"Your names aren't on the guest list. Sorry."
I'm supposed to talk to Thurston Moore, and quite honestly, I felt like I was in over my head even before this particular neutron bomb exploded. The box office attendant at Philadelphia's Electric Factory just gives me a shrug.
"Are you sure?” I ask him. “I'm supposed to do an interview with the band."
I remembered that I'm supposed to talk to a guy named Dan Mapp who's Sonic Youth's manager, and immediately ask about him.
"Is Dan Mapp there? He knows we’re coming. Can you get in touch with him?"
"I have no idea who Dan Mapp is. Sorry," is his only response.
I've always feared this: something getting screwed up and my name not being on the list. That's bad enough, but having friends depend on me (after commuting for two hours, no less), and not coming through for them is downright an embarrassment. Luckily (if you can even call it that), no one on the Matador Records guestlist seems to be on it, and before you know it, there's a count of about a dozen or so journalists standing outside the box office with a certain look on their face. Since I'm one of them at this point, I can assure you, kind readers, that this look is the most complete facial representation of the words "What the fuck?!".
The line of concertgoers is giving us a confused look, which I can't help but return, because I'm seeing plenty of people wearing Sonic Youth shirts to their own show: a significant faux pas in my book. My photographer assures me this is acceptable in the indie scene. I find that hard to believe, but take his word for it. So, since we choose so sit around and wait and make small talk with the other pissed off journalists.
After an hour or so, Dan finds me and introduces me to Thurston. We only have 15 minutes to talk (Sonic Youth is on a schedule, I guess?), but I don’t realize he’s serious until he actually pries Thurston away from me 17 minutes into our conversation. However, during our conversation Thurston was cool, responsive, friendly, and very welcoming to my questions, which makes him having to cut the interview short that much more of a letdown.
Philadelphia is known for having a hostile crowd. Has that ever reflected at shows that you guys have played in the past?
I don’t remember Philly ever being overtly hostile. I mean, maybe because I’ve experienced more hostile environments around the world. I’ve never thoughts about Philly being any weirder or “worser.” You know, it’s one of the first places we played outside of New York, because it was close to New York when we first started out. Some of our earliest gigs coming down here, I do remember playing a couple of shows opening for some local bands at the time, like Execute Slacks or whatever. I remember them, and sort of the audience being sort of, “What the hell are you guys doing?” There was a bit of a “Go back to New York” vibe, sometimes. But I didn’t really care. I was so young. I think we got a pretty tough skin before we actually started playing.
Is there any particular experience that you remember that was particularly hostile?
In Philly? No, I don’t remember anyone throwing anything at us. I don’t recall Philly being that weird.
You guys just released The Eternal last month. Seeing as you once described Sister as being a cyberpunk album. How would you describe The Eternal?
Sister was described as a cyberpunk album because we were passing around paperbacks of that subgenre of science fiction cyberpunk. And there were some ideas that were happening in that writing that we gleamed. The Eternal is completely post science fiction. It kind of explodes science fiction.
With your move to Matador, and the flexibility that it gives you, do you see it as a bit more difficult or redundant to run your individual labels for your oddball projects?
Yeah, I don’t know. I’m kind of curious now that we’re working with a label like Matador why that would necessitate us doing anything on SYR when Matador would probably want to put out something like that. Those records were put out in the sense that it’s really of no interest to Geffen records. The only records they’re interested in putting out are records that they can campaign behind and those records were all about “we don’t want to have any campaign behind those records.” We want to slip them out for people who want to hear more marginalized playing and I think Matador would be a label who would do that anyway
You’ve actually talked about that, when Geffen was putting out your records, that they weren’t pushing them too much. Was there any active attempt by the band to ask, “Hey is there anything special we can do for this release?”
The label didn’t even know we were doing it really at that point. There wasn’t much concern. It wasn’t even in their zone. They were interested in re-upping us, I think, but we certainly weren’t interested. We didn’t really need a label like that anymore. The industry has changed to such a degree that it doesn’t really have the same power of service that we would require.
Speaking of SYR, you’ve also been releasing your back catalog giving them the deluxe treatment. How much work goes into doing putting those out?
A lot of work goes into putting those out, but those aren’t on SYR, those are on Universal [ed: Thurston is correct. I was thinking of Goofin Records]. We’ve never really reissued anything ourselves on our labels. We do the vinyl versions, because that’s part of the deal. They’ll do the CDs, and we’ll do 1000 copies of the vinyl.
And they probably do the iTunes part of it…
Yeah, I don’t know anything about iTunes.
[Laughs on both sides]
Does a lot of work go into preparing them?
Tons of work. Sifting through the historical tapes is a lot of work. Steve Shelley is the one who does most of the work on that. He presents to the band “this is the stuff that’s in the archives that’s relevant to this time period, that’s relative to this record,” and he will actually go through it initially and say these shows sound pretty good, etc, so we’ll make these initial judgment calls on that stuff. Then as a band we start parsing it down to what we think is the most presentable stuff. And then working on the artwork is fun and digging up ephemera from the era that was coinciding with the records, flyers, etc, getting different interesting writers to write about it. We like making them because it really lets us really dig and present something. We don’t let the record label do it, but we work with them.
