Sonic Youth: Classic or Dud/S&D?

this was the last time I saw them!
https://sonicyouth.bandcamp.com/album/live-in-austin-1995

I saw Lorette velvette with panther Burns at Dingwalls and i Think possibly later, not sure if she was still with them when they came back though. Had a Hellcats mini lp too.

Saw SY at CBGBs in the summer of 86 as well as Maxweels Hoboken that summer. Dinosaur pre jr support on both .

more memories:

July 1986

The Hoosier Ballroom in Indianapolis. Their whole set is on Youtube. EVOL tour with the standard setlist of LP tracks, the early "White Cross", "I Love Her All The Time", "Death Valley '69", and "Brother James". Openers were a one-off noise project of Scott Colburn's (O.D.I.R.) and not-so-great local band The Math Bats. Unbelievableshow that cemented my love for them.

July 1987

At Oberlin College near Cleveland, Big Black opened (!! yes they were great). Sister hadn't come out yet, Thurston said "we're gonna play a bunch of new songs", they burned through a great set, and then did the Ramones medley. I was very happy.

December 1988

Trax, Charlottesville, VA. Next-to-last show on the Daydream Nation tour, they were exhausted and punch-drunk but still brought it. Happy Flowers and B.A.L.L. opened. Kramer had a box of wine that got passed around on and off stage. All-star "I Wanna Be Your Dog" closer.

summer 1990

Jockey Club, Cincinnati. I remember much less about this show than the others, it also wasn't as memorable. Goo had come out for sure, I can't remember the opening band.

September 1999

Bumbershoot, Seattle, the big arena. As mentioned above this was a mostly-instrumental set of skeletal NYCG&F sketches which seemed to baffle and confuse the (very full) crowd, but they did do "I Dreamed I Dream" to my great delight. At one point a Lollapalooza-looking teen in front of us said to his friend "I thought you said their songs had words, man."

I only saw them in 2000 and 2006, I was kinda late to getting into them really, for some reason during all my indie and grunge listening in the early 90s I didn't knowingly hear anything by SY apart from 100% until the mid-90s. I got super into them in 1997 when all their albums got reissued mid-price and I had just left uni and got a job so I bought them all

Duh, just remembered that I saw them in 2007 when they did the Daydream Nation set at Pitchfork, the night Slint also played.

The 2000 show I went to was for the NYCGAF tour and almost half the set was off that album which is one of my least favourite but it worked OK live. I did enjoy the 2006 set a lot more (half Rather Ripped and the rest all from Sister, Daydream Nation and Confusion Is Sex)

Was the Oberlin show in the ‘Sco (basement of student union) or Finney Chapel? (Big church)

it was in Hales Gym!! I still have a flyer!

part of the "1987 WOBC music festival"

sleeve I’ve had a recording of that Bumbershoot set forever, I really like it. I think the stolen gear truck prompted a major rethink and the new material was written on borrowed gear without customisation?

Speaking of the stolen gear truck, my only SY show was the This Ain't No Picnic festival in Irvine, CA, 4th of July 1999--the first gig after the gear was stolen.

Highlights of the day included:
- My introduction to Boredoms, playing Super AE stuff.
- The spontaneous discussion among strangers as we headed for our cars at the end of the day between the "I don't see what the fuss is" folks and the "Holy fuck that was awesome" contingent.
- Driving back to L.A. on the 5, and passing through Anaheim with the Disney fireworks going off ahead of me.

To clarify, point #2 above was specifically about Boredoms.

oh man Hales. I never even stepped foot in there. The only concert I remember being held there was De La Soul.

xp Weirdly, I don’t specifically recall Boredoms’ performance at ATP USA 2002 (curated by SY)… though I must have seen them, as I was a fan, (and I remember seeing them later)? I definitely remember other acts at that fest…

drummer Richard Edson’s cymbal crashes

Today I learned that one of the guys who stole Cameron's dad's car in Ferris Bueller's Day Off used to play drums for Sonic Youth

I just saw him in an old re-run of Homicide: Life on the Street, a really great episode that was mostly him and Bruno Kirby. Didn't he get his start as an actor in Jim Jarmusch's Stranger than Paradise? Crazy how he jumped to that from Sonic Youth.

