I don't have idols, but I do have heroes. Johnny Cash, Tom Waits, Ozzy and Sonic Youth come to mind. Over the years, I've never thought that any of them were bigger than life or meant to be put on a pedestal, but I have always appreciated their songs, their integrity and their contributions to music. Sonic Youth's most recent release, “Sonic Nurse,” is their 19th LP and, like nearly every other recording they've put out, it's groundbreaking to some degree. It's intelligent, sometimes soft and sometimes noisy, almost always abstractly structured. At times it has a message, but mostly it questions. I recently talked with Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth and asked him some questions of my own. My respect for the band was only heightened by his candid, honest remarks, obvious astuteness and dedication to his craft.
How have you managed to stay together as a band for over 23 years?
It's not something you plan; let's just say that. It's a sign that things have been pretty good for us all the way along. When Thurston, Kim and I started we were just kind of always looking ahead and never seemed to look back. We feel pretty good about what we're doing and where we're at, and recognized that there is something special that happens when we all play together. As long as those things are good and we feel good about the new music we're making, why stop?
How has your role in the band changed?
That's an interesting one. I don't actually know. In some cases our roles as they were defined when we started have stayed pretty much the same. The ways in which everybody participates and the way that we create our music, it's really a pretty democratic unit as far as decision making and song writing and all that kind of stuff. Everybody kind of has multiple roles in this band. There are three of us who are singers, we're all composers, and we're all part of all the various decision making processes. We're good at splitting up responsibilities when we need to. It's the way you are and it's kind of a given. It's there from the beginning and it just kind of stays there.
Was it difficult to go from a four piece for so long to a five piece or was it a natural progression?
It wasn't like it was something we were thinking about. It just kind of snuck up on us and happened. We were doing a bunch of work with Jim [O'Rourke]. Late in the ‘90s we started seeing more of each other and hanging out more and Jim was spending more time in New York so he was naturally hanging around our studio a little bit. One thing just led to another. We've never been the kind of band that make those kind of decisions like, “We're going on the road and we need some auxiliary players.” It started with him helping us mix “NYC Ghosts and Flowers” and in the process of that, putting some bass parts down on songs that were, up until then, three-guitar attack songs between me and Thurston and Kim. After that we asked him to come out on the road with us to play those parts live. Immediately we started joking, “Hey, Jim, you do this and you're going to end up in the band.”
Do you think that Jim O'Rourke in any way revitalized Sonic Youth or has it been different than that?
My first reaction would be to say that it's been different than that, but I suppose it's possible that that's an aspect of it. You have a new person in a long-standing relationship to bring certain aspects of a new energy to it. He brings a new outlook and a new voice into a mix that has been sort of the same for a long time. So in some regards I would say yeah... well, revitalized sounds like something that wasn't vital to begin with and made vital again, so I don't like that connotation of it... but I would certainly say that he's added a new energy to the band which has been very positive.
It seems as though every album has Sonic Youth's distinct fingerprint, yet each one is entirely set apart from the others. Is this a conscious decision or is it just how the band makes music?
It's pretty much just how we operate to make our music. We have never entered a recording project with any preconceptions, any concepts. We organize the time we are going to spend together by blocking it out on the calendar and then we just start playing. Whatever musical ideas we bring into the room just grow and generate and that's pretty much how the music is written. It's very intuitive and it's not preconceived at all. The fact that they turn out different just implies that we're growing or changing, or I suppose more than anything else it's reflective of what interests we have at any given time.
Musically, how do you and the rest of the band challenge yourselves? How does the band continue to do something new?
Anybody who considers themselves an artist on some level is going to be aware of those things: not falling into the same patterns and things like that. I don't know if we consciously challenge ourselves in that way. I mean, I'm sure we do but it's done on a very intuitive basis, the same way that any artists work. We know what we've done and where we've been, and we're not the kind of band that likes to repeat past things. Yet we are a group that speaks a certain common language and you can't erase that. Sonic Youth is always going to sound like Sonic Youth no matter what we do because of that language and because we play a certain way and that's not going to change. And as far as challenging ourselves, I guess the challenge is to keep ourselves from being bored and boring with what we're doing. It's more of a work in process than a challenge. You dig into the process that you've developed and that you continue to develop and just kind of move it along and see what happens. We get together and it's like, “This is so much fun, let's see what we can come up with now.” It's really about putting in the time: just going to the studio and bashing out stuff and seeing what happens. There is a great big work ethic in it.
When we first started to get more well known, sort of late ‘80s and early ‘90s, I think people sort of thought of us as this freaky band of freaky people... you know, like New York heroin addicts or whatever. We'd always be surprised with the impression people had of us. We ultimately realized that it was the kind of music we played. Maybe it's less radical in today's climate than it was when we were doing it earlier in our career, but our music was pretty radical for a sort of pop/rock music. People thought that our personalities had to go along with it a certain way. Yet we were never heavily into any nasty stuff off stage; we just always saved all that energy and aggression for what was on stage and putting it into the work we were creating, and then just kind of went about leading just kind of normal lives, which at this point include family, children and everything else that “normal” people have. It's sort of a switch on that tired rock‘n'roll notion of people that live a really radical lifestyle, but their music is fairly tame. We like it to stay the other way.
