Sonic Youth: Classic or Dud/S&D?

Shared this in the "I Rate Everything" board accidentally (no idea that existed). This was just posted by Roxy Cinema in NYC but not widely announced - they're screening The Velvet Suite with a Q&A afterwards with Lee Ranaldo and filmmaker Ignacio Julia moderated by Thurston Moore:

https://www.roxycinemanewyork.com/screenings/the-velvet-suite/

what is the Roxy Cinema? How long has that existed?

The Roxy Hotel decided to turn its basement into an arthouse cinema around 2017. It's been building its profile since then. (I think it helps that a few distributors/programmers who were friendly with Metrograph seemed to have gravitated more towards Roxy.)

I saw a rare screening of Godard's King Lear there recently and there's a pretty cool retrospective on Sara Driver coming up too. Right now they're also playing Aftersun, EO and Moonage Daydream.

FWIW, this turned out to be pretty awesome. The concert that was filmed turned out to be pretty great, but they also presented some re-discovered footage of the Velvets at their very first concert after they began their association with Andy Warhol. It's a pretty brief glimpse, but it's amazing to see them and the kids they were playing too (who apparently walked out as soon as the feedback-drenched solos began). The Jonas Mekas film was also a pretty great tribute to Andy with some surprising faces (like Lennon and Ono).

The Q&A was long, with Ignacio Julia doing most of the talking, but Moore and Ranaldo hung out for a long time afterwards, happily talking with anyone but also selling the new book, Linger On, published by Ecstatic Peace Library. Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley were also there in the audience which was pretty cool - last time I saw them with anyone from Sonic Youth (specifically Ranaldo and Steve Shelley), it was actually at the Lou Reed tribute at Lincoln Center where Kaplan, Hubley, Ranaldo, Shelley and others performed "Sister Ray." (Since then, at least Ranaldo has played in their annual Hanukkah shows, but not at the ones I attended.)

*the kids they were playing to

The legendary mid 80s "bootleg" Walls Have Ears is getting an official reissue via the band in February:

https://sonicyouth.bandcamp.com/album/walls-have-ears

Culled from three 1985 gigs in the UK during a transitional and transcendent time in the band’s story, Sonic Youth’s ‘Walls Have Ears’ appeared as a 2LP set in 1986, not just a live album but an artful tapestry full of live experimentation with songs, between-song tape segues, darkness, humor and audio verité on par with elements of side B of ‘Master Dik’ to come later. With a bit of complexity to the situation of the release itself. Deleted as quickly as it appeared, it’s now issued for the first time officially under the band’s auspices.

The ’85 shows were the second time the band appeared on British soil, picking up on a newfound high profile in the press after their 1983 London debut supporting SPK and Danielle Dax. That particular gig, while admittedly a technically-challenged, volumatically room-clearing one for the band, nonetheless wowed music scribes in attendance. This anarchic set cast the New Yorkers in a bit of an exotic light, Brits now getting juiced to the mythos of the emerging guitar-slinging American independent underground; an art/punk band from NYC sporting casual attitudes and tees sporting Bruce Springsteen, Madonna, and Prince made some good copy on top of their bludgeoning stage appearance. For Brits, Sonic Youth repped an all new avenue apart from the usual 4AD/Rough Trade/Some Bizarre hold on the scene, and were embraced. After a mostly dormant 1984, the band then established a new evolution within themselves via ‘Bad Moon Rising’ and found a home stateside on Homestead. In Britain, SY found its keyhole to the all-encompassing (even on an indie standpoint) music biz via Paul Smith, who was wowed by a cassette passed to him by Lydia Lunch. A promoter and label liaison who had forged many connections locally working for the likes of EMI and Cabaret Voltaire’s Doublevision label, Smith ultimately founded his own imprint Blast First to take on ‘Bad Moon Rising’ and evangelized the band with P.T. Barnum-esque gusto, eventually acting as a strong portal for UK footing for others of the American underground (Big Black, Butthole Surfers, Dinosaur Jr.). Blast First continued to act as an overseas diplomatic envoy for Sonic Youth through their SST years as well as issuing their classic 1988 Daydream Nation outside the USA. But true to Barnum, Smith’s injection into the band’s creative sphere as a sort of de facto manager type was somewhat in guerilla mode, and the Smith-produced ‘bootleg’ of their ’85 UK gigs surfaced much to everyone’s surprise, just before EVOL, their SST debut, was to be released. It turned out to be a marker of the group’s dissatisfaction that ultimately led to the band and Smith parting ways after Daydream.

