Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo

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2:03Pushkin.

2:07I initially reached out to you because I didn't realize when Bob Weir passed away that you were a fan. And I had only started getting into the dead since about 2020 when it clicked for me. You know, I mean, the great thing about music is there's always like these great catalogs just kind of waiting to be found. And Sonic Youth, similarly, in the last five years clicked for me. Not that I didn't like Sonic Youth before, but I think I was a little scared of you guys. Because, you know, it just seemed very intimidating. You know, I was like, I don't, there's already so much that felt like so much cooler than me as a kid.

2:44And it was like Sonic Youth is another level beyond that. You know, we were like fun-loving goofballs, you know, but for some reason, especially early in our career, we had this weird reputation where people were a little afraid of us for some reason. They thought because the music was ferocious that we were going to be ferocious as people as well, which was not the case at all, you know. And now that I know you guys or more familiar with you guys, it's not that way, but you guys were in a time when purity mattered a lot and authenticity. You guys were like the gold standard. It was like, you know, you couldn't get better.

3:20You pegged everything against, you know, Sonic Youth. And so it was kind of like, oh, man, I don't know if I'm cool enough, you know? So you never saw us play? You know, I probably did at a festival at some point. Maybe so. Maybe so. I'm sure I did at a festival. We played a bunch of L.A. festivals for one thing. Obviously, we played a lot of festivals. But, you know, since Kim was based in or Kim grew up in L.A., we spent a lot of time in L.A. and our record company was in L.A. And we played a lot out there, which was really cool for me to be able to spend a lot of time in L.A. because I really love it.

3:53Really? Yeah, we played at Al's Bar. And was there a place called Club Lingerie? I think that was in L.A. There was. I was too young for that, but I've heard of Club Lingerie. Yeah, we played those places. And we played the Roxy and stuff like that as well at some points. Did you guys... Yeah, it's funny because I guess it's the Kim connection, but it does feel like there's a bit of between um sst and geffen there's this you just feel like there's a strong and then death valley 69 it feels like there's a west coast streak that runs through sonic youth yeah yeah you know yeah no for sure for sure and and we were totally fascinated with that you know especially that period of like you know the beach boys on the one hand and and peace and love and manson on the other hand you know that's the period i was talking about actually when that song came out it was one of the first songs that a lot of people heard we'd be going around and like people would imagine that they were going to meet a bunch of like Mansonites or something like that and which couldn't have been further from the truth or further from the kind of the subject matter of the song in a way that was funny people people had a certain impression of us because the music was ferocious you know I used to say that we were friends with a lot of bands in New York in the early days that were living really edgy lifestyles, like kind of ferocious lifestyles, you know, deep into hard drugs and stuff like that.

5:15And then they'd get on stage and the music was less ferocious than their lifestyles. And with us, it was kind of the reverse offstage. You know, we wanted to live in nice places and have refrigerators with food in them or whatever it was, eventually having kids and stuff. And, but we wanted the onstage to be where the ferocity lived, you know. Was there a catharsis to it, you think? There's always a catharsis to be playing music. I mean, that's the case all the time. And to play music that could be as wild and free as some of our music was super cathartic, you know, in a way. But that was something that was definitely coming out of, I mean, not just the New York scene, but we were really feeling that from a lot of the things that were happening here back at that point in time, like what bands like Teenage Jesus or DNA were doing or Glenn Branca and Reese Chatham.

6:05I mean, this was really music that wanted to move you in one way or the other, like really in that cathartic sense, you know? And, you know, the stuff that was going on in LA too, Black Flag and Minuteman. And, you know, it was just like, they didn't want you to just stand there as a passive observer. They wanted you to be really involved. Yeah. I mean, given that there was so much going on around New York, cool. It always seems to me it would have made more sense to maybe sign with like a Z Records or 99 or something, you know, versus... Yeah, we would have loved to have been on 99. I mean, the first two records were on Glen Branca's label, which was a brand new indie label at a time when there really weren't like indie labels all over the place, you know, so it was kind of a radical move that he did that.

6:49So our first bunch of records were on New York labels, but we were in love with sst records we were in love with everything they did and we just thought they were like the pinnacle of of a record label at that point in time all the bands we loved were on sst saccharine trust and meet puppets and you know you name it and uh so when we had the chance to to move to them we really just kind of jumped at it signing to sst did it did you get to know everyone over there pretty well or was it like a family or a group yeah i mean to a to a to a large degree i mean we certainly got to know uh greg ginn and henry rollins and all those guys and and we were already well probably right around the same time we signed with them we were we got to be really good friends with mike watt in particular and and the minute men guys and and the meat puppets you know we did lots of shows with with all those uh bands it felt really cool to to be a part of that you know and a petty bone you know raymond petty bone was sort of part of that crew at that point and yeah he became a good friend and and then you know things changed and and we ended up on another california label with geffen which was was also really cool just to stick on sst for a second you were there when the minute men kind of changed into fire hose yeah we were playing a warehouse gig in la with the swans the night that d boone died in arizona or new mexico wherever it was.

