January 28–February 4, 1999
music
Sonic Truth
In JRNLS80s, Sonic Youth's Lee Ranaldo collects his thoughts from the band's formative years.
by Sam Adams
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Remember that time when Sonic Youth wrapped themselves in guitar strings, set the hotel couch on fire and started pelting German tourists with maraschino cherries?
If you're hoping that Lee Ranaldo's collection of journal entries from Sonic Youth's first decade would be filled with such juicy tidbits—stop. Don't expect a tome filled with life-on-the road details, a Behind the Music-style look at the inner workings of one of the most influential bands of the last 20 years. Ranaldo's new memoir, JRNLS80s (Soft Skull Press), draws more from the literary tradition of journal writing than from gossip-obsessed rock bios. Pages go by without the author even mentioning the band. What the book offers is a singular insight into one-quarter of Sonic Youth, a history of what the '80s were like inside Lee Ranaldo's head.
Ranaldo, on the phone from his Manhattan apartment, concedes that the book is likely to disappoint Sonic Youth fans looking for gossip on Thurston and Kim, or "hoping to get the flavor of what the '80s were like in Sonic Youth."
"It would be another story entirely to try and write the history of Sonic Youth from the inside," he says, "one that's happily left undone." Instead, the book spins out as a series of fragments, narrative entries, poetry and lyrics which bears about as much resemblance to the traditional memoir as one of Sonic Youth's ear-shredding feedback codas does to Phil Spector's wall of sound.
Still, JRNLS80s is best appreciated by those with at least a cursory knowledge of Sonic Youth's history; since Ranaldo doesn't always stop to clue you in, it helps to keep a timeline of the band's career running in your head. His long depression, chronicled in the book's early pages, when Ranaldo is in his mid-20s, coincides with the band's first recordings, whereas the shift in tone and style that occurs at the book's chronological midpoint parallels Sonic Youth's transition from embryonic art-rock experimenters to full-fledged EVOL-era gods of noise.
The handful of passages where Ranaldo goes into detail about the band's shows are among JRNLS80s' highlights: "It was a set for sleepwalkers," he writes in 1986. "We wound our way as through uncharted territory, taking liberties at every turn, in confused fusion with purpose." But Ranaldo also reveals a surprisingly romantic, even sentimental side. He has a tendency for falling in love across a crowded room, writing rapturously of beautiful women with whom complete relationships are lived out in the space of a few wordless glances. One 1988 entry is written as a letter to his 3 year-old son, and reads, "I just wish you could know what yr dad is doing. It's pretty cool, I think, to have a dad doing this. I wish I did. I hope you'll think so."
In the book's last entry, Ranaldo writes, "We have, w[ith] DAYDRM, accomplished all that we set out to do," a reference, of course, to Sonic Youth's monumental double album Daydream Nation, which forever secured the band's reputation and cut the greed decade down to size. Looking back at that period now, Ranaldo recalls, "We never planned beyond Daydream. With that album we did everything we thought you could get into a band and do. All we wanted was to be in a band that our peers really paid attention to, and here we had made a record that I think everyone had to sit up and take notice of, whether you liked it or not."
Sonic Youth continues to evolve, most notably with its foray into documenting what Ranaldo calls "the other half of the band," the 20-minute-plus songs that have long been featured in the band's shows but have only recently made it onto disc. "That's another side of the band that we never had the confidence to put on record, and even though it's been a long time to evolve up to the point where we can put that stuff out, you can see the start of that process with Daydream," he says. "That's the jumping-off point for everything that comes afterward."
