Rick Rubin
In addition to being a podcast host, Frederick Jay “Rick” Rubin is an American record producer and former co-president of Columbia Records. Along with Russell Simmons, he is the co-founder…
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Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo helped transform the possibilities of the electric guitar at a time when its role in rock music could seem well established. He came of age in New York City’s downtown No Wave art scene in the late 1970s before co-founding Sonic Youth with Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon in 1981. Over the next three decades, the band became an artistically and critically important act in American rock, serving as a conduit between the underground and the mainstream.
Since Sonic Youth’s dissolution in 2011, Ranaldo has continued to work prolifically as a solo artist and collaborator, moving freely between noise, folk, drone, and spoken word. His work reflects a restless curiosity that has made him a genuine musical polymath.
On today’s episode, Justin Richmond talks with Lee Ranaldo about his life and work, including the recent release of The System, a soundtrack he composed for Dutch filmmaker Joris Postema’s documentary about three climate activists working to imagine a different world.
You can hear a playlist of some of our favorite songs from Lee Ranaldo HERE.
Pushkin. I 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. The great thing about music is there's always 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 as a, you know, I was like, I don't, there's already so much that felt like so much cooler than me as a kid. And then it was like, Sonic, he's another level beyond that.
00:53
Speaker 2
You know, we were, 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?
01:12
Speaker 1
And now that I know you guys are familiar, 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. You pegged everything against, you know, Sonic Youth. And so it was kind of like, oh man, I don't, you know, I don't know if I'm cool enough, you know?
01:30
Speaker 2
So you never saw us play?
01:32
Speaker 1
You know, I probably did at a festival at some, at some point. Maybe so. Maybe so. I'm sure I did a bunch of L.A.
01:39
Speaker 2
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, you know, 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.
01:56
Speaker 1
Really?
01:57
Speaker 2
Yeah, we played at like Al's Bar. And was there a place called Club Lingerie?
02:02
Speaker 1
I think that was in LA. I was too young for that, but I've heard of Club Lingerie.
02:05
Speaker 2
Yeah, we played those places. And we played the Roxy and stuff like that as well at some points.
02:10
Speaker 1
Did you guys... Yeah, it's funny, and I guess it's the Kim connection, but it does feel like there's a bit of... Between SST and Geffen, 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.
02:29
Speaker 2
Yeah, no, for sure, for sure. And we were totally fascinated with that, especially that period of the Beach Boys on the one hand and Peace and Love and Manson on the other hand. 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 people would imagine that they were going to meet a bunch of 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. And 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. But we wanted the onstage to be where the ferocity lived, you know?
03:38
Speaker 1
Was there a catharsis to it, you think?
03:41
Speaker 2
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. I 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, 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, as a passive observer. They wanted you to be really involved. Yeah.
04:28
Speaker 1
What, I mean, given that there was so much going on around New York, it always seems to me would have made more sense to maybe sign with like a Z Records or 99 or something, you know, versus. Yeah.
04:39
Speaker 2
We would have loved to have been on 99. I mean, the first two records were on Glenn 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. So our first, 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 meat 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.
05:19
Speaker 1
Signing to SST, did it, did you get to know everyone over there pretty well or was it like a family or a group?
05:25
Speaker 2
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 Minutemen guys. And, And the Meat Puppets, you know, we did lots of shows with all those bands. It felt really cool to be a part of that. You know, and Petty Bone, you know, Raymond Petty Bone was sort of part of that crew at that point.
05:55
Speaker 1
Yeah.
05:56
Speaker 2
He became a good friend. And then, you know, things changed and we ended up on another California label with Geffen, which was also really cool.
06:04
Speaker 1
Just to stick on SST for a second, you were there when the Minutemen kind of changed into Firehose.
06:10
Speaker 2
Yeah. We were playing a warehouse gig in L.A. with the Swans the night that D. Boone died in Arizona or New Mexico, wherever it was. And 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 were, then we got really close to Mike. And actually, you know, when, 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, that I sang that, was kind of a Stooges-esque riff, and 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 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'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, called Mike up and said, hey, let's play, and Firehose started.
07:40
Speaker 1
Wow.
07:41
Speaker 2
Yeah.