He’s in Good Morning Vietnam, as well.

I somehow find it funnier that Kim Gordon dated Danny Elfman for a long time, before the band.

I forgot Moore has a song called "Sleepin' Around" (as in "I'm not...").

lol

I don't think "I'm not" is implied at all in that song!

If anything, it seems pretty sympathetic to the person who's sleeping around - the only concern is "what will the neighbours say", while the verses paint a grim picture of their relationship ("what did you good is gone/Nothing you do is right...") imo.

I agree!

:) but :(

Speaking of the stolen gear truck, my only SY show was the This Ain't No Picnic festival in Irvine, CA, 4th of July 1999--the first gig after the gear was stolen.

Hah I was there too. I saw them four times: 1990 at UC Irvine, This Ain't No Picnic, Terrastock V's all Murray Street set, and finally at ATP Long Beach in 2003

That This Ain’t No Picnic set was the first time I ever saw them and like Elvis I was there for the T5 set — third time was the first ArthurFest and fourth and last time was an excellent show in Seattle on the _Rather Ripped_ tour. But they were all great and three out of four times they played my favorite song by them, “Mote.”

Of the many times I saw them the one that really sticks in my head was the 2000 set at the Walker Art Center (w/ Stereolab); their gear had been ripped off that last summer, everyone had decided NYC Ghost & Flowers sucked for some reason, their last Mpls appearance was for circa A Thousand Leaves & it was a good but pretty mellow, O'Rouke was in the band now and no one had any expectations for them and they hit the stage with "Teen Age Riot" and it was like 1987 all over again. They were fucking great.

I only saw them once, the first time I saw a show at the now-demolished Roseland Ballroom in NYC when they were on the Goo tour.

This was before the venue added the stage at the end of the room so Sonic Youth played on what would later become the VIP area.

I remember that I was so impressed that they were selling shirts for only $10 I bought one even though I was perpetually broke back then. I wore the fuck out of that shirt.

I also remember the show was wonderful and heavy on Goo which was fine with me as it and Daydream Nation were my two favorite Sonic Youth albums (I like to imagine a world where Sonic Youth are a pop band).

I first saw them in St. Louis, summer 2003. They opened with "Peace Attack" and I remember thinking it was the most beautiful thing they had ever done. I had to wait another year to hear the studio version on Sonic Nurse and it did not disappoint. The rest of the set was basically Murray Street plus the hits, an ideal situation imo.

Where was that in St. Louis? I saw them once, around the same time, in St. Louis, but can remember none of the details.

tried getting into their 2002 central park summerstage show on standby but didn't get in

I was at that show, the only time I've ever seen them. I remember mostly the "Murray Street" songs and their kids running around on the stage.

Archival release coming out on Three Lobed:

https://threelobed.bandcamp.com/album/in-out-in-2

More on what's up:

Over a decade ago it was a crazy ask to see if they wanted to participate in a TLR box set and it was crazier still when the response came back “yes”. The material that they contributed to the "Not The Spaces…" set blew me away upon first listen and continues to do so today. About 2 years ago I felt that those songs demanded recontextualization, to be pulled off the virtual shelf and placed back into circulation. The fire and vitality within those tracks that was apparent in 2011 somehow burned even more intensely in 2022.

Welcome "In/Out/In", a sort of cousin to both "The Destroyed Room" and the SYR series in that it consists of primarily instrumental tracks that were cosmically meant to live together. Calling out such hallowed tracts is not an act that is taken lightly. "In/Out/In" takes the tracks from that 2011 set and couples them with three additional like-minded cuts from the band's 2000-2010 phase, all never previously released physically. Be it the closet mix choogle of “Basement Contender”, the rhythmic Gordon/Shelley showcase of “In & Out”, the spiraling guitar grind of “Machine”, the expansively exploratory “Social Static” or the gloriously ascendant white-hot rocket ride of “Out & In,” there’s something here for every flavor of SY head. Taken individually or as a whole, the band’s unmistakable voice shines.

