Rockabye baby
Thurston and Kim and family.
The Sonic Rumblings of Lee Ranaldo
Lee and lots of guitar stuff. East Jesus and Washing Machine.
The band remains the same
The similarities between the Velvet Underground and Sonic Youth.
Kill yr tunings
Lee, Kim and Thurston and Experimental guitar.
Sonic Youth
Dirty article.

Title: Rockabye baby
Author: Steve Dougherty

Alternative rock icons Kim Gordon and her husband, Thurston Moore, are accustomed to zealous young fans. But the couple can't get over one recent visitor to the Memphis studio where Sonic Youth, their ultrahip and influential rock band, was recording a new album. "We'd be listening to mixes, and she'd just get wild," says Gordon, 43. As the walls rattled with the sound of Washing Machine, the ninth clangorous, feedback-drenched CD the band has released in a 15-year career, the fan "would scream and shout," adds guitarist Moore, 37. "She'd raise her hands in the air and go, 'Arrrgggghhhhh!'"

The head banger in question is no pierced and peroxided punk, however. She's the couple's 23-month-old daughter, Coco Hayley Gordon Moore, who has been hanging out in studios and traveling the world with her parents almost since the day she was born. "We take her everywhere," says her proud bassist-mom. Which means that infant Coco was along for the ride when Sonic Youth headlined last summer's Lollapalooza tour and later logged a lifetime's worth of frequent-flier miles as the band worked its way through parts of Asia and Australia. Now, to promote Washing Machine and a video of "The Diamond Sea," a single from the album, Coco was airborne again for the band's just- completed spring swing through Europe. Muses Gordon: "She'll probably be a stewardess when she grows up."

Her parents' decision to bring up baby on the road doesn't seem to bother the couple's bandmates. "It's not like we've had to shift gears radically to accommodate Coco," says Youth guitarist Lee Ranaldo, 40. (The other band member is drummer Steve Shelley, 33.) "We weren't out partying till 5 in the morning beforehand. We're pretty much normal people, not insane drug addicts. But Coco does add another layer of stability."

Though they have an image as the Godfathers of Grunge and a decidedly high- decibel, avant-garde sound, few groups are as firmly settled as Sonic Youth. They've been through a lot together, having struggled for nearly a decade on the punk-rock club circuit before an underground buzz, promulgated in part by such longtime fans as Nirvana's Kurt Cobain and the Breeders' Kim Deal, brought them mainstream notice. "We lived in a tiny apartment for 10 years with no money," says Moore. Adds Gordon: "We ate noodles every night." That began to change in 1989 when the band signed with David Geffen's DGC Records, a deal that resulted in a more varied diet, a larger living space--in Manhattan's Soho--and a baby to crawl around in it. "We always wanted to have children," Gordon says. "But I didn't feel like I was ready."

Gordon sprang from a very ungrunge home in Los Angeles. Her father, C. Wayne Gordon, is a retired UCLA dean, and her mother, Althea, is a seamstress. Settling in New York City after she dropped out of Toronto's York University in 1980, Gordon had just begun to play music when she met her future husband at a Manhattan rock club, where he was performing. Moore had grown up listening to classical music as well as rock and roll in Connecticut, where his late father, George, taught music at the University of Connecticut, and his mother, Eleanor, was a homemaker. But he joined the burgeoning punk-rock scene when he moved to New York in 1977. "There was something special about him and his guitar playing," Gordon recalls.

"I was Beavis, man," laughs Moore. Then, turning to his wife, he adds, "I thought you were beyond my means."

Eventually Gordon invited Moore to her Lower East Side apartment. "I finally came over," he says, "and I never left. We played music together from day one. The relationship developed simultaneously." The two dubbed themselves Sonic Youth, signed on Ranaldo and in 1982 released their first record, Sonic Youth. By 1985 the couple had wed and drummer Shelley had joined the group, which has remained unchanged ever since. As the band's popularity has spread- -they made an animated appearance on The Simpsons' season finale May 19--the Sonics have never tried to make their music more mainstream. "They are so eccentric. No one else can do what they do," says Kim Deal, a fan since 1986, who sings on Sonic Youth's "Trouble Girl" album track. Nor does the group worry that they are no longer really youths. "We just started to grow up instead of trying to maintain that you have to be like a teenager to really rock out," Moore says matter-of-factly. "It sort of puts us in this position where we're the wise older brother and sister."

