Coincidentally or otherwise, it's arguable that the best recent memoirs by pop/rock musicians have all come from women. Tracey Thorn of Everything But The Girl's Bedsit Disco Queen and Viv Albertine of The Slits' Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys both landed last year, and now comes Girl in a Band, a typically idiosyncratic endeavour by Sonic Youth's bassist and singer Kim Gordon.
All three women write punchy prose, but it probably also helps that female takes on the music biz – that most stubbornly patriarchal of bizzes – still tend to seem that little bit fresher than those of their male counterparts.
Like Thorn and Albertine, Gordon sidesteps the macho clichés of rock-star memoir, focusing instead on the deeply personal, the palpably human. Taking in her musical career and her experiences as a visual artist, fashion designer and style icon, her book is dedicated to her daughter Coco, whom she calls “My North Star”.
Its title plays on the hackneyed-though-not-quite-redundant question: “What’s it like to be a girl in a band?” and the memoir sometimes relays its anecdotes from a feminist position. Whatever her stance, though, Gordon always makes us think. “Sometimes in a band it can feel as though you’re together because you collectively suffer from a psychological disease none of you can name or acknowledge,” she writes, nailing an experience that will surely chime with many musicians. “You’re like a family who does what they do for ingrained, habitual reasons – except no one remembers why or what started the behaviour.”
Naturally, Sonic Youth, the revered avant-garde band Gordon co-founded with her husband Thurston Moore in Manhattan in 1981, goes under the microscope, but not at any length until we’re a good third of the way through the book.
The author does, however, open with an account of the band’s final shows in South America in 2011, the backdrop to which was the dissolution of her 27-year marriage to Moore, one of the electric guitar’s great sonic adventurers.
"[Those] festival stages were like musical versions of awkward domestic tableaux … where the husband and wife pass each other in the morning and make themselves separate cups of coffee," notes Gordon. Such are the measured, beautifully sad sentences that plumb the depths of her heartbreak. Later in the book, she details how she discovered text messages on Moore's phone that had come from his mistress, a woman Gordon refers to only as "her". With Gordon also detailing how various ultimatums to her husband came to nothing, Moore does not emerge from Girl in a Band looking good.
If the author expends more pages than most memoirists on her upbringing, her writing is strong enough – and the years eventful enough – to sustain this. Gordon was 5 years old when she and her family left Rochester, New York State, for California, her father having been offered a professorship in sociology at UCLA. She says that, despite her knowing even then that she wanted to become an artist, they were an academic, not a showbiz family, and that this had a lot of cachet in Los Angeles.
The year the family spent in Hawaii, when Gordon was 12 years old, and their Hong Kong sojourn, when she was 13, are evocatively rendered. More resonant, still, though, are the pages where the author prods the dark underbelly of late 1950s and early 1960s California: “I’ve always felt there’s something genetically instilled and inbred in Californians …” she writes, “…that California is a place of death, a place people are drawn to because they don’t realise deep down they’re actually afraid of what they want.”
More than her relationship with her father (William Burroughs reminds Gordon of him when she visits the said author with REM’s Michael Stipe years later); more than her relationship with her seamstress mother (“she was gorgeous, like Ingrid Bergman”, but also a practitioner of tough love, we learn), it’s Gordon’s relationship with her older, some times bullying brother, Keller, that really shapes her.
Later prone to psychoses and diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, Keller is described as a “crazy smart” and “hyper-verbal” child, an ipso facto magnet for parental attention. “He was, and still is brilliant, manipulative, sadistic, arrogant, almost unbearably articulate,” writes Gordon of the sibling, now in his mid-60s, she still flies out to California to visit. “[Growing up] I turned into his opposite, his shadow – shy, sensitive, [and] closed to the point where, to overcome my own sensitivity, I had no choice but to turn fearless.”
Further in, we learn of her brother's close shaves with the Manson family, and of Gordon dating Danny Elfman while they were in junior high school alongside one of Judy Garland's daughters; Elfman later went on to compose the theme tune for The Simpsons. When Gordon gravitates eastward again, it's first to Toronto to study dance, and then on to New York City at the start of the 1980s.
Gordon details how a minor car accident she was involved in on the same day her brother had his first psychotic episode eventually brought her the first real money she’d known in the form of a US$10,000 insurance cheque. The windfall enabled her to rent a cockroach-infested NYC apartment at 84 Eldridge Street, and she writes vividly and affectionately about the seamy, as-yet-unhomogenised lower Manhattan of the period, and about the burgeoning art scene she slowly infiltrated fortuitously after scoring a clerical assistant’s job alongside Jean-Michel Basquiat’s first art dealer, Annina Nosei.
Gordon’s store of love – but not forgiveness – for Moore seems apparent when she recalls encountering him for the first time at a gig by his pre-Sonic Youth band, The Coachmen: “He was very tall and skinny, six foot six, he told me later, charismatic and confident-seeming, with pillowy lips.
“I remember feeling so excited he was there, surrounded by my few belongings,” Gordon adds a few paragraphs later, detailing Moore’s first visit to Eldridge Street. Sonic Youth becomes their baby until Coco arrives in 1994, and for a while Gordon’s memoir progresses in thoughtful, album-by-album chunks.
“Some people thought [we] were the best thing on the bill, while others thought we were pretentious and arty,” she writes of the band’s first show in London in 1984, the year after the release of their debut album Confusion is Sex. By and large, that knack for splitting the room would remain with Sonic Youth.
Girl in a Band is not a starry-eyed memoir, but it packs plenty of stars. Gordon cooks dinner for Neil Young when Sonic Youth tour with him. There's also a lovely passage where, having relocated to the moneyed suburbs of Northampton, Massachusetts, Gordon realises afresh that she and Thurston are not typical residents.
“I’m going to the gym. What do you have going on today?” a fellow parent asks her when she’s dropping Coco off at school. Before she can edit herself, Gordon has relayed that she must go home and interview Yoko Ono.
She also reproduces the open letter she once wrote to Karen Carpenter and writes movingly about the anorexia that eventually claimed the troubled singer’s life, while Courtney Love, not unexpectedly, gets it in the neck. Gordon recalls the sinking feeling she had when, while she was co-producing Pretty on the Inside, the 1991 debut album by Love’s band Hole, Love told her of her as-yet unconsummated crush on Kurt Cobain. “We all said to ourselves: ‘Uh-oh, train wreck coming,’” she writes.
Still, it's the less predictable, late-onset train wreck of her own marriage that Gordon keeps coming back to. She and her husband were widely viewed as the golden couple, hence the writer Elissa Schappell's tearful 2011 Salon article: How Could Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore Divorce?
“[Schappell] closed with the question: Why should they be different than the rest of us?” notes Gordon. “Good question, and we weren’t, and what had happened was probably the most conventional story ever.” Gordon’s memoir, however, is far from conventional. Always inventively ruminative, it’s an excellent read.
This book is available on Amazon.
James McNair writes for Mojo magazine and The Independent.
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