Burning the Candle at Both Ends
Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation at 35
It may be their most famous and celebrated album, but quite possibly it’s also their most difficult to write about in 2023. I’m not suggesting that Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation is some impenetrably complex release whose music and lyrics defy comprehension and analysis. Or that contemporary standards of morality and ranges of interest inhibit one from writing freely about such an album. But rather that so much has already been written about the album in question over the past three and a half decades that there is very little of any originality left to be said about it.
Regardless, the 35th anniversary of such an album warrants some recognition in the form of analysis and assessment, and I reckon that my Gen-X recollections and observations are as valid as any; hence the attempt that follows forthwith.
Officially released on the 18th of October, 1988, Daydream Nation was issued in the UK on indie label Blast First, which had issued the band’s two previous albums, 1986’s EVOL and 1987’s Sister. In North America, however, the double-length album was issued on the Capitol-distributed Enigma label, making it the first Sonic Youth album to have any sort of major-label backing (which runs contrary to popular belief that 1990’s Goo on DGC was their major-label foray).
The album had been recorded the previous July and August for $30,000 at Greene St. Recording in Soho, and produced by Nick Sansano with input from the band. Sansano was best known at the time for having recorded and mixed several key rap/hip-hop records, most notably Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock’s ‘It Takes Two’ 12-inch single and various tracks from Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back LP. Among other projects, he would go on to be initially entrusted with producing Sonic Youth’s Goo.
Unlike previous studio albums by the band — guitarists Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo, bass guitarist Kim Gordon and drummer Steve Shelley — Daydream Nation consists of generally longer tracks, including several jam- or improvisation-supplemented numbers and the concluding multi-part piece. According to band biographer David Browne, fellow recording artists such as Henry Rollins had been telling the band that they enjoyed the manner in which they “let it fly” on stage and that their studio records “never quite captured that wild, roaming aspect of their music” (Goodbye 20th Century, Hatchette Books, 2008; p. 264). With twelve numbers spread out over four sides, a double album such as Daydream Nation would remedy the situation. Dubious modern-day media such as Wikipedia have stated that the album had to be expanded to double length owing to Moore being on something of an out-of-character “writing spree”. This simply doesn’t compute, however, given the length of most of Moore’s contributions, and in light of the fact that three of the twelve tracks were obviously written by Ranaldo — to say nothing of the fact that no additional Moore compositions from the album’s sessions turned up on related singles and EPs or the Deluxe Edition years later. Ranaldo himself sums it up best when quoted in the liner notes for the 2007 Deluxe Edition of the album:
“We were at least ready for it […]. The few doubles that were coming out back then felt good. The Minutemen’s Double Nickels on the Dime was out, and also Hüsker Dü’s Zen Arcade. The Minutemen were super heavy and we felt like it was a cool classic rock move that had now been validated in indie terms, to one degree or another. And the songs were there for it. Up to that point, any song that made it as far as being recorded was something we planned to use. We weren’t in the habit of bringing in extra material. If we needed twelve songs we brought twelve songs, not twenty.”
The double album opens with ‘Teen Age Riot’, a hard-rocking Moore number that begins with Gordon chanting almost esoterically about “spirit desire” over a mellow guitar prelude (which some allege is based on the ‘Intro’ that opens the band’s 1985 album Bad Moon Rising). This seven-minute track would become something of an anthem for disillusioned Gen-X youth and the ‘grunge revolution’ over the next few years, owing in no small part to its angst-driven lyrics. “Cuz it’s gettin’ kinda quiet in my city’s head,” complains Moore; “It takes a teenage riot to get me out of bed / Right now.” According to some sources, the working title for the track was ‘Rock and Roll for President’, and that the lyrics were inspired by Moore’s vision of the US if Dinosaur Jr.’s J. Mascis were head of state.
