In recent years, I’ve become addicted to a new literary subgenre: the New York City punk memoir. The key example is Patti Smith’s prize-winning Just Kids, but there are plenty more, from the very famous (Blondie’s Debbie Harry) to the less so (Television’s Richard Lloyd).
They celebrate with scuzzy nostalgia the days when the city was officially bankrupt, and the East Village and surrounding neighborhoods had scary-but-low-rent apartments that attracted young artists. Everyone seemed to be in a punk band and crossing paths with Lou Reed, Jean-Michel Basquiat, the Ramones, and Keith Haring.
The most recent example is from Thurston Moore of art/noise band Sonic Youth. I read his new memoir this week in tandem with that of Kim Gordon, his former bandmate and ex-wife.
Moore was only 18 years old when he moved alone to the badlands of Alphabet City to be a musician in 1976, right at the genesis of Punk. A tall skinny guitar-geek, he spent his first few years in the city scraping by on odd-jobs to support his music obsession. The neighbors in his tenement building rarely lasted very long — if they weren’t evicted by the landlord’s goons, they were often arrested by police.
Moore lived monk-like in a tiny room with just a mattress, a cat, and his guitar. His existence revolved around rehearsals with various transitional bands, and attending shows at small venues such as CBGB and the Mudd Club, where he saw every punk or alternative band that mattered.
This was the nerdy boy-man that Kim Gordon met when she arrived in the city in 1980, and, with guitarist Lee Ranaldo, the core of Sonic Youth was formed.
Moore’s memoir meticulously documents all the era’s fellow bands and his favorite performances. Most published reviews of the book are very dismissive of this aspect, claiming it is a poor substitute for emotional insight.
Certainly it contrasts with Kim Gordon’s memoir, which takes a “selected highlights” approach to the music, while giving us her wider emotional perspective on their lives. She had a background in the visual arts and the gallery world, and always saw Sonic Youth as playing within that larger conceptual context.
But the obsessive focus on music is what I found most appealing about Moore’s book, as well as the depiction of his gawky, emotionally-stunted, younger self taking refuge in the local rock scene. I completely identified with his descriptions of long walks all around St. Mark’s Place searching for obscure albums and DIY fanzines such as The Big Takeover.
For their 1991 European tour Sonic Youth invited an unknown band from Seattle to support them, a raucous trio called Nirvana. When grunge soon exploded into the mainstream they could have taken it as an opportunity to go for wider commercial success. But they chose to stay in their own art-band lane, and both Moore and Gordon are still confident they made the right decision.
Their separate memoirs complement very well across the decades, including tours, albums, and parenthood, until they reach the events that wrecked their marriage, and thus the band.
Gordon’s account makes clear how much his extramarital affair hurt her, while Moore’s book takes only vague responsibility. Looking back on their relationship Gordon writes with deep regret about her pattern of falling for “narcissistic” men.
Gordon opens the chapter about her arrival in Manhattan within a sad frame: “Writing about New York is hard… It is because knowing what I know now, it’s hard to write about a love story with a broken heart.”
She continues: “Today, when I think back on the early days and months of Thurston’s and my relationship, I wonder whether you can truly love, or be loved back, by someone who hides who they are. It’s made me question my whole life and all my other relationships. Why did I trust him, or assume I knew anything at all about him? Maybe I imposed on Thurston a dream, a fantasy.”
Each of the Sonic Youth memoirs suffers in comparison to Patti Smith’s book Just Kids.
Smith’s memoir was so powerful and moving due to the strong emotional engine of the story: every page was suffused by her deep relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe. The book was her profound elegy for him, and that devotion connected with readers.
Due to their broken marriage, neither of the Sonic Youth books has a comparable emotional engine to drive the narrative.
Lacking the universal appeal of Smith’s memoir, Moore’s book instead is driven by a fan’s passion for music, aimed at fellow aficionados.
Just like the band’s great and beautiful noise.
