Sonic Dude: 5 Easy Pieces w/Thurston Moore

Five questions, not a single one about music. That's the deal.

I turned 14 in 1976. The same year I started high school and started hitting the subways to get to that high school. Before I had anywhere to go really, I got drunk off of the freedom that mass transit offered, but with freedom came a certain consequence. Mostly that the city, in my wanderings, had tried to kill me.

But by 1977 I had packed on a few pounds, a knife, and boxing at the Boy’s Club, as well as karate in random church basements. And I was developing an understanding about my place in space and how to negotiate it having factored in a lot of the miserable variables that most of us could do without in a city of 12 million intent on making manifest the kind of crazy that could change you forever.

Now all I needed was somewhere to go. And then: punk rock hit.

I wish there was some cooler way to say I discovered it other than the New York Post but it was the New York Post. And the Sid Vicious coverage. And the Nancy Spungen murder. Then the Ramones and Patti Smith. I followed people on the street who looked strange just to see where they were going (Yup: looking at you Stephan Ielpi, Johnny Thunders, Buzz Wayne). I went to Rocks in Your Head to buy music. Or Bleeker Bob’s. CBs, Max’s. The Mudd Club. Just another bridge and tunnel kid dressed like Travis Bickle, I attracted very little notice.

Someone once asked me in an interview later if I had found the racial politic back then alienating. I said that in 1977 it didn’t rise above my base level of alienation enough for me to notice. That is, guys wearing swastikas didn’t shock me. And in not a single one of these clubs or places did anyone ever try to kill me. Which is much more than I could say about the city at large.

I also can’t cop to not remembering since given that I am standing there pants-less, seems to add up, in general, to a picture of man who very much doesn’t have his shit together.

But here there was music and so there I was.

Years later. After playing sax in Al + the X’s, then singing for Whipping Boy, and then and now OXBOW, I look out off of the stage that we were playing in Texas at SXSW. We finish the last song and I spy, unmistakably, front row, Thurston Moore. Sonic dude from Sonic Youth. It was jarring enough that I, who’ve never been that big of a fan of cool, blew what little I had, jumped off the stage and confronted him.

“What are you doing here?”

“Watching you.”

“That’s nice,” I said. “Well, nice to meet you.”

“We’ve met before!” He says.

“I don’t think so.” He’s like 6’5” or 6’6”. That alone seems like something I would have remembered.

“Yes. Through Lydia.”

Now I am bamboozled. I can’t call him a liar. I also can’t cop to not remembering since given that I am standing there pants-less, seems to add up, in general, to a picture of man who very much doesn’t have his shit together. So I concede.

“OK.” A few other niceties, and he disappears off into the night. We don’t see each other again until we’re both playing a festival in Montreal. I peek through a curtain and watch him soundcheck. I don’t interrupt his soundcheck and don’t talk to him later, for reasons unknown to me.

But outside of the meandering crossroads of our exchanges, the similarities are both absent and then again shockingly present. We were friends with some of the same people, went to the same shows at the same time, and there were only four years between us. I remember him from back then too. But he always vibed so…easy. And me…well I’ve always been wrapped a little too tight. The twain would not meet.

His interviews were also fairly Warholesque. Gentle and not too revealing. But like when I met Warhol for the first time it’s pretty clear that there was a divergence between the man and the image. And the same with Thurston. Face to face he seemed to me to be a lot heavier than anything that anyone ever captured in an interview.

So, a FIVE EASY PIECES. He answered all but one question. Which I had to swap out with another. I don’t know that I’m any close to solving the riddle of me and Thurston, but if this is as close as I get, I can live with it.

So: have at it.

[ONE] What do, or did, your parents do, and where are you in the birth order if you have siblings?

THURSTON: My mother was (and is, still bopping at 93 years young) a home maker, very devoted to the role of wife and mother as informed by the standards and strictures of Western societal norms of the last 200 years. My father passed away in 1976 - he was a professor of music and psychology, teaching a "Humanities" course at university entitled "Man And Nature". He played classical piano incessantly at home. During WWII he was a military bandleader, never seeing carnage overseas, thankfully. A gentle father, with a fairly disciplinary hand, informed by kindness. My mother a true blue Roman Catholic church goer, my father coming from a Christian Science mother and non-religious upbringing more or less - he, in his later years, got very deep in to Christian theology. I, born 1958, have an older brother, Gene, born 1953, and sister, Susan, born 1956.