This is followed by the rollicking ‘Silver Rocket’, which sounds like a number straight out of the classic Ramones songbook with one’s typical, noisy Sonic Youth guitar flip-out occurring strategically between the second and third verses as if to parody the churning, improvisatory middle section of Led Zeppelin’s ‘Whole Lotta Love’. The nearly four-minute track features a frenzied Moore shouting the almost-indiscernible surreal lyrics (e.g., “Nymphoid clamour fuelling up the hammer, you got to / Fake out the robot and pulse up the zoom”), which can be interpreted as anything from a Philip K. Dick-style approach to space travel to an abstract take on shooting heroin. According to Byron Coley’s liner notes for the 2007 Deluxe Edition of the album, the term ‘silver rocket’ was New York slang for a miniature ‘airplane’ bottle of vodka — the “beverage of choice” amongst underaged CBGBs patrons at the time “if Bowery litter was any evidence”.
Closing out side 1 of the original double-vinyl configuration is ‘The Sprawl’, a grungy ebb-and-flow rocker driven largely by Shelley’s heavy drumming. Truly a product of its literary time, the number’s lyrical theme draws heavily on William Gibson’s Sprawl Trilogy of science-fiction novels, which are set in a futuristic super-city that stretches from Boston to Atlanta. The story goes that Gordon had just read the recently published Mona Lisa Overdrive, the final installment in the series. The number also owes a lot to Denis Johnson, whose 1986 novel The Stars at Noon apparently served as Gordon’s primary source for the first verse’s lyrics. Over seven and a half minutes in length, ‘The Sprawl’ on a musical level truly represents the sort of extended studio pieces that the band had been aiming for, with its final three and a half minutes unfolding in waves of layered guitar improv before evaporating in a cloud of feedback and glittering stray notes.
Side 2 kicks off with ‘ ’Cross the Breeze’, another Gordon vocal showcase; this one taking the form of an upbeat hard-rocker bookended by a prelude and an interlude that serve as Sonic Youth’s take on that rather dubious ’80s contrivance known as ‘thrash metal’. Gordon, in fact, is quoted in the aforementioned Deluxe Edition liner notes as saying, “That song was directly inspired by listening to Slayer’s South of Heaven record.” Gordon’s lyrics are not particularly poignant or polished, but her vocals are some of the strongest of her career — a far cry from the snarling and groaning ‘experiments’ that would come to define much of her ’90s and early 2000s output. According to Chris Lawrence at the official Sonic Youth website, the seven-minute number had the curious working title of ‘Dinosaur (Wombats!)’.
Up next is the grungy, hard-rocking ‘Eric’s Trip’, the first of Ranaldo’s three turns at the mike. Reminiscent of 1950s Beat poetry in both style and subject matter, the surrealistic lyrics were largely inspired by Eric Emerson’s appearance in a 1966 split-screen experimental film by Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey. (Emerson, it is worth noting, was the actor-dancer who in 1967 hindered the release of The Velvet Underground’s debut album when he threatened legal action over the unauthorised use of his facial image on the jacket’s back cover.) “I saw Warhol’s Chelsea Girls around then [1988] for the first time,” Ranaldo told Byron Coley in 2007, “and just copied down Eric’s words verbatim in the darkened theatre; constructed first verse and general concept of the song from there.” Hence those eponymous lines:
This is Eric’s trip
We’ve all come to watch him slip
He’s slipping all the way to Texas
Can you dig it?
Musically, the track relies heavily on Moore’s use of a specially (de)constructed guitar. Once owned by painter David Bowes, the beat-up Les Paul Drifter had been relieved of its frets and fitted with four bass-guitar strings. This guitar was also used in a photograph for a Daydream Nation promo poster. (Sadly, it would be among a vanload of guitars stolen from the band a little over a decade later.) Under four minutes in length, ‘Eric’s Trip’ economically employs all the right elements to make it one of the most memorable of Ranaldo’s early Sonic Youth numbers. Its legacy has been substantially enhanced by the fact that New Brunswick singer-songwriter Rick White chose to name his low-fi grunge-era band after the track two years following Daydream Nation’s release.
