Sonic Life: A Memoir - Softcover

Moore, Thurston

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593467922 ISBN 13: 9780593467923

Publisher: Vintage, 2024

Synopsis

From the founding member of Sonic Youth, a passionate memoir tracing the author's life and art—from his teen years as a music obsessive in small-town Connecticut, to the formation of his legendary rock group, to thirty years of creation, experimentation, and wonder

"Downtown scientists rejoice! For Thurston Moore has unearthed the missing links, the sacred texts, the forgotten stories, and the secret maps of the lost golden age. This is history—scuffed, slightly bent, plenty noisy, and indispensable." —Colson Whitehead, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Underground Railroad and Harlem Shuffle

Thurston Moore moved to Manhattan’s East Village in 1978 with a yearning for music.  He wanted to be immersed in downtown New York’s sights and sounds—the feral energy of its nightclubs, the angular roar of its bands, the magnetic personalities within its orbit.  But more than anything, he wanted to make music—to create indelible sounds that would move, provoke, and inspire.

His dream came to life in 1981 with the formation of Sonic Youth, a band Moore cofounded with Kim Gordon and Lee Ranaldo.  Sonic Youth became a fixture in New York’s burgeoning No Wave scene—an avant-garde collision of art and sound, poetry and punk.  The band would evolve from critical darlings to commercial heavyweights, headlining festivals around the globe while helping introduce listeners to such artists as Nirvana, Hole, and Pavement, and playing alongside such icons as Neil Young and Iggy Pop.  Through it all, Moore maintained an unwavering love of music: the new, the unheralded, the challenging, the irresistible.

In the spirit of Just Kids, Sonic Life offers a window into the trajectory of a celebrated artist and a tribute to an era of explosive creativity.  It presents a firsthand account of New York in a defining cultural moment, a history of alternative rock as it was birthed and came to dominate airwaves, and a love letter to music, whatever the form.  This is a story for anyone who has ever felt touched by sound—who knows the way the right song at the right moment can change the course of a life.

About this title

About the Author

THURSTON MOORE is a founding member of Sonic Youth, a band born in New York in 1981 that spent thirty years at the vanguard of alternative rock, influencing and inspiring such acts as Nirvana, Pavement, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, My Bloody Valentine, and Beck. The band’s album Daydream Nation was chosen by the Library of Congress for historical preservation in the National Recording Registry in 2006. Moore is involved in publishing and poetry and teaches at the Summer Writing Workshop at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. He divides his time between the USA and England.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1

Epiphany

Gene bounded into our small South Miami, Florida, house, the summer of 1963, a look on his face as if he had located a gift of gold dropped from a psychedelic UFO. In his hand he clutched an article of sonic subterfuge: a seven-inch black vinyl single deliriously titled “Louie Louie,” by a group called the Kingsmen. Their name suggested royal knaves, subjects of a British Invasion–informed notion of aristocracy, and not the four hip, sneering roustabouts from the Pacific Northwest that they were.

From that moment onward, my brother’s universe and mine would become all flash lightning, “Louie Louie” ringing out repeatedly, a seductive noise machine from on high, the singer wailing, out of control and completely cool, steering us toward an undeniable future—

Okay, let’s give it to ’em, right now!

I was five years old to Gene’s ten, my response to the record driven as much by the sound as by my older brother’s excitement. He reverently spun the single, an artifact from preteen heaven that he had somehow stumbled onto. The only other music heard in our house had been our father’s classical records and, more profoundly, the sounds emanating from his hours-long performances at the piano—an instrument that commanded most of the real estate in our modest living room. He worked deliberately through a repertoire of Beethoven, Bach, Brahms, Mendelssohn, and other heavies. Classical music ruled our airwaves.

At least until “Louie Louie” came breaking and entering in.

With that disc in constant revolution, the energy of our existence would change, a new current of electricity introduced. It was as though it had taken the soundworld of our day—our kitchen appliances, our television—and recast it into song, using only guitars, organ, and drums. The lead singer’s voice had the air of a boy smoking a cigarette with one hand while banging a tambourine in the other, an insolent distance to his delivery, a vision of being at once boss and bored.

The flip side of the record was “Haunted Castle,” an instrumental with a simplistic chord figure and a suitably mysterious vibe. The fun danger of “Louie Louie” was offset by the cool otherness of “Haunted Castle.” Everything about these subversive vibrations suggested to me a new world; they were changing not only my here and now but my vision of what the future might hold for me.

I decided to someday, somehow, be in a band like the Kingsmen.

The first order of business would be my hair. From flipping through the pages of 16 magazine, the bible of 1960s pop-rock teen-idol worship, I could see how the cool cats in bands like the Kingsmen all had bangs grazing their eyebrows, the back of their hair hanging slightly below their collars.

To grown-ups, my little-boy crew cut was cute, but after my blinding introduction to rock ’n’ roll by way of “Louie Louie,” I knew it would no longer do. Forget cute.

After a bit of pleading, I was given permission by my parents to let my hair grow out. Each day I would check its progress, wetting the minuscule strands of my potential fringe so that it might fall onto my forehead, yearning to flick it casually to the side. A few of my classmates at the Epiphany Catholic School took me to task for my preening and faux flicking—

“You don’t have long hair, stop pretending.”

But I needed the practice.

My father’s piano had always been our family’s great and sacred object. It cost as much as a car, and we were living on a schoolteacher’s wages. But it was a necessary extravagance—not just an outlet for my father but a collective beacon of high art, a reflection, I thought, of our commitment to sound and composition.

But it wasn’t for me. What I really wanted was a guitar.

Preferably electric.

Or at least a transistor radio.

Anything that could bring more “Louie Louie” into the world.

Edition details

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0593467922
• ISBN 13: 9780593467923
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 512