An Interview with Thurston Moore

On August 13, 2013, I got together with Thurston Moore in his flat in Stoke Newington to discuss how his readings in contemporary American poetry influenced some of the songs on the recently-released self-titled album by his post-Sonic Youth band, Chelsea Light Moving. We never really got around to talking about the record, as we spent most of our three or so hours together having a wide-ranging conversation about Vito Acconci, Bernadette Mayer, the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, Dan Graham, Dee Dee Ramone, Clark Coolidge, Lydia Lunch, and beyond. Below is a condensed and lightly edited transcript of that conversation.
 
DK: I’m really interested in your commitment to poetry. In an interview with Mike Kelley, you said that Beat writers like Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, d.a. levy, William Burroughs, and Vito Acconci and Bernadette Mayer’s conceptual art-affiliated journal 0-9 were all “really culturally interesting. And it’s also reflective of a certain aesthetic that is not too dissimilar to punk rock. To me it all sort of leads into what happened with Patti Smith and Television and Ork Records and then going right into Rough Trade. The lineage is really apparent to me. And the people doing the work as artists are very similar to me, even though it’s coming out of hippie culture, which I really like.” How curious that you link Acconci and Mayer’s conceptual work—all that restraint-based, procedural poetry—to the history or at least the aesthetics of punk! I can’t think of any other musician really who might point to a rare 1960s mimeograph magazine that published writers, choreographers, and thinkers like Clark Coolidge, Robert Smithson, Yvonne Rainer and Jackson Mac Low and say “that’s punk.”

 

TM: I know that when I first came to New York the people that I was involved with, playing music with, were coming out of art school. The first people I played music with came out of the Rhode Island School of Design. I had no idea or concept of what art school was aesthetically, as far as music was concerned. I knew that Talking Heads came out of RISD, and the first people I met in New York were from that school and they were the ones I connected with and played music with. It seemed that the influx of young people into Manhattan at that time were coming out of art schools, and they were really sort of disparate people. Unlike, say, Lydia Lunch or James Chance who were coming from these places that were a bit more wild …

 

Myself, I did not come out of art school. I basically just came to New York so I could be part of the music scene, and the people I was involved with would talk about people like Vito Acconci and Dan Graham as people who were precursors to what they were doing. When I met Kim Gordon, she was an artist who had come to New York to be an artist and she had driven cross-country to New York with Mike Kelley, who she was involved with at the time, and she got involved with playing music with Dan Graham. And Dan Graham was somebody who always sort of looked at rock music as something that was really correlative to what he was doing as a conceptual artist. He used ideas from the iconography of rock music, particularly bands like the Kinks, and that was just really interesting to him, what was going on in the lyrics of rock music and how people presented themselves. None of this did I really understand at the time, but I knew by meeting Dan Graham through Kim that he was completely fascinated with rock music and its history.

 

Hearing about Vito Acconci, doing his performative pieces in New York like Seed Bed where he would lie in a construct under the floor of a gallery masturbating … there was something very sort of punk rock about that! He was considered to be this really heroic figure among people like Glenn Branca. The first place that Sonic Youth started rehearsing was in Vito Acconci’s studio in Brooklyn, and only because the young woman he was involved with was our keyboard player, this woman Anne DeMarinis. Vito Acconci and Dan Graham had this relationship that was really kind of combative in a way, even though at one point they were really connected. What I had figured out was that Vito Acconci came out of the Iowa Writers Workshop and he had aspirations to be a writer, to be a poet, and Dan Graham was coming out of being a conceptual artist, a very idea-driven artist who had some kind of aspiration to get involved with poetry, because he saw poetry as some kind of architectural display.

 

DK: Sorry Thurston, but what do you mean by “architectural display?” That phrase is curious to me. I was thinking on the train over here about how the poetry in 0-9 very much foregrounded its own materiality.

 

TM: I think Dan Graham was really interested in how words existed on a page, primarily visually, and almost secondarily in terms of what they were doing subjectively, emotionally on the page, the things they connected to. So, words were very conceptual to him because they were descriptive in creating some kind of visionary situation just by being words. Dan Graham was doing pieces where he was taking instructional texts and placing them on a page and presenting them as the work itself, descriptive practice on the page. That would be the art. He was going towards poetry whereas Vito Acconci was going the other way, he was a poet who was looking at what words were doing on the page and he wanted to leave the page. What would happen if he takes those words and he puts them on the floor, puts them on a wall? Or they just become completely abstracted to the point where they become performative in a way? Vito would do a reading, for example, where he would have a phone at the reading, and instead of him being at the reading he would go to a phone booth en route to the reading and call in and he’d describe where he was to whoever answered the phone, how close he was getting to the reading, and that was his work. And so he was really trying to figure out what he wanted to be as a poet …

 

DK: Trying to figure out the boundaries between poetry and performance …

 