Capping off the first record is the seven-and-a-half-minute ‘Total Trash’, a tuneful hard-rocker that brings to mind ’70s ‘cruising songs’, glam rock and the more accessible exponents of early American punk. As Rolling Stone observed in their contemporary review of the album, the track would not have sounded terribly out of place on Alice Cooper’s School’s Out album from ’72. Moore’s sketchy lyrics are probably the least notable and memorable of the entire album, but his delivery of them is smooth and holds one’s attention. “It started the top / Now it’s spirallin’ down,” observes the singer esoterically, foreshadowing the sonically spiralling guitars of the frantic jam that comprises the number’s three-minute middle section. Following Moore’s iteration of the initial verse and chorus, the track fades out during a gale-force flip-out of feedback and squalling effects.
Record 2 of the double vinyl set opens with the second of Ranaldo’s three turns at the mike. Less than four and a half minutes in length, ‘Hey Joni’ is a fast and furious hard-rocker augmented with jangly dapples and moments of thrash guitar. As with ‘Eric’s Trip’ and most other Ranaldo compositions before and after, the often surreal lyrics owe a lot to the Beat writers of the 1950s and ’60s; e.g.:
Shots ring out from the center of an empty field
Joni’s in the tall grass
She’s a beautiful mental jukebox
A sailboat explosion
A snap of electric whipcrack
The lines “In this broken town can you still jack in / And know what to do” appear to reference the direct linking of the human brain with computers (‘jacking in’) as found in the aforementioned Sprawl Trilogy by sci-fi novelist William Gibson. Also, according to various sources, the title is a takeoff on ‘Hey Joe’ of Billy Roberts and Jimi Hendrix Experience fame, while the ‘Joni’ character is loosely based on singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell. Given the Beat influences and references to ‘Joni’ and ringing shots, one cannot help but wonder if the lyrics were to some extent inspired by Joan Vollmer, the ill-fated wife of Beat writer William S. Burroughs. Still, probably the song’s most famous line is the one that doubled as a direct satiric affront in the era of Nancy Reagan and the ‘War on Drugs’: “Tune out the past, and just say yes.”
What’s sometimes described as a ‘tape collage’ comes next in the running order. ‘Providence’ consists primarily of a low-fi recording of Moore playing the piano at his mother’s house mixed with a recording of a Peavey Roadmaster tube amplifier overheating. Superimposed over this are two recordings that Firehose bassist (and Ciccone Youth collaborator) Mike Watt had left on Moore and Gordon’s answering machine while he and his band were in Providence, Rhode Island for a show. The messages refer to some technical cables that Moore had purchased and misplaced while meeting up with Firehose at a New York City show the previous night. “Did you find your shit?” asks Watt. “We couldn’t find it in the van at all… We were wondering if you looked in that trash can. When we threw out that trash, man … with the bag in your hand, did you dump it?” Watt also warns Moore that he has to be more careful using “mota” (Watt’s code word for marijuana) because his “fuckin’ memory goes out the window”. With the allusion to marijuana and the reference to the cables as “shit”, the messages imply that Moore has misplaced his illegal drugs. In the greater scheme of things, the two-and-a-half-minute track serves as intriguing ‘comic relief’ just a little past the halfway point of the double album.
The album’s lightest moment is followed by what is unquestionably its most commercially compatible one. Mellow guitar intro and all, the five-minute ‘Candle’ actually sounds like a semi-acoustic ballad dressed up in artsy hard-rock clothing to fit an album steeped in urban angst and ’80s aggression. Rolling Stone called the track “gorgeous” — an adjective usually reserved for Lou Reed ballads where New York critics were concerned. Whatever commercial potential the tune may have had in 1988–89, however, would probably have been negated anyway if the radio and video programmers had gotten hip to the drug-laced lyrics about “crystal cracking”, a “falling snow girl”, and changing one’s mind “before it burns out” — all written from the point of view of a “cocker on the rock”. Crack cocaine and crystal meth references aside, ‘Candle’ is one of those ’80s numbers that would have been a top-twenty hit in a perfect world.
