Gordon Girl in a Band

Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-30936-8
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 320 Seiten

Often described as aloof, Kim Gordon opens up as never before in Girl in a Band. Telling the story of her family, her life in visual art, her move to New York City, the men in her life, her marriage, her relationship with her daughter, her music, and her band, Girl in a Band is a rich and beautifully written memoir. Gordon takes us back to the lost New York of the 1980s and '90s that gave rise to Sonic Youth, and the Alternative revolution in popular music the band helped usher in-paving the way for Nirvana, Hole, Smashing Pumpkins and many other acts. But at its core, Girl in a Band examines what partnership means-and what happens when it dissolves.

Kim Gordon is a musician, vocalist, visual artist, record producer, video director, fashion designer, and actress. She rose to prominence as the bassist, guitarist, and vocalist of alternative rock band Sonic Youth, which she formed with Thurston Moore in 1981. In 2012, after the breakup of Sonic Youth, Gordon formed Body/Head with friend Bill Nace. Her memoir, Girl in a Band, was published by Faber & Faber in 2015 and was a New York Times bestseller. She has appeared in several films, as well as episodes of Gossip Girl and Girls. She lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, New York, and Los Angeles.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Gordon, Kim

Leseproben

The End

WHEN WE CAME OUT onstage for our last show, the night was all about the boys. Outwardly, everyone looked more or less the same as they had for the last thirty years. Inside was a different story.

Thurston double-slapped our bass guitarist Mark Ibold on the shoulder and loped across the stage, followed by Lee Ranaldo, our guitarist, and then Steve Shelley, our drummer. I found that gesture so phony, so childish, such a fantasy. Thurston has many acquaintances, but with the few male friends he had he never spoke of anything personal, and he’s never been the shoulder-slapping type. It was a gesture that called out, I’m back. I’m free. I’m solo.

I was the last one to come on, making sure to mark off some distance between Thurston and me. I was exhausted and watchful. Steve took his place behind his drum set like a dad behind a desk. The rest of us armed ourselves with our instruments like a battalion, an army that just wanted the bombardment to end.

It was pouring, slanting sheets of rain. South American rain is like rain anywhere else, and it makes you feel the same too.

They say when a marriage ends that little things you never noticed before practically make your brain split open. All week that had been true for me whenever Thurston was around. Maybe he felt the same, or maybe his head was somewhere else. I didn’t really want to know, to be honest. Offstage he was constantly texting and pacing around the rest of us like a manic, guilty kid.

After thirty years, tonight was Sonic Youth’s final concert. The SWU Music and Arts Festival was taking place in Itu, just outside São Paulo, Brazil, five thousand miles from our home in New England. It was a three-day-long event, broadcast on Latin American television and streamed online, too, with big corporate sponsors like Coca-Cola and Heineken. The headliners were Faith No More, Kanye West, the Black Eyed Peas, Peter Gabriel, Stone Temple Pilots, Snoop Dogg, Soundgarden, people like that. We were probably the smallest act on the bill. It was a strange place for things to come to an end.

Over the years we had played lots of rock festivals. The band saw them as a necessary evil, although the do-or-die aspect of having no sound check before you played made them sort of thrilling, too. Festivals mean backstage trailers and tents, gear and power cords everywhere, smelly porta-potties, and sometimes running into musicians whom you like personally or professionally but never get to see or meet or talk to. Equipment can break, delays happen, the weather is unpredictable. There are times you can’t hear a thing in the monitors but you just go for it and try to get the music across to a sea of people.

Festivals also mean a shorter set. Tonight we would close things out with seventy minutes of adrenaline, just as we’d done the past few days at festivals in Peru, Uruguay, Buenos Aires, and Chile.

What was different from past tours and festivals was that Thurston and I weren’t speaking to each other. We had exchanged maybe fifteen words all week. After twenty-seven years of marriage, things had fallen apart between us. In August I’d had to ask him to move out of our house in Massachusetts, and he had. He was renting an apartment a mile away and commuting back and forth to New York.

The couple everyone believed was golden and normal and eternally intact, who gave younger musicians hope they could outlast a crazy rock-and-roll world, was now just another cliché of middle-aged relationship failure—a male midlife crisis, another woman, a double life.

Thurston mimed a mock-startled reaction as a tech passed him his guitar. At fifty-three, he was still the shaggy, skinny kid from Connecticut I first met at a downtown New York club when he was twenty-two and I was twenty-seven. He told me later he liked my flip-up sunglass shades. In his jeans, old-school Pumas, and un-tucked-in white button-down oxford, he looked like a boy frozen in some diorama, a seventeen-year-old who didn’t want to be seen in the company of his mother, or any woman for that matter. He had the Mick Jagger lips, and the lanky arms and legs he didn’t seem to know what to do with, and the wariness you see in tall men who don’t want to overpower other people with their height. His long brown hair camouflaged his face, and he seemed to like it that way.

