Girl in a Band Read online

  What got me through was being onstage, the visceral release of performing. Extreme noise and dissonance can be an incredibly cleansing thing. Usually when we play live, I worry whether or not my amplifier is too loud or distracting, or if the other members of the band are in a bad mood for some reason. But that week I couldn’t have cared less how loud I was or whether I accidentally upstaged Thurston. I did what I wanted, and it was freeing and painful. Painful because the end of my marriage was a private thing, and watching Thurston show off his new independence in front of audiences was like someone rubbing grit in a gash, and my friendliness faded away as one city turned into the next, replaced by anger.

  It reached a point in São Paulo where I almost said something onstage. But I didn’t. Courtney Love happened to be touring South America at the same time. A few nights earlier, she had begun railing against a fan in the audience who was holding up a photo of Kurt Cobain. “I have to live with his shit and his ghost and his kid every day and throwing that up is stupid and rude,” she screamed. She left the stage, saying she’d return only if the audience agreed to chant, “Foo Fighters are gay.” The clip ended up on YouTube. It was typical Courtney shtick, but I would never want to be seen as the car crash she is. I didn’t want our last concert to be distasteful when Sonic Youth meant so much to so many people; I didn’t want to use the stage for any kind of personal statement, and what good would it have done anyway?

  Someone told me the entire São Paulo concert is online, but I’ve never seen it and I don’t want to.

  Throughout that last show, I remember wondering what the audience was picking up on or thinking about this raw, weird pornography of strain and distance. What they saw and what I saw were probably two different things.

  During “Sugar Kane,” the next-to-last song, an oceanic-blue globe appeared on the screen behind the band. It spun extremely slowly, as if to convey the world’s indifference to its own turning and rolling. It all just goes on, the globe said, as ice melts, and streetlights switch colors when no cars are around, and grass pushes through trestles and sidewalk cracks, and things are born and then things go away.

  When the song ended, Thurston thanked the audience. “I can’t wait to see you again,” he said.

  The band closed with “Teen Age Riot” from our album Daydream Nation. I sang, or half sang, the first lines: “Spirit desire. Face me. Spirit desire. We will fall. Miss me. Don’t dismiss me.”

  Marriage is a long conversation, someone once said, and maybe so is a rock band’s life. A few minutes later, both were done.

  Backstage, as usual, no one made a fuss out of this being our last show, or really about much of anything. All of us—Lee, Steve, Mark, our music techs—lived in different cities and parts of the country anyway. I was too sad and worried I would burst into tears to say good-bye to anyone, though I wanted to. Then everyone went his or her own way, and I flew back home, too.

  Thurston had already announced a bunch of solo shows that would start in January. He would fly to Europe and then circle back to the East Coast. Lee Ranaldo was planning on releasing his own solo album. Steve Shelley was playing nonstop with the Chicago-based band Disappears. I would be playing a few gigs with a friend and fellow musician named Bill Nace, and working on artwork for an upcoming show in Berlin, but mostly I’d be home with Coco, helping her through her senior year of high school and the college application process. In the spring, Thurston and I had put our New York apartment on Lafayette Street on the market, and it finally sold six months later. Apart from that, just as the press release said, Sonic Youth had no future plans.

  I came to New York in 1980, and over the next thirty years, the city changed as quickly and as slowly as my life did. When did all the Chock Full O’ Nuts go, or the Blarney Stone bars with the corned beef and cabbage buffet-table lunch deals? Sonic Youth came together, of course, but before and even after that I worked one part-time job after another—waitressing, house-painting, working at an art gallery, stapling and Xeroxing at a copy shop. I’d switch sublets every couple of months. I lived on grits, egg noodles, onions, potatoes, pizza, and hot dogs. I’d walk home fifty blocks from a bookstore job because I had no money for subway tokens. I’m not sure how I did it. But part of being poor and struggling in New York is making ends meet during the day and doing what you want to do the rest of the time.

