NOTES FROM THE UNDERGROUND
BAD MOON RISING TO DAYDREAM NATION
The band convene in downtown Manhattan during the early ’80s. Ice cream sandwiches, Pat Benatar and Creedence Clearwater Revival all have their parts to play in the band’s fascinating formation…
I FIRST met Thurston when both of our bands moved to New York around 1979. He was a Connecticut college dropout who had aspirations to be a writer – but more than anything, he wanted to be involved in New York’s music scene. He was playing with The Coachmen, I was in The Flux and we were on a CBGBs bill together. But Kim, Thurston and I didn’t get to know each other well until Thurston curated Noisefest for nine nights in the summer of 1981, at a gallery called the White Columns. The day after those shows, the three of us got together in the gallery and started rehearsing what became the fledgling Sonic Youth.
For the first six months, it was just me, Kim and Thurston without any drums, bashing on guitars, putting drumsticks and screwdrivers under the strings. We got our first drummer, Richard Edson, in 1981. Glenn Branca saw the first gig we played with Richard and he gave us the chance to make our first record, Sonic Youth (1982). Even though it was on a tiny New York label, Neutral, we had a chance to put what we were doing down on vinyl. Then, a year later, we made a more ambitious record, Confusion Is Sex. We had a lot of early luck like that. Our first couple of CBGB’s shows were reviewed by the New York Rocker, then they ran a profile at a time when nobody of our generation was getting written about. We were singled out quite early on.
No Wave was the most radical thing happening at that point. Groups like DNA weren’t trained in playing instruments at all. So it resulted in a kind of primitivism, in some ways an update on the earliest rock’n’roll. You didn’t need skill as much as have an idea for something to do. Sonic Youth, throughout our whole career,. By then, we had solidified a working method, instead of just saying, “OK, we’ve got guitars… now what?”