07:42
Speaker 1
Yeah.
07:42
Speaker 2
So I always felt like we had a hand in pulling Mike out of his doldrums of D Boone's death.
07:50
Speaker 1
You kind of kept a relationship with Pettibone. Did you keep a relationship with Greg as well?
07:56
Speaker 2
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.
08:08
Speaker 1
But that didn't transfer to Pettibone at all, like the awkwardness of that?
08:12
Speaker 2
No, not at all. We were relating to Raymond on a completely different level. And at that point, he was... starting to be more in the art world than the music world. And, you know, Kim and I trained as artists, and we all had a real affinity for his art in particular, you know. And he lives nearby here. We see each other every once in a while.
08:33
Speaker 1
That's amazing, man.
08:34
Speaker 2
Yeah, we actually, 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. He 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 a whole bunch of movies. And he started making some again. And 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 a 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. So they're very, very weird movies. Very cool.
09:33
Speaker 1
Sounds like it might be better than the, I think they're putting out like four Beatles biopics soon.
09:38
Speaker 2
Yeah, they're coming.
09:39
Speaker 1
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 before?
09:49
Speaker 2
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 signings. 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 ahmed erdogan for atlantic records we met with herb albert and and the people at a and 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, uh, in the A & M studios in LA and, you know, where like all these great records were made and we're walking through the studios with him and we come around the corner and there's his trumpet, like sitting on a pedestal. And he says, Oh yeah, that's my trumpet. And like, he picked it up and he played something for us, which was like 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 and Young and his pot delivery didn't make it. And he was like refusing to go on. And Geffen's like, I'm not going to carry pot on the plane, you know, and all this kind of stuff. And, uh, 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, like we would, we almost didn't care if we got signed or not. We were just like, this is amazing. We get to like suck the stories out of all these uh 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 um no oversight like didn't have to present demos or or any of that stuff and it worked really well for us with them for for a pretty good amount of time yeah yeah i mean we're still it doesn't it's not called geffen anymore it's called universal but we're still on that path with with you know the records we made with them we're still putting out stuff through universal But yeah, they, they were good. And then, you know, on, on our backs, they signed Nirvana. So at that point we could do no wrong within their eyes. You know, it was like, boy, we brought them like the biggest cash cow of, of the, of the era.
12:29
Speaker 1
Yeah. Yeah. And, and, oh, and that's right. And you guys shared management with Nirvana too, right? Yeah.
12:34
Speaker 2
They, they followed us. They, they, they were asking us who should be their management. And we liked our, our, uh, Silt, John Silva out in LA. And so they, They signed with Silva. They signed with Geffen. They used our merch people. They were kind of taking their lead from what we were doing, which we felt was a real compliment.
12:57
Speaker 1
It is an amazing thing about you guys because 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.
13:13
Speaker 2
And it was definitely our trip completely. You know, as soon as we could bring opening bands along, we just brought all the people we wanted to hear every night. And 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 Wolfeyes 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 we had Pettibone and Mike Kelly and Gerhard Richter paintings and 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. We always would rather talk about stuff we were interested in than talk about our, our, ourselves really, you know?
14:36
Speaker 1
Yeah. I read something Thurston said that like when you guys initially signed to Geffen, people there had the idea that maybe you guys had a, um, a dark side of the moon and you guys like, you were, they were kind of thinking of you as, as a, like a sleeper pink Floyd, you know, kind of all these crazy records and then, Oh, but they're going to, if they get focused enough, they're going to have a dark side of the moon. Does that ring true?
15:00
Speaker 2
Well, I don't know. I mean, with every record from the very first one, there was a single that they were 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 I don't know which ones they chose from those couple of records. But, you know, it was never going to we were too weird a band 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, I would cite certain of our records as being in that category for us. You know, a song like The Diamond Sea is like a 20-minute song, 25 minutes on the 12-inch single. And it's like, you know, we did it. We were doing our own thing.
15:45
Speaker 1
You know, I guess that's the thing. Like, you know, 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 kind of... Yeah.
15:58
Speaker 2
You know, a certain a certain aspect of success is. 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, 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. It's a huge, huge band. That's not huge in the bigger scheme. They're not Bob Seger huge or whatever, you know. But to the right people, they're like, you know, top shelf or whatever.