TM: Yes, and he subsequently got very involved with using architecture for his ideas and his work as a linguist. All that stuff I sort of gleaned much later on as I got to figure out these gentlemen. But they had this interesting relationship, the two of them. When I met Kim she was in Dan Graham’s camp; when I met Vito’s girlfriend Anne DeMarinis she was in Vito’s camp, and I kind of brought them together. I remember rehearsing in Vito’s place around 1980, and one day Dan Graham came over for a sort of pow-wow at the kitchen table, so there were these two older guys having an intense conversation about Gang of Four’s new record! (Laughs). And I was this young guy, I was like 21, 22 years old … I could see that they were really interested in punk rock because it had this art-school sensibility and they were really interested in that.

 

Before I don’t think rock ‘n’ roll had that much of an art-school connection. There were a few things here and there, of course. People looked at the Velvet Underground as having that, and there was some realisation that even Iggy coming out of Ann Arbor had an art-school background. The idea of him creating the Stooges was sort of like this rough and tumble rock ‘n’ roll neighbourhood band, and using that, that was his piece, in a way. “I’m going to get these thugs on stage, and that’s me as an artist.” He’s much more loaded than that, obviously, as well, whatever’s going on with Iggy Pop. But I think Dan and Vito saw that as well, they understood that. But now that there were bands in New York like Talking Heads or Television or Patti Smith, Blondie, there was a certain kind of new intellectualism going on in music that really appealed to conceptual artists. Conceptual poets, too, even though they weren’t really referring to it at the time. Vito had this sort of relationship with this woman Rosemary Mayer…

 

DK: The poet Bernadette Mayer’s sister, right? Bernadette published 0-9 with Acconci…

 

TM: Yeah … Rosemary had this sister, Bernadette. And I think Vito had published some pieces as “Vito Hannibal Acconci” in a few poetry journals and was involved with this artist Rosemary and her younger sister was interested in poetry and I think the idea for Vito was that he wanted to do a poetry magazine that kind of expanded the idea of how to present text in poetry as a medium. Creating 0-9 was their idea of what to do. Bernadette was coming from a situation where she was involved with this kind of post-Frank O’Hara school centred around the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church: poets like Ted Berrigan, Anne Waldman, Lewis Warsh etc. Vito really didn’t have too much affinity with that crew, even though he’s said “I may have gone to some of their readings, I may have gone into [Ed Sanders’s] Peace Eye Bookstore at the time, but I still felt pretty alienated from what that community was.” He said he felt alienated from pretty much any community that was happening at the time and Dan Graham was the first one to recognize him and sort of start having galleries show Vito Acconci. It was Artists’ Space in New York, which was a place set up by artists to curate shows for new young artists and I think Dan Graham chose to show Vito as an artist, wanted to present his work independently of poetry journals, poetry publications. So that brought Vito into that milieu.

 

Then Vito chose an artist to show at Artists’ Space, and being so socially disconnected he asked Dan Graham who he should show and Dan Graham said “You should show this young woman Laurie Anderson.” So Laurie Anderson’s first show at Artists’ Space was via Vito Acconci, but really via Dan Graham, so Dan Graham is really important in that respect. Dan Graham was always very community-minded about what was going on with people as personalities, whereas Vito really didn’t care about that so much, the idea of being collaborative, or being social, and communal, but he did do this magazine 0-9 with Bernadette. I think their idea was to interrelate this kind of contemporary New York School writing, these John Ashbery kind of lines that were filled with very artful non-sequiturs and were simultaneously very visual on the page, and then sort of doing things where they were taking pages out of a Daniel Defoe book, or out of the phonebook, and putting these various kinds of pages together, seeing their connectivity, figuring out what that meant, what that could evoke. That was really smart, and so 0-9 subsequently became this kind of infamous poetry magazine. It really did try to explode what could be considered writing.

 

DK:  One of the things I’m always moved by when I revisit 0-9 is that the magazine always strikes me as staging, however tacitly, an argument with that Frank O’Haraesque “I do this, I do that” style so beloved by second generation New York School poets like, say, Ted Berrigan and Jim Brodey.

 

TM: Well, it was. Vito and Bernadette—according to Vito—really had this desire to strip any semblance of emotion out of the work, out of the text.

 

DK: That basic critique in 0-9 of subjectivity, the authority invested in the speaking “I” is precisely the authority Mayer and Acconci were so intent on contesting. When I was reading your interview with Mike Kelley, I thought to myself, “Is that what Thurston’s picking up on?” You know, that punk critique of togetherness, or, say, the utopian and arguably ridiculous idea that everyone can be a poet. Not to denigrate Frank O’Hara by any means, who was of course a fabulous poet, but many of the writers coming out of St. Mark’s during the 1960s were in essence writing the same great poem, letting the reader know precisely when and where they had an ice-cream, what pills they took, what they were smoking, or who they met for lunch. They were adapting O’Hara’s “I do this, I do that” style that he got across so brilliantly in poems like “Adieu to Norman, Bon Jour to Joan and Jean Paul” (the one that starts “It is 12:10 in New York and I am wondering / if I will finish this in time to meet Norman for lunch / ah lunch! I think I am going crazy / what with my terrible hangover”). 0-9 marked a break from all that in favour of a more concept-driven aesthetic.