Along the lines of radical music, when you are in the studio, how are the more free-form and/or noise-oriented parts of each song created? Does one person have an idea of how it is going to go and everyone follows or is it more live improv jazz and just happens?
It kind of works in both ways. We play a lot when we are writing songs. Songs don't happen with somebody bringing this in and saying, “here's the song, go figure out your parts from G to C to A minor.” Nothing like that happens. We just get into a room and starting playing and we really put in a lot of time. We play four or five days a week and we do it for months. And it slowly whittles things into shape. We tape record a lot of stuff and listen back to the tape. The stuff you're talking about comes from that free-form playing when you're just blazing through an afternoon, just trying stuff out in a room. Sometimes it stems from an idea somebody has like, “What if we try to make it feel like this?” or “What if we try to get really noisy and then move it into this other place?” and then you just sort of work off that. You play and play for a day or a week and you just keep tape recording it and listening back to it. There is no doubt that there are areas when we are playing live that are totally free-form. You know you are going to start at point A and end at point C and how you get there is kind of your own business. But there is a lot of that that looks like free-form playing that is pretty structured. It comes from a lot of repetition and a lot of integration of the different parts. In our non-technical non-trained way working on the harmonies and the different interactions of everybody's parts, which is sort of what it's about when we're writing the music.
Do you think that having all of your instruments stolen in 1999 ultimately helped the creative process or did it disrupt the progression?
It ultimately helped. It was really sort of tragic at the time because it was stuff that we loved and we really developed over quite a long period of time. Most of the ‘90s we spent developing that equipment and those guitars and really just getting our gear in the shape to where we could take less and less of our gear because that stuff was pretty much an extension of each of our playing styles. And then it was all sort of wiped away. But in the long run it was kind of good just because it forced us to reassess and try some new things and take a new look at what can be done in terms of the gear that we play on. At this point everybody's rolled back into normal. We've got a new set of gear that we're happy with. But I guess it made us feel like we were more versatile than maybe we imagined we were, because it didn't change things all that much by having all that stuff taken away—the music came from the personalities, not the gear.
How important is image to the band? Has this changed over the years?
It still matters. In the bigger picture there is a certain place where it matters to some degree. But I think that we've become such an established thing on our own weird level, [that] maybe we've relaxed into a little bit more of who we are in a way. We've been that from the very beginning. But posing is part of starting a band, in a way. When you first start a band, half of it is about the attitude and the look and all that stuff. I just think the more we proved to ourselves that this is something we've been doing over a long period of time, the more we feel like, “This is who we are. Make no bones about it.” We're not 18 years old anymore. For us it's more about the music. I guess if you do something for as long as we've been doing this while getting a certain amount of recognition you get a little more comfortable in your own skin. When you play live, what songs do you like to perform?
This is a question similar to that one, “what's your favorite album?” It's really, really hard to answer. I don't really have a single, particular favorite. Favorite songs can change by the week. It can be really fun to be playing this or that song this week and you're finding out new stuff about it. And the next week your focus shifts to a different song. There are songs that I love playing for ages then I suddenly get sick of playing for awhile then I renew my interest in them again. The easy answer is usually favorite songs are coming from the most recent material. Certainly right now, the most recent material is the stuff we are most interested in and working hard to figure out how to put over live. So that's the most challenging stuff, so in a way that's the most fun at the moment.
With such a catalogue to choose from, how do you all decide what to play for each set?
I wish I could say we have a large roster of songs to choose from and we do certainly have a lot of songs that we made, but we can't play them all. For some of it, it does come down to [the fact] that we don't have the right gear anymore: certain songs are about particular gear. But in many cases the muscle memory for how to play certain songs is lost. Some songs are kind of easier than others to relearn five or ten years after you've written them and stopped playing them, but other songs are nearly impossible to try to figure out how the hell they went. As we progress through the years we write more stuff down; I certainly do. But there is a large part of it that we just don't write down; we don't make proper scoring and things like that. There is always the last few albums which you are fairly conversant with and then there are a few songs that go way back that you almost never stop playing like, “Brother James” or “Teen Age Riot” or “White Cross”— a couple songs from every record. Maybe there are 20 to 30 songs from all the other records, but if you're fitting six or eight new songs or more there isn't room for all that many old songs. But we do like to bring back the old ones. There are certain old songs that are always fun to play and you just keep playing them. And there are other ones that would be fun to know how to play, but sometimes those would just take more work than we have time to give it. I wish we were more the kind of band that at a drop of a hat play everything in our catalogue—it would be amazing to go out on stage and have four to five hundred songs to choose from or whatever it is; it would be mind-blowing. There are definitely bands that can do that and we're not one of them, partly because of all the tunings and whatnot. If all the songs were in standard tuning we'd probably able to remember a lot more of them, but now we have to relearn every aspect of the tuning and the fingering positions.