Now that they've taken on the role of parents as well, Gordon and Moore are expanding the family circle. On their recent European tour, Eleanor Moore was along for the ride. "I brought my mom," says Thurston, an admitted late bloomer, "for 20 years of birthing me."

Title: The Sonic Rumblings of Lee Ranaldo
Author: Jas Obrecht

Sonic Youth's Lee Ranaldo and Thurston Moore can make garbage-can jaguars and jazz masters sing and howl like the second coming, as this year's Lollapalooza crowds can attest. With bassist/singer Kim Gordon and drummer Steve Shelley, they frame stark lyrics with jarring sonic backdrops--some huge, others shivering and small. There is very little cliched in their music.

Listening to an unmixed pre-release cassette, it's tempting to proclaim Washing Machine the apex of SY's catalog. Frantic, harrowing improvs segue into fuzzy astral guitars and breathy vocals. Pretty two-chord vamps get drowned in blitzkriegs of bombs, rumbles, and bells, only to rise and lull again. Unchecked guitar rage surrounds grim, angry portraits of street people, and punk petulance meets sexy grind. The guitarists' unusual tunings create compelling and unsettling overtones.

Lanky, tousle-haired Thurston Moore may be the band's most recognizable guitarist, but Lee Ranaldo is every bit as innovative. In fact, Sonic Youth is but one side of Ranaldo. Performed for smaller crowds, his recent unaccompanied improvisational performances have been more like symphonies than solos. Like Elliott Sharp and Fred Frith, he's a sonic sorcerer and visionary free guitarist. His just-released East Jesus [Atavistic, Box 578266, Chicago, IL 60657-82661] is lush, edgy, off-balancing, and rife with guitar figures that conjure the booming foghorn and crying gull, the rush of airplanes and the numbing pound of a steel mill.

It's impossible to not have a strong reaction to East Jesus.

Wow! Cool. Thanks a lot. I'm never sure how visible all those smaller records like that are. I'm really glad about that one.

"Time Stands Still" sounds like the Ford Rouge steel mill.

Yeah! That's exactly what it was supposed to be. Back when I made that stuff, it was supposed to be real mechanical, repetitive machine music, because we're always in love with repetitive mechanical sounds that we hear.

What's the story on "The Bridge"

That was actually the very first spoken-word type musical thing I ever tried to do.

Compelling slide sound.

Oh, thanks. It's mostly involved with the tuning of it. It was just simple, regular old slide on a 12-string, with a specific tuning that I don't even remember at this point.

During parts of "Some Distortion," it sounds as if you're dropping objects on the strings.

I was doing some stuff with little steel rods and things at that time, and I was probably dropping them on the strings or maybe it was even hitting the strings right over the pickups with my fist. It's hard to remember.

How did you get that track's foghorn sound?

It might have been a really low-tuned string played behind the bridge of a Jaguar or Jazzmaster--something that has a lot of string behind the bridge.

How often do you play outside of Sonic Youth?

Pretty often. We took a pretty good hiatus last year, up until the making of this record, because of Thurston and Kim having a baby. We all released a bunch of different records in various guises during that period. I do a fair amount of solo stuff, and I also did quite a lot of duets with William Hooker, a free jazz drummer. We have one release that's out on the Knitting Factory label, called Envisioning, and a trio record with [harpist] Zeena Parkins ready to go. It's really extemporaneous and spontaneous. We seem to have a pretty cool thing worked out together.

How does it compare to playing with Sonic Youth?