8:17And I was actually playing his amp on that gig the night that he died. I mean, I think he died later in the evening than our show was, but that was pretty devastating. And we were really close to Mike in particular in that period. And especially once that happened, then we got really close to Mike. And actually, when that happened, Mike kind of shut down for a period of time. He wasn't doing anything. He wasn't playing music. And he came out to New York when we were recording the record Evol, like 1985, just not that long after Dee had died, I guess. We had this one song, actually, this song called In the Kingdom that I sang, that was kind of a Stooges-esque riff.

9:01And we never really finished it as a song. It was always going to be this thing. I was going to do this kind of spoken word thing over. And Mike was in the studio when we were getting ready to record it and we asked him to play on it and he played he played the bass on that song and this other song we did a cover of kim fowley's song called bubblegum and i think those were the first two that that's kind of an extra track from that period and those two were the first things that mike did in music again since d boone died and then shortly after that ed from ohio as he's known uh called mike up and said hey let's play and and fire hose started wow yeah yeah so we i always felt like we had a a hand in pulling mike out of his his doldrums of of d d boone's death you kind of kept a relationship with pettibone did you keep a relationship with with greg as well no not really i mean i think we had a falling out when we left the label and i don't think he was very happy about the situation and it was kind of an awkward moment and we didn't really keep up much after that yeah but that didn't transfer to to pettibone at all like the awkwardness of no not at all we were we were relating to raymond on on a completely different level and you know and at that point he was starting to be more in the art world than the music world and right you know kim and i trained as artists and we all had a real affinity for for his art in particular you know and um he lives nearby here we see each other every once in a while that's amazing man yeah we actually my my my wife leah and i acted in his most recent movie, which was a, you know, he made all these movies in the late 80s, early 90s.

10:41He made a whole bunch of like feature length movies that were really, he did one about the weatherman that I think Kim and Thurston are in. He did, he did a whole bunch of movies and he started making some again and he did, his most recent movie was about the Beatles. I played Ringo and Leah played Linda Eastman. And this artist, Marcel Zama, played Paul. And this costume designer played George. And this couple from England, I think, played John and Yoko. And it was just, you know, it was kind of, his movies are kind of like his drawings, you know, like a bunch of people standing in one position and saying stuff, you know, just kind of like the drawings are.

11:24So So they're very weird movies, very cool. Sounds like it might be better than the, I think they're putting out like four Beatles biopics soon. Yeah, they're coming, they're coming. I think I'd rather see you as Ringo. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Did you, the move to Geffen, did you guys get to know Geffen at all? We had really one meeting with him when we were getting ready to sign with a major. I guess it was in the wake of like REM signing and the replacement signing or who's could do it was like all the majors started to get interested all of a sudden you know so we met with with David Geffen we met with uh Ahmet Erdogan for Atlantic Records we met with Herb Albert and and the people at A &M but we met with like all of these like classic record men you know from from the older generation and and like that was the coolest thing to us like we met Herb Albert in the studio in the A &M studios in LA, where all these great records were made.

12:30And we're walking through the studios with him, and we come around the corner, and there's his trumpet sitting on a pedestal. And he says, oh yeah, that's my trumpet. And he picked it up, and he played something for us, which was totally surreal. We met Ahmed Erdogan at a kind of a swanky Chinese restaurant in Uptown in New York here. And the coolest thing about all these meetings was these guys told us all these insane stories, like stories about being in the studio with the Stones, like with big bowls of Coke on the mixing desk and all this like debauchery going on. Like Geffen told us stories about having to smuggle David Crosby pot across the country because he was supposed to play Madison Square Garden that night with Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and his pot delivery didn't make it He was like refusing to go on.

13:16And Geffen's like, I'm not going to carry pot on the plane, you know, and all this kind of stuff. And eventually he did. But we just got so many cool stories from like we were deep into that, the moments of that era and all these bands that had, you know, like the Beach Boys working on those classic records or the Carpenters or whatever. And so to meet with all these people, we almost didn't care if we got signed or not. We were just like, this is amazing. We get to suck the stories out of all these people, which was really, really interesting. And then we chose Geffen because they really offered us the best deal in terms of full creative control, no oversight, didn't have to present demos or any of that stuff.

