of writing which has been really good and something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time. I’ve been able to stay put in one place and focus on that. I’ve been writing a lot of music essaying about being young in the ’70s and discovering what I loved about music and what I wanted to do as a vocation. I’ve recorded a record! I did that. I’ve been keeping busy in my little flat in West London.
I like the fact that there are not many aeroplanes in the sky. Usually around this time of day, the sky is lacerated with chemtrails and you don’t see that anymore. But I understand it comes with some issues. I think a lot of people are contemplating their own reality in the world right now. It’s a topsy-turvy time.
My impression is that you’re quite an optimistic person. Is that accurate?
I suppose so, yeah. I’ve always felt lucky. I don’t really feel that I have any disabilities in my life. I grew up in a fairly optimistic time in the ’70s, during the post-Vietnam War fallout. The ’70s in the USA were fairly liberal, with Jimmy Carter as President. Then in 1980 it changed with Ronald Reagan coming in and this constant enforcement of that kind of state. But I’ve always had a positive outlook and I guess it comes from my family. My mother was, and continues to be, an extremely upbeat and positive person so I think that rubs off on you.
It’s weird because when getting involved in punk rock and no wave and stuff, that music had a tendency to be very nihilist. I think I also appreciated it for its joy. There was a bit of joy in its anger. I thought that was very important. Even with no wave, as dark, atonal and noisy as it was, there was a certain absurdist happiness in that whole scene. It was kind of fun. James Chance and Lydia Lunch and everybody, they were wild and funny people even though they were making this really damaged, dark and nihilistic noise music.
I see that as something that’s overlooked. When people talk about hardcore and punk rock, it’s always about this aggressive, testosterone-fuelled teenage anger coming out of the early ’80s. That’s the easiest thing to see but, at the same time, it was really conscientious music. There was a real collective energy and what I witnessed was nothing but fun. It was a place to have an alternative lifestyle that was full of agreed-upon good times. It was a calling for a lot of kids who felt like they didn’t belong to the standards that were set by their societies, anyway. It was a smart scene, too. As well as the happiness in it, there’s the intelligence of it. There were a lot of ideas being shared. Just coming out of Dischord Records alone, in [Washington] DC, were bands like Minor Threat and figures like Ian MacKaye and his brother Alex. They were sharing lots of positive ideas that weren’t really being found so much in other genres of music, at least in the mainstream.
Is By The Fire an optimistic record?
I think every record I’ve ever done is optimistic. I mean, there’s some melancholy and there’s some anger, but there’s always optimism so, yeah, I think it’s totally optimistic. That title, By The Fire, is all about communication for me. There’s this film that Julien Temple made about Joe Strummer where he uses this device where he’s talking to Joe’s older friends from back in the 101ers days and they’re all sitting around a fire, trading stories. I thought that was such a cool thing. It’s kind of what we all do now anyway, online. It’s like one universal campfire. We’re all talking and debating and dialoguing. And shouting. The title is about this idea of communication which I think is optimistic because, with this whole thing of being locked down, that’s a bit of prison term, isn’t it? Lock-down. It makes you think of yourself as being imprisoned. I find it just the opposite. People are communicating more off-the-hook than ever, just because of being sequestered in their homes. There’s this necessity to Zoom, talk and share, and all this kind of thing. I find it really interesting.
Speaking of optimism, is Donald Trump on his way out [as President]?
I hope so, if there are enough people who actually go to the polls. The major problem would be people not going. But I think people will go because it’s a different scenario than it was four years ago. Four years ago, most liberal-conscious people were led to believe that there was no way in hell this person would ever become the leader of the USA. They were told he wasn’t. They were told, hours before the polls closed, that Democratic hopeful Hillary Clinton was 80 percent in favour to win. So why go out and vote? She’s gonna win anyway. There’s no way that ass-hat is going to win! It was a joke. That was the most devious thing about it: leading people to believe it was a no-contest. And then, boom! I don’t think that’s going to be the case at this point. I think everybody is going to show up. I think more people are going to show up. Let’s put it that way.
He lost the popular vote anyway. It’s a little tricky in the USA because they have this Electoral College which represents the ratio of different numbers of people. It’s a nefarious system of counting votes because it goes back to slave-ownership days. It was geared for that demographic so that’s a really heinous aspect of the voting system. It’s hard to overturn things but you just keep pushing against them. Keep fighting. Things can change. I hope there will be a change. I can’t imagine if there isn’t. I only have so many years on this planet. Why are they taking up so much of our time with these bozos who are put in charge?
There are some pretty nifty guitar solos on this album, courtesy of James Sedwards. I didn’t really have you down as a guitar solo guy before James appeared.
