Most people think ”alternative” rock got hot last year, when Nirvana`s
”Smells Like Teen Spirit” became an MTV hit and the Lollapalooza tour marched through suburbia for the first time.
But the turning point probably came about a year earlier, when longtime underground favorite Sonic Youth signed with the David Geffen Company and put out its first major-label album, ”Goo,” after a decade of independent releases.
”Goo” wasn`t a monster hit, but it sold 220,000 copies-more than twice any previous release by the band-and the single ”Cool Thing,” which paired singer Kim Gordon with Public Enemy rapper Chuck D, presaged the alliances between rock and rap forged on the Lollapalooza tour.
Encouraged that DGC didn`t try to turn Sonic Youth into the new Journey, Nirvana also signed with the label, and Nirvana and Sonic Youth now share management and a strong friendship. But the 4 million sales piled up by Nirvana`s 1991 DGC debut, ”Nevermind,” have obscured the fact that Sonic Youth tested the waters first.
”I was listening to an upstate New York station the other day,” says guitarist Lee Ranaldo, lounging with the other members of Sonic Youth at a SoHo restaurant, ”and at one point they were saying they`re gonna play this band from New York City and they developed this whole mythological thing-`This is the band that convinced DGC to sign Nirvana`-as though people didn`t know the first (expletive) about who we are. Then they played one of our songs. It`s funny that we`re now known as the band that convinced DGC to sign Nirvana.”
Which, besides being untrue, is more than a little demeaning. Sonic Youth was for many years the heart of the rock underground, the band that rewrote the rules for playing the electric guitar and which pioneered the noise-rock since embraced by groups ranging from the Pixies to My Bloody Valentine.
A new Sonic Youth album, ”Dirty” (DGC), and a tour that brings the band to the Riviera for shows Oct. 5 and 6, may help set the record straight.
”Dirty” is already the group`s best-seller, recently topping 225,000 sales, according to a Geffen spokesman. But no one`s betting on a Nirvana-scale breakthrough. Sonic Youth, for all the pop overtones in its new music, is still too prickly to ever become a monster mainstream act.
”The bands we feel a kinship with sort of fall through the cracks of what the industry is calling `alternative` now,” says drummer Steve Shelley. But Nirvana`s success has given even those fall-through-the-cracks bands a shot at a bigger audience.
”The timing couldn`t be better,” singer-guitarist Thurston Moore says.
”We`re selling a lot more records than we would`ve without Nirvana`s success. A lot of bands are.”
”The thing is, `Goo` had nothing to do with Nirvana, and it still sold more than any record we`ve put out,” Ranaldo adds. ”What Nirvana`s success means is that certain radio stations now have their ear more cocked to bands like us, they`re more open to playing more stuff.”
”Dirty” is, as its title suggests, frayed around the edges, as guitars buzz and howl and tear at the fabric of what are, underneath all the noise, some stellar pop tunes.
The beauty and bite of the guitars have been captured with remarkable clarity and warmth by producer Butch Vig and engineer Andy Wallace, the same team that worked on Nirvana`s ”Nevermind” and the first real producers the band has ever worked with.
The ”Dirty” songs evolved out of jam sessions, and the songs retained their shaggy-dog looseness even as choruses, vocals and melodies were introduced.
”I don`t think Butch knew what the (expletive) was going on till the end of the recording process,” Moore says. ”We sent him rehearsal tapes, and he heard some things going on. But they never had vocals, so he was kind of in the dark. It was a lot of jamming, noise.”
”I was amazed he was able to deal with it all,” Ranaldo adds.
Amazing is how the record sounds. It comes closer than any Sonic Youth record to capturing the band`s concert sound, from the spectral beauty of
”Theresa`s Dream World” to the punk splatter of ”Swimsuit Issue.”
The band has also honed its songwriting. Melodies abound, and the lyrics reflect on a tawdry world with uncharacteristic directness, whether the topic is the shooting death of a friend (”100%,” ”JC”) or social issues such as sexual harassment (”Swimsuit Issue”) and political repression (”Youth Against Fascism,” ”Chapel Hill”).
”There`s still irony in what we do, because we`re not interested in being explicitly topical,” Moore insists. ”But things have changed the last couple of years. The `80s were an era of complacency. And the only real reaction to it, Reagan and stuff, were the young hard-core punk kids.”
”If it`s not expected of you, it`s more fun,” Gordon adds.”It`s fun, empowering to write about stuff like sexual harrassment.
”You can`t do anything about it, but if you can make a few men in suits squirm . . .”
”We`re not trying to be `spokespersons for our generation` or anything like that,” Moore interjects.
”It becomes more like a shared concerned. When you see people in your community, our community, everybody is affected by it. It`s not like, `Oh, Sonic Youth is doing this, let`s follow that.` You`re scared because you don`t want to be a spokesperson.
”You are sort of an entertainer-slash-artist, and you don`t want to be seen as grandstanding. The whole idea of exploiting topical subjects for your own merit is kind of grotesque.”
When Gordon, Moore and Ranaldo formed Sonic Youth in the early 1980s, the idea of the band being a spokesperson for anything was ludicrous.
Possessed of rudimentary technique and working with cheap equipment, the trio created a new sonic vocabulary for the guitar almost out of necessity.
”At that time in New York, every band was some screwed up weirdo trip of some sort or another,” Ranaldo says. ”That was normal in New York. So we didn`t feel like some weird thing at all.”
”We felt we were writing pop songs,” Gordon says, in all apparent seriousness.
”We wrote the first songs acoustically, at super low volume in this gallery space,” Ranaldo says. ”And the first gig was very loud.”
”Thurston would hit a floor tom with a drum stick, and then jab it into his guitar,” Gordon recalls. ”Everything was very percussive, even though we didn`t have a drummer.”
The initial audience response was one of slack-jawed silence.
”It wasn`t like booing or cheering,” Gordon says. ”It was like we dropped from outer space.”
Yet the band knew it was onto something.
”It was kind of fun,” Gordon says. ”It was like instant songs, and then when you played live, there was the surprise of `What`s it gonna be like?` There was a lot of excitement in not knowing what was going to happen, but just having all this great, swirling chaos.”
Out of that chaos-founded on bizarre tunings and a sort of anti-technique that included wedging screwdrivers into guitar bridges and bashing strings with drum sticks-came a form of aural sculpture, and eventually some pretty good songs that flirted with pop conventions such as melodies and choruses.
A key in the band`s leap from avant-garde dabblers to rock visionaries was Shelley, who joined for the 1986 ”EVOL” album.
His skill as a drummer gave Sonic Youth`s songs a linear momentum that they had lacked, and its albums started to rock instead of merely wallowing in feedback.
”I don`t know if we know how to play or not,” Moore says. ”But I think we`ve developed a language on the guitar that`s as developed as anybody else`s.”
The tough part was trying to capture the nuances of that language on record. ”Dirty” does the job.