One thing I've always wondered about Sonic Youth is that you guys have always come across as something of an anti-establishment band, yet you are signed to one of the largest record labels in the world. Has this compromised your values or your music? How much freedom does Geffen allow?
They allow us complete freedom and they always have. Right from the beginning our contract with them called for us to be in complete control of our product. We don't submit demos and we hardly discuss anything with the label. There were definitely some growing pains when we first signed with them because everyone, including ourselves, wondered what it would be like to be on a big label and have a little bit more money at our disposal to make records. It was definitely a learning process for everybody. [Now] we've outlasted everyone who was at the label when we signed with Geffen. Even Geffen himself is not there anymore; he sold the company. Initially we had an A&R [artists & repertory] guy there who was one of these hands on kind of guys and he wanted to be involved. We tried to keep him involved as much as possible because it doesn't hurt to hear what anybody has to say, but our deal calls for us to not to have to do any of it if we didn't want to, so we pretty much just went about making our records. After the first couple of records when that guy left and other people we knew left, we literally went through a period with the company where we barely knew anybody there and we didn't talk to anyone. Somebody in our management office would just call the label and say, “Sonic Youth is making a new record, send us a check.” A few months later, “Sonic Youth is about to deliver the record, here it comes.” Now we've actually got somebody there who we are on good terms with, so we've got a bit more of a dialogue going. Whatever crazy scheme they want to throw out, we're happy to listen to it, laugh it off and go back to work. But it never hurts to listen to what's going on from [the label's] side. We're not a huge selling act; it's rare that you find a band that sells the amount of records we do that still remains on a label for so many years. But I guess there are many reasons why they keep a band like us around. Even though we're not making millions of dollars for the company, I don't think we are losing money for them. We're just kind of a feather in their cap.
I was going to ask you about that. Why do you think it's beneficial for Geffen to keep Sonic Youth?
I think that's probably why. We are a super-respected band. When Bob Dylan is not selling any records you don't kick him off your label... not equating us with him, but it's kind of the same thing because we have this legacy about us that's kind of heavy. Why wouldn't a label want to have certain acts like that around? That's kind of what gives a label its prestige. There seem to be more and more people at the label that like our music now than ever before. People at the label are completely excited about the new record and are working really hard on it, which is what you want out of a label. In general, we've kind of got the best of both worlds. We've got our own indie label with SYR and we've got Geffen for the bigger releases and we can divide up the projects we do. Some stuff really seems more suited for going the indie route we'll just put it out on SYR. We're not going to give Geffen a record of like two sides of sheets of noise because it would be shooting ourselves in the foot. They won't know what to do with it or how to work it and it just really wouldn't make any sense at all. So we're not out to antagonize them in anyway because we've got a fairly successful little boutique label of our own. It's a pretty cool situation to be in.
Lee, can you tell me a little bit about the song entitled, “Kim Gordon and the Arthur Doyle Hand Cream” or more specifically Kim Gordon's fascination with Mariah Carey?
We were all sharing a fascination with her. But Kim is definitely interested in looking at female pop icons and seeing how she does or does not relate to them. We kind of threw those words together very collectively. I think it came around the time when Mariah was going through that whole publicized thing with her label or whatever it was. The label signed her for like $80 million and her record only sold a couple of million and the label thought it was a failure and they dropped her, or something like that. It's just one of those absolutely ridiculous stories. So she signs with another label and makes another successful record. It just shows the absurdity of the music business and how an individual, in this case Mariah, gets caught up and swept along in it... some by her own doing and some not. So it was kind of an opportunity to examine both the individual pop star and sort of a commentary on the entire thing. Obviously it was written to be called “Mariah Carey and the Arthur Doyle Hand Cream,” but the label did ask us to change that for libelous reasons. It was one of those kinds of songs that just kind of wrote itself really fast. It's a simple rockin' song and the lyrics were kind of group composed in the studio one day just out of the papers, the newspapers and the headlines.
Though we didn't really have time to get into the political aspects of Sonic Youth, do you have any final words—political or otherwise—that you'd like to offer the readers of Tablet?
Well, I don't know. I think we've covered a lot of stuff related to Sonic Youth and I'm not going to go on a political diatribe here except to say we're all hoping there will be a change in November, at the very least.
We're starting our tour up in the Seattle area and we're really excited to come up there. We're definitely all going to come up a couple days early to hang out. Seattle's always been a really good town to us and I want to check out this new library; it looks pretty amazing.
The Lollapalooza revival was cancelled due to poor ticket sales. Be sure to look for Sonic Youth on tour in support of "Sonic Nurse" in the near future.. |