Well, it just wasn’t something that was as specific in Sonic Youth. There was always some perception of Lee [Ranaldo] being the lead guitarist and I was the rhythm guitarist, yet there was such a blurred line there. Lee was certainly a higher technique guitarist. He came out of studying guitar playing where he could exact more traditional motifs and play more melodic leads. Maybe I wasn’t interested in doing that so much. I was more into what was happening in the full picture of the music. I never thought about trying to play “lead guitar”. I didn’t think it was necessary, anyway. I felt it was something that had already been abolished on the first Ramones album. So to actually play lead guitar? I didn’t really care.
When I heard the first Damned single and Brian James had a bit of a lead going on, I was a little taken aback. “I thought we’d got rid of that! What’s going on here?” Mixed signals. I didn’t really think about it until the late ’80s. I think when I first accepted the notion that great, classic lead guitar playing can coexist in the music scene that we were part of was when I heard J Mascis play as a young kid after Dinosaur Jr first started. It was a hairs-on-the-back-of-the-neck kind of moment. It actually worked and it was really great. And that brings you back into appreciating Jimmy Page or Tony Iommi and things like this. The other amazing guitarists who were playing lead in that [hardcore] scene were people like Greg Ginn of Black Flag. He was playing leads all the time but they were so idiosyncratic. And they had nothing to do with Jimmy Page!
James is somebody who has studied Jimmy Page as well as being somebody who regards The Fall as the greatest band of all time, so that kind of disparity, and that connection between those two things, is fantastic. I never really thought about him as a lead guitar player when I started working with him. I just needed a guitarist to work with and he was so good. It wasn’t until we were doing The Best Day and there were a couple of songs and I was like, “James, you actually play lead guitar. Why don’t you try something?” When he did, I thought, “Oh my god. I’m really undervaluing this person.” So now I always have him in mind when writing. I also think I wouldn’t want that to happen on every composition or every song. It would be kind of rote. Some people would be happy about it but I don’t think he feels it’s necessary either. I don’t think he feels he’s being undersold. On the song ‘Cantaloupe’, it’s incredible. When I wrote that song and we recorded it, the section was his for the lead. He went in and did it in, like, one take. I couldn’t play like that to save my life. This total melodic sense and this whole mastery of playing. There’s a certain artistry to it that is really impressive. I think it takes that song and just elevates it. I know when people listen to it they go, “Whoa! That guitar’s just smoked! Well played, sir!” That kind of thing. I’m totally okay with that.
Most of the time I feel a bit allergic to too many guitar solos but if it’s Dinosaur Jr it’s always amazing. It’s hard to pinpoint the difference.
A little goes a long way. I recall seeing Viv Albertine from The Slits at All Tomorrow’s Parties, when she was making her return to music. Dinosaur Jr was playing and I told her “I’m going to go over and see this band. They’re friends of mine. You should check them out.” We went over and stood by the monitor board. They were amazing. J was just shredding through all his effects pedals and everything, doing this insane lead guitar thing. Viv yelled in my ear, “This is horrible! I thought we’d got rid of this! This is everything we fought against!” Then she just left. Haha. This long-haired guy playing fourteen-minute leads? She was like, “Argh! Get me out of here!” I didn’t even think about that. I’d never thought through that prism before. “This is what you like? This is a disaster!”
Are you involved in the treasure trove of Sonic Youth archive recordings that’s been appearing on Bandcamp of late?
I am. I’m certainly kept aware of it. It’s being administered mostly through the hard work of Steve Shelley. He’s been fantastic in keeping a real catalogue of these recordings and figuring out how to release them in a way that isn’t too over-saturating to the, erm, Bandcamp marketplace. We’ve been unearthing things. That’s been fun. He has taken it upon himself to actually listen to all these recordings that were made mostly from the early ’90s onwards. They became more prolific as the years went by because the technology would allow us to record all the shows.
It’s been good because people have been contacting us; tape-traders and people who have a cassette of a concert that was recorded in the south of France in 1987 or something they’d forgotten about. And there it is. Not everything is up to scratch. We’re not putting out every moment of Sonic Youth. They’re things that we all agree are okay to put out there. I can tell you there are a lot of live takes that I would never want to be out there in the stream because the singing is off-key, especially on my part. With the early stuff it’s like, “What in God’s name? How could anybody in the audience even accept somebody singing like that?” It was so damaged. But you’re young and learning how to deal with staying in tune with extremely discordant music. There are documents like that which will stay buried.
I was interested to hear the set from All Tomorrow’s Parties in 2000 which has its place in Sonic Youth mythology as a concert where the crowd started booing and jeering, and weren’t very happy because it was too arty.