13:57And it worked really well for us with them for a pretty good amount of time. For a while, yeah. Yeah, I mean, we're still, it's not called Geffen anymore, it's called Universal, but we're still on that path with the records we made with them. They're still putting out stuff through Universal. But, yeah, they were good. And then, you know, on our backs, they signed Nirvana. So at that point, we could do no wrong in their eyes. You know, it was like, boy, we brought them like the biggest cash cow of the era. Yeah, yeah. Oh, that's right. And you guys shared management with Nirvana too, right? Yeah, they followed us.

14:32They were asking us who should be their management. and we liked our John Silva out in L.A. and so they signed with Silva, they signed with Geffen, they used our merch people, you know, they were kind of taking their lead from what we were doing, I mean, you know, which we felt was a real compliment. It is an amazing thing about you guys, because like for as, like much for a group of people who seem to be as uncompromising about their vision as you guys were, you guys seemed to be fairly happy to bring people along and bring people around. It was definitely our trip, completely. As soon as we could bring opening bands along, we just brought all the people we wanted to hear every night.

15:18And that was a main component of Sonic Youth, was that kind of inclusivity. We had the chance to do this museum show towards the end of our career, like in 2008 and 2009. We did this massive show that took over museums in five different countries in Europe. And it was part stuff we had done, like they exhibited a bunch of our guitars and, you know, artwork that individual members made. But we also had like Allen Ginsberg photographs and the Wolf Eyes guys drawings and crazy paintings. And there were like 50 or 60 different people. Like at that point, we were associated with all these artists. So we had Pettibone and Mike Kelly and Gerhard Richter paintings.

16:02And it was this really amazing, massive show, Dan Graham sculptures. And so it was kind of a mix of like artwork from some of our indie rock friends and then like really heavy stuff from like really, you know, well-known artists and musicians. And our whole thing was always like bringing more people to the party. That was a big part of Sonic Youth, you know. So we always would rather talk about stuff we were interested in than talk about ourselves, really, you know? Yeah. I read something Thurston said that when you guys initially signed to Geffen, people there had the idea that maybe you guys had a dark side of the moon in you guys.

16:44They were kind of thinking of you as like a sleeper Pink Floyd, you know, kind of all these crazy records. And then, oh, but if they get focused enough, they're going to have a dark side of the moon. Does that ring true? well I don't know I mean with every record from the very first one there was a single that they were just like this is the song that's going to break you guys wide open you know and for a while we kind of fell for the verbiage of it but we you know it quickly became sure even like a song like cool thing or um I don't know which ones they chose from those couple records but you know it was never gonna we were too weird a band for for that to happen in the same way that it would for instance that it happened for nirvana but you know we had our own kind of dark side of the moon in us and you know we i i would i would cite certain of our records as being in that category for us you know song like the diamond sea is like a 20 minute song 25 minutes on the on the 12 inch single and it's like you know we had it we did it we were doing our own thing you know i guess that's someone that's the thing like you know i what i've realized as i get older is how much of success is down to marketing and being willing to buy into or create a narrative and and kind of um yeah you know um a certain a certain aspect of successes but you know like the kind of success that someone like dylan or neil has is not down to marketing you know it's down to being a true artist and and you know there's fans that i could cite as being completely successful that never never had a gold record or any of that kind of stuff you know i mean in a way pavement is a band like that.

18:19Huge, huge band. That's not huge in the, in the bigger scheme, but they're not Bob Seger huge or whatever, you know, but, uh, to the right people there, they're like, you know, top shelf or whatever. Yeah, no, absolutely. Like those, for those manager guys, success was measured in how much money you could make for how long you could make it. And those were not the values that we had, you know? Yeah. We were making music, not making money. This moment is brought to you by Sierra Nevada's Hazy Little Thing, your go-to beer for good times. The tent's in the trunk, the cooler's packed, and you're about to lose cell service for the next few days.

18:56That can only mean one thing. It's time for a camping trip. Before you hit the trailhead, there's one last piece of gear to sort out. The playlist you'll be listening to around the fire. This is part three of the Sierra Nevada Sounds of Summer series. This time, we're building a playlist worth downloading before you head off the grid, made for pairing with a hazy little thing in good company. Here are the songs making the cut on my next camping trip. First up, I've been on a bit of a David Crosby kick lately, so I'm going to start off with a couple of songs from his catalog. The first is Draft Morning.