16:33
Speaker 1
Yeah, no, absolutely.
16:34
Speaker 2
Like 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.
16:44
Speaker 1
You know. Yeah.
16:45
Speaker 2
We were making music, not making money.
16:49
Speaker 1
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. That 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 and good company. Here are the songs making the cut on my next camp. 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. It's a beautiful song from the Byrds' 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 cue 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. Miller, 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 and a crackling fire. Download it before you go, because out there, you get one shot at cell service, and it's not coming back. If 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.
19:04
Speaker 2
It was amazing. He was at a high period and you know, we were, he had the, 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. Cause we didn't see those original concerts. It was the first time we'd ever played those kinds of hockey arenas and stuff, you know, and we did three months of it with him. And, um, it really, uh, taught us how to do that. And we were kind of learning from the master because he's, he's the King of making those rooms sound great, you know? And, um, 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 careers. 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. And, you know, we'd never done tours like that with a semi truck of gear and all, you know, all that kind of stuff. And it was, 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. He 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. And 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. like 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 like hang with him backstage and like watch the show. And like the crew guys kept being like, you guys are still fucking here. And like, eventually they, they, we are kind of their respect because they realized we weren't just like out there to take it, take the piss as they say in England. And, and, you know, we'd never, you know, they, they realized we were in it for the long haul and they, they came around to being like, By 10 years later, they were like, hey, Lee, how you doing when we were backstage or whatever. But it was an evolution for them to 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.
22:17
Speaker 1
It's incredible to hear Neil's crew levying all the complaints most people have about Neil.
22:24
Speaker 2
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. They're, they're pulling down the master volume or whatever it was. And, 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, and the news got to Neil and like, he put his foot down and was just like, I asked these guys to play, you give them like everything they want. And, and it just got like so much better from there, but you know, like, and it really took Neil himself, like, you know, coming, coming forward on our behalf. And, and that was, that was super cool. And, and it really smoothed a lot of things out.
23:16
Speaker 1
It's incredible guy to have on your side, you know? Yeah. Yeah.
23:20
Speaker 2
Yeah.
23:20
Speaker 1
Yeah.
23:20
Speaker 2
Incredible. Yeah.
23:22
Speaker 1
Did you ever figure out Neil all those years, no opening act and then why, why you guys?
23:28
Speaker 2
I 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 we were just like, you should have Nirvana open for you, man.
23:53
Speaker 1
He just had no clue. Yeah.
23:56
Speaker 2
It wasn't the right moment, and then they were too big to do anything like that. When we were talking about them, they were still kind of an underground band, but we were just like, you should hear this band. They're so amazing. The next summer, or that summer, I guess, Nevermind grew up.
24:12
Speaker 1
When you guys put up the Goo demos, the front cover is a photo of Cher, and one of the inserts is Cher with David Geffen. in kind of like an intimate pose.
24:25
Speaker 2
They were, they were, they were a couple. You're right.
24:27
Speaker 1
But like, did you, did that, was that like to fuck with Gavin or was that?
24:32
Speaker 2
You know, I guess so. I mean, nobody ever said anything to us.
24:36
Speaker 1
No.
24:36
Speaker 2
You know, the first idea we had for the cover of Goo, we wanted to use a pettibone and the first, 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, uh, cover, you know? Um, as a matter of fact, last year, this Canadian artist put out a book of all, you know, there's, I don't know if you've ever seen any of the variations on that cover. I mean, there's a million spinoffs of, 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 artist 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. They'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.
26:37
Speaker 1
You guys have always had great covers, but that one definitely just captured the imagination of people in a super unique way.
26:43
Speaker 2
I mean, the Mike Kelly images on Dirty Dirt, also were very popular. That sock puppet and all that stuff, you know?
26:50
Speaker 1
Yeah.
26:50
Speaker 2
We had cool cover artists. That was definitely for sure.
26:54
Speaker 1
Yeah. In the Bad Moon Rising era, you guys did the Richard Kern video for Death Valley 69. Yeah. There's kind of like the, there's the Bad Moon Rising cover, which is like, you know, I guess Halloween-y. There's a Halloween-ish. Everything was a little horror movie, Halloween themed there for a second, you know?
