Goodbye 20th Century: A Biography of Sonic Youth

Author:David Browne [Browne, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Composers & Musicians, Entertainment & Performing Arts, Music, General, Genres & Styles, Rock
ISBN: 9780306816031
Google: mZDMQBK7TK0C
Amazon: 0306816032
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 2008-01-01T11:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

RECORDS—THEY NEEDED RECORDS, as many as possible. In the early days, when the band would stay with friends or friends of friends, it wasn’t uncommon for Moore to flip through someone’s home LP collection and stumble across an obscure album he was desperate to own; inevitably, the person would just give it to him. They were no longer crashing in strangers’ homes, but the on-the-road routine didn’t change. Whether it was during the tours for Goo or with Neil Young, anyone who worked for Sonic Youth noticed the same daily ritual. The van or bus would arrive somewhere, the band would check into wherever they were staying, and Moore would immediately pull out the Yellow Pages in his and Gordon’s hotel room. Quickly finding the listings for the nearest record stores, he’d rip out the page and hit as many as possible by foot or taxi. Ranaldo and Shelley (and Terry Pearson) were avid record shoppers as well, but reflecting an obvious gene passed along from his scholarly father, Moore had become the band’s most obsessive collector. He even traveled with a small notebook listing the names and serial numbers of rare vinyl he needed for his archives.

Eventually, the music library grew so sizeable, and took up so much space, that Moore and Gordon rented a second, equally compact apartment at 84 Eldridge to house them all, as well as piles of books and clothes. But even those additional quarters weren’t enough, and, besides, the incoming Chinese gangs in the neighborhood were resorting to guns to settle their disputes. With an extra advance from Geffen, as well as money their landlord paid them to leave the building once it was sold to a new owner, the moment came to leave behind their first home and, along with indie labels and certain business associates, relegate it to their past.

In search of an ample-size loft, they found a large, raw space on Lafayette Street, in the far trendier and more bustling SoHo. A quarter of a million dollars later, it was theirs. With the help of an architect, the space was remodeled and restructured; walls were added, as was an office surrounded by LP shelves. As a reminder of the factory building it had once been, water pipes snaked across the ceiling, and the gas station up the street had a snack stand so unappetizing that even former Lower East Side residents hesitated before entering it. Moore had a few apprehensions: Writing to a teenage fan a few years later, he called SoHo and Tribeca “bourgeois to the max, but beyond that, there’s a historical vibe I dig.” Taking out the garbage one night, in fact, he was struck by how much the building’s back alley reminded him of the cover of the first Ramones album—the same album he’d bought after his father’s death. But with its price and location, the apartment was also a sign of both changes in the city and the band’s economic standing. “They were totally The Jeffersons,” says Julie Cafritz, one of many friends who dropped by and marveled at the new space.

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