 

TM: More minimalist, right? I’d be curious to see more literature about how minimalism presaged punk rock. Punk rock was always this sort of thing, this kind of reclamation of rock ‘n’ roll which at the time was sinking into a morass of being flowery and overwrought and subscribing to high technique … and then of course the Ramones come in. And the Ramones was this kind of high-concept band that I always suspected were a kind of glam variant of minimalism: the leather jacket and jeans, this uniform look, it’s almost like the Bay City Rollers! (laughs). It was around the same time! When that first Ramones album came out, there was a lot of talk about how this was coming out of minimalism. These are not academics though, these are weirdos from outside the margins who are doing something that is so pure …

 

DK: Well, there was Arturo Vega, who was sort of the Ramones’ artistic director, right? He had an art-school background.

 

TM: Yes, Arturo Vega! Now there’s a really interesting guy, and no one ever really thinks about that … the fact that the Ramones were so allowing of this effete kind of artist, this gay Svengali figure telling them “This is how you’ll look.” That’s really curious. The lyrics and music on the first Ramones record, the fact that they were so pared down and repetitive, so minimal … it was really exciting!

 

DK: So we can draw a line from, like, Sol LeWitt to the Ramones?

 

TM: Yeah! The Sol LeWitt people were responding to the Ramones! They were going to see the Ramones, Dan Graham was certainly going to Ramones shows, and even more so going to see the No Wave bands, bands that had even less to do with any reference to R & B, or really any kind of rock ‘n’ roll. Bands like the Sex Pistols who came around and said “We’re here to destroy rock ‘n’ roll” were still playing rock ‘n’ roll, whereas Lydia Lunch and Pat Place and Arto Lindsay weren’t playing even any semblance of rock ‘n’ roll, they were playing something wholly other. That connection became really interesting to me, the fact that it became a place where a lot of the energy in the art world suddenly started going. A lot of the dialogue that started happening around those bands in 1976 and ’77 was coming from the art world. It had less to do with anything coming out of the music culture and more to do with what was coming out of the art culture, as far as dialoguing about that. Patti Smith was coming out of this relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe, Talking Heads were coming out of art school, and even Richard Hell had his dalliances with art world women! (Laughs). The whole Patty Oldenburg connection …

 

Dan Graham has written about it in his Rock / Music Writings to some degree, though he’s fairly impenetrable sometimes in his writings, Dan is really … perverse as well, but he’s one of the few people I know in art-world culture who can talk about the Dead Boys and Henny Youngman in the same breath. I’ve seen him in symposiums where somebody like Benjamin Buchloh will be giving a talk that’s so intellectually rigid, and then Dan Graham will stand up and comment on it, and unlike anyone else who might comment on it in an equally rigid way, Dan will jump from Bruce Springsteen to Bow Wow Wow … he’ll jump to all these sorts of things and everyone just gasps. But he’s also completely able to stay in tandem with academia. He’s this wild card.

 

DK: Did any of that austere work in 0-9 actually influence you personally as a musician? Did you ever sit down and think to yourself, “How can I translate some of these text works into musical sounds? Can these works affect the way I’m thinking as a composer?”

 

TM: No, I didn’t even really see 0-9 until way after. Those poetry journals had a very limited shelf life. I wasn’t really aware of it until I started getting into really collecting and archiving underground poetry publications. And then seeing Vito Hannibal Acconci’s name mentioned in these magazines coming out of New York, like Extensions, which would have a mix of art and poetry writings, writing by people like Stanley Broun, Dan Graham, alongside poetry by Ted Berrigan. That was really interesting to me, finding out about Warhol’s flirtation with the poetry world. Warhol was romanticizing the poetry scene taking place in the East Village at Cafe Le Metro— if you read Reva Wolf’s book Andy Warhol, Poetry and Gossip in the 1960s she talks in detail about those connections. All those kinds of things fascinated me. And I got more into it as I collected more and more of these fugitive little magazines. It was Richard Hell who sort of got me into it, and Byron Coley, who was the one that turned me on to d.a. levy. We started looking at all this Cleveland 1960s stuff, which had this Middle American style, and that was what we liked about Pere Ubu and Devo, a real heartland of punk rock. American punk rock. That relationship in Cleveland with Peter Laughner, and then Television in New York … you know, in 1974 Television actually went to Cleveland and played with Rocket from the Tombs. Peter Laughner’s sort of this drunken aesthete … so looking into all that stuff, and being into the publications of Patti Smith, Richard Hell … you know …