27:15
Speaker 2
Yeah, there was definitely that autumnal kind of children of the corn kind of moment. I don't know why we were mining that, you know, at that particular moment in time. You know, Husker Du had put out that record called New Day Rising.
27:29
Speaker 1
Yeah.
27:30
Speaker 2
And we felt like Bad Moon Rising was our East Coast version of that in some way. And of course, we loved the Creedence song and the scarecrow on the cover has a flannel, you know, a John Fogerty-esque flannel shirt. And it 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 Bird on drums and the scarecrow. But the original back cover picture of that record had a lot of handwritten text and it had pictures of the four of us in our most 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. I 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, 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, and ready to go. And, 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 like looked like pumpkins. And so that's what they got. They got like, they got like 40 or 50 of these little pumpkins that we spent a couple of afternoons carving them and had them all over the stage. It was, it was super cool looking, but we were like, really, they don't have pumpkins over here.
29:29
Speaker 1
It was, it was, I love that. I love that you guys, whether it's blast first or you guys, the label head is always mad at you guys.
29:40
Speaker 2
Yeah, beleaguered. Always beleaguered, I guess.
29:42
Speaker 1
It's a great word, always beleaguered. It's a unique talent you guys have.
29:48
Speaker 2
Yeah.
29:49
Speaker 1
Is it true that When you guys were doing Cool Thing and you guys had Chuck D come record that he had a crew of people with him, including Vanessa Williams and Ice Cube.
30:01
Speaker 2
I don't think that's true.
30:03
Speaker 1
That's not true?
30:04
Speaker 2
But I don't think that part about Vanessa Williams and Ice Cube is true. He came on his own. You know, we were working at this place in Soho here. We did Daydream Nation there and we did Goo there. And Public Enemy was working in the same studio. So we were always there working in one studio and they were in the other studio. And so the song is written about LL because Kim had just interviewed LL and we really loved that first LL Cool J record so much. Can't Live Without My Radio, that whole album. We just played that record to death. And the studio we were working in called Green Street was really a hip hop studio. We were one of the first rock bands that were in there doing stuff. And the guy that we worked with on that record, I don't know if he'd ever done a rock record before. He was a hip hop. They were all hip hop producers in there. But you had Public Enemy working across the hall, making, you know, It Takes a Nation of Millions and Fear of a Black Planet. At the same time, we were making Daydream Nation and Goo. And so we got to know those guys. And in particular, we were admirers of the Hank Shockley and his crew. Oh, the Bomb Squad. Yeah, the Bomb Squad. So we got to hang with them a little bit, which was like really cool for us. And Chuck just wandered across from like his room to our room one afternoon and did that on the spot, you know? So, but I don't remember how. Ice Cube and Vanessa Williams may have been visiting those dudes. And, you know, Flavor Flav was in the hallway when my oldest son was a little kid. He like came over and put his big clock around the neck of my son and, you know, stuff like that. But Chuck came over pretty much on his own to do that. And he just went in the vocal booth and like, without even much preparation, just in like one take, he kind of did his thing.
31:52
Speaker 1
Incredible. I might've misread the liner notes. I don't know.
31:56
Speaker 2
I mean, I might be wrong about that, but I certainly would remember if Ice Cube and Vanessa Williams were there. I don't remember that.
32:03
Speaker 1
Okay. Your lyrics around that time starts to feel like maybe it corresponds with turning New York. Also the fact that you guys were recording in a studio with Public Enemy, but it does feel like there's a bit of like a turn in theme around that time too. You know, Daydream Nation, I guess I'm talking.
32:22
Speaker 2
There may be. You know, we were a New York band and all the stuff that was happening here was influencing us greatly. Certainly when hip hop started, kind of the same moment that like these noisy musicians were happening like us and Swans and Live Skull or whoever. I mean, hip hop was kind of starting at that same moment and we loved that music. And we considered both kind of what we were doing and what they were doing as kind of these new urban folk musics of two different sorts, you know, being made in the city in this kind of urban environment. So we were definitely influenced by that stuff. I don't know if I detect evolution in the gritty quality of our music. I mean, I think we always had kind of a gritty kind of observational eye on things that took different forms. I mean, sometimes more romantic and sometimes more gritty or a little darker theme.
