Sonic Youth and Neil Young

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Last night I dreamt I kissed Neil Young
If I was a boy I guess it would be fun.

-- Sonic Youth, Creme Brulee, 1992.

In an interview in Exclaim (June 2004), Sonic Youth's Lee Ranaldo had this to say about Neil Young when asked "What's been your most memorable or inspirational gig and why?"

Lee Ranaldo:"That's a hard one. Being someone who plays gigs and finding many, many memorable ones in different ways - I guess I'd have to say I don't really have a single favourite one that I could pick out. As far as seeing other people, I wouldn't say it's the most memorable one but a memorable gig would have to be Neil Young's recent Greendale show."

In an interview in MELODY MAKER in 1991, Neil said about the selection of Sonic Youth as an opening act:

NEIL YOUNG: "I didn't want acts that people were going to say "Oh, I can take them or leave them". I wanted to get somebody that people were going to love or hate. And I think we did a good job there. Sonic Youth are way out there on the cutting edge with what they're doing. And it's also extremely similar to what we've been doing for a long time.

In an interview in MOJO Magazine with Neil Young in 1995, he was asked about recording with Sonic Youth, possibly for the album that became Sleeps With Angels.

YOUNG: "With Sonic Youth? Well, that sounds like it came from a news story that was in fact wrong. Hell, if they wanted to play, I'd be there. It sounds like too much fun to pass by. Sonic Youth are great. Same with R.E.M.: I'd love to work with those guys if the right conditions prevailed. "

Over on Blogcritics' StarPolish Interview with Sonic Youth, some interesting comments by Sonic Youth's Lee Ranaldo guitarist on alienating fans with musical experimentation:

LEE RANALDO: "I don't think that's true. In fact, I think it sort of happens in a kind of the reverse -- it's easy to alienate the fans that have kind of come recently and sort of dip in and check it out, and then move on to something else. I think especially for a band like us, our hardcore fans are really interested in the different directions that we go, and the same goes for us; if we like an artist, even if they go through a period that has you scratching your heads and wondering, 'What the fuck are they doing?' -- like with Neil Young or someone like that when he goes off on these crazy tangents -- you still like something about who they are and what they're enough doing that you keep coming back to see where they're going. Hopefully they come around and do stuff you really love again, as Young has for sure. So I think that because we've been around for so long, there have been fans that have been with us for a really long period of time, and in general they look for us to do different things and sort of challenge their expectations of who we are and what we are."

NEIL YOUNG (Guitars Magazine 92) : Obviously I like Sonic Youth. They are definitely a modern rock'n'roll band in my eyes. They make some beautiful music. Have you heard "Expressway To Your Skull"? It's unbelievably good. So beautiful! It's classic. Magnificent melody, and to hear it live, especially, it's awesome. They have several songs of that quality. So they're a great band.

In the book "I Dreamed Of Noise" written by Ignacio Julia and Jaime Gonzalo, Sonic Youth's Kim Gordan said:

KIM GORDON : That was the first time (the 1991 Neil Young tour) I ever felt what it was like to be a girl in a band, I really felt sorry for like Joni Mitchell. I mean, he's [Neil] very sweet and everything but he's part of that generation and that way of thinking. It sounds like it's changed, but in certain level, in rock, it's just there.

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Confusion is Next: Sonic Youth on Neil Young by Alan Foege

I've been reading the Sonic Youth story, "Confusion is Next" by Alan Foege (1994). Since Neil Young and Sonic Youth are my two favorite musicians/bands, I was a both looking forward to and dreading the section about the 1991 tour. Well, here we go...

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"In retrospect, it shouldn't come as any surprise that sixties stalwart Neil Young offered Sonic Youth an opening slot on the early-1991 leg of his Ragged Glory tour. After spending a good share of the 1980s indulging in a series of genre-hopping, half successful albums, and publically embracing Reaganism for his own unclear and eccentric reasons, Young had decided to reaffirm his roots - loud, bonecrunching guitar rock. Ragged Glory regrouped Crazy Horse - the renowned backing group with whom Neil Young recorded his most memorable material.

" 'We were on a list of like twenty acts that they were interested in,' Thurston says. 'Neil Young wanted some bands that were, well... interesting.' Oddly divergent names such as Einsturdende Neubauten and Public Enemy reportedly made the short list. Sonic Youth was originally asked to join the tour for the West Coast leg, only to find that they were expected to play third on the bill, opening for watery sixties throwback act World Party. The band had decided to reject the offer when Young's people came back with a better offer: World Party had dropped out; Sonic Youth could play directly before Neil Young for the whole 3-month tour.

"Yet Young's mammoth size audiences (11,000 - 18,000) were not automatic converts to Sonic Youth's still relatively challenging fare. The crowd was likely to boo throughout Sonic Youth's set; although some, like the one at New Jersey's Brendan Byrne Arena, seemed partially converted to the bands undeniably forceful delivery. Sonic Youth had never before spent such an extended period on the road. Thurston remembers it ambivalently: 'It was interesting, it was fun, it was boring, it was enlightening, it was drudgery - it was everything.'

"Onstage Young's set far overpowered Sonic Youth's (his crew insisted on keeping the opening acts' volume far below Neil's); Sonic Youth almost quit after the first few weeks (a particularly tepid mix ruined the 2/4 performance at New York's Madison Square Garden) in protest of the sonic muzzle until a face-to-face meeting with the hoary headliner rectified the matter. And sure enough, as the tour progressed, Neil Young seemed strangely fortified by his esteemed opening act; on some nights he could be caught apparently trying to rest Sonic Youth-like dissonance from his heavily amplified guitar strings.

"Neil Young didn't socialize much with the band, although he'd occasionally visit the Sonic Youth dressing room to praise the night's version of 'Expressway to Your Skull,' a song which he's referred to on ocassion as the greatest guitar song ever written. From an interview in a 1992 French Guitars Magazine in response to the question "about what groups he classifies as rock and roll, Young said:
"It's obvious that I like Sonic Youth. In my book, they really do modern rock. They make magnificent music. You know that one, Expressway to Your Skull?

It's incredibly good, so beautiful. It's a classic. Superb melody, and even better live. They have quite a few that are that good. So that's one great group."

Young's roadies, holdovers from classic rock's dark ages, were less predisposed to what they perceived as to be Sonic Youth's art-freak eclecticism. 'The Neil Young tour was actually the first time I encountered so-called sexism,' Kim Gordon said. 'Every time it was somebody's birthday, there'd be strippers hanging around.'

"For most of the dates in the South, Sonic Youth played half-hour sets to disinterested crowds who used the band's time onstage as an opportunity to purchase Cokes; at some shows, the band went so far as to confiscate chairs from the front rows of the audience and bring the chairs onstage, a gag that perplexed the fans but amused the band. Neil Young cancelled the tour's LA dates, one of the main reasons Sonic Youth had stuck things out, when he developed an ear infection.

"When I spoke to Young a couple months after the tour, he described it as 'a fantastic voyage inside a power cord.' The typically disingenuous Young, perhaps reluctant to dish out overripe praise to a younger band for whom he had so much respect, explained his affinity with Sonic Youth like this: 'I knew if people knew that they were there that they'd know, Okay, first of all, he's not going to be doing an acoustic show.'

" 'The Neil Young tour was the first time I really felt like we were suddenly confronting the mainstream,' Kim says. 'We really had this pretty much redneck, conservative audience. It was interesting because it made me feel like we were performing for the first time. I felt good that we could actually shock people. It made us feel really young.'

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More on Sonic Youth and their influence on Neil Young (and vice versa) from excerpts of "I Dreamed Of Noise", The Sonic Youth Biography.

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