 

Before I had even heard Patti Smith, I was reading her small press poetry, because she was a rock writer, publishing poetry and criticism in places like Creem magazine, and I remember reading Patti’s poems, and being enamoured by that, thinking “What’s going on? This person’s picture looks amazing,” and then seeing her name in Rock Scene, where she wrote that first piece in 1974 about Television. That was really resonant for me. At first I thought that it was a piece on television—you know, the medium! And then I saw that it was a piece on the band, and I found that so jarring: why would a band call themselves “Television?” You know, they might as well have called themselves “Door.” That whole aesthetic of investing energy in something that was banal, there’s something about that that really fascinates me. The guys in Television all had short hair, that was just like, nobody goes on stage with short hair! Everything about it was completely curious. Patti’s writing was really amazing too, she was writing things like “This guitar sounds like a thousand bluebirds screaming.” What does that sound like, you know?

 

DK: I remember a related article where Patti Smith describes Tom Verlaine’s neck as “Real swan like. The kind of neck you want to strangle.”

 

TM: Exactly! That was what led me into the writing. I remember driving into New York and going to Gotham Book Mart and buying her books. That was really great. We always thought about it in a very literary way. Verlaine and Patti had a book called The Night, and there was a poem by Richard Hell and Patti published somewhere, so there was all this poetry around… like even more glammy punky people like Cherry Vanilla wrote poems, you know!

 

DK: That’s funny … one of my favourite finds in the Richard Hell Papers at Fales Library, NYU is a letter David Johansen wrote to Richard Hell asking him “So when are you going to publish my poems?”

 

TM: Well, being a poet then was being a performer, one was in the business, you know?

 

DK: So many of these musicians did come out of the poetry world, the scene going on at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church …

 

TM: Yes, like Lydia Lunch comes down from Rochester as a 16 year old, and the way she talks about it is she has a fistful of poems and is trying to get people to acknowledge them and everybody’s like “Get away kid, you’re bothering me,” except for Lenny Kaye. That connection’s really interesting, because Lydia denounced Patti Smith to such a degree where she was proclaiming “The first person I’m going to get rid of is Patti Smith, I’ve had enough of this barefoot hippie shit.” I saw that as Lydia’s scheme of aggression, because Patti was great, she was untouchable, she was the sacred persona of the scene. When I first read this interview with Lydia in the Soho Weekly News—I lived down the street from Lydia at the time, though I didn’t really know her—where she was basically just defiling Patti Smith, I was completely and utterly shocked. But the way she was saying it was so acerbic and funny, it was like “Wow, you’re someone who’s really asking for it.”

 

Patti did come out of the hippie scene. The whole punk thing was just kind of served to her, obviously. The fact that what she was doing was referencing garage rock through Lenny Kaye … Richard Hell was just like “They are the most boring band that I’ve ever seen. They were bar rock. We were all doing these weirdo rock moves, even in Television, and in the Voidoids, and even the Heartbreakers had alcohol and heroin going for them, and these guys were just a bar-rock band with a very intense personality as lead singer.” There’s a lot to be said about that band and how powerful they were, but it was really all about Patti.

 

So it was kind of interesting to see Patti Smith attacked by Lydia Lunch, it was completely different, it had nothing to do with togetherness at all. And it wasn’t about fighting or breaks between generations. Lydia was there in 1975, you know, she was at the infamous Lower Manhattan Ocean Club show where Lou Reed, John Cale, Patti Smith and David Byrne all put on a gig together, which for me…when I started reading about that event in Rock Scene magazine and seeing pictures of it, that was such a significant event for me! The Velvet Underground with Patti Smith and the Talking Heads…I thought of that show as marking the beginning of the next phase. It was amazing because it was recorded, but it’s only in the last few years that I got to hear those recordings.

 

DK: Clark Coolidge was published in 0-9, and his work I think can be seen as marking another shift away from the gossipy, chatty style affiliated with the second generation New York School poets and towards a much more conceptually-oriented poetry / theory world. I wonder if you could talk a bit about your interest in Clark’s work. You’ve been performing with him recently, I know, playing and recording improvised music together and with Anne Waldman …

 

TM: The fact that Coolidge was in 0-9 alongside poets like Aram Saroyan, who was writing these one-word poems … I actually asked Vito about that, and he said, “Well, that was mostly Bernadette.” Those people were there because Bernadette was wanting to go more towards a place where language became sort of naked. Vito said that they were both wanting to find writers who were breaking away from the chattiness of New York confessional poetry. But Vito was mostly into moving away from any semblance of “personality.” Vito’s whole thing was like “I’m going to copy François Villon out of a book and that’s going to be art.” His practice was really just to distance ourselves from personality, having fun with the work, so I think Clark and Aram were more in Bernadette’s scope. But even Vito said, “Oh my god, here’s this poet putting one word on a page!” Of course that completely appealed to him, how could it not?

