MOORE FUN IN THE NEW WORLD

"I’m not much for nostalgia, but at the same time, I find so much pleasure from work, from the past. You know, I loved digging through ’60s and ’70s iconography of rock ’n’ roll and literature and poetry and whatever. I mean, that always keeps me really sort of jazzed.”

It can’t be denied that Thurston Moore—the 66-year-old guitarist whose former band Sonic Youth brought “noise rock” as close to the mainstream as anything with “noise” in the pitch was ever going to get and eventually became something akin to a Grateful Dead for people who hate jam bands—really likes his stuff. An ardent lifelong collector of literature and vinyl (“I certainly never understood or related to anybody my age spending whatever money they got on anything except books and records. Right? Like, why would you spend money on a bag of pot when you can buy Exile on Main Street?”), he talks a good enough game about his stuff (describing his stuff with words like “vibratory” and comparing the rifling through the Poetry Project’s archival material to mudlarking 1,000-year-old artifacts from the shores of the Thames) that you’d almost think his stuff was something else. Something bigger than stuff. Something totemic.

In this, who’s to say he’s wrong? Hard to prove that an old Black Flag show flyer isn’t a household god until you cross it.

“Classic rock was kind of stomped on by punk rock as being moldy, old dinosaur music,” Moore says. “But in some respect it was due to the American hardcore movement—specifically a band like Black Flag—which started breaking the barrier of 1977 and going back into Black Sabbath and saying, 'Yeah, you know, Ronnie Dio is pretty cool,’ growing their hair out and putting early-’70s metal-centric rifting in their music, for better or worse.”

Throughout our conversations—the first being held in person at the Union Square loft of one of Moore’s band manager friends and the second being held over Zoom after the guitarist returned to his home in the U.K. (and with both being granted as part of the promotional junket for Moore’s new album, Flow Critical Lucidity)—this usage of “for better or worse” will do a lot of heavy lifting.

Because Moore will say things like, “You start becoming a custodian of your own nostalgia—in your community’s nostalgia,” which is as brutally an empathetic indictment of his own passion projects as could be lobbed at him.

Rather it would be, if he didn’t immediately follow with: “But there was never any sense of preservation so much. I think it always was about essentially being fascinated and loving the work..."

Okay! Essentially means good!

“And then, when it’s getting further away from you, it’s just like, 'My God, remember that Teenage Jesus and the Jerks flyer from 1979? Like, there’s an actual copy that still exists!’ And it’s only because it defines so much of your own aesthetic, and you know it’s really subterranean in the first place.’’

Goddamnit, Thurston.

Continuing, Moore says, "The nostalgia of it is because everything that is an epiphany for you—in your youth, towards what you want to devote your life to, which becomes vocational—that remains throughout your years. You’re always going back to that flash point and mining it.

“You really see that in social media now with, like, all of these 50-year-old-plus 'kids’ who came out of American hardcore. They’re constantly like, 'Wasn’t that a time,’ you know? It’s almost like old folkies talking about Greenwich Village. And it’s like the social media accounts that never show you images of what the participants look like now, but you’re constantly seeing images of the participants from 30 years ago, and it’s like, ‘That’s who I still am. That’s what my soul still looks like. That’s who I was, in front of the Bad Brains at CBGB’s in 1981. That’s me forever...’”

Alright, with that bit of (to me, genuinely profound) wisdom, we are back, baby. Cooking with gas, as they say. Hardcore dudes and their nostalgia for hardcore. Booooo!

Have I mentioned that on the first track of Flow Critical Lucidity, entitled "New in Town,” Thurston Moore sings: "Minor Threats, Teen Idle vibe/Freedom springs/Let them inside/Bad Brains, Red C, a Youth Brigade, GIs, Fugazi, here to stay”?

Like I said, the man’s relationship with the past is complicated. Or maybe Moore’s complex feelings about his own archivist tendencies can be summed up by saying that Thurston Moore has really good taste.

That is, that’d be some sort of simplification if not for the fact that, of all the damning praise one can give to a rock musician, it doesn’t get much fainter than accusing them of having good taste. If it meant, "I really like your taste in notes,” that would be one thing, but what it invariably means is, “I have good taste too. And I know which Amon Düül II B-side you lifted that riff from.” It’s still technically a compliment, but with the implication that the musician ain’t fooling anyone.