  All the hours and years since then inside vans, on buses, in airplanes and airports, in recording studios and lousy dressing rooms and motels and hotels were possible only because of the music that sustained that life. Music that could only have come out of New York’s bohemian downtown art scene and the people in it—Andy Warhol, the Velvet Underground, Allen Ginsberg, John Cage, Glenn Branca, Patti Smith, Television, Richard Hell, Blondie, the Ramones, Lydia Lunch, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and the free-jazz loft scene. I remember the thrilling power of loud guitars and finding kindred souls and the man I married, who I believed was my soul mate.

  The other night, I walked past our old apartment at 84 Eldridge Street on my way to a Korean karaoke bar where a cross section of people from Chinatown and Koreatown hang out, alongside the usual art-world hipsters. The whole time I was thinking about Dan Graham, the artist who turned me on to a lot of what was happening in the music scene in the late seventies and early eighties, who lived in the apartment above ours and witnessed the early versions of what would someday turn into Sonic Youth.

  I joined a friend inside the karaoke bar. There was no stage. People just stood in the middle of the room surrounded by video screens and sang. One of the songs that came on was “Addicted to Love,” the old Robert Palmer song I covered in a do-it-yourself recording booth in 1989, which ended up on the Sonic Youth LP The Whitey Album. It would have been fun to sing it karaoke-style, but I couldn’t decide if I was a courageous person in real life or whether I could only sing onstage. In that way I haven’t changed much in thirty years at all.

  Now that I no longer live in New York, I don’t know if I could ever move back. All that young-girl idealism is someone else’s now. That city I know doesn’t exist anymore, and it’s more alive in my head than it is when I’m there.

  After thirty years of playing in a band, it sounds sort of stupid to say, “I’m not a musician.” But for most of my life I’ve never seen myself as one and I never formally trained as one. I sometimes think of myself as a lowercase rock star. Yes, I’m sensitive to sound, I think I have a good ear, and I love the visceral movement and thrill of being onstage. And even as a visual and conceptual artist, there’s always been a performance aspect to whatever I do.

  For me performing has a lot to do with being fearless. I wrote an article for Artforum in the mideighties that had a line in it that the rock critic Greil Marcus quoted a lot: “People pay money to see others believe in themselves.” Meaning, the higher the chance you can fall down in public, the more value the culture places on what you do. Unlike, say, a writer or a painter, when you’re onstage you can’t hide from other people, or from yourself either.

  I’ve spent a lot of time in Berlin, and the Germans have all these great words with multiple meanings inside them. A few visits ago, I came across one of those words, Maskenfreiheit. It means “the freedom conferred by masks.”

  It’s always been hard for me to make space for myself emotionally around other people. It’s some old childhood thing, a sense of never feeling protected by my parents or from my older brother, Keller, who used to tease me relentlessly when we were growing up—a sense that no one out there was really listening. Maybe for a performer that’s what a stage becomes: a space you can fill up with what can’t be expressed or gotten anywhere else. Onstage, people have told me, I’m opaque or mysterious or enigmatic or even cold. But more than any of those things, I’m extremely shy and sensitive, as if I can feel all the emotions swirling around a room. And believe me when I say that once you push past my persona, there aren’t any defenses there at all.

  1

  IT’S FUNNY WHAT you reme
mber, and why, or whether it even happened in the first place. My first take on Rochester, New York: gray skies, dark, colored leaves, empty rooms, no parents around, no one watching or minding the store. Is it Upstate New York I’m thinking back on, or some scene from an old movie?

  Perhaps it is a film my older brother, Keller, and I saw on TV—The Beast with Five Fingers. I was around three or four. Peter Lorre plays a man who’s been left out of the will of his employer, a famous pianist who’s just died. He takes his revenge by cutting off the pianist’s hand, and for the rest of the film, the hand won’t stop tormenting him. It roams and sneaks around the big house. It plays dark notes and chords on the piano, and hides out in a clothes closet. As the film goes on Peter Lorre gets crazier and sweatier until at the end the hand reaches out and strangles him.