33:14
Speaker 1
Yeah. New York... In 1980 versus New York in 1989, what was the evolution? Did it feel different?
33:22
Speaker 2
That pretty much is our first decade. I mean, New York changed a lot in that decade. It was the beginning of New York kind of coming back to life from this really, like when we start in the period when we started in like late 70s into early 80s, New York was a pretty scuzzy place and it was dirty and there was a lot of junkies on the street and a lot of dope on the street. And there were, you know, if you went to the East Village, you know, it was, it was, could be scary to go over there. You know, New York slowly was pulling out of that. And I mean, by the end of the 80s, a certain scene that we had come up with, you know, the New York bands that we were, we were kind of comrades with and the bands from around the country and LA, a lot of that stuff had either run its course or was kind of mutating into something else at that point, you know, and, and we were too, in a way we were going from being a very local band in our first couple of years to being a band that started touring the U S and started to meet, you know, like meeting the Steve Albini and big black in Chicago and meeting the butthole surfers in Austin and meeting all the LA bands and Seattle bands starting to be an American band. And by the end of the 80s, we were on our first worldwide tours and we were starting to like see what was happening in Japan, for instance, and in Australia and all over Europe. So we were becoming something different. I mean, New York's place in our vision was not the totality that it was in the early period, you know, in a way. We were broadening out into all these, you know, seeing all this other you know, marvelous music culture that was going on all over the globe. And like, again, like bringing as much of it into our fold as we could, you know, touring with the Boredoms, for instance, from Japan, or just bringing as many interesting people into the picture as we could.
35:22
Speaker 1
Was the scene you guys were a part of, late 70s, early 80s, was that replaced with anything in the early 90s? Was there anything like that, that you just weren't, part of anymore because you guys had kind of maybe outgrown it was there anything there grunge grunge.
35:38
Speaker 2
Okay you know grudge is what took over in the early 90s you know mud honey and all the bands from seattle and and of course nirvana or you know and even before that like sort of proto grunge like dinosaur junior dinosaur that would you know we played a lot of shows with them we loved them and both grunge and then bands like pavement and the breeders and you know there was a real um renaissance of like, you know, sort of what they grew to call indie rock, you know, and, you know, these new personalities like Kim Deal and Malkmus and his crew and whatever. And, uh, and Courtney, of course, all the, all the Seattle bands, uh, that's kind of what was happening. And we really embraced that stuff. It, I mean, if you look at a record like Dirty, which was the record that happened after, uh, Nirvana and, and the rise of that whole not just Nirvana, but this kind of harder-edged, like, you know, Stooges-y, you know, Seattle movement. I mean, we embraced a lot of that stuff. And for a period there, our music, especially on Dirty, I think our music got harder in kind of emulation or inspiration from a lot of those bands.
36:52
Speaker 1
I was going to ask if there was pressure to make a certain sounding record after the Nevermind explosion. There wasn't.
37:00
Speaker 2
Only internal pressure. Like, man, this sounds great. Let's make a record that has that kind of balls-out ferocity or whatever. And of course, for Dirty, we used the Nirvana team of Butch Figg, who we'd known for years, and Andy Wallace.
37:18
Speaker 1
Oh, wow. You did the dual combo. That's amazing. Yeah. I didn't know Andy Wallace mixed that.
37:23
Speaker 2
Yeah, he mixed that. And then Butch made the next record with us, but not Andy.
37:26
Speaker 1
Andy.
37:28
Speaker 2
And then we just went back to making records on our own, like where our comfort zone was in a way, you know, but that was the first couple of records for Geffen. By the time we did Daydream Nation, I think our recording budget for Daydream Nation, which was obviously the biggest one up till that point was like $ 30, 000 or something like that, you know, and maybe we made that record in 10 or 12 days total. And the next record, Goo, the budget was like $ 150, 000. And it took us weeks and weeks to make that record, maybe months and months even. A bunch of different studios. And those first couple records there were like us wondering, like, well, if you took a band like Sonic Youth and you really produced them the way you produced an Aerosmith record, say, you know, threw tons of money at it and spent all the time it would take to make a record like that, you know, what would Sonic Youth sound like in that regard? And those were the records where we were experimenting with that. And, and in the end we realized like, didn't really matter. It didn't make a big difference to who we were as a band. And, uh, and we actually liked a little bit more homespun kind of production anyway, that wasn't so big and bossy or glossy or whatever. You know, we, we made our own studio after that and just made our own, made our records at home after that pretty much, you know, and just started making our records in our own little clubhouse and, and that was really where the action was for us.
