SONIC YOUTH
Kim Gordon, Thurston Moore and friends reveal how they tore up the postpunk rule book with their audacious double LP, 1988’s Daydream Nation.
October 1988. When the New York ex-No Wavers released their masterpiece fifth album into a Reaganomic/Cold War world, they detonated a double-vinyl mind-bomb which melded hardcore punk, avant-noise and classic rock into an electrifying, accessible unity. In time Daydream Nation would also be recognised as advance guard for the indie rock takeover of the ’90s, but how did they get there? “Don’t do it the normal way,” they advise. “Do it some fucked up way you’ve never tried.”
Thurston Moore: “We were thinking of making a double album because we thought that would be a pretty audacious move. There weren’t many double albums by bands like us historically – the only ones we knew were Hüsker Dü’s Zen Arcade and Minutemen’s Double Nickels On The Dime. We were inspired by those two SST releases, but we weren’t releasing it on SST, which was somewhat ironic.”
Lee Ranaldo: “We did a lot of touring for [1987 album] Sister with Dinosaur – they weren’t Jr then – and were really inspired by what they were doing. For Daydream, we made really sure we did a lot of live playing of that material before we recorded it. We just went into the studio super-ferocious, because we’d done a few nights at CBGB’s, and at Maxwell’s, and the Knitting Factory.”
TM: “I remember breaking into Eliminator Jr, which was this take on what we thought a ZZ Top riff was and seeing someone in the audience really crack a smile because it was a really ridiculous riff for us to play. But why the hell not?”
LR: “We were looking for a studio that could hold our sound, and Greene Street came up. It was recommended we try Nick Sansano – he was a hip hop guy [Sansano worked on Public Enemy’s It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back] so it was an interesting experience to take him on.”
Steve Shelley: “In 1988, besides your friends making more alternative rock, hip hop was the exciting thing that was going on. The big rockers were making terrible sounding records.”
Nick Sansano: “I had done plenty of indie bands and things that went nowhere, but most of my professional work was hip hop and dance music. The prevailing wind of the whole Daydream Nation project was experimentation. Now, I’d probably overthink it and ruin it, but then I was too young and stupid to realise it was risky.”
SS: “[Greene Street] fulfilled all of our requirements and was close to everybody’s home, and in New York City that matters – like, ‘How is the commute?’ We liked that Public Enemy were working there – there’s two different rooms and you’d see them when you went to the drinks machine.”
Kim Gordon: “Chuck [D] would be waiting for two or three days for Flavor Flav to turn up. You’d hear his big floppy feet coming down the stairs and he’d come in with like 10 people or something. You never knew who was going to be hanging out in the lobby.”
NS: “The studio we were working at was quite small. We were right on top of each other. It was a crazy hot summer and the air conditioning would break regularly.”
SS: “We did the album photo shoot with Michael Lavine; when you see those photos we look like we’re cooking on the streets of Manhattan.”
TM: “I really wanted to write about what it was like to be a young outsider on the city streets and being somewhat destitute, but being in this place of grace where you’re in a really vibrant relationship, not only with your partner but also with this community of people. I started writing Hyperstation as I was traversing back from Eldridge Street, where Kim and I were living, to Greene Street Studio, and I was talking about travelling down Broome Street, about being at odds with other realities of city life, especially in New York at the time, when you really could be in the face of danger. There’s a stanza about being beat up on the street by people who don’t know anything about art, they just know about sports and violence – ‘dressed up for basketball’.”
KG: “Some people feel like during that time in the ’80s artists just escaped into some kind of romantic tower because no one could deal with Reaganism. But I think the title says so much about us and about what a distraction entertainment is.” TM: “Teen Age Riot was kind of inspired by a young J Mascis. I remember one of the first interviews he did with NME – the guy said, ‘Is there anything I can say to make you answer these questions?’ and J’s response was, like, ’This is as good as it gets.’ I came from a culture when you really parlayed with journalists, so to think that it was nothing more than an annoyance was kind of radical. There was something pure about it. I wanted to write about that new generation I saw coming through with him.”
KG: “Thurston came up with a lot of the more melodic songs like Teen Age Riot, I remember him writing that. Normally he would sing those songs, and I would sing whatever the weird songs were that came out of playing and arranging.”