They're two sides of the coin. Sonic Youth is as much about structure as it is about free improv. What I like about the other thing is the ability to indulge in the pure extreme sound and tone of it. With Sonic Youth we go in and out of that--we deal with the pure sounds and then pull back into song structures. That's what Sonic Youth's audience is accustomed to and probably why the audience is so large. There's never as large an audience for all-instrumental improvised music.

It's funny, because that kind of improvised music that both Thurston and I have gotten a fair amount of playing in on during the last few years has really been a New York tradition. All through the late '70s and '80s, at a time when we really didn't want to have anything to do with improvised music, there were tons of people doing it, like Elliott Sharp, Arto Lindsay, and John Zorn. It's only been in the last half-decade that we've had a much more specific interest in it. Maybe that's because we're listening to a lot more jazz, or maybe the fractured nature of die rock scene at this point has left us wanting something that wasn't being fulfilled there.

Which of the improvisational guitarists would you go out of your way to see?

There are a lot of those guys that I would like to see now and again. I guess it's not fair to call Zorn an improviser these days, because a lot of his stuff is really composed and structured. I really love what he does, and I would always go and see what he's doing. I really like Charles Gayle, who's a sax player, and I like Rudolph Gray's Blue Humans for improvised work that really spans the gap, since he was doing the same stuff in the late-'70s No Wave days.

How much improvisation is on the new Sonic Youth album?

There's quite a lot. Those extended songs like "Diamond Sea," "Washing Machine," and "Unwind" have sections that have very open, free playing going on, where we sort of know what keys we're dealing with and how long it's supposed to go on. Aside from that, there's not a whole lot of other specified information. It's different every night on some of those songs. We've purposefully kept it that way by not nailing it down.

Some of the songs on that record were tracked in our rehearsal room, where I have an 8-track machine set up. One thing we loved about those recordings was that they were very spontaneous-sounding. Some of the takes were the first time we got a song to really gel and flow in that perfectly natural way before you refine it further. Some of those demo recordings weren't the most hi-fi and there's some bum notes here or there, but we really liked the way it was so casually played.

When we went to Memphis to do the actual recordings, we tried to keep it like that. We kept a very loose schedule, where we'd go in and play for a while, and if we got bored or didn't feel like it was right, we would just leave the studio and go eat barbecue or something. So when we got things to click, there wasn't that feeling of grinding things into the ground by trying to perfect them. Which is also a reason why we produced this record ourselves instead of going with someone like Butch Vig, who did the last couple of records. We found it was getting to be too much about the perfectionist kind of record-making mentality. We definitely polished these songs, but not nearly to the degree we did on the last couple of records. I like the idea that the record can be closer to an actual document of something. We were all playing live on all the tracks, all four of us in the same room, using as little baffling as possible. We've done most of our last few records that way, but this one in particular was very easy and comfortable.

Have you settled into the Pavement tuning?

Thurston uses that tuning [C, G, D, G, B, B, low to high! almost exclusively on his solo record, and I love that tuning--I like to play around with it at home--but we didn't use it at all on our record. There are a few pretty common tunings on this record that we used an awful lot. That's not to say that Thurston and I are in the same tuning on most songs. But we're in complementary tunings. On "Saucer-Like" we're probably in the same tuning, what we used to call the "Death Valley" tuning. It started out as a low pair of F#s, double F#s in the middle, and then E and B on the high end. For a bunch of the songs on this record I altered it so the bottom string of the low two pairs changed. I think it ended up being E, F#, A, F#, E, B.

Do you imagine parts before you discover their tunings?

My parts usually come out of the tunings, although sometimes I'll hear a part in my head and set about devising a tuning that will allow that part to be actualized. Sometimes I hear something and I know it has to do with a certain confluence of tones next to each other on a certain place on the fretboard, and I go in reverse and try to figure out how to do it.

Did you write "Saucer-Like" and "Skip Tracer"

Well, we all wrote the music together. I wrote the lyrics to those two, but we almost always write all the music before we have any lyrical ideas at all. Sonic Youth's thing has pretty much always been musical composition first. Then in the few weeks before the record, people take different songs home and write lyrics for them.

