What Destruction Sounds Like

Cheap Rent.

That’s the facet of Thurston Moore’s story that resonated the most with me as I read his new memoir Sonic Life. The memoir chronicles Moore’s childhood through his time as the singer-songwriter-guitarist and chief visionary of Sonic Youth, a band that sold its share of albums in the grunge-infused 1990s and influenced a range of the era’s luminaries including Nirvana, Hole, and Beck. In 1978, Moore secured in a New York City apartment for $110 per month. This vantage allowed him routine access as a 20-year-old to the wave of punk rock in the city that featured Patti Smith, Television, Talking Heads, the Ramones, and countless others. Moore was front and center at shows at CBGB and Max’s Kansas City for these and other acts, where he was smitten by punk culture and tried to figure out how he might participate in the scene.

To hear Moore tell it, his New York neighborhood was crime-addled and frightening. He avoided going outside his apartment at certain times, and he had to deal with harassment from bullying tenants and landlords. The “intercom system” of his building involved yelling up to Moore’s window from the street—Yo, Thurston—and Moore tossing down his keys in a sock. Moore was mugged and intimidated during his early years in the place. It didn’t sound like much fun.

Still, $110 a month to live within an easy commute of the club gigs of your rock heroes? I can’t help but remember my own apartment with my then-girlfriend now-wife in Tempe, Arizona, a town where my comparatively small rock and roll dreams came true. The rent at our place by the railroad tracks was $280, or $140 apiece. Every Sunday, Kel and I rode our bikes back from the Safeway with plastic bags of groceries hanging from the handlebars. We had to tolerate the worst kinds of domestic scenes at two a.m., police lights making our one-bedroom bright red then bright blue as the cops carted away an abuser from an apartment or two down. Still, such hassles were more or less background noise for our weekly trips to clubs such as Long Wong’s and the Sun Club to see the Gin Blossoms and Dead Hot Workshop as they began their ascension to national acclaim. I was like Moore. Through cheap rent, I had a front row seat as my heroes went from locals to legends, and I wanted to be like them.

Moore managed to break out of his shyness and start the ball rolling toward Sonic Youth upon meeting his future wife and bandmate, Kim Gordon. Gordon, an artist and musician who came to New York from her native California, seemed smitten by Moore’s lanky, 6’ 6” frame and desire to become part of it all. At the beginning of their romance, Moore pulled together gigs for no wave (an off-shoot of punk) musical artists at a local gallery where Gordon also curated an exhibit, and the pair started getting traction for their new band. Through Gordon, Moore seemed to learn to bridge the gap between himself and those making art around him. It’s hard not to notice the correlation between Gordon’s arrival in his life and Moore figuring out how to be who he wanted to be.

What Moore wanted more than anything was to create not music so much as noise, and with his bandmates, he developed a singular guitar style that focused as much on the random, dissonant sounds a guitar could make as anything you could learn from a Mel Bay book. This approach required a massive number of guitars set up and tuned to weird specifications, and the band also employed as a nebulous songwriting style that relied at least as much on spontaneity as anything resembling a traditional process.

Moore writes in the memoir of a time when punk bass legend Mike Watt visited Sonic Youth while they recorded EVOL, an early album, “[Watt] seemed taken aback by our loose working methods in the studio, two dozen guitars in varying states of disrepair lying around in every corner, song arrangements allowed to formulate and breathe as we went along.” My own band was like Watt’s the Minutemen. We never went into the studio until we knew exactly what to do there. In those hallowed places, you could feel the money being sucked out the door. Moore’s band was Zen enough—or maybe well-off enough—not to worry about such details. I’ve never seen two dozen guitars in any one room save at a guitar shop, another place I get out of as quickly as possible.

Such an iconoclastic perspective served Moore well, and his legacy is unique among rock musicians. No one else—save perhaps his Sonic Youth cohort Lee Ranaldo—has so employed guitar buzzes, scrapes, and odd tunings to advance musical dissonance so far into the cultural mainstream. Sonic Youth released 16 albums and co-headlined Lollapalooza in 1995 before breaking up in 2011, and people typically namedrop them as one of the heavyweight bands of the era, if only for their influence on more commercially successful acts.

I recently had the unenviable task of trying to remind my wife of one of their singles. My attempts to sing “Kool Thing” and “100%” yielded only blank stares. Maybe they weren’t great songs, but they didn’t have to be. The band looked right, loved the right bands, and weren’t afraid to blow up musical convention to see what remained, which turned out to be enough. By the time Moore and Gordon eventually gave up that cheap apartment, they’d signed to David Geffen’s record label and ready to take their swipe at the brass ring. Did Moore make it? I think so. When you start at $110 a month rent, just about anything is up.

(Doubleday, October 24)