38:53
Speaker 1
Do you think by that point, too, that you felt you kind of knew you weren't going anywhere?
38:57
Speaker 2
Yeah. I mean, I think we felt that at every point in our trajectory, but we just always felt pretty much in control of our destiny, and it wasn't like we were being buffeted by outside forces of fame or fortune or anything like that. We got sick of paying $ 1, 000 an hour or whatever it was to work in a fancy studio, and we worked in some incredible studios, but It was more fun for us to be able to have, like I said, a kind of clubhouse atmosphere here on Murray Street, kind of not far from where I'm sitting, and and just like show up four or five days a week, work 12 to six or whatever it was, and just get together, read newspapers, share magazines and books and play for a few hours. And, you know, you might get a take, you know, the machines were there. It was always set up. All the mics were in place. It was always ready to go. And we started making our records like that. And that, that was, uh, really conducive to a lot of our later records, for sure. And we started our own label called SYR, where we were putting out not songy stuff that we put out on the Geffen records, but more experimental stuff. And it gave us this laboratory to do all kinds of different stuff, a lot of weird collaborations. That's how we first started working with Jim O'Rourke, who became a full-fledged member for a period of four or five years. He came to New York and we were doing these kind of collaborative recording sessions and we did one with him and then that led to him co-producing our records for a little bit and playing in the band.
40:27
Speaker 1
So there was no point in your career were you ever worried uh maybe we maybe i'll have to get a day job or maybe i won't be able to do this forever.
40:36
Speaker 2
No not after we quit those early day jobs uh you know we by the time we were made i think bad moon rising was probably the last record where we had day jobs and then we started money started dribbling in from tours and enough to live on. You know, New York was a cheap place to live back then as opposed to now. And once we quit our day jobs, we never looked back and never even thought about the fact that we might have to do that again. You know, we're getting established. We're getting a certain kind of respect, even if it wasn't dollars and cents kind of respect. But it was, you know, Art Forum was writing about us. And, you know, people were writing about us in a lot of like cross-cultural ways, not just the music magazines or the fanzines, but they were writing about us too. And and the English magazines. At some point, Rolling Stone and Spin started picking up some stuff. We were just on a pretty hermetic trajectory. We were doing our own thing. We were making some movie soundtracks and making our albums. It was all going in the right direction as far as we were concerned.
41:40
Speaker 1
Speaking of movie soundtracks, I want to ask you about the system. Oh, yeah. Last question before we get to the system is, You guys used standard tuning on the first Sonic Youth album, right?
41:54
Speaker 2
The first one.
41:55
Speaker 1
Yeah. I guess what changed?
41:58
Speaker 2
You know, even the first record, I don't think it's all in standard tuning, but those are the earliest songs we wrote. But when we started, you know, I'd been playing with Glenn Branca at that point, and he was tuning the guitars in all kinds of weird ways. And I knew a bit about that before I grew up using altered tunings. That's kind of how I learned to play guitar. I had an older cousin who showed me some stuff. And once you tune the guitar to an open chord, you sound really good, even though you can.
42:24
Speaker 1
Barely play, you know?
