Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo on the Fake Punks Who Scared Everyone

The Sonic Youth guitarist tells Broken Record’s Justin Richmond why the band’s offstage life was boring on purpose, and how a dying friend’s bass line saved Firehose

Sonic Youth spent three decades being mistaken for a band as dangerous as its music. Lee Ranaldo, who co-founded the group with Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon in 1981, tells Broken Record’s Justin Richmond that the reputation never matched reality. “We were like fun-loving goofballs,” Ranaldo says. “People thought, because the music was ferocious, that we were going to be ferocious as people as well, which was not the case at all.” These days Ranaldo is deep into The System, a just-released soundtrack for Dutch filmmaker Joris Postema’s documentary about climate activists, and full steam ahead on a new solo record.

Ferocious Onstage, Boring Offstage

Ranaldo says Sonic Youth deliberately inverted the rock-star script. Many of their peers in New York’s early-’80s downtown scene lived chaotic offstage lives and played comparatively tame music; Sonic Youth wanted the opposite arrangement. “Offstage, we wanted to live in nice places and have refrigerators with food in them,” he says. “We wanted the onstage to be where the ferocity lived.” He traces that appetite for catharsis to the era’s noise scene, from Glenn Branca and Teenage Jesus and the Jerks to Black Flag and the Minutemen. “They didn’t want you to just stand there as a passive observer,” he says. “They wanted you to be really involved.”

Playing a Dying Friend’s Amp

Sonic Youth’s loyalty to SST Records, the label behind Black Flag and the Minutemen, produced one of the darkest nights of Ranaldo’s career. The band was playing a warehouse show in Los Angeles with Swans the night Minutemen frontman D. Boon died in a van accident in the Arizona desert. “I was actually playing his amp on that gig the night that he died,” Ranaldo says. Minutemen bassist Mike Watt shut down afterward, but Sonic Youth coaxed him back into a studio to play on two tracks during the sessions for their 1986 album EVOL. Shortly after, guitarist Ed Crawford called Watt up and asked him to start playing again, and fIREHOSE was born. “I always felt like we had a hand in pulling Mike out of his doldrums,” Ranaldo says.

The Record Men Who Told the Best Stories

When major labels came calling in the wake of R.E.M.’s and the Replacements’ deals, Sonic Youth took meetings with old-guard executives purely for the war stories. Herb Alpert played them a tune on the actual trumpet from the A&M Records lobby. David Geffen, who ultimately signed the band, told them about having to smuggle David Crosby’s marijuana across the country before a Madison Square Garden show. “We almost didn’t care if we got signed or not,” Ranaldo says. “We were just like, this is amazing, we get to suck the stories out of all these people.” Geffen won out by offering full creative control, and the label’s fortunes changed almost immediately: Sonic Youth’s next signing recommendation to Geffen was a scrappy Seattle trio called Nirvana.

Learning to Fill Arenas From Neil Young

Ranaldo credits a three-month tour opening for Neil Young and Crazy Horse, complete with the same giant amplifier stacks from Young’s famous Rust Never Sleeps run, with teaching the band how to play cavernous rooms. Young’s crew was openly hostile at first. “They thought we were a bunch of jokers who didn’t know how to tune our guitars,” Ranaldo says. When the crew began quietly limiting the volume on Sonic Youth’s set, the band threatened to quit the tour entirely, and Young intervened personally. “He put his foot down and was just like, I asked these guys to play, you give them everything they want,” Ranaldo says. “He’s the king of making those rooms sound great.”

Since Sonic Youth’s 2011 dissolution, Ranaldo has kept moving: playing in the genre-blending Medicine Singers alongside Native American powwow drummers, scoring films, and now finishing a new solo album with collaborator Yonatan Gatt. Listen to the full conversation on Broken Record.