That week, it was as if he’d wound back time, erased our nearly thirty years together. “Our life” had turned back into “my life” for him. He was an adolescent lost in fantasy again, and the rock star showboating he was doing onstage got under my skin.

Sonic Youth had always been a democracy, but we all had our roles, too. I took my place in the center of the stage. It didn’t start out that way and I’m not sure when it changed. It was a choreography that dated back twenty years, to when Sonic Youth first signed with Geffen Records. It was then that we learned that for high-end music labels, the music matters, but a lot comes down to how the girl looks. The girl anchors the stage, sucks in the male gaze, and, depending on who she is, throws her own gaze back out into the audience.

Since our music can be weird and dissonant, having me center stage also makes it that much easier to sell the band. Look, it’s a girl, she’s wearing a dress, and she’s with those guys, so things must be okay. But that’s not how we had ever operated as an indie band, so I was always conscious not to be too much out front.

I could barely hold it together during the first song, “Brave Men Run.” At one point my voice fell like it was scraping against its own bottom, and then the bottom fell out. It was an old, very early song from our album Bad Moon Rising. I wrote the lyrics on Eldridge Street in New York City in a tenement railroad apartment where Thurston and I were living at the time. The song always makes me think of the pioneer women in my mother’s family slogging their way out to California through Panama, and my grandmother being a single parent during the Depression with no real income. Lyrically, the song reminded me of how I first brought together my art influences into my music. I took the title from an Ed Ruscha painting that shows a clipper ship angling through waves and whitecaps.

But that was three decades ago. Tonight Thurston and I didn’t look at each other once, and when the song was done, I turned my shoulders to the audience so no one in the audience or the band could see my face, though it had little effect. Everything I did and said was broadcast from one of the two forty-foot-high onstage video screens.

For whatever reasons—sympathy, or sadness, or the headlines and articles about Thurston’s and my breakup that followed us wherever we went that week in Spanish, Portuguese, and English—we had the passionate support of South American audiences. Tonight’s crowd stretched out in front of us and blurred with the dark clouds around the stadium—thousands of rain-soaked kids, wet hair, naked backs, tank tops, raised hands holding cell phones and girls on dark boys’ shoulders.

The bad weather had followed us through South America, from Lima to Uruguay to Chile and now to São Paulo—a corny movie-mirror of the strangeness between Thurston and me. The festival stages were like musical versions of awkward domestic tableaux—a living room, or a kitchen, or a dining room, where the husband and the wife pass each other in the morning and make themselves separate cups of coffee with neither one acknowledging the other, or any kind of shared history, in the room.

After tonight, Sonic Youth was done. Our life as a couple, and as a family, was already done. We still had our apartment on Lafayette Street in New York—though not for much longer—and I would keep on living with our daughter, Coco, in our house in western Massachusetts that we’d bought in 1999 from a local school.

“Hello!” Thurston called out genially to the crowd just before the band launched into “Death Valley ’69.” Two nights earlier in Uruguay, Thurston and I had to duet together on another early song, “Cotton Crown.” Its lyrics were about love, and mystery, and chemistry, and dreaming, and staying together. It was basically an ode to New York City. In Uruguay I was too upset to sing it, and Thurston had to finish by himself.

But I would make it through “Death Valley.” Lee, Thurston, and I, and then just the two of us, stood there. My about-to-be-ex husband and I faced that mass of bobbing wet Brazilians, our voices together spell-checking the old words, and for me it was a staccato soundtrack of surreal raw energy and anger and pain: Hit it. Hit it. Hit it. I don’t think I had ever felt so alone in my whole life.

The press release issued a month earlier from our record label, Matador, didn’t say much:

Musicians Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore, married in 1984, are announcing they have separated. Sonic Youth, with both Kim and Thurston involved, will proceed with its South American tour dates in November. Plans beyond that tour are uncertain. The couple has requested respect for their personal privacy and does not wish to issue further comment.

“Brave Men Run,” “Death Valley ’69,” “Sacred Trickster,” “Calming the Snake,” “Mote,” “Cross the Breeze,” “Schizophrenia,” “Drunken Butterfly,” “Starfield Road,” “Flower,” “Sugar Kane,” and closing out with “Teen Age Riot.” The São Paulo set list borrowed from when we first started out, lyrics Thurston and I had written apart or together, songs that took...