Many of the record in the back catalog have been re-released. Which one is next? Are there plans to do the entire catalog?
It would be nice to do a really great Confusion is Sex kind of package. The earlier you go the harder it is to find stuff.
The first EP; was it hard to do?
We actually did release that EP as a double album. That was kind of interesting because that live music I hadn’t heard in so long and it just sounded so alien. We were playing in such a different way. It was really interesting to me. I’m glad we picked it out.
So, which one is next?
I’m not quite sure. I think it’s possible that Sister would be next, because I think there’s more live material that centers around Sister.
That will be done much further down in the line, right?
Yeah, where we’re at with that kind of stuff…because getting this record ready, and working with Matador, it’s sort of a new era for us, so that kind of activity, how we will get that activity happening again… We want to! We have things lined up that we want to do on SYR. There’s a couple of live things that are really great, those in and of themselves are documents, but they’re really interesting and we were thinking about doing live things from different places. There’s a whole session that we did with Brigitte Fontaine in Paris many many years ago when Jim O’Rourke was with us. As well as a live concert of that stuff that was filmed with four cameras, so it would be a live DVD/CD. It’s something that’s waiting to be done. We’ve just been very focused on what we’ve been doing.
How difficult is it to do these reissues considering that Geffen owns most of the material? Is there any resistance?
No, because it goes through Universal. They’re only too happy for us to try and sell music any way we can, because they certainly aren’t doing it.
[Laughs on both sides]
What’s the most pressure you guys have gotten from a label in the past?
You know, funnily enough it was really early on when we wanted to do the Flower/Halloween 7” that had this image on the front that was taken from a Puerto Rican calendar from NYC, it was of a topless Puerto Rican woman in a very gentile pose. It wasn’t very lewd, but it was sexual. It was a beautiful Puerto Rican woman looking very demure and nude and we used it for the cover. I had written the lyrics to the songs next to it, “here’s the power of women, here’s the word love, here’s the word fuck,” and those were the lyrics to the song that Kim recited over the music. There’s a song we had called Flower, and there was the song called Halloween. And it was a 12”…
It wasn’t a Misfits cover was it?
No, it wasn’t a Misfits cover, but we sort of reference the Misfits in a way. So, Rough Trade said we can’t put this out. And Kim went back in the stock room and pulled out all these Smiths albums with all these coy photos of young boys and said, “What’s the difference between these two things?” They just stared at us, and we did put it out.
Vinyl is having a resurgent over the last couple of years; everything's being re-released on vinyl, and it’s almost become the standard physical format of a release…
To me, it’s all about being able to touch the record and look at it. That’s what I wanted.
Yeah, me too. Has vinyl always been the ideal format for Sonic Youth? Seeing your career, you’ve been active also during the cassette format.
I have more cassettes than any other format.
Cassetes are coming back too, but it’s obviously a fad now…
It’s a fad on that level, but it’s always existed on the underground.
These deluxe editions; you’ve being doing the vinyl versions pretty cheap. On the other hand, major labels are doing deluxe remastered versions of albums, like Beck’s Odelay album came out for about $90, Bob Dylan’s bootlegs are about $100, Mastodon’s new album’s deluxe edition is $50. What do you think of this?
They’re conscientious about pricing and economics, and we’ve never spent the label’s money. We’ve never really done music to strike it rich. I don’t know why those records are priced that way.
It sort of sounds like labels are just taking advantage of consumers. Does it really come down to charging $80 to properly remaster and album?
Yeah, but those are also artists that are very popular, so they know that people are definitely going to buy these records. I think Sonic Youth is a harder sell than Dylan or Beck. We’re not as well known.
This overpriced vinyl is still selling. Do you think people have started seeing vinyl as less of a music format and more of a collector’s item?
Some people are, but if your collection is new vinyl by new bands, that’s sort of a lame collection.
Who knows what’s going to happen to the Beatles catalog that’s going to come out in September…
I have the Beatles remastered thing, called 1, or whatever.
Wasn’t it called Love?
No, I think it’s called 1 [ed: turns out both 1 and Love were remastered]. That was remastered and I thought it sounded horrible. I don’t want to hear that remastered. I don’t want to hear anything remastered. I have a problem with people remastering our records. They sound a little better, but I don’t want to make it louder. It’s what the record was.
In a recent interview for the Guardian Kim Gordon was criticizing the Radiohead model for being unfriendly to other bands…
Yeah, because of course a band like Radiohead already has an audience that is going to buy their records regardless. I mean, it’s a weird model. An up-and-coming band can’t say, “Pay what you want…”
But for the majority of bands out there who don’t make a living from their music, do you think it’s a good idea? Because it lets as many people as possible have access to their music. For smaller bands, don’t you think it’s a great model?
I don’t know. I’m a little on the fence about that. I think all records should be free anyway.
Based on that, do you think Sonic Youth makes music primarily for their audience, for themselves, or for other bands?
I would make it for everybody. I don’t think about making it for myself or anybody. I don’t think “certain people.”
Artist:
www.sonicyouth.com
www.myspace.com/sonicyouth
Download:
Sonic Youth – Sacred Trickster – [mp3]
Album:
Sonic Youth's The Eternal is out now. Buy it on Amazon.
Related Articles:
Review: Sonic Youth – The Eternal