I've been hit, punched a few times, knocked to the ground…I am mortified by fighting… — Thurston Moore

[TWO] I’m a native New Yorker, close in age to you, and started going to shows in ‘77...how weird was the racial politic then and is it just me or did it seem weird to you too?

THURSTON: In NYC it seemed to be about tribes subsisting in various states of impoverishment. Living in the Lower East Side as a 20-year-old white kid wanting to be a writer and musician, engaging with the Poetry Project and CBGBs, I was sharing space with families more indigenous to the city (I had moved in from the middle class rurality of Western Connecticut) - mostly Puerto Rican, African-American and Chinese-American. Each ethnicity banded together in cultural solidarity and would war with each other, which is entirely historical.

The necessity of unity in white youth culture had not much to do with survival, as comfort and privilege was granted to us from the imperialism of white culture in the USA, so the bonding was found primarily in the safe zones of art and music - for us it was punk. These zones were obviously cultivated for all and race in the country, and the world, but with white culture it was hardly predicated upon any fact of dehumanization or disenfranchisement no matter how "rebel" some punker may pose.

As it is I found a sense of social progressivism in the fact that punk was fully informed by black consciousness, most strikingly through it's engagement with reggae as a political and experimental (dub) music and, even more so - with hardcore - the template created by the Bad Brains for all of hardcore (mostly white and male) youth to extrapolate (and learn!) from.

I remember the Lester Bangs piece well [“The White Noise Supremacists”] though. He always claimed he wished he never wrote it as he felt slightly convoluted with taking so many of his friends to task. It was a brave piece to write for him and I’m glad he did. It made an impression on me as I was aloof from a lot of consideration for feelings of pain caused by discrimination. Typical for a middle class white kid, no matter where or when.

[THREE] I’ve read you decry nihilism but Thomas Stephen Szasz said insane responses to an insane world are sane...on that note: have you ever been physically assaulted by a stranger?

THURSTON: I was mugged by three youngsters on Avenue C one late night in the late 1970s - hardly physical as I gave them my 3 dollars and pack of cigs - that's all I had - and they just chased me down the street. Shook me up for a long time but I wasn't physically hurt. I've been hit, punched a few times, knocked to the ground - mostly when I was a kid. I am mortified by fighting, getting into any physical/violent altercation. I am not aggressive and am never looking for confrontation - freaks me out. I have good friends who are totally confrontational in their own way, such as our fantastic friend Lydia, but she has transformed such antagonism into an art of war, where love is the prevailing wisdom.

[FOUR] How convenient does it seem to you that every time Netanyahu is in dire political straits there's a distracting Middle Eastern kerfuffle a la our Gulf Wars to redirect attentions and allow him to play strongman? And does your interest in politics extended beyond the Middle East?

THURSTON: It seems the planet goes through cycles of war and resistance since the beginning of civilization. We live now in a time where we have technology allowing us transparency of actual war crimes of state sponsored police oppressing the disenfranchised.

Israel has one of the most enriched and sophisticated militaries in the world, partially financed by USA interests. It’s encroaching real estate grab, weaponizing religious fundamentalism, toward Palestine is no different than a 16-year-old bully pouncing on a 6-year-old, enraged and throwing up fists. There is no contest in regards to power and Israel could easily eradicate all of Palestine tomorrow if need be – but it picks at it, knowing that it can contain the wrath of the rest of the world, until it finally mows it all down. All we can do is RESIST RESIST RESIST – that’s what the sounds coming out of the amplifiers are: the glory of rage and resistance sharing space with beauty and transcendence.

[FIVE] In the continued conversation around cancel culture I find myself feeling amazingly laissez faire up to and including that someone like Trump is just following his essential nature...is our lack of interest in people who are pieces of shit enough or should we have stronger sanctions?

THURSTON: I was told that in Buddhism there is a valid reason to rid the planet of those who present such danger to the world - though my reading of this could be off base! My feeling is that the world and its societies continue to go through phases and dynamics of chaos, resistance, humanitarianism and barbarism. To fight against any political oppression has always been a key factor of staying close to the eternal sentience of immortality.