NS: “Lee was an endless experimenter – Lee loved the process more than the result, I think. ‘Don’t do it the normal way, do it some fucked up way you’ve never tried.’ If an amplifier was feeding back, or a tube was going, we would quickly get in there and make layers of random noise we would layer into songs, or make into a song, like Providence.”
LR: “Providence has got this recording of [Minutemen bassist] Mike Watt’s voice. The backing track is the sound of this amplifier that went on the blink in the studio one day and started making this ungodly noise. The amplifier was a Peavey and for a long time the music under that song was called the Peavey Heave – this amplifier heaving in the studio.”
“THURSTON AND KIM WERE THE LEADERS… AND OF THE TWO, THE LEADER WAS KIM.” Nick Sansano, producer
Paul Smith: “I was pleased for Lee Ranaldo as Hey Joni was a great step forward in his writing and audiences responded with a better understanding of his presence in the band.”
LR: “Eric’s Trip, the lyrics came from seeing Warhol’s Chelsea Girls – the first verse is taken verbatim from what Eric Emerson says on the screen. Rain King – I was reading a lot of poetry, particular Allen Ginsberg, and it was also a time when I was being seriously reacquainted with Bob Dylan.”
NS: “To me, it was obvious that Thurston and Kim were the leaders and I think of the two, the leader there was Kim. She held the line, she set the benchmark. The rest of the band would say, ‘That’s as good as we can get it’ – and Kim would never quite walk away until she got what she wanted: ‘That’s not the sound I was going for; it’s close but it’s not there.’”
KG: “As a woman there’s a lot of material you can write about without writing a love song. The Sprawl was inspired by a book I was reading [Denis Johnson’s The Stars At Noon] and kind of growing up as a woman, feeling self-conscious about being looked at and self-conscious about sexuality. The Trilogy was kind of interesting – just like picking things out of the paper, like the preppie murder [Robert Chambers killed Jennifer Levin in Central Park on August 26, 1986]. Kissability was about Hollywood. Cross The Breeze, I’d been listening to Slayer or something.”
TM: “Total Trash wasn’t even going to be on the album. It was a glam rock riff that I had and a little off from anything else. I decided to sing it in a faux Bryan Ferry intonation. I had pretty openminded parents but I remember my mother saying: ‘You know I really enjoy some of the records you play, but there’s one singer that really makes my skin crawl’, and she pulled out Bryan Ferry’s These Foolish Things. So I sort of loved Bryan Ferry – he was the only musician that got under my parents’ skin. My father was concerned that I was gay because I had pictures of Bryan Ferry, the New York Dolls and Sparks on the walls.”
SS: “Because of the segues and the long intros and outros, there was a lot of cross-fading, so three or four people would have their hands on the faders during mixes. That’s fun to do with your bandmates and producer. When you have more money to make records and a bigger budget, they don’t always need you to do that.”
PS: “I’d been telling them they would be going to a major label since [1986 album] EVOL. At that time they pretty much laughed me out the room, but it was clear to us near outsiders that they were leading and shaping some kind of cultural sea-change. We’d put them into the jaws of the big beast and when that wave hits, it hits hard. The day that Pat Naylor [Blast First press officer] got the Daydream review published in Rolling Stone – that very morning of its publication, at like 8.30 – Ahmet Ertegun was cold-calling me on my New York apartment number. Other bigwigs followed and greeneyed seduction began.”
LR: “I tend to look at our career in thirds and Daydream capped that first third – the solely indie period, an innocent period in a way. Daydream was the first tour where we went everywhere around the world. Then we signed to a major label and spent the next 10 years in a completely shifted environment.”
TM: “We did a Daydream Nation reunion tour [in 2007/2008] and to revisit it was something I bristled against because I didn’t have it in me to be so utterly nostalgic. Learning to play those songs again was very strange; we had to get the master tapes and listen to the separate tracks and what we were doing as a whole sounded really complex and intricate, but they were actually very simple moves. That was really exciting for me, all those moves together as a four-piece created this weird and wild cacophony. I really got into it and I loved that tour. That was one of the last great moments as a band. That record will always have, as much as anything, this real definition of what we were as a four-piece. For sure.”