42:26
Speaker 2
And that's still my hypothesis today, basically. But we didn't have many guitars, but the ones we had were kind of cheap and they wouldn't really stay in tune. And so we started just fucking with them, you know, putting stuff under the strings, screwdrivers and drumsticks and just using them as noise-making tools. And as soon as we left standard tunings behind... We became a unique band. You know, that was the one thing, especially in the early period before, like a lot of people realized you could play in different tunings. You know, by the time Pavement comes around in early 90s, they're playing in open tunings and kind of inspired by what we were doing. But in the 80s, nobody was doing that. And when you heard us play or you heard our music, it just did not sound like anybody else because we weren't playing G and C and D or whatever it was. I mean, maybe we were in these weird open tunings, but we just had a different kind of sense of tonality and musical texture going that was different from everybody else. So you heard our music and you immediately knew it was Sonic Youth. It wasn't Green on Red or the Long Riders or whoever else was kind of popular guitar bands back then. We were doing something totally different and it immediately set us apart. And we didn't do it because we wanted to be set apart. We did it because that's what naturally where our minds went with it. But And it opened up this incredible world of tonality, basically, that wasn't there in playing those standard chords. We couldn't rely on... When you learn guitar, you learn whatever it is. You learn Clapton riffs, or you learn those basic bar chords. All that shit went out the window, so we couldn't fall back into these standard odds. Here's how many guitar players have you heard riffing over a set of blues changes, and they're playing You know, they're playing Clapton-esque riffs or whoever, you know, fill in the guitar player here. And our stuff was just so different because we couldn't do any of that stuff because our strings were all weird. So it meant we had to devise a language of our own, which really, really set us apart in a lot of great ways.
44:33
Speaker 1
Are there tunings that you, to this day, are more partial to or do you just.
44:39
Speaker 2
They kind of shift and change over the years. I mean, I don't even know if I'm using any tunings right now that Sonic Youth was using back then. And we went through a million different tunings across our career, which is why we had all these like cheat sheets and spreadsheets with different tunings for different records. And our crew guys really kept all that stuff together for us. But there's actually one of my main tunings now I probably was using back then as well. But, you know, it's just kind of a constantly evolving thing. You pick up a guitar, you start twisting the strings until it sounds cool. And then you start trying to figure out where you put your fingers.
45:16
Speaker 1
Tell me about the system. I imagine you saw the film before you made the music and before you signed on to do it.
45:23
Speaker 2
They were working on the film while they were sending me rough cuts. And as I was making the music for different scenes, they were updating the cuts of the film. Yeah, it's done by this Dutch director named Joris Postema. And they asked me to do it. And I mean, I'd done a bunch of stuff for films before. Like I worked on that Todd Haynes film and some other things. And Sonic Youth did four or five different film soundtracks. But it was one of the first recent ones that I've done on my own, like start to finish. And in the last two years, in addition to the system, I did the score for a film by these two Brazilian directors that's just starting to hit the festival circuit right now. And I did a short film for this independent director in Boston named Tom Bell about is kind of an artist portrait of this guy from Maine that does these weird drawings out in swampy waters. And that film actually, that short film, my score won a best, best score award at some, some small festival, which was kind of cool. But in the last two years, I started doing more movie soundtracks and I sort of built myself a new studio for, for this purpose. Uh, and, um, working on the system was a great experience for me because it was really, it was my test drive for the studio. I was working on it. I thought could be like a potential place where I could do more film scoring and I could also work on my own music. And I've in between these film scores, I've been working on what's going to be my next record, which I'm now full steam working on my next proper album. But, um, they liked what I was doing. And right away I started giving them some weird stuff and they, they responded to it. And, and, gave me a lot of free reign to do some different things. And so for me, it was a really cool experience and it was a really intensive experience over like four or five months or, or more maybe of sending tracks back and forth with them and kind of debugging my studio and setting up more and more instruments to work on it. And I guess we connected through Ethan Miller, whose silver current label is putting out this, uh, this re-imagined soundtrack of the movie, uh, The movie soundtrack has got a lot of music on it, some piano music and some other stuff. And Ethan came to me. He really responded to the music. And he said, let's put out a record that really focuses on the guitar music you made for this movie and put out a kind of like a Lee Ronaldo guitar record kind of thing and a more experimental guitar record. And so that's the tracks we focused on for his really upcoming vinyl release. I think it comes out October 2nd. he chose a really good group of tracks. We used a couple tracks that the movie didn't end up using. So there's a couple, uh, unreleased things on there. And, um, for me, it was, it was a super cool experience. I was playing a lot of keyboards on, on some of it and, and a lot of, uh, a lot of different acoustic and electric guitars and some other, uh, I play a lot of these weird homemade instruments that this guy in Holland builds for me just had pretty free reign to do this. You know, there's three main characters. And so I kind of developed a theme for each of them and, And I feel like I'm kind of primed at this point that I could do some more film soundtracks.