What did you bring to "No Queen Blues"

I like that song a lot. I play the really snaky lead-like lines. Thurston's doing the wall scratches at the beginning, and then I'm doing the more straight lead-guitar stuff throughout that song, that sort of cat-up-on-tiptoes kind of thing.

Sounds like early Jorma Kaukonen.

Huh. That's interesting because I was really into him in his early period. I used to really love his playing incredibly so.

What's the secret of that tone?

It's a Les Paul with an additional pickup between the first two. It's played with a lot of the treble rolled off, so it's really warm and round and not too biting. The first minute or two of that song--where all the scratchy stuff is happening--that's an 8-track demo. And then right as it kicks into the song proper, it's cross-faded to the 16-track mix At the beginning it's pretty ratty and lo-fi, but as the first vocal hits, just about all the instrumentation except my guitar becomes 16-track. For the first verse, we kept my 8-track lead lines. When the second verse hits, I'm back in the 16-track domain as well, so another tonal shift happens. I'm really proud of the way we managed to seam that one together.

How did "Junkie's Promise" develop?

That was an early one that came from a dirty, Neil Young kind of riff that Thurston had and we developed. That one came together pretty fast, actually. We had never felt it was really worthy of being a song. And then in the last week or so, we jazzed it up and fucked around with that ending section where it gets all out of control.

Speaking of out of control, that solo in "Saucer-like". . .

That's me playing a Travis Bean Artist guitar, which I used a lot on this record. I've got a small collection of those; I really like the sound of them.

There's an ancient blues riff lurking in "Washing Machine."

It's in the second part of the song, with a little bent note. That's my playing as well. It's also got a kind of Creedencey sound because of that little picked thing. We thought that was cool, because we took this song that was going one place and added this whole other familiar-sounding riff to it. That song has been a really fun centerpiece live. I play the Travis Bean with that tuning we talked about earlier, and then in the section where it drops down briefly to just bass and drums, I swap over to a Les Paul in a G tuning for the second half of the song. That gives it this really cool tonal shift, because in the first part Thurston and I are playing in these F# tunings. So Thurston shifts keys to G, but I actually shift guitars. I do it every night onstage.

Who does the whammy?

That's Thurston--that long sick lead thing in the second section. That's really good.

Does Kim play guitar on this record?

Kim plays an awful lot of guitar on this record. She plays guitar on more of the record than she plays bass on. When we got into the mix mode, we realized it was a little strange because songs were unconventionally light on the bottom. It took us a while to realize that's just par for the course when there's no bass on the song. [Laughs]

Kim's guitar style is really cool. She's not like a schooled player in that she doesn't have a lot of those built-in riffs clogging up her head like a lot of guys do. Certainly both Thurston and I have that to some extent--we've listened to a lot of records and copped things. She tends to get into these really repetitive rhythmic parts that approximate a bass type of movement. She's playing in an altered tuning as well. I don't even know what the main key of it is, but I think it's in Gs. It gave this record a much needed dose of an additional chaotic element.

What's with Thurston's "moratorium" on talking to guitar magazines?

I don't know. [chuckles] That's Thurston's thing.

Have you found any new creepy pedals?

Oh, man, did we! We have two of the creepiest pedals on this record that you could ever imagine or desire. One is an old Maestro ring modulator that I use a lot these days when I play solo. I used it on the record on a bunch of different places, and I really love it. It's got that real outer-spacey kind of sound. The other device, which I use for the middle break of "Junkie's Promise" and Thurston uses at the head of "Diamond Sea!" for another kind of a wah-wah sound, is a really bizarre pedal called something like the Ludwig Phase II guitar synthesizer. It comes in a little metal suitcase, and you unfold one side that becomes a wah-wah kind of footpedal with a bunch of switches on it. Then you lift back a plate on the top, and there are all kinds of modifying sliders for envelope and stuff like that. It's really a sick thing. I've never seen anything like it before, and it's capable of all kinds of insane, crazy phasing and wah and synthetic kinds of sounds. It's gorgeous. Thurston plays it onstage, and we're looking for another one so we can each have one.