In this 2LP set brimming with primitive classics like “The Burning Spear”, “I Love Her All The Time”, “Death Valley 69” and “I’m Insane” (uncredited on sleeve), segues and live guitar changes ooze together threaded by Madonna tapes and vocal loops off the board (somewhat a necessity for distraction until the band had a full fledged stage crew to prepare guitars). Claude Bessy (French punk raconteur who moved to LA for a period to cofound Slash Magazine and notoriously appeared in the Penelope Spheeris ‘Decline of Western Civilization’ documentary) humorously MC’s their intro to a October 30th ULU London gig with a lob at the indie label zeitgeist: vocally detailing how Rough Trade had come down on distributing the “Flower” 12” for sporting a xeroxed, nude female on the cover. The message was that music was reality, not manufactured subcultures, and Sonic Youth was there to present Britain with a healthy dose of it. The first two sides of ‘Walls’ are massive, cavernous, with newly-drafted drummer Steve Shelley in tow taking on past tunes and unveiling “Expressway To Yr Skull” in glorious form. They tear it up especially on one trash-fi excerpt of “Blood On Brighton Beach” (actually “Making the Nature Scene”) from a legendary outdoor gig November 8th where Moore, Gordon and Ranaldo’s guitars treble-blast dissonant shockwaves over the black-stoned beach of Quadrophenia fame.

The record’s second slab spotlights an April 1985 pre-Shelley gig supporting Nick Cave at London’s Hammersmith Palais and was one of the final appearances live of Bob Bert, again featuring some molten takes on “Brother James”, “Kill Yr Idols”, “Flower” (Iisted as “The Word (E.V.O.L.)”), “Ghost Bitch” and others. The emergence of the Jesus and Mary Chain in the world gave Brit scribes a lazy and easy parallel, addressed here with a wink with the inclusion of “Speed JAMC”, another offstage tape interlude playfully scrolling through one of that band’s songs at fast-forward. In six more years the continual evolution of Sonic Youth would find them darlings of The Reading Festival, on tour with Nirvana in tow and continuing to smash down walls, but this document remains an essential representation of some lean and mean years of the quartet’s throttling march out into the world.

Brian Turner

V excited by this. Amazing music on that boot.

Absolutely amazed to see an announcement of this in my inbox.

Oh wow have never seen a copy of this anywhere other than the radio station I DJed at. It really does have some amazing stuff on it.

lol of course WTJU had one

I treasure my copy for sure

Yep hah hah! I have looked at most record stores I have visited over the years and have never seen a copy in the wild.

I don't think I have either, I bought mine on release

Ah cool.

I remember when I was researching my SY book Paul Smith of Blast First telling me he pressed up the boot to make SY some extra money, because he thought it was immoral that Thurston and Kim had to work at a photocopy shop to make rent and that they should be able to live off their music, and that's why he did the boot. but they heard about it before he could explain that to them, and they thought he was ripping them off, and he reckoned it caused a profound crack in their friendship.

Thurston had hevay flu at the ICA show that some of the tracks come from, and was shivering backstage and was sweating and wearing every item of clothing he owned just to stay warm, and all the London scenesters thought he must have been some dopesick smackhead. He gets on stage and they begin playing and he's burnin' up under the lights and begins removing all his shirts and jumpers, one item at a time, as the show wears on, and everyone tells him afterwards that it was a genius bit of stagecraft on his part.

I remember when I was researching my SY book Paul Smith of Blast First telling me he pressed up the boot to make SY some extra money, because he thought it was immoral that Thurston and Kim had to work at a photocopy shop to make rent and that they should be able to live off their music, and that's why he did the boot. but they heard about it before he could explain that to them, and they thought he was ripping them off, and he reckoned it caused a profound crack in their friendship.

That excuse might have worked had he not pulled the exact same trick on Big Black...

That excuse might have worked had he not pulled the exact same trick on Big Black...

Sound Of Impact? i had always thought that was with the band's consent.

i sold my Walls Have Ears, to my eternal regret so this is good news.

Sound Of Impact? i had always thought that was with the band's consent.

I'd have to dig out my copy of Our Band Could Be Your Life to check, but I believe it was supposed to be a promo-only thing sent to radio stations, and then Albini spotted copies in record stores and confronted Smith about it.

actually, that sounds familiar.

Of course there's an Albini interview about it (from Quietus):

Tell me about Blast First re-issuing records without your permission.