Side 3’s fourth and final track is the third of Ranaldo’s three lyrical and vocal contributions to the album. Rarely performed live (even in its early days), the four-and-a-half-minute ‘Rain King’ may indeed be the album’s overlooked gem. Musically, this booming and lumbering-yet-fast-paced number is probably the album’s heaviest track. The blatant use of wah pedal following the “sparks” hook lent the number a certain uniqueness in 1988, inadvertently connecting it with 1960s and ’70s psychedelia. Ranaldo doesn’t as much sing his lyrics as what he does recite or chant them; which is appropriate, given their surreally poetic nature; e.g.:
Crossfire Rain King with his Cadillac kid
Marries every dictionary from his trainyard bliss
His lips a fountain, his daylight sparks
Scattershot image king fortunate wheel when?
Keeps a steel drum wedding ring
Pontiac doorknob tent
His mind a countdown, his daylight sparks
According to Chris Lawrence at the official band website, the working title of the track was ‘Ubu/Mellencamp’, suggesting a Pere Ubu and/or John ‘Cougar’ Mellencamp inspiration or tribute.
Side 4 gets off to a rocking start with the punked-up ‘Kissability’. A little over three minutes in length, the track features lyrics and vocals by Gordon. With lines such as “I’ll put you in a movie — don’t you wanna? / You could be a star, you could go far” and a title that brings to mind the 1963 experimental film Kiss, it’s quite obvious that Gordon is paying tribute to pop artist and filmmaker Andy Warhol, who had died the previous year.
The double album concludes with a three-part medley of sorts. The fourteen-minute ‘Trilogy’ consists of ‘The Wonder’ (part a), which segues into ‘Hyperstation’ (part b), and a completely separate track, ‘Eliminator Jr.’ (part z). The three numbers utilise the same or very similar guitar-tunings. According to Steve Shelley in the Deluxe Edition’s liner notes, the three songs were grouped and given the somewhat pretentious but familiar title so as to make fun of 1970s progressive groups like Emerson, Lake & Palmer.
Running roughly four minutes and a quarter, ‘The Wonder’ is a frantically upbeat number with lyrics and vocals by Moore. According to some sources, Moore’s original title was either ‘The Town and the City’ (after Jack Kerouac’s first novel) or ‘Huskeriffic’ (a salute to Hüsker Dü, maybe?). According to Moore (in The Wire No. 58/59, 1989), it was renamed ‘The Wonder’ in reference to mystery writer James Ellroy’s quest to encapsulate the perpetual mystery that lies at the core of historical Los Angeles. Although Moore has reportedly stated that the lyrics were written while walking the streets of Washington, the lyrics themselves suggest LA; e.g.:
See flashing eyes
They’re flashing ’cross to me
Burnin’ up the sky
Sunshinin’ into me
Your locus crown
A cop-killin’ heartbeat
Head’s lookin’ down
Bowin’ out to the street
The lyrics are made all the more effective by the soaring, swirling guitar sounds, which seem to suggest sirens and police lights searching a potential crime scene.
As the guitars settle down, the number morphs into the comparatively laidback ‘Hyperstation’. Clocking in at over seven minutes, it is this section of the ‘Trilogy’ that supplies the album its title (Tonight’s The Day, a line from ‘Candle’, had been previously considered). “It’s an anthem in a vacuum on a hyperstation,” insists Moore; “Daydreaming days in a daydream nation.” According to the Deluxe Edition’s liner notes, the lyrics to ‘Hyperstation’ detailed Moore’s “daily trajectory” during the making of the album. “Take a right out of the Eldridge Street apartment,” explains Moore, “a left on Grand, a right on Bowery, a left on Broome and a right on Greene. I remember writing the lyrics in my head as I cruised to the studio.” Elsewhere in the number, Moore truly encapsulates the era and the plight of the angst-ridden Gen-X’ers he was increasingly addressing with the ominous lines, “There’s bum trash in my hall and my place is ripped / I totalled another amp, I’m callin’ in sick”.
When the pulsing hum has subsided and the last stray notes sparkled and faded, a coda from hell comes ripping through the speakers in the form of ‘Eliminator Jr.’. Under three minutes in length, the track takes its title and section letter (‘z’) from the fact that it sounds like a cross between Eliminator-era ZZ Top and Dinosaur Jr. Written by Gordon, the number’s one complete verse borders on the scatological and inane:
Tears cruise away, packed and then took a shit
The sky is ours, dark stains on his pants
Enough to make him blush around the bone
Take a walk in the park, shit yeah!