 

But Clark? I never knew what to think about Clark Coolidge because I saw his work as being … I didn’t really sort of feel like it compelled me to read it in full, and therefore it became curious to me as work that didn’t aspire to be read, but rather to simply exist as something to contemplate. I thought it was OK, but I don’t think it extended beyond my admiration for just accepting it as some kind of artful exercise. I first became really aware of him when he read at the Poetry Project opening for Cecil Taylor. And I went specifically to see Cecil Taylor read. Cecil had just issued an LP on Leo Records of him reading his poems, and his reading had a lot to do with vocal ululation kind of sound stuff and then he would read writing that was really perverse, lines about architectural ideas, descriptive of architecture, thinking about how Cecil Taylor as an improviser goes into playing where he has these ideas of building and structure … Clark read before him and he sat on a stool pushing his hair back and reading non-stop this litany of non-sequiturs for close to 30 or 40 minutes without hesitation or an “um.” I was completely enamoured and fascinated by who this guy was and what he just did. I was like, “OK, that was kind of great.” And I went up to him afterwards and I asked him about playing in David and Tina Meltzer’s band Serpent Power, and we talked about that a little bit.

 

Clark was living in Great Barrington at the time, and he would come to a couple of Michael Ehler’s gigs that he promoted at the Unitarian Church in Amherst, and I played a show with a drummer from Hartford called Randall Colburn, a free jazz drummer who played with Paul Flaherty. We did a duo, and the place was packed, and right before we got on Randall Colburn lit up a joint and I took a couple of hits off of it, and it was so narcotic that I went upstairs, and by the time we started playing I became completely freaked out—paranoid, and the music was just not … like I couldn’t … I felt really discombobulated … we kind of rampaged through the set for what it was. Clark was there. Someone said to me “Hey, cool, Clark Coolidge is here!” And I thought, “Oh, great, I’m playing like I don’t even really know what I’m doing.” I didn’t know what I was doing. It was like, throw a monkey in front of a typewriter kind of thing. Years later, I wrote to Clark (he had relocated to the West Coast, Petaluma) asking him for some writing for a poetry journal I was editing. We got a dialogue going, and I told him, well, I remember playing at this thing and you were there, and I told him that same story. And he was really gracious. He said “Well actually, my memory of the event is quite different from yours, because I remember thinking it was an amazing piece of music!” And I was like “Oh man, that’s so nice of you to say that.”

 

Maybe I saw Clark read once or twice in New York since then, but in 2012 he was on the summer faculty at Naropa for the third week, and I was due to be there for the fourth week, so I got there a week early because I wanted to hear him do his thing. Clark Coolidge was teaching Clark Coolidge, going from book to book chronologically. I was there on the third day and there was a bit of a mutiny in his class. Clark had said “I don’t want anybody to write, I don’t want any writing, I just want you to listen. That’s what I’m teaching.” I thought that was great, but the students were like, “But we came here to write. We want to write. Give us our writing!” Clark just said “There’s not going to be any time for writing. You can write while I talk, that’s fine.” So I went to his class, there were maybe five or six students in there, and I just took notes during the whole lecture, which I read the next night at a student reading. Then I read it again in the studio at Naropa with Clark playing drums. I bring all this up because in his class he really elucidated what I liked about his work, when I wasn’t quite sure what I liked about his work. The point was that he was a musician who was composing notes on a page, turning linguistics into music and vice-versa. So when he mentioned that, it became pretty apparent, and then he started reading those sections of some of his writing, talking about bop, and talking about Kerouac as a jazz musician. So that became really interesting to me, it elucidated his work for me in a real way, and it gave me a new-found way of enjoying his work. And then the Poetry Project had a book launch for one of Clark’s books, and a lot of us read from it, and it was really enjoyable to read Clark Coolidge.

 

DK: Before I even knew Coolidge was a drummer, I remember thinking how percussive his poems were … listening to him reading from The Maintains and some of the earlier work, for example …

 

TM: And also his wit. His wit in so much of the work that … I know how important Clark’s work was for L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, but I’ve gotta say I like that fun element in Clark’s work. It makes me think of Ted Berrigan’s term “language meanies.”

 

DK: Well, now that you’ve mentioned L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, I get to ask you about this flyer I came across. It was advertising an event in 1982 based at the Public Theater, and it promised “Language and noise will be featured during the first two ‘Poets at the Public’ programs for this year. Tomorrow, writers who explore the limits of language and are called ‘language’ writers will read from their recent works. They are James Sherry, Hannah Wiener, Peter Seaton, Michael Gottleib, Charles Bernstein, and Bruce Andrews. The ‘noise music’ movement, a product of the downtown art community, will be represented by the Sonic Youth Band and David Rosenbloom’s Experimental Chorus and Orchestra.”