That was an early ATP. I think it was the second or third one. When we were asked to do it, it was presented to us that ATP was a festival for more experimental music, like you’re maybe not supposed to go out and play your hits. That was the impression I had. There was some instrumental guitar piece that I had done solo at club called The Cooler in New York. I introduced it to the band and we did that for the first time at that gig. We decided to do that gig where it was going to be this instrumental music that we were working on, and I thought it was going to be great. In fact, I thought it was great when we played. I realised the vibe from the audience was not what I was expecting but I was a little caught up in what we were doing. It wasn’t until I left the stage and everybody was standing in front of the dressing room area and I could tell from the look on everyone’s faces. “That… was… interesting.”
The review in the NME was infamous because it was basically going “Why in God’s name would a band go onstage and do this to us?” There was a picture of me with a guitar behind my head. We had just put out Goodbye 20th Century, which was Sonic Youth covering twentieth-century composition music, and we got booed at that concert as well, when we played in London. It was great because the NME had printed “Goodbye Twentieth Century, Goodbye Talent.” What a fantastic image. We used that for the cover of the record. It was an SYR release.
In a way, it pointed towards where we were going anyway. It was right before Jim O’Rourke joined the band. We created our own label to do music like that because it wasn’t of interest to Geffen Records who we were recording for. So we came up with this compromise where we would just put them out and they would put out the song-based records. It was a nice agreement while it lasted.
You might expect that reaction at Reading Festival or somewhere like that. But you’d think All Tomorrow’s Parties audiences would be a bit more openminded in the first place.
I did and I kind of still do. When I think back on it, it still confuses me a little bit. Why would that be such an affront? The expectations for a band like us should be kind of out-the-window anyway, so to think that we would come out and play… what? We were really that well-known? I always thought of us as this obscure band, even when we were playing to thousands of people. I see footage of us online and we’re playing in front of tens of thousands of people. What? It’s like this other world I was living in. We were doing that, to that many people, and they were actually okay with it?
It was an interesting period. I feel like it was something I can’t foresee happening again. I don’t see too many bands playing that kind of music to a larger audience right now at all. Well, no one’s playing to any audience right now. When this group [The Thurston Moore Band] played at Glastonbury we were on a fairly modest stage but even the bands on that stage were playing pretty conservative music. Even the “wild” bands. Even if it was Big Fat Family. Or Fat White Family. The radical aspect of the band was that they were disorderly but I didn’t find the music very radical. To me the most the radical thing that was happening was mostly in hip-hop, not so much in rock ’n’ roll music.
What was the reaction like on the Spirit Counsel tour when you were playing an hour-long song with no vocals?
It was good. I never got a sense of people being upset. More than anything, it was audiences being rather surprised if they didn’t know that’s what we were up to. After the ten-minute mark they’d be thinking, “What is this?” But it is very musical and it’s amped-up and it’s this thing that’s constantly progressing. For the most part, when we would end that first piece, which was also the entire set, there would be a beat of silence and then just appreciation. “Wow! What the fuck was that all about?” In a way, I didn’t have an anxiety about our audiences accepting me going out and playing this in clubs. At this point in time, anybody who’s going to come and see a gig with my name on it, I think they realise it’s not going to be Foo Fighters!
Thank God!
I’m just saying I know there’s a relationship there with that kind of scene but I don’t think that’s the expectation. They’re not going to hear ‘Teen Age Riot’ or ‘Kool Thing’ or anything. They know that much. Coming out and playing a completely instrumental, 60-minute piece is… Yeah, you’re asking for a little trouble sometimes.
Have you been following the activities of your fellow ex-Sonic Youth members as well?
Yeah. I’m totally aware of what everybody’s doing. But I would never publicly make any commentary on it, to tell you the truth.
Lee’s record with Raül Refree was really good.
Yeah, yeah. I like that he’s really fluid. He’s always changing up from one project to he next. I love that. Both Lee and I come out of that scene. That’s how we met. When I met him in ’79, that’s where we were. That’s what it was all about. I think we both retain that kind of practice of not staying in one place.
Hopefully at some point we’ll be able to hear these new songs live. I don’t know when that will be.
It might be soon. It seems like things are dissipating. We can only hope. It’s a little hard to read behind the lines of the “Oh, it’s going to be another year” or this or that because the story changes from one day to the next so we can only hope for the best, and pay attention to the people who are actually speaking with some modicum of intelligence, without any agenda towards their own political aspirations. I think to be positive is a really good energy to have.
There’s that optimism I was talking about.
Yeah. PMA. Like The Bad Brains. Positive Mental Energy.
Live In Brooklyn 2011 by Sonic Youth is out on Silver Current Records. Sonic Life: A Memoir by Thurston Moore will be published by Faber & Faber in October 2023. Electric Wizards: A Tapestry of Heavy Music, 1968 to the Present by JR Moores is published by Reaktion and already graces the shelves of all good bookshops.