However, the “poor rich boy comin’ right through me” that Gordon bemoans in the chorus is allegedly none other than Robert Chambers, the notorious mid-’80s ‘Preppie Killer’ — although I’ve never personally encountered a band confirmation of this common claim.
And on that ‘happy’ note, the music and double album abruptly end.
In terms of packaging, the original 2-LP set was released in a gatefold sleeve with one painting of a candle (Kerze, 1983) by Gerhardt Richter (b. 1932) on the front cover and a different candle painting (Kerze, 1982) by the same artist on the back. The candle paintings serve to reference the song ‘Candle’ and — according to Byron Coley’s liner notes to the Deluxe Edition — also suggest the idea that the band is burning their candle(s) at both ends. A nocturnal photo of the band posing outside what appears to be a Manhattan building graces the inner gatefold. Different photos from the same August/’88 shoot by Michael Lavine are used in the booklet and j-card for the CD and cassette editions. Not unlike the four symbols used on the fourth Led Zeppelin album, a symbol representing a different member of the group appears on each of the four record labels on the double-vinyl edition. All four symbols — specifically Infinity (Ranaldo), Female (Gordon), uppercase Omega (Moore) and a demon baby (Shelley) — appear on the Blast First compact disc. States Steve Shelley in the Deluxe Edition’s liner notes: “We still thought it pretentious to have a double album. That’s why we titled those three songs as a ‘trilogy’ and used the Zoso-style symbols for each of the LP sides. It was our way of making fun of bands like ELP and Zeppelin. And ourselves.”
As was often the case with Sonic Youth albums before and (certainly) after, Daydream Nation was represented with a number of singles, EPs and other related releases in the months prior to and following its initial issue. As was also often the case with Sonic Youth albums, the choice of singles and the manner in which they were released was rather dubious. For example, two alternative live versions of ‘Silver Rocket’ were released as 7-inch singles and distributed through magazines Forced Exposure (Boston) and La Herencia De Los Munster (Spain). The former version also includes a live noise piece entitled ‘You Pose You Lose’ and a live instrumental version of ‘Eliminator Jr.’ retitled ‘Non-Metal Dude Wearing Metal Tee’; while the latter features two live tracks from The Miracle Workers on the flipside. To muddle matters even further, yet another version was used in the song’s video — the version that was made available as ‘Silver Rocket (Take 6)’ on Blasts! EP2, the second in a series of 7-inch releases issued by Sounds magazine in March of 1989. Radio-friendly edits of ‘Teen Age Riot’ and ‘Candle’ were released in 12-inch format, but both were issued as ‘samplers’ or ‘promo’ records in generic Blast First / Enigma sleeves. The ‘Teen Age Riot’ 12-inch also includes the original LP versions of ‘Silver Rocket’ and ‘Kissability’ on the B-side; while the Candle 12-inch EP features a flipside of live tracks from 1988 (‘Hey Joni’) and 1985 (‘Flower’, ‘Ghost Bitch’), as well as a 1983 telephone conversation between Lee Ranaldo and producer Wharton Tiers, discussing the prospect of Sonic Youth releasing a 7-inch single(!). I should also note that the Candle EP wasn’t issued until almost exactly a year after the album’s release. Even more bizarre was the release of ‘Providence’ as a 7-inch promo single — the A-side in stereo, the B-side in mono.
Four music videos were officially made to represent the album and its singles. The band directed their own hipster-cameo-riddled video for the edited version of ‘Teen Age Riot’; Kevin Kerslake, who had previously made videos for tracks from the band’s Sister and EVOL albums, directed a haunting take on the edited version of ‘Candle’; Peter Fowler and the group directed a videotaped quickie for ‘Providence’ to use on the UK’s Snub TV; and Charles Atlas constructed the aforementioned video for ‘Silver Rocket (Take 6)’ from footage shot for Put The Blood In The Music, a documentary film done on Sonic Youth and John Zorn for an episode of The South Bank Show in the UK.