19:25It's a beautiful song from the Byrd's 1968 album, The Notorious Byrd Brothers. The song has the sound of a stark, beautiful morning. Just the kind of morning you wake up to when you're camping. Then I'd queue up Music Is Love from Crosby's solo album, If Only I Could Remember My Name. It's a beautiful meditation on the nature of music and consciousness featuring Graham Nash and Neil Young. Of course, those are his perennial partners. And the rest of the album features members of the Grateful Dead. It's one of my all-time favorites. Then there's Suzanne by Leonard Cohen, which of course is a beautiful song all on its own, but I can never divorce it from its stunning opening sequence to Robert Altman's McCabe and Mrs.

20:01Miller, where Warren Beatty's riding through the Canadian wilderness on horseback. It's one of the most beautiful sequences in all of film history. And then to round this whole thing out, something from just last year, Billy Martin's Planets. Billy is a phenomenal singer-songwriter who writes some of my favorite songs. This one, Planets, happens to feel like pure wonderment, similar to the awe I experience taking in nature. A great camping playlist isn't about hits. It's about songs that hold up next to the sounds of crickets in a crackling fire. Download it before you go, because out there, you get one shot at cell service, and it's not coming back.

20:38If you've ever reached for a cheers when your favorite song comes on, you're ready to embrace the haze with Hazy Little Thing from Sierra Nevada. Hazy, citrusy, smooth, juicy, but not sweet, hoppy, but not bitter. America's best-selling hazy IPA for a good reason. Hazy Little Thing, enjoy responsibly. How was it touring with Neil and getting to know Neil? It was good. It was amazing. He was at a high period and, you know, we were, he had the crazy Rust Never Sleeps giant amplifier sets and everything. So, you know, we knew all about that stuff. So it was amazing that we were getting to see that stuff because we didn't see those original concerts.

21:17It was the first time we'd ever played those kind of hockey arenas and stuff, you know, and we did three months of it with him. And it really taught us how to do that. And we were kind of learning from the master because he's the king of making those rooms sound great, you know. And same with meeting Erdogan and Geffen and all those people. We were deep into all of these musicians from that period. And like what Neil did with Buffalo Springfield and Crosby Stills and Nash and his solo career. It's like we read all the books. We were deep into, you know, everything that happened to these cats. And suddenly to be around them and to be on one of these big tours with like a full-on crew.

21:56And we'd never done tours like that with a semi-truck of gear and all that kind of stuff. And it was an eye-opener for us. But it was really the same as signing with the major label where we always felt like we're really an indie band that's just kind of like spies in this world. It was the same thing on these big stadium tours. That was not our scene. And we kind of went through it and came out the other side of it. And we're back kind of where we started and where we were happier. I mean, at first when we got on that tour, it was the first tour that Neil had ever taken opening acts with him.

22:32He never had opening acts before. He was a monster success. He didn't need to do that. And his crew were totally not into it. And they were not into us. They thought we were a bunch of jokers, that we were just making fun of the whole business and making noise and that we didn't know how to play. And they were really mean to us, with a few exceptions, a few very classic exceptions, like Neil's front of house guy, Tim Mulligan, was always super nice to us and warm. And Neil's guitar tech, Larry Craig, was amazing and fixed our guitars when we broke them and all that kind of stuff. But it took their crew a long time to realize that what we were doing was something.

23:17And I think even by the time we finished that tour, they were just like, these guys are idiots and we'll never see them again. And yet, because we were friends with Neil and with Elliot, especially Elliot was very warm to us. Every time Neil would come through or we'd be in the same city and he'd be playing, we'd go and we'd hang with him backstage and watch the show. And the crew guys kept being like, you guys are still fucking here? And eventually, we earned kind of their respect because they realized we weren't just out there to take the piss, as they say in England. and they realized we were in it for the long haul and they came around to being, you know, by 10 years later, they were like, hey Lee, how you doing?

24:01When we were backstage or whatever, you know, but it was an evolution for them to, you know, open up to that kind of thing and see that we weren't just like jokers who didn't know how to tune our guitars or whatever. I mean, it's incredible to hear Neil's crew levying all the complaints most people have about Neil. Yeah. And, you know, the agreement we had going into that three months of touring with him was that we could be as loud as we wanted and have full use of the PA and all that stuff. But for the first couple of weeks, they were tamping us down. And our sound man, who was, you know, he was kind of learning on the job, had a mix for these big rooms, just finally came to us and said, like, they're not letting me do my thing out there.

