[LISTENED TO: November 2021] Girl in a Band
I didn’t really have that much interest in this book when it came out. I love Sonic Youth, but I didn’t really think I cared all that much about their origin stories. Then I saw that there was an audio book read by Kim and that sounded pretty cool.
I realized that I had no idea anything about Kim Gordon’s life and it was fascinating to learn just how much of a bohemian artist she was before she joined the band.
The memoir starts with the final Sonic Youth show. Kim and Thurston’s divorce was already going to happen. They simply wanted to finish out their final shows. So Kim played while watching her disappointment of a husband absorb all the adulation.
But Kim’s book isn’t a salacious tell-all. It’s the story of her life and how she wound up where she did. In fact, there’s very little about Sonic Youth (a lot more about the earliest records and then bits and pieces about the later records). And, while she’s obviously pissed at Thurston for what he did, she’s restrained in her need to thrash the guy.
Perhaps the biggest take away from the book is that after thirty years of being in a rock band, she doesn’t consider herself a musician or a Rock Star (maybe a small letter rock star). That eye opening statement is a kind of lead in to the fact that she has been an artist for most of her life–just not necessarily in music.
She moved to New York from California in 1980. It’s crazy thinking that Kim was a California girl.
It’s even crazier thinking about her older brother Keller who was manipulative and mean and ultimate institutionalized. Kim idolized him and he abused her terribly (more than an older brother might normally do). All of this made Kim into the shy and sensitive woman who you would never think was responsible for some of the most iconoclastic and then iconic music of the 20th century.
Her early childhood is fascinating–her dad was turned on to jazz and beatnik culture while he went for his degree. This impacted Kim while she was growing up. High school was a dark time for her, but she really got into painting and dance choreography. She was a strangely quintessential L.A. girl, although she didn’t really fit in. So she transferred to York College in Toronto–a drastic change of scenery for a girl who never knew cold weather.
She first moved to New York City in 1980. She worked at art galleries. She was able to afford living in New York because she had been in car accident in L.A. and the money gave her stability. It was when she started to see rock and punk bands up close and feel that energy that she wanted to be part of it. She wrote an article called “Trash Drugs and Male Bonding” for a magazine called Real Life. It was about the way men interact on stage. That brought her into the scene.
One of her artist friends asked if she’d put together an all-girl band to act as part of a conceptual art piece he was working on. They called themselves Introjection. One of the members of the band introduced her to Thurston Moore who then played with the Coachmen. They bonded over music and over a guitar that she happened to have in her apartment (that he knew from the person who had it before her). This gradually morphed in Sonic Youth with her, Thurston and Lee Ranaldo and a string of drummers.
Then she moves on to the recording of early Sonic Youth recordings, which is interesting to read because it’s more about a new band finding out what works for them. She also talks about Ciccone Youth and how much they really liked Madonna.
There’s an interesting line about Lydia Lunch, who always seemed to go with Sonic Youth. Kim notes: “I wouldn’t describe Lydia Lunch as a friend, since friendship requires trust.”
There’s also this cool bit about Sonic Youth’s composition:
‘Thurston or Lee would usually sing the poppy, more melodic things from riffs one of them wrote. I sang the weirder, more abstract tings that came out of all of us playing together and arranging until everything jelled. My voice has always had a fairly limited range, and when you’re writing a melody you trend to write for your own voice. Lee on the other hand usually brought in songs that were complete and ready to go, then we layered dissonance over.
In 1990 when they signed with DGC, it gave them the money to buy an apartment. It also meant they toured with Neil Young. And of course they became friends with Kurt Cobain as well. She has some nasty things to say about Courtney Love–nothing controversial, just comments about how she knew Courtney was manipulative and was bound to get what she wanted and that Kim tried to avoid that kind of drama in her life.
She launched the X-Girl fashion line (which I had forgotten about). And had a baby (in 1994). She also made the Free Kitten album with Julie Cafritz who was in Pussy Galore.
Then She and Thurston moved to Northampton, Mass (which sounds like about the coolest place to live). She marvels when Coco started a band and didn’t tell the band they were opening for (Yuck) who her parents were.
Kim says their marriage combusted when she accidentally discovered texts between Thurston and the other woman with whom he had been spending a lot of time. Around this time Thurston recorded Demolished Thoughts which she describes as “a collection of sophomoric, self-obsessed mostly acoustic mini -suicide notes. ” She was sure the lyrics were all about the other woman. They broke up when Coco turned 17.
Then she talks about her band Body/Head which she formed with Bill Nace.
She ends the book where it started with her doing paintings and getting a gallery show called Kim Gordon: Design Office.
I saw someone complain in a review that there is a lot of name-dropping in the book. And that is true, but it’s never done as a “look who I know” tone. It’s more of a “these are people I know and knew before they were famous artists” tone. And how can you tell a story of being in a band without naming other band members. Or working in an art gallery without naming artists. It’s part of her life, dummy.
Kim has a good eye for detail and storytelling. But she doesn’t have a great ear for narrative flow. The timeline is a little jumpy, some chapters are crazy long. Others are really short and seem to end abruptly. And I was rather surprised by this–Kim is not a great reader. I mean, yes, there’s the instantly recognizable Kim Gordon voice, but her reading didn’t have a lot of flow to it. She never stumbled or made a mistake (that’s what engineers are for), but it felt like she wasn’t always sure about the words she was saying. Now, maybe that’s just the way she talks–but it does seem to convey the shy person that she is.
Once again, having listened to the audio book, I missed out on all the pictures–there’s some groovy bohemian pictures from the 1970s–which nods to Kim’s fashion tastes.
Leave a Reply