What's your best feedback setup?

Feedback comes down to the guitar and the amp connection, and it's not that hard to get. I tend to like humbucking pickups for it, although the Les Paul is not humbucking, and that guitar is one of the prime feedback culprits. I really love this amp that I used on the last two records. It's a Fender Custom Shop model called the Tone Master. That's pretty much my amp of choice these days. It's almost too loud at 100 watts, and I was talking to them about putting in a switch to step it down to 50 watts. I use Fender Custom Shop cabinets--a 4x12 and a 2x12 with little legs on the side so you can lean it back. I also use a Fender reverb unit that's a copy of the original late-'50s unit, since the Tone Master doesn't have a reverb unit inside of it. That's pretty much my setup at the moment.

Can you suggest how guitarists can go about destroying and rebuilding their sounds?

It mainly comes from having a concept. It starts when you realize that you want to get into less-explored territory. A lot of guitar players can be faulted because they look to cop stuff from other players--that's the way everybody learns, obviously--but there's a whole school of people whose emulation factor is really high. So look for stuff that doesn't sound like anybody else. Once that shift of mind is made, it gets a lot easier. You just catch yourself when you lapse into somebody else's language.

Title: The band remains the same
Author: Dave Merline, Rob Michaels and Mike Rubin

New York bands the Velvet Underground and Sonic Youth share more than a zip code. Both include three men and one woman, both play rambling feedback dirges. And both have received the kiss-of-death sobriquet "seminal," while moving negligible units. But that's not really why Sonic Youth are the VU of the '90s; the reissue of four Sonic Youth albums reveals more ominous similarities.

Title: Kill yr tunings
Author: Joe Gore

Scattered around the lobby of Manhattan's Sears Sound, the members of Sonic Youth idly thumb through a stack of music magazines, nibble Mexican takeout, and pass around a copy of Michael Azerrad's Come As You Are: The Story Of Nirvana. Kurt Cobain is still alive, and the musicians have been scrutinizing their depiction as early boosters, touring buddies, and label mates of the Seattle trio.

The night before guitarist Thurston Moore cornered Azerrad after a Royal Trux gig at CBGB's, telling him that his book erroneously reported that Sonic Youth mixed in layers of white noise to help their last album, Dirty, live up to its name. Might Moore, who thrives on tweaking earnest journalists, have uttered such a fib in much the same spirit that he told Guitar Ptayer readers he attended Berklee and studied with Bill Frisell? "Maybe," he allows.

Producer Butch Vig, veteran of Nirvana's Nevermind, Smashing Pumpkins' Siamese Dream, and Dirb, calls in the musicians one at a time for level checks. It's well past midnight when he asks the quartet to run down one tune so they can listen with fresh ears tomorrow. They plow through "Doctor's Orders" and then return to the console for a playback. The sound, with absolutely no processing, is stunning, the oddly tuned guitars alternately barking and glistening. "Wow," murmurs bassist Kim Gordon. "It sounds like it's mixed already."

Six monts later Experimental Jet Set, Trash And No Star is about to be released. A giddy blend of fastidiously arranged pieces and off-the-cuff rave-ups, Sonic Youth's ninth album (excluding EPs and gray-market bootlegs) recalls EVOL, Sister, and Daydream Nation, the late-'80s LPs that helped elevate the quartet from fringe avant-gardists to postpunk's most influential guitar band. Many of Experimental's songs are downright beautiful, full of eerie harmonies, precise ensemble work, and ravishing guitar textures. There's even a solo acoustic cut. "Geffen says they don't hear a single, but we all love this record," enthuses co-guitarist Lee Ranaldo. Tomorrow morning Cobain's body will be discovered; today the band is in high spirits.

Did everything go as smoothly as that first night?

Thurston: It started easy, then we decided to make it harder, then we went back to Easyville.