 

TM: I totally remember that show! That show came about … I remember the invitation to it came via Josh Baer, who co-owned Neutral Records and was a director at White Columns Gallery. Josh Baer was a young moneyed guy, and we had some connection to White Columns through Kim’s connection to certain artists who were showing there at the time—artists like Jenny Holzer—and Kim was working at this gallery in Soho that was directed by the woman who first showed Jean Michel Basquiat… there was all that sort of connective stuff going on … and Josh Baer let Kim curate a show. I think she had different artists do record covers, a record covers show. Everyone was in it, Lawrence Weiner was in it, Dan Graham was in it, Glenn Branca was in it, I even had a little thing in it. Josh had something to do with Sonic Youth being the band that represented the burgeoning noise-music scene coming out of a post-No Wave … no one ever called it “noise music,” they called it No Wave, or they called it “atonal.” Some would just call it unlistenable, it was very polarizing within the scene itself, but as soon as the primary participants, people like Lydia Lunch, Arto Lindsay, Mars, James Chance and the Contortions, as soon as any of these people played any semblance of rock ‘n’ roll music, it was over. As soon as Lydia Lunch did 8-Eyed Spy, which was basically a boogie-rock group, but a very good one, and Pat Place starts the Bush Tetras, James Chance becomes more James Brown, things like that, the Raybeats, garage rock…all very good stuff, but it wasn’t No Wave anymore, it was post-No Wave, and that’s where Sonic Youth starts.

 

The idea of “noise” really came out of us doing a show at White Columns that Josh Baer asked me to curate, an underground music show that was sort of similar to what was so sensational at Artists’ Space a couple of years prior with the No Wave bands. Brian Eno was there, No New York, all that kind of stuff, and I said, “Well, yeah.” A lot of it had to do with Sonic Youth trying to get a show at this uptown club called Hurrah, and the proprietor of that place would never let us play there and he was closing the place down actually and in an interview he said “I don’t really feel like there’s a music scene here anymore, all these demos I get from bands is just noise.” And that’s where we got the idea to call the White Columns event the “Noise Fest.” There were older people on the scene who were talking about noise as coming out of an academic composer movement, but as far as noise and rock, no one was really using the term “noise rock,” so the idea of a noise fest became really pronounced. A three-day festival became a nine-day festival, because everybody came out of the woodwork, and it was like “Oh, here’s a forum for us, we don’t actually have to go and kneel down before Hilly Kristal, this is an open door for us.” It was a really big deal. That was very early for Sonic Youth, I think maybe we had just got our name together, we still had our keyboard player Anne DeMarinis, Lee Ranaldo wasn’t with us at the time but he played there. Lee comes into the band late ’80, early ’81 …

 

DK: I love the idea of you guys playing alongside Charles Bernstein a year later …

 

TM: Well, across from White Columns was the Ear Inn, and Ear Inn was this place where a lot of these language poetry activities took place. I had an awareness of this stuff, but to me it was like these older generations who were committed to a writing scene, and back then my only interests were what was going on in the music world, tangentially with the art world, but it was all about being in a band.

But the society was such that writers, artists, and musicians were all hanging around the same scenes. You had the writers across the street, so I was satisfied seeing Allen Ginsberg or William Burroughs at the Mudd Club or CBGBs. To go to the Poetry Project to actually get involved with what was going on … Ted Berrigan was still reading there, Joe Brainard … my God, in retrospect I wish I had hung out there, but I was too young. I didn’t think I was going to get seriously into poetry, even though people like Barbara Barg, Susie Timmons, Eileen Myles were around, but it didn’t mean anything to me. There was no poetry scene that was going on that was directly informing Sonic Youth at the time. My writing, my notebooks, wasn’t correlative with what was going on at the Poetry Project. I didn’t have any real awareness of what that lineage was, even though I knew a little bit about it from being there. I didn’t really know what the structure was then. There was nobody telling me about it, it was another thing happening in the landscape. It was quite a while before I would actually see Ted Berrigan walking around all the time, and I’ve always said to his son Anselm that I thought he was a cult leader!

 

DK: Which he sort of was!

TM: (Laughs) It’s funny because I bought books all the time and I read all the time and I would hang out at St. Mark’s Bookshop and the one across the street which was called East Village Books, and the last remaining used booksellers on 4^th Avenue, and I was always in these places. I think about the stacks of mimeos I would push out of the way back then and it’s painful, but no one gave any credence to that stuff back then, they were just transient publications, communications between poets … For me writing lyrics and Sonic Youth was really just coming out of a void. Confusion is Sex, writing lyrics like “Confusion is next,” came out of Henry Miller. Sister came out of reading Philip K. Dick. Richard Hell’s lyrics were really important. The Ramones lyrics, really important. Talking Heads lyrics, really important. Patti Smith, really important. These were pretty key poets within that context, working within a form that I was in, so I didn’t really need to go and read Ron Padgett.