48:36
Speaker 1
Well, it also makes sense to me that you say you're also primed or full steam ahead on your next solo thing. Because, I mean, you know, sometimes you hear a film soundtrack and it can even be a really good film soundtrack, but sometimes it doesn't have the character of the person who made it so much in it, which isn't always a bad thing. But at least the version that Ethan put together of it, which is what I've heard, It really has a lot of character to it beyond the character of what I imagine is the film. But it feels like there's a lot of you in it. Yeah.
49:06
Speaker 2
Yeah, no, it definitely does. I'm deep into my next record and I'm super excited by it because a lot of the tracks are just turning out really great. And all of this work on the system and these other features. and this short film that I did have all kind of contributed to where I'm at right now in general. So it's a good moment for me.
49:29
Speaker 1
That's great. Are you working with anyone else on that project or is it just you?
49:34
Speaker 2
I'm working with this guy that I've been working with for the last two or three years called Yonatan Gatt. He was in a band called Monotonics. He's Israeli. He's lived in New York area for a long time. And he's a multi-instrumentalist and producer. And so I've been playing with him in this group called the Medicine Singers for the last few years. And it's a bunch of sort of rock and experimental players playing with these indigenous Native American singers and drummers that sort of sit in a powwow around a circle with all their regalia on and they're they're singing their native songs and we're kind of backing them up with like a drum kit and electric guitars and stuff, electric bass. And it's been really cool. We've done some work with the medicine, medicine singers themselves are a new England tribe, but we've done work with a bunch of first nations players in Canada. And we were down in Brazil working with indigenous musicians down there. It's it's so it's kind of a hybrid project. That's been really cool. And Yonatan brought me in on that and we've gotten to be friends and So he's working with me a lot on this project. Brian Chase from Yeah Yeah Yeahs is playing drums on a lot of it. And I think there'll be more people to come as we start adding more musicians. We're kind of like pulling all the tracks into shape at this point.
50:54
Speaker 1
That sounds amazing.
50:56
Speaker 2
Yeah, no, I think it's going to be really cool. We've got a couple of really killer tracks at the moment.
51:00
Speaker 1
I'm dying to do a music trip down to Brazil. I am dying to do it.
51:04
Speaker 2
Yeah, it's awesome. I've been going there a lot for the last couple, well, up until Pandemic. I was going there a lot, and it's amazing. It's an amazing culture, and the music culture down there is fantastic.
51:16
Speaker 1
Yeah. Well, great to meet you, man. Yeah, yeah.
51:18
Speaker 2
It's been really fun talking to you, so let's do it again at some point.
51:22
Speaker 1
Yeah, let's do it, man. Broken Record is produced and edited by Leah Rose with marketing help from Eric Sandler and Jordan McMillan. Our engineer is Ben Talladay. Broken Record is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you love this show and others from Pushkin, consider subscribing to Pushkin +. Pushkin Plus is a podcast subscription that offers bonus content and ad-free listening for $ 4. 99 a month. Look for Pushkin Plus on Apple Podcast Subscriptions. And if you like this show, please remember to share, rate, and review us on your podcast app. Our theme music's by Kenny Beats. I'm Justin Richmond.
The Hosts
Malcolm Gladwell
Malcolm Gladwell is co-founder of Pushkin Industries and host of the hit podcast Revisionist History. He is a journalist, a speaker, and the author of several New York Times bestsellers including The Tipping…
Justin Richmond
Justin Richmond is producer and co-host of the music podcast Broken Record with writer Malcolm Gladwell, New York Times editor Bruce Headlam, and music producer—and Def Jam co-founder—Rick Rubin. Justin…
Bruce Headlam
Bruce Headlam is one of the co-creators of the music podcast Broken Record. He worked at The New York Times for 19 years, including two years running the 50-person Video…
Leah Rose
Leah Rose is a senior producer and hosts episodes of Broken Record. A former music editor at XXL Magazine, she also served as an on-air personality for Eminem’s SiriusXM channel, Shade 45.…