Lee: Which is to say, as much as we enjoyed our quick rough mixes, we felt we couldn't trust them, so we spent two weeks and 25 grand doing proper mixes . . .

Kim: But we ended up using the half-hour rough mixes.

There's an amazing mix of sublime, pretty stuff and bonehead punk rock.

Lee: "Bonehead"?

Thurston: Well, we're trying to eradicate the bonehead parts as we go along.

"Skink" and "Bone" use the guitars and bass in one big, resonant choir

Kim: Both of those are based on guitar riffs of mine--there's no bass on those cuts. It's the same tuning I use with Free Kitten: B, E, D, D, and two low B's on top.

It's cool how "Bull In The Heather" makes pop hooks out of abstract gestures like cluster harmonics and behind -the-nut strums.

Thurston: That's a behind-the-bridge strum. Behind-the-nut is for arty, pretentious people. Behind-the-bridge is rock; behind-the-nut is art school. Stay away from the nut.

Has anyone compared that song to Creedence's "Fortunate Son"?

Lee: Yeah, that's what the main guitar riff is.

Thurston: What?

Kim: I don't hear that, but "Sweet Shine" was originally called "Lindsey" because it sounds like Fleetwood Mac.

What are the noises on "Starfield Road," the ones that sound like toy ray guns?

Thurston: Toy ray guns.

Come on, man--I've seen you lie to journalists before.

Lee: And then five years later some guy in France is going to say, "Deed you evair do more with ze toy ray gun sound?" That effect is my newest toy, a Maestro ring modulator. My other favorite is the Ibanez AD80 analog delay stomp box I use all over the album. We've been really into old effects pedals.

Thurston: I use Sovtek Big Muff pedals for all the "bonehead" chords. I've also got a '70s Mu-Tron Fuzz/Wah and a Mu-Tron phase shifter that just makes a scratchy whistling sound. I used some Turbo Rat for your classic distortion, but I'm thinking of abandoning that in favor of just clean and cranked Big Muff.

You're using mostly high-quality guitars now instead of the pawnshop trash you used to play.

Lee: Yes indeed. My biggest recent discovery has been the Les Paul; almost all my parts on the record were written on it. I love it so much; everything it does is perfect. I also used my usual Travis Bean aluminum-necks and early-'70s Tele Deluxes. My main amp is a new Fender Tone Master; I really like the way it has the simplest controls possible. Now I'm going to investigate early Fender Deluxes. I'm definitely leaning towards cool smaller amps, though I need something like the Tone Master to blast live.

Kim: My main bass was a Fender Precision through a Mesa/Boogie amp and some tube direct box.

Thurston: I just used the same old same old, mostly a couple of Jazzmasters and a 160watt Peavey Roadmaster. We have to go on tour so I can have one of our roadies change the tubes.

Lee: See, we haven't had to do that stuff ourselves in so long, we don't know how.

Thurston: I changed a string myself the other night. It took five hours, man. I run the Peavey through a '60s Marshall 4x12 bottom. I need more so I can build a wall out of them--or at least some coffee tables. I like amps as furniture.

What's the acoustic guitar on "Winner's Blues"?

Lee: That's Thurston playing my Carson J. Robison acoustic, which was made by Gibson in the '30s. It's an amazing guitar.

What's the tuning?

Thurston: E, E, B, E, G#, B, low to high. But they're not tunings; they're secret codes.

Lee: Tunings talk is passe. Every article you read, whether it's Pearl Jam or whoever the fuck, they all use tunings at this point. It's not important. I mean, it's great for guitarists to know that those things exist, but at this point it's very secondary to what we do.

Kim: Now tunings are just part of the vocabulary that everyone uses. A tuning is just an extension of the guitar Wouldn't it be great if the guitars people bought on 48th Street all came in weird tunings, and you were committed to that tuning for the life of the guitar? What would happen?

Now that you've dismissed tunings, tell us which ones you used.