 

In a way Richard Hell was really significant because he was publishing. He published Cuz, which allowed me to draw some lines. And then Byron Coley started turning me on to underground press stuff … there was a book called Cunt, that was John Giorno. I started seeing that stuff, and I thought that it was like what we were doing with records, as far as independent means of production, but it was even more underground. It was the same thing that led me into the improvised music world, with people like Derek Bailey. That was even more on the margins of what we in Sonic Youth thought we were doing. We thought we were the most marginalized hipsters in the world and this stuff was even more so. It made me want to investigate it and get involved with it, certainly improvised music, and it was poetry publications that got me into the poetry. I started amassing this stuff, I started reading it, I started figuring out what it meant historically, and it really helped that it had a lot to do with Richard Hell … to find the magazine Buffalo Stamps coming out of Buffalo, which actually printed Richard Meyers (Hell) and Tim Miller (Verlaine)…

 

DK: And Richard published Bruce Andrews in his little magazine Genesis: Grasp in the late 1960s …

TM: Bruce told me he still has a letter from Richard accepting some of his poems. But anyway, our connection to people like Barbara Barg, Susie Timmons, that’s all there … Richard Edson, the first drummer on our first record, was doing Poetry Project stuff …

 

DK: That’s right, he took a poetry workshop led by Lewis Warsh …

 

TM: He’s published in some of the early mimeos, and we knew about it, and I thought, “that’s cool,” but the connections were more physical than they were in practice.

 

DK: I remember an earlier conversation we had when you were in Brighton, when you told me how disappointed you were in finding out that Brian Eno’s lyrics on Here Come the Warm Jets were produced procedurally. He employed Burroughs-style cut-up, arbitrary nonsense words, phrases generated randomly while skimming through his notebooks, that kind of stuff. Cagean chance operations. That is to say, his lyrics—and whatever meaning the listener got out of them—weren’t intentional in the traditional sense of that word.

 

TM: Yes, Here Come the Warm Jets was such a defining record for me, and what he was singing lyrically was so evocative to me, so humorous, not afraid of being smart. It dealt with a lot of things that were moving forward from any kind of hippie aesthetic, and in a way I thought that record was one of the great documents, a bridge from 60s fallout aesthetics into punk rock. I always thought there must have been some kind of narrative sense in those lyrics. But I never really debated it or anything, I just figured he was a great lyricist. I found a lot of exciting descriptive visions going on in those lyrics. But I never thought about what they “meant.”

 

I still have this whole thing, like somebody in a classroom if a difficult text is being discussed and someone says, “Well, I don’t get it, I don’t know what that means …” I always say something like, “It’s not predicated on you getting it, on its meaning anything,” as far as poetry and music go. These aren’t scientific essays. It’s all about evocations, so for you to disparage it because you don’t get it … I even had this conversation with a member of Public Enemy in the common room of a studio we were both working in during the late 1980s when we were doing Daydream Nation and they were doing It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. The television was on and there was something interesting on TV that had to do with John Cage or something, it was really fun, and we were all looking at it and saying “That’s great,” and the guy from Public Enemy was saying “Yeah, it’s pretty cool, but I don’t get it.” And we talked about it, and I was saying it wasn’t about getting anything, it’s about work that is open to the senses. To have to employ meaning to work like that … I always have a pretty reactionary response to that!

 

So with Eno, it wasn’t about getting Eno’s lyrics, but I always thought there was something more to it than what I heard … and when I found out he basically just threw sentences down on the page I kind of bristled at the time. They were throw-away! They could be replaced very easily with something else! They weren’t necessary. I had invested so much pleasure listening and thinking about those lyrics that it kind of disturbed me to find out how arbitrary they were. But I’ve come to terms with it. It’s funny that you mention this, because I’ve managed to find new pleasure (to quote Richard Hell!) listening to that record now that I know what I know.

 

DK: I want to go back to your affection for the Ramones. I’ve been thinking about why I reacted so wildly and positively to their song “Beat on the Brat” the first time I heard it. And, well, I know why. It’s all about the way Joey Ramone enunciates the “t” at the end of “brat.”

 

TM: Oh yeah, oh yeah! Joey Ramone’s pronunciation is very unusual, it’s like a faux English accent, which I thought was really remarkable.