  “The hand is under your bed,” Keller told me afterward. “It’s going to come out in the middle of the night while you’re sleeping and it’s going to get you.”

  He was my older brother so why wouldn’t I believe him? For the next few months, I lived on top of my mattress, balancing there in my bare feet to get dressed in the morning. I fell asleep at night surrounded by an army of stuffed animals, the smallest ones closest to me, a big dog with a red tongue guarding the door, not that any of them could have defended me against the hand.

  Keller: one of the most singular people I’ve ever known, the person who more than anyone else in the world shaped who I was, and who I turned out to be. He was, and still is, brilliant, manipulative, sadistic, arrogant, almost unbearably articulate. He’s also mentally ill, a paranoid schizophrenic. And maybe because he was so incessantly verbal from the start, I turned into his opposite, his shadow—shy, sensitive, closed to the point where to overcome my own hypersensitivity, I had no choice but to turn fearless.

  An old black-and-white photo of a little house is all I have to prove Rochester was my birthplace. Black-and-white matches that city, with its rivers, aqueducts, manufacturing plants, and endless winters. And when my family headed out west, like any birth canal Rochester was forgotten.

  I was five years old when my father was offered a professorship in the UCLA sociology department, and we—my parents, Keller, and I—drove out to Los Angeles in our old station wagon. Once we passed over into the Western states, I remember how excited my mother was to order hash browns at a roadside diner. To her hash browns were a Western thing, a symbol, full of a meaning she couldn’t express.

  When we pulled into Los Angeles, we stayed at some dive called the Seagull Motel, one of probably a thousand look-alike places with the same name along the California coast. This Seagull Motel was in the shadow of a Mormon temple, a huge monolithic structure on top of a hill, surrounded by acres of trimmed, saturated green grass no one was allowed to walk on. Everywhere were sprinkler systems, little metallic gadgets here and there twisting and chugging away at all hours. Nothing was indigenous—not the grass, not the sprinkler water, not any of the people I met. Until I saw the movie Chinatown, I didn’t realize L.A. was, underneath everything, a desert, an expanse of endless burlap. That was my first glimpse of L.A. landscaping.

  I also had no idea that going to California meant a return to my mom’s roots.

  In my family, history showed up in casual remarks. I was in my senior year of high school when my aunt told me that my mother’s family, the Swalls, was one of California’s original families. Pioneers. Settlers. The story went that along with some Japanese business partners, my great-great-grandparents ran a chili pepper farm in Garden Grove, in Orange County. The Swalls even had a ranch in West Hollywood, at Doheny Drive and Santa Monica Boulevard, on land that’s today all car washes and strip malls and bad stucco. At some point the railroad laid down tracks, slicing the street into Big and Little Santa Monica Boulevards. The ranches are all gone today, of course, but Swall Drive is still there, swishing north and south, a fossil of ancestral DNA.

  I’ve always felt there’s something genetically instilled and inbred in Californians—that California is a place of death, a place people are drawn to because they don’t realize deep down they’re actually afraid of what they want. It’s new, and they’re escaping their histories while at the same time moving headlong toward their own extinctions. Desire and death are all mixed up with the thrill and the risk of the unknown. It’s a variation of what Freud called the “death instinct.” In that respect the Swalls were probably no different from any other early California family, staking out a new place, lured there by the gold rush and hitting an ocean wall.

  On the Swall side also was my mother’s father, Keller Eno Coplan, a bank clerk. The story goes that at one point he forged a check belonging to his own in-laws and went to jail. My dad always laughed when he talked about my grandfather, saying things like “He wasn’t dumb, he just had no sense.” Odd, then, and not exactly a blessing, that my parents would name their only son after him. Family tradition, I guess.

  With her husband in jail, my grandmother moved with her five kids, including my mother, who was young at the time, up to Northern California, to be closer to the clan in Modesto. During the Depression my grandmother picked up and moved again, to Colorado this time, where her husband’s family had roots. When her husband wasn’t in jail, he was out roaming the country looking for work. With no money and five kids to feed, she must have put up with a lot.