Lee: We used so many fewer guitars and tunings than ever before--maybe two or three each. For about 60% of the record, I used the Les Paul in a new tuning, G, G, C, G, C, D. Two other recent faves are G, G, B, D, G, A, and C#, F#, C#, F#, A#, B. All my tunings are restrung--I never use any string gauges smaller than .017. I used E, E, B, B, E, F# for "Sweet Shine." I call it "Wooden Ships" tuning because it sounds so Jefferson Airplane/Crosby, Stills & Nash.

Thurston: I used a lot of the "Brother James" tuning [G, G, D, D, Eb, Eb]. "Skink," "Screaming Skull," "Tokyo Eye," and "Sweet Shine" are all in the "Dirty Boots" tuning [E, G, D, G, E, D, with the second string tuned lower than the third] that Kim came up with. I'm using Pavement's tuning for every song I'm writing now, but they'll get bummed if I disclose it.

Lee: Tell!

Thurston: Okay, it's C, G, D, G, B, B.

Lee: This time around we wanted to expedite the writing process and skip the weeks of searching for tonal centers and so forth. At this point we have a collection of guitars and tunings that work well together; why not just utilize them?

Thurston: Didn't you see the quote on the back of our CD? It's from Jack Brewer, the singer from Saccharine Trust. He said, "Once the music leaves your head, it's already compromised." I don't know, man.... I remember reading an interview with Greg Ginn years before I knew him. They asked him what his favorite guitars were, and he said he didn't have any favorites because he didn't consider himself a guitar player. He just happened to pick up guitar because it was around. J Mascis is like that too.

You mean musicians referring to themselves as "guitarists" is like novelists calling themselves "typewriters"?

Thurston: Yeah. That's what Charles Bukowski always used to say: "I'm a typewriter." So I agree with Greg Ginn. I'm not a guitarist.

So how come Guitar World pronounced Sonic Youth the "eighth most important" fixture on the guitar scene, in between Jimmy Page and Ace Frehley?

Lee: They did? Cool! But how do they rationalize that? We're not what they're all about.

Thurston: Yeah, but some things you can't deny! [Laughs] Hey, I like playing guitar. It's a cool instrument, in a way.

Title: Sonic Youth
Author: David Browne

This year some anger is served

"Nirvana has validated all of us jerks," laughs Thurston Moore, singer and guitarist of Sonic Youth. The kingpins of New York's downtown rock scene hardly need any validation, though. On '80s albums like Daydream Nation and Sister, Sonic Youth made music (hurricanes of fuzzy guitar squalor) and copped an attitude (bratty and deadpan-hip) that hacked out a path through today's alternative rock jungle.

For its efforts, the band has been rewarded with a contract with Geffen's DGC label (which released its 1990 album, Goo) and with opening for Neil Young on his 1991 tour. "He kind of exploited us to fuck with his audience," Moore recalls, "but he was a down-to-earth dude."

It's easy to see how Sonic Youth could mess with an audience's mind: Using screwdrivers and other tools, the group achieves maximum feedback quotient yet shapes the sonic whirlwind and hooky melodies into a beautiful noise, much the way Young does whenever he picks up his electric guitar. Young should also appreciate Sonic Youth's new album, Dirty, due in stores July 21, which tackles topics like racism, the murder of a close friend and, in a song called "Swimsuit Issue," sexual harassment in the workplace. "Well, it's an election year," says bassist-singer Kim Gordon, who is married to Moore. "Yeah - we have a right to be angry," adds Moore.

The band - which also includes guitarist Lee Ranaldo and drummer Steve Shelley - champions other causes as well, namely underground rock. It was Sonic Youth who brought Nirvana to the attention of DGC, which signed the Seattle trio, and Moore runs his own independent label, Ecstatic Peace, which specializes in records by obscure young bands like New York's Cell. Moore and Shelley can also be heard this summer on a raw, feisty album by the Dim Stars (Caroline Records), featuring a rare recorded performance by the legendary Richard Hell. Sonic Youth itself will tour nationally after the release of Dirty. "Then we'll break up," Moore jokes, "and I promise you we'll never come back for a reunion tour." Now there's a cool idea.