SA: It's kind of complicated, in that my relationship with Paul Smith who runs Blast First kind of broke down over a Big Black bootleg that he had done. He had originally done the bootleg with our blessing, under the precondition that we weren't trying to milk the audience; we just wanted to put out a live record and we wanted to stop the inevitable bootlegging of the band by putting out a very high quality live record. And that was The Sound Of Impact. The record was intended to come out as a limited run, to cover its costs and nothing else. Just put the record out, sell as many copies as necessary to cover the cost of making it, and that's it. Right?

OK.

SA: A second run of that record was done, and started showing up in stores, with some very slight manufacturing differences that allowed me to tell that these copies were not part of the initial run. So I confronted Paul Smith about it, and he told me a story about someone at the pressing plant deciding - because he was a fan of the band - that the world needed more of the record, and pressed up another edition. That story didn't sit well with me, and it seemed completely incredible. Previously to that, there had been a problem with the band Sonic Youth, where he had done a bootleg for Sonic Youth under similar circumstances where it was obvious that they were going to get bootlegged anyway, so he thought, "Let's cut them off at the pass, and do a really nice bootleg, get it out there and you guys can make a little money."

The band kind of went along with it at first, then decided better – decided against it – but Paul went ahead and made this edition and released it, and the band found out about it and the band got mad about it and they almost broke off their relationship with him. This had happened a couple years previous to this thing with the Big Black record, and I knew about it, and he knew that I knew about it. So the story that this second edition was done by somebody at the pressing plant seemed completely incredible. So I asked him to put me in touch with this kid who he claims was a big Big Black fan, and he claims did this edition of the record all on his own. I said "Just let me talk to this guy, and it's all over; if it's somebody else then I have no complaint with you. I'll verify the story then we can move on". And that effort went on for a couple of years, literally a couple of years, during which time Big Black ended, and the posthumous record came out and the Rapeman record came out, and ultimately he was just never able to produce this other person. And it ended our relationship. I said, "I can't deal with someone who's bullshitting me, and this seems like bullshit, so I guess we're done". The problem with just ending the relationship there is that, at the time, the Rapeman record was still un-recouped. Meaning we had been given an advance from Blast First, and the bulk of that money was spent just relocating Rey and Dave from Texas to Chicago, and not spent on the record itself. But regardless, the money was spent, so the Rapeman record hadn't yet recouped at the point where our relationship broke down to the extent that we weren't going to be working together anymore. We haven't spoken about it, but it seems to me like it would be callous of me to reissue the record without clearing the books with Blast First, despite whatever my feelings might be about any duplicity on Blast First's part regarding the Big Black record. I wouldn't want to reissue their record and do a new, worldwide edition of the record. That record hasn't been available in the UK since Blast First ran out of them, I don't think that they've bothered to reprint them, although they would certainly be within their rights to do so. It's been available continuously in the US, and so if we were to reissue it and make it available in the UK it would be through Touch And Go, and I would be self-conscious about doing that without clearing the books with Blast First, and I honestly don't know how much money we owed them. There's potentially a prohibitive debt there, I really don't know.

I have a CD boot of Walls Have Ears which is currently in a box to sell on Discogs (if it's not blocked on there which it might be). I ripped it first obviously

it is blocked, it's this one https://www.discogs.com/release/2748209-Sonic-Youth-The-Sonic-Youth-Sound-Experience-Walls-Have-Ears

Well not directly them but this is one of the best/most unexpected things I've heard in a while -- liv.e doing a cover of "Kissability"

https://www.instagram.com/p/C2fjP3HPLs5/

Listening to Walls Have Ears now and it's really incredible. Would have loved this in high school (1988-90) when I was listening to them the most.

yeah it rules

Hoping this is sitting at home waiting for me when I get there.

Mine arrived this morning, just spinning it now. Great start to kick it off with one of my favourite SY songs (no, not yer man from Slash’s speech).

Liked Walls Have Ears so much I made their first decade the subject of this week's BA newsletter.

Really liked this early years visit. I just finished reading Moore's memoir and have been on quite the SY kick lately. 'Sister' just gives and gives - definitely a fave album. For absorbing the NYC no wave and post punk and glam rock and hardcore scenes around them at their inception, they came up with such a unique sound that would serve them throughout their career. Truly an exciting band.

I appreciate seeing I Love Her All The Time getting some kudos in your piece. One of my SY all time favourites. Loving the Walls Have Ears version of it too.

Nice essay!

i will read later when i have time. somehow i ended up spending too much time reading about phish! that is definitely my SY era.