Genius in a sense that he is, Thurston Moore gets in front of the accusation by having placed his impeccable taste front and center for the past four decades. As a young fanzine writer living in an East Village walk-up with only the books his dad left him and the few records he could afford, as the beanpole aesthete co-fronting the NYC anti-institution Sonic Youth, and most recently as the author of Sonic Life, a 468-page memoir that catalogs every single piece of outsider art and unlistenable music that came within a hundred yards of the man between the years 1974 and 2011, Moore has taken great care to curate his own life and credit those whose work has informed that life. In his memoir, Moore’s ex-wife and bandmate Kim Gordon is described in measuredly rapturous terms, until she isn’t, which signals the end of the two’s artistic collaboration. This refusal to discuss the intimate details of his marriage’s dissolution was greeted with a parasocial gnashing of teeth from Sonic Youth fans, many of whom seemed to forget their Punk 101 handbook at home and opt for aggrieved whining of which the ostensible underground hadn’t displayed since Sid Vicious did something nearly as bad as cheating. Not giving a shit about Moore’s personal life (and also needing his publicist to reply to my emails if I ever wanted an interview with Alison Krauss), we didn’t discuss any of that. Instead, at every opportunity, Moore will attempt to bring the conversation back around to his collaborators, to his favorite obscure pamphlets, and to Jamie Nares, the filmmaker and Flow Critical Lucidity cover artist whose sculpture of a tuning fork helmet could work as a metaphor for both the guarded attunement of the album’s mastermind or a wry wink at the kind of limited-edition sonic warfare that Moore revels in.

None of this should be considered mere strategy. Sardonic and borderline bookish as he may be (befitting someone whose dad taught art appreciation and phenomenology, before dying when the son was 16), Thurston Moore is an enthusiast. Whether it’s interdimensional free jazz or Japanese noise-core, Moore has made an unbridled affection for the avant-garde and trash bag spasms of the 20th and 21st centuries his signature move. His enthusiasm is so contagious that once, when he was backstage with Neil Young, Moore was encouraging a particularly unbridled collaboration (with the guitarist Bill Nace who, at the time, was inclined toward dragging a metal file across his guitar strings). Young’s manager saw the excitement in his client’s eyes and, in Moore’s telling: "As soon as the 'yes’ was coming out of Neil’s mouth, his manager took him by the arm and gave me this look of, like, 'Stop talking to my artist.”’ Of course, if just having good taste was enough, Thurston Moore wouldn’t be in a position to even potentially inspire career implosion amongst the classic rock elite. Luckily for him, Moore also plays a pretty mean guitar.

Having apprenticed in no wave and the downtown new musics of composers like Glenn Branca, and (by his own admission) having been booed by a Neil Young audience at a benefit for disabled children, Moore’s entry into a pantheon that includes Steve Vai was not a foregone conclusion. Moore’s roots—teen worship of Ron Asheton and driving three hours to see Alice Cooper—were always there. But purposely idiosyncratic tuning and a philosophical disinclination to pander to such staid guitar hero metrics as “chops” should still have made Moore a harder sell in a field dominated by technical maestros. Span of influence is an undeniable factor in the guitarist’s canonization. Success, even at Sonic Youth’s singular standards, is nothing to sneeze at. And Moore’s aforementioned good taste has been mis-paid forward a millionfold, with countless guitar bands—all with refined enough sensibilities to have a Daydream Nation poster in their rehearsal space—operating as though Sonic Youth comparisons were its own form of currency (which, in certain circles, it is).

Moore’s role as guitar hero is generally accepted. In 2003, Rolling Stone listed him as #34 in their top 100 guitarists of all time. On the magazine’s 2011 list, he was demoted to #99 (presumably as punishment for breaking up Sonic Youth, and therefore the hearts of rock critics everywhere). In 2023, Moore bounced back slightly (to #57, with Lee Renaldo chaperoning). As David Fricke’s 2003 list had exactly two women on it and the later lists arguably penalized Moore for no longer being married to Kim Gordon, well split the difference and say that Thurston Moore is officially the 63.333333rd Greatest Guitarist of All Time. Which is pretty good, considering how long time is.