 

DK: At the risk of sounding incredibly pretentious, it’s when Joey Ramone goes “Beat on the brat-tt” that’s the real “art moment” in the song. He “releases” the “t.” I asked a linguist colleague of mine at the University of Sussex, Lynne Cahill, to comment on that released “t,” and she wrote, “The ‘t’ is generally described as a stop consonant (or a plosive). That means that the sound is produced by the release of air after a complete closure in the mouth. What’s interesting here is that, at the ends of words, plosives are often unreleased. Compare the sound at the end of ‘brat’ in the first and second ‘beat on the brat’ with the sound at the end of ‘brat’ in ‘with a brat like that.’ In the first, he has released the ‘t,’ which makes it much more audible. In the second, it is unreleased, as is more normal, and is to all intents and purposes inaudible as a separate sound.”

 

TM: Yes, exactly, and I agree with your “art moment” comment. “Beat on the Brat” is really the cornerstone. Dee Dee wrote the song, Dee Dee, the most wild and uneducated member of the band, living on impulse the whole time, reading comic books, having a band. The beauty of that is astounding. To write a song like “Beat on the Brat,” his influence there is a sort of childlike gaze at the Katzenjammer Kids. It’s just completely remarkable, how it came from this childlike persona.

 

DK: Again, in a funny sort of way I was really moved earlier when you talked about minimalism feeding into a lot of this music because I’ve always thought of the Ramones and Warhol along the same lines, in the sense of their shared bland glee in the face of daily life …

 

TM: Yes, the participants having a real engagement with the work … I talked to Tom Verlaine about Dee Dee, and he told me that when Television were having try-outs for bass players, Dee Dee came, and Tom said that he and the rest of the band knew about him already in a way, because they’d been talking about Ramones people, but he couldn’t play. I mean, he literally did not know how to play bass. But he just really wanted to be there! There’s an interview with the Ramones, I think it’s in the movie “Punking Out,” and Dee Dee’s there and in his Queens accent he says “Have you seen Television? I really really like Television.” And there’s Television, a band playing really intricate music with lyrics coming from French surrealism, and Dee Dee Ramone’s just completely engaged with them. It’s not that he just wants to sit around listening to lunkhead rock. Dee Dee was the chief songwriter at least for their first few records. Now was Dee Dee Ramone thinking “I’m consciously being informed by minimalist tendencies”? I don’t think so. But at the same time there’s a certain peripheral resonance going on. Osmosis. Some of the practices going on at the Poetry Project, St. Mark’s, and Sonic Youth, it may not be direct but there’s a lot of osmosis, shared practices, peripheral resonances going on. Richard Edson being in Sonic Youth and coming to us from the Poetry Project …

 

DK: Even Rhys Chatham was publishing poems in The Soho Weekly News …

 

TM: And I was writing poems, too … my God, in retrospect, I would have done anything to be in Bernadette Mayer’s class in 1978. Things might have turned out differently in my life then, who knows?

 

DK: Well, it’s probably for the best. You may have made the dreadful mistake of becoming a full-time poet …

 

TM: (laughs) Yeah, I might have.

 

DK: But obviously poetry’s now very much in your life! In your Chelsea Light Moving album, your song “Heavenmetal” refers to “last night’s magic workshop.” Is that a reference to Jack Spicer’s “Poetry as Magic” workshops he used to hold in the San Francisco Public Library?

 

TM: Yeah.

 

DK: I know of no other rock song that references Jack Spicer! What informed you here?

 

TM: That was definitely written for poetry fanatics. I’ve been discovering Spicer’s world these last few years, particularly through Peter Gizzi’s and Kevin Killian’s My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, and Lewis Ellingham’s and Killian’s Poet Be Like God , those two tomes were just really big. Spicer, he was just such an iconoclast. Learning about him led me to learning a lot more about the San Francisco Renaissance, what it was, and I really want to read Lisa Jarnot’s Duncan biography, The Ambassador from Venus. It just seems wonderful to me, that whole scene, the young Joanne Kyger, the magic workshop, the way poetry was seen to be part of their human condition. To me that was really interesting because it lent itself to a certain thought process I was having about reading and writing poetry in the context of a community which I’ve been becoming more active in over the last ten years or so. I started looking at poets reading the way I would look at bands playing, thinking about what worked and what didn’t work. A lot of the times when I would see poets read I would think to myself, “Don’t explain your poems, don’t give me a background on the poem, don’t tell me where it’s coming from, don’t talk!” A certain element of mystery gets diffused when that happens. Reading Spicer’s history, and reading his poetry, and then to come across this intense enlightenment he had in terms of his writing the ongoing, serial poem, where he basically said to himself “These poems can be liberated, by being part of this continuum,” that enlightenment being part of the magical quality … I thought about that because when I was first asked to do some readings with established poets at the Poetry Project or whatever, I knew that I was being asked because they understood “Here’s a guy from this world who’s really interested in our world.” I basically would read like that, I would have maybe a dozen poems but I would read them as one piece. That had a lot to do with how I was writing lyrics, where I was taking aspects of poems from different places and then create another piece, which basically was the lyric.