24:43They're pulling down the master volume or whatever it was. And this was like two weeks into a three month tour. and we're like, okay, if we can't fix this, we're going to quit. And the news got to Neil and he put his foot down and was just like, I asked these guys to play. You give them everything they want. And it just got so much better from there. And it really took Neil himself coming forward on our behalf. Wow. And that was super cool. And it really smoothed a lot of things out. It's an incredible guy to have on your side, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Incredible. Yeah. Did you ever figure out, Neil, all those years, no opening act, and then why you guys?

25:25I don't know. I think it was just the times were changing, and artists needed to have opening acts to draw more people in and to make it a fuller bill. And that was like dealings between Silva and Elliot. While we were on that tour, we tried to convince Neil that he should have Nirvana open for them. and it never happened but like we were just like you should have nirvana open for you man what he was he just had no clue just it wasn't the right moment and then they were too big to do anything like that or oh but by the time you know when we were talking about them they were still kind of an under you know an underground band but we were just like you should hear this band they're so amazing and then like the next the next summer or that summer i guess never when you guys put out the the uh the goo demos front cover is is a photo of Cher and one of the inserts is to share with David Geffen and kind of like an intimate post they were they were they were a couple you're right but like did you did that was that like to fuck with Geffen or was you know I guess so I mean nobody ever said anything to us no you know the first idea we had for the cover of goo we wanted to use a pettibone and the first um and we were also aware that you know we were making this jump from the indies to the majors and people were going to say sell out and all that kind of shit and so the first cover proposal we had with geffen was his pettibone picture of it was a big line drawing of the face of joan crawford like with these huge red lips and it said over the top blowjob with a question mark and we wanted that to be the record cover and we wanted to call the record blowjob uh just as a commentary on like the indie band signing with the major and all this shit and like they kind of came to us and said we know we can't tell you what to do but please please don't do this and they made a strong enough case that we changed it to the cover that everybody knows, which became such a crazy iconic cover, you know?

27:33Yeah. As a matter of fact, last year, this Canadian artist put out a book of all, you know, I don't know if you've ever seen any of the variations on that cover. I mean, there's a million spinoffs of the Goo cover, like Obama and Hillary or C-3PO and R2-D2 or Jay-Z and Eminem or Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. There's like, there's hundreds and Ren and Stimpy, you know, there's hundreds of variations on that cover. They keep coming out all the time. There was one called Islamic Youth with a woman in a burqa and a guy next to her. And some artists wrote this long conceptual essay about it and published this kind of like zine-like book with like 200 different examples of these spinoffs on the goo.

28:21They're called goo mashups. If you type that into your computer, you can probably lead you somewhere where you can see a bunch of them. But yeah, we went with the right image instead. I don't think blowjob. I don't think that would have happened with blowjob. You guys have always had great covers, but that one definitely just captured the imagination of people in a super unique way. I mean, the Mike Kelly images on Dirty also were very popular, that sock puppet and all that stuff. We had cool cover artists. That was definitely for sure. Yeah. In the Bad Moon Rising era, you guys did the Richard Kern video for Death Valley 69.

28:57Yeah. There's kind of like the, there's the Bad Moon Rising cover, which is like, you know, I guess Halloween-y. There's Halloween-ish. Yeah. Everything was a little horror movie, Halloween themed there for a second, you know? Yeah, there was definitely that autumnal kind of children of the corn kind of moment. I don't know why we were mining that at that particular moment in time. Husker Du had put out that record called New Day Rising. We felt like Bad Moon Rising was our East Coast version of that. Of course, we loved the Creedence song. The Scarecrow on the cover has a flannel, a John Fogarty-esque flannel shirt.

29:42It was right when we were starting to work with Blast first. the back cover of Bad Moon Rising was like slapped together at the last minute because we really needed a rushed back cover and it's that picture of the four of us with Bob Byrd on drums and the scarecrow but the original back cover picture of of that record was it had a lot of handwritten text and it had pictures of the four of us in our most like hippied out days like me with super long hair and a beard and thurston with like a leather jacket kind of punked out with long hair and like it had these pictures and like paul smith looked at these pictures and said people are not going to get this they're not going to understand that that's not you right now and again he was like please don't do this you know it was like but we thought it was funny to put like pictures of us from a previous uh in our previous incarnations when we were young you know hippie freaks or whatever.

30:37I don't know. We just had this pumpkin thing for a while. We went to England right around that same time and they didn't have the pumpkin jack-o'-lantern tradition, you know? And so we were doing like our first like big major show in England at this place called the ICA, this Contemporary Art Institute. And Paul Smith had the idea that we'd have like, you know, four dozen jack-o'-lanterns on stage all carved and ready to go. And like there were no pumpkins in England. There were no orange pumpkins the size of your head. There were these little softball-sized green squash that looked like pumpkins.