Book review #26: Sonic Life

Moore no less shapes epic Youth study

Sonic Life: A Memoir by Thurston Moore (Faber, 2023)

THERE IS A chilling moment in Thurston Moore’s doorstopper of an autobiography when the noir urban underbelly, within which this middle class New Englander and would-be musician is just about surviving, suggests our hero has truly entered the portals of a Hubert Selby Jr. dystopia.

As reader, I had embarked on a search for literary signs, specifically Beat streaks, embodied in the life of an individual who would become, in time, a linchpin of the radical and venerable noiseniks Sonic Youth. But I didn’t quite expect to be immersed quite so speedily in the fetid pages of an existence straight out of Last Exit to Brooklyn.

Moore, the Connecticut kid now a very late teenager experiencing the thrills and ills of lower Manhattan, fosters vague creative hopes and dreams and seeks accommodation in the heart of the action. As he reports: ‘After looking at some real ratholes, I settled on the third floor walk up at 512 East Thirteenth Street between Avenues A and B. The rent was $110 a month, and manageable enough some – if I could land a job.’

He continues: ‘The building was typical for the East Village in 1978, especially for the stretch the residents called Alphabet City. No buzzer system at the door […] the tenant above a barely functional ex-con and drug addict who had a couple of high strung rottweilers. Above him an alcoholic couple who stumbled up and down stairs.’

A toothless pal of the former jailbird neighbour regularly propositions Moore, inviting him to join his drug dealing fraternity and sexually menaces him. That broken individual eventually appears lifeless on the apartment stairs, a flood of blood emanating from his stiffened corpse. It is an unsettling episode when the tawdry attractions of this subterranean quarter take on a hue that is viscerally red.

The author does not glamorise this unpromising setting – he admits his deep gut fear as he races briskly along the downtown criss-cross of rundown roads surrounding his paltry home to sidestep muggers and teen gangs – but he certainly paints a convincing picture of the aspirational artist in a jungle of crumbling garrets.

For Moore, sprung from a comfortably-off, bookish home with a college lecturer father, the environment of the down and out is particularly challenging. Nonetheless, he is still entranced by these bustling, if threatening, thoroughfares, these cracked and creaking buildings in a post-industrial New York City, embroiled in the tangles of civic bankruptcy. Yet this is a seeding ground for a gathering of artists who, with native impulses and original ideas not to mention courage, can sustain themselves on low rents in cold water flats.

How did the young Thurston get here? When his family arrangements are jolted by his Dad's premature death, Moore is deflected from the expected university route to seek out the frequently transgressive expressions emanating from Max's Kansas City and CBGB, where first the New York Dolls and Wayne County, then the Dead Boys, the Ramones and Television, hold court.

Driven first as a fan – he is an avid collector of records but also books as he scours second hand stores for dog-eared treasure – he slowly finds his feet as an apprentice guitar player and discovers fellow spirits with whom he can develop his vision and collaborate, eventually on stage and in the studio.

By the start of the 1980s, he has tracked the talents of LA Art graduate, gallery worker and soon bassist Kim Gordon – they quite rapidly marry – and the versatile creativity of another unorthodox axe player Lee Ranaldo, to form Sonic Youth and the band, in various incarnations, go on to survive and prosper, for 30 years and 16 albums, until their 2013 dissolution.

Although Sonic Life is a story of a singular experimental rock act – in fact, also an account of a plethora of bands who Moore follows with almost as much commitment as he dedicates to the music he makes himself – it is also an authentic first-hand portrait of an era in which underground artforms interact and music and painting, writing and filmmaking, bounce off each other promiscuously and vigorously. Think Glenn Branca, Lydia Lunch, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Kathy Acker.

With his personal attachment to written texts, Moore is drawn to poets and spoken word performers like Patti Smith. Of Smith the author writes: ‘Her journalism in music magazines, books of small press poetry, a black-and-white countenance amongst the peacocks of glam rock – all spoke to a new heart for an intellectually charged subculture. Patti Smith exemplified punk rock as art, both beautiful and ugly, at timeless expression of convulsive energy.'

And then there are the various Beat Generation references woven in. Early on in the narrative, William S. Burroughs is a visitor to punk hothouse CBGB, attending on a key night when Smith performs. He takes the table next to common or garden punter Moore and the writer’s assistant James Grauerholz studiedly lights the novelist’s cigarette. Later, Sonic Youth rehearse in premises close to Burroughs’ famed ‘Bunker’ and also in proximity Allen Ginsberg's long-time Lower East Side apartment not to mention Gregory Corso’s nearby own pad.

Pictured above: Thurston Moore and Patti Smith appear together at the ‘Lowell Celebrates Kerouac’ event in 1995

Sonic Youth's opening ten years is a grind of remorseless practice and composition in which the core trio plus various drummers build a reputation for uncompromising gigs – they eschew conventional instrumental tunings, turn to blistering feedback to build their distinctive wall of sound and rely on eviscerating volume to shock and unsettle audiences.

Such a strategy brings scant economic stability. The struggle for a fast-food snack and the constant foraging for cigarettes, an oft-repeated motif,  is a sign that the group lack commercial potential but cling gamely, if hungrily, to the raft of utter independent credibility.

In the long haul, they establish themselves as darlings of the left-field, fêted at festivals and art events, very often in Europe, and respected by cutting edge outsiders in music, art and publishing. By the 1990s, Moore is visiting Burroughs at his Lawrence, Kansas, home with REM’s Michael Stipe, being invited by Patti Smith to join her in a show at ‘Lowell Celebrates Kerouac’, and, in the 2000s, chatting backstage to McCartney about Ginsberg’s verse techniques, while poet Anne Waldman is recruiting him to tutor at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, Colorado.

Nor should we forget either, by way of a sidebar, that his bandmate Ranaldo takes on production roles on two classic Beat albums – Kerouac: Kicks, Joy Darkness (1997), and Jack Kerouac's Reads On the Road (1999) – in conjunction with Jim Sampas, now Literary Executor of the novelist's estate.

Pictured above: Moore with daughter Coco visits William S. Burroughs’ home in Lawrence, Kansas, in 1995 during a Sonic Youth tour with REM

So there are Beat examples aplenty in this volume, literal references to key figures in that influential generation. But the principal Beat exhibit, I would argue, is Moore’s life itself: his 50-year commitment to the creative task, art for art's sake, the lure of the dollar pretty well rejected, and a near obsessive-compulsive pursuit of the fresh, groundbreaking and unconventional, on record and in concert, a brave counterpoint to the all too limited scope and intentions of most mainstream popular music.

Further, for a student of indie US rock over the final quarter of the twentieth-century, Sonic Life is a fantastic history of a tumultuous period – the groups, headline and obscure, the venues, from coast-to-coast, and that extraordinary eruption of sub-genres – punk, new wave, no wave, avant-garde, hardcore, art noise, post-punk, post-no wave, grunge.

Moore writes with keen-eyed clarity, a fierce intelligence and passionate authority about all of these multiple brands of music-making and, with so much ground and detail covered in its near-500 pages, an index would have been a superb bonus to this sweeping and frequently gripping opus.