Still, it’s only in retrospect that one can see how long the cultural project—from alt-rock to classic rock, from noisenik provocateur to elder statesman—has been percolating.

Others saw it early as well, if not getting the details exactly right. In an issue of Maximum Rocknroll, the punk bible at the time, a young Ben “Weasel” Foster wrote that “While D.R.I. & 7 Seconds may very well be the Bon Jovi & U2 of the ’90s, Sonic Youth & Husker Du will be the Yes and REO Speedwagon. Bleeaacchh!!” (Sonic Youth, always open to different perspectives, reprinted this critique on the sleeve of their 1988 Master-Dik 12-inch, and Weasel himself would go on to make one classic pop-punk album in the ’90s before eventually converting to Catholicism.)

If a keen observer of repurposed Sabbath riffs (along with the occasional Ramonesmaniac) could see classic rock becoming inevitable, some punk innovators didn’t notice till the ’90s. As with every counterculture shift of the past half century, Moore has an illustrative story (with a legendary name not so much dropped in as casually run into).

“I was at an All Tomorrow’s Parties gig in England and Dinosaur Jr. were playing. I was talking to Viv Alberteen from the Slits. She had just sort of reentered into the music world, and she had a new record coming that I helped her put out. So we were hanging out and I said, ‘You should go see one of the best bands in the world right now. They’re called Dinosaur Jr. I think it’ll blow your mind.’

“So we went to the side of the stage and were watching Dinosaur—you know, old-school Dinosaur reformed—Lou, J, and Murph—just tear it up. And J [Mascis] was, like, shredding. He was going crazy and was just...wow. So good. Viv got really disturbed. She reached up and started screaming in my ears and was like, ‘WHAT IS THIS? I thought this is what we fought against, this...guitar solo bullshit,’ and she stomped off.”

Moore tells this story offhandedly after repeating a story from Sonic Life about Siouxsie Sioux being kind of unpleasant to some members of the Grateful Dead about the death of Jerry Garcia.

Both anecdotes are prompted by this reporter asking a lot of questions about how the chronological window of what is considered “classic rock” keeps widening as rock ’n’ roll steadfastly refuses to die. And how all that relates to Thurston Moore, whose view of what makes rock “classic” is, in a word, expansive.

Beginning with whether Sonic Youth would reunite to play the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame if inducted (to which he responded that they’d “cross that bridge if we came to it”), taking a brief interlude to ask if he and Nick Cave had ever discussed Christianity (“Actually, no, we never did”), a quick follow-up question of “How did Sonic Youth manage to have a New York band with no Jews in it?” (he wasn’t sure), before finally ending with Thurston Moore introducing this reporter to, in a lifetime of taking terrible genre names in stride, one of the least cool terms ever.

“When we started getting into the post-20-year mark of the band’s existence, they started throwing that one around; that we were a ‘heritage rock' band.”

Accepting that the term sounds like a trad wife recruitment tool, Moore explains its actual meaning.

“I think maybe it has something to do with bands that kind of came into being around ’79, ’80, ’81, as opposed to ’69, ’ 70, ’71. What do you call bands like ours, Chili Peppers, Meat Puppets, or Mudhoney, who were getting gray and weren’t kids anymore— even though they were in arrested development as all people in rock bands are, for the rest of their lives, no matter what they do. So there was this thing of, like, ‘Sonic Youth were a heritage rock band,’ and I was like, ‘Oh, are we now?’ You know? So that was one way, I think maybe, that might have been the death knell right there.”

The fact that it’s the term “heritage rock” that finally gets both of our blood pressures up is kind of funny. As is the term’s application being seen as the beginning of the end for Sonic Youth, a band that had bashed and/or droned up against prevailing winds for a quarter century. I could have asked about that, but potentially revealing jokes shouldn’t be overanalyzed. Acknowledging that a joke is not necessarily a “ha ha” joke—just letting it, you know, vibrate—is a sign of good taste.