Kool thing
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Sonic Youth performing in Italy last year; photo by _endless_ via Flickr.
Today ‘Goodbye 20th Century,’ a biography of Sonic Youth by David Browne, is reviewed by David French. It’s a strange review, positing that ‘there was nothing to compare’ the band’s 1988 record ‘Daydream Nation’ to. The MC5, Brian Eno and Iggy Pop leap to mind, for starters, but perhaps I quibble.
More interesting is the idea that a band might have a biography. Music publicists certainly think so -- the band histories they provide with new music releases are usually called biographies -- but can a band really have its own life? When it comes to Sonic Youth -- a band that has created loud, relentlessly adventurous, complex and challenging rock for more than thirty years -- there must be both a band life and the interwoven lives of its four regular members. Browne warns that this bio has little in the way of lurid sex and drug stories, but there are still individuals making all that noise. And sometimes a little trouble.
Guitar player Lee Ranaldo, a founding member of the band, has been publishing books of poetry and prose for years. This excerpt -- with a bit of rock-n-roll craziness -- is from ‘Metholated Webs -- 1980-1984.’
about 1 am, just returned from rosinante’s pub where we all met after lydia’s performance. where roli got thrown out in what was nearly a drunken brawl; he got too excited and germanicly drunk, wanted to crack a bottle over lyle’s head just to hear the sound of it! they had to come and drag him away, the whole bar watching, bartender in his white apron and roli really wild and screaming “wimps! you’re all wimps!” or “rrrimps!” w his accent. he was half putting on and half serious, at once drunk out of his mind and stone cold sober, completely and totally himself. they threw him out and thom almost got into the fray w some guy looked like kenny rogers who seemed just to be waiting for a chance to jump in. it was an exciting moment, we were brought alive and all focused for a moment on what was happening to this one person. roli let himself go, didn’t give a ... for propriety or self-picture or anything—he wailed with the moment. so as sorry as it was in one way, in another it was a liberation, which is always grand; it was a shedding of veils and an exposé of what lies lurking. bravo! everyone came to attention around him.
Carolyn Kellogg