After signing the band and buying off the rights to most of its back catalogue, the David Geffen Company (DGC) reissued a remastered version of the double album on CD and cassette in 1993. In Brazil, a single-LP version of this remastered version was also released. Unlike a famous Russian bootleg edition that had been issued on one 12-inch record two years earlier, the Brazilian LP miraculously avoided omitting half the tracks. A Deluxe Edition of the album was issued by Geffen as a 4-LP box set and a 2-CD package in 2007. In addition to a new master of the original double album, this edition included previously unreleased live versions of the Daydream numbers recorded in 1988–89, Ranaldo’s ‘Home Demo’ version of ‘Eric’s Trip’, and four previously issued cover tunes: The Beatles’ ‘Within You Without You’ (from the 1988 tribute album Sgt. Pepper Knew My Father), Mudhoney’s ‘Touch Me I’m Sick’ (the A-side of a 1989 Sub Pop / Blast First single that has Mudhoney covering Sonic Youth’s ‘Halloween’ on the flipside), Neil Young’s ‘Computer Age’ (from the 1989 Young tribute album The Bridge) and Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band’s ‘Electricity’ (from the 1988 Beefheart tribute album Fast ’n’ Bulbous).
Although initial sales of the original album were far from stellar, the reviews were generally quite positive. Rolling Stone’s Robert Palmer insisted that “Daydream Nation presents the definitive American guitar band of the Eighties at the height of its powers and prescience”. One-time band naysayer Robert Christgau, writing in Playboy, observed that the album “won’t storm the charts — the high-energy monotones of Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon aren’t radio-ready and the functional audio is grungy by 64-track standards. And so what? If you crave stick-to-the-ribs tunes that won’t turn your stomach, Moore and Gordon go 14 for 14 on this double LP, sustaining the extended lengths with an avant version of what Iggy Pop I.D.’d as raw power.” Another reviewer called the album “accessible thrash”.
“Daydream Nation really catapulted us, reflected Moore a few years after the album’s release. “All the records were progressive in the way that we got bigger and bigger, more and more, and taken seriously. The fact that we were staying together so long was also crucial in us being taken seriously. Daydream Nation really solidified it, it was like a big record for us. And then we got into negotiations with major labels. We were into negotiations before Daydream Nation, but we decided not to do it, ’cause it would had come out much later, it would have taken so long to get it going. It was already recorded, but it would have come out a year and a half later and it would have killed it.” (I Dreamed of Noise by Ignacio Julià and Jaime Gonzalo; RUTA 66, 1994; p. 99)
Gordon has insisted that she likes “parts of” the album. “It was a landmark too,” she’s added, “because it was a double album and gatefold.” (Ibid., p. 100)
Steve Shelley has leaned towards Daydream Nation being his favourite SY album, but “[…] it’s a really hard question. There are songs that I’m more satisfied with than others […]. ‘Teen Age Riot’, I think is a really good recording.” (Ibid., p. 100)
As Coley notes in the Deluxe Edition’s liner notes, the album “has subsequently made a vast array of ‘greatest albums of all time’ lists” (Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, Spin, etc.), and has been “lauded in various other ways”. Most notably, it was chosen by the Library of Congress to be added to the National Recording Registry in 2006.
A 2010 Canadian motion picture directed by Michael Goldbach is entitled Daydream Nation. Appropriately, one of the main characters is named Thurston.
On a personal note, there seemed to be so much promise in the air during that time, and Daydream Nation was part and parcel of it. The album was one of a handful released in the late ’80s that seemed to foreshadow or signal a shifting musical paradigm, a generational overhaul, or some sort of cultural renaissance.
Daydream Nation was the last of Sonic Youth’s Eighties albums. True, the Ciccone Youth Whitey Album would be released a short time later, in January of ’89, but that record had actually been recorded prior to the Daydream Nation sessions, between March of ’86 and January of ’88; and besides, technically speaking, The Whitey Album represented a different group — or at least the band’s alter-ego. When the band re-emerged with a true follow-up album, it would be the 1990s and a whole new ball game. Cooler times and kooler things lay ahead.