Thurston's EOY list:

Thurston Moore

Thirty killer recordings I had the pleasure to come across in 2021, all new performances from a galaxy of inspired lights. Keep on shinin’, friends!
—Thurston Moore / Sonic Life

1. Seafoam Walls - XVI (Daydream Library LP)
2. Xopher Davidson - Lux Perpetua (Daydream Library LP)
3. Wobbly - Popular Monitress (Hausu Mountain cassette)
4. Farida Amadou & Pavel Tchikov - Mal De Terre (Trouble In Mind cassette)
5. Luke Stewart - Works For Electric Bass Guitar (Triptickstapes cassette)
6. Ana da Silva & DJ Mooncup - Shouting Out Loud (Noods Radio cassette)
7. Joseph Nechvatal - Selected Sound Works (1981-2021) (Pentiments cassette)
8. Wharton Tiers - Wharton’s Expanding Jazz Band (self released digital)
9. Moor Mother - Circuit City (Black Quantum Futurism LP w/ Playbill)
10. Michael R. Bernstein - Blind In Sight (self released cassette)
11. Marshall Trammell & Aaron Turner - Experimental Love I & II (Sige cassette)
12. Jaimie Branch - Fly Or Die Live (International Anthem 2XLP)
13. Twig Harper - Classical Electronics (Radical Documents cassette)
14. Ava Mendoza - New Spells (Relative Pitch cassette)
15. Michael Morley - Electric Guitar (Radical Documents cassette)
16. Gerald Cleaver - Griots - (Positive Elevation LP)
17. Title TK - Metallic TK (self released cassette)
18. Sophie Cooper - Goodbye Gemini (Borley Rectory cassette)
19. Co-ed - s/t (Sludgepeople cassette)
20. Gergesenes - Exorcism of the Gerasene Demoniac (Banner Of Blood cassette)
21. Orphan Fairytale - Titania Moon (Ultra Eczema LP)
22. Joe Morris & Damon Smith - Gusts Against Particles (Open Systems LP)
23. The Bohman Brothers - In Their 70s (Fort Evil Fruit cassette)
24. Natalie Beridze - Mapping Debris (Monika Enterprise cassette)
25. Tasos Stamou & Alan Wilkinson - Whenever (Ikuisuus cassette)
26. Irons - Unto The Kingdom (self released digital)
27. Alan Braufman & Cooper-Moore - Live at WKCR May 22, 1972 (Valley Of Search 12”)
28. Nihilist Spasm Band - Nothing Is Hard To Do (But We Try) (We Are Busy Bodies 7”)
29. Gaahls WYRD - The Humming Mountain (Season Of Mist 10”)
30. White People Killed Them - (Sige LP)

lol @ the top two spots going to his own label's releases, but I have read others enthusing about that Seafoam Walls album.

Pre-ordered that new archival release right away, looking forward to it!

good list!

I saw them open for Pearl Jam in 2000 and don't remember a damn thing about their performance. To be fair, I was in the cheap seats.

Liner notes by tylerw? TAKE MY MONEY

Lol, otm

same

also this tracklist looks killer

The sole track with O'Rourke on the new release (which has been released before as part of a box set as stated in the liner notes) is a slow, brooding and instrumental early version of "Pattern Recognition".

Liner notes by tylerw? TAKE MY MONEY
ha, brian turner (ex WFMU) actually wrote the liners, I wrote the "obi-essay" that comes with the LP. a tiny thing, but believe me, 15-year-old me is over the moon about it.

Either way, that's awesome! I might just have to get back into buying more vinyl just for your obi-strip essays! I did get the one that came with the Sunburned Hand of the Man vinyl.

they're kind of glorified hype stickers, but they are cool!

When I die will you write the obi obit for my posthumous best of

obi is a big nytimes crossword answer. japanese belt. It always bums me that I forget.

Am 100% hiring Tyler to write bumf first my next record. Only stipulation: must be scrupulously honest.

“Eh, this stuff is alright for a bunch of fiftyish hobbyists from the prairies. You could do worse. But you’ll probably forget it in a week, so why bother?”

i will write everyone's obis, just call me obi-wan.

Agree to that so quickly

Where was that in St. Louis? I saw them once, around the same time, in St. Louis, but can remember none of the details.

― Karl Malone, Thursday, December 23, 2021 4:37 PM (one month ago) bookmarkflaglink

Sorry, just saw this now. It was at the Pageant.