  The only reason I know this is because my aunt figured out that one of his short-term jobs was selling pencils. Turns out only ex-cons got those gigs.

  At some point my grandmother and her children ended up making a permanent home in Kansas. This is where my parents met in their early twenties, in a little city called Emporia, where both of them were in college.

  My father, Wayne, was a native Kansan, from a big farming family, with four brothers and one sister. He was fragile as a boy, with a middle ear disorder that kept him from enlisting in the military or getting drafted. He was the first child in his family to attend college, his dream being to teach someday at the university level. To help pay his tuition, he taught elementary school in a one-room Emporia schoolhouse, first grade to sixth grade, everything from shapes and colors to spelling, history, and algebra.

  My parents were married during college, and after graduating from Washington University in Saint Louis, where Keller was born, it was on to Upstate New York and Rochester, where my dad began writing his Ph.D. Three years later, I came along. The story of how my parents met came out only during cocktail hours, the details always sketchy. My dad was scatterbrained, my mother liked to say, adding that his habit of making popcorn in her house without putting the lid on when they were courting almost made her rethink the idea of marrying him. She always said it with a laugh, though the point she was trying to make, maybe, was that my dad wasn’t as down-to-earth and responsible as he appeared.

  The names in our family—Keller, Eno, Coplan, Estella, Lola—always make me wonder whether there’s some Mediterranean in the mix. There is also the de Forrest side from my mom’s mother, who was French and German, but there’s an Italian strain, too, flashing eyes and Groucho brows mixed in with all the Kansan flatness. Kansas is where my mother’s ninety-two-year-old sister—the source of everything I know about my family history—still lives in a farmhouse at the end of a long dirt road. She’s a woman who during her life I never heard utter even one self-pitying word. Her stories are pretty much the only ones I know. My parents told me next to nothing.

  2

  ONCE WHEN SONIC YOUTH was on tour in Lawrence, Kansas, opening for R.E.M., Thurston and I paid a visit to William Burroughs. Michael Stipe came along with us. Burroughs lived in a little house with a garage, and the coffee table in his living room was crisscrossed with fantasy knives and daggers—elegant, bejeweled weapons of destruction. That day, all I could think of was how much Burroughs reminded me of my dad. They shared the same folksiness, the same dry sense of humor. They even looked a little alike. Coco, our daughter, was a baby, and at one point when she started cryi
ng, Burroughs said, in that Burroughs voice, “Oohhh—she likes me.” My guess is he wasn’t somebody who spent much time around kids.

  My dad’s academic specialty was sociology in education. In Rochester, he’d done his Ph.D. on the social system in American high schools. He was the first person ever to put a name to various school-age groups and archetypes—preps, jocks, geeks, freaks, theater types, and so on—and then UCLA had hired him to create an academic curriculum based on his research.

  One of the conditions for my dad taking the UCLA job was that Keller and I were able to attend the UCLA Lab School. That school was an amazing place. The campus was designed by the modernist architect Richard Neutra, with a large, beautiful gully running through it. One side was grass and the other concrete—for hopscotching or Hula-Hooping or whatever. The gully flowed up into an untamed area where a covered wagon and an adobe house sat beneath some trees. As students, we fringed shawls, pounded tortillas, and skinned cowhides out among those trees. Our teacher drove us down to Dana Point, in Orange County, where we tossed our cowhides down on the beach for imaginary incoming boats, copying what the early traders must have done. There were no grades at that school—it was all very learn-by-doing.

  My dad was tall and gentle, with a big expressive face and black glasses. He was a gestural guy, physical, emphatic with his arms and his hands, but incredibly warm, too, though the few times I remember his getting angry at Keller or me were frightening. The angry words seemed to start in the soles of his feet and travel up through his entire body. Like a lot of people who live in their heads, he could be absentminded; there was that popcorn story, after all. Once when I was little he put me in the bathtub with my socks on—he hadn’t noticed—which of course I begged him to do again and again from that point on.