Guitarist’s meandering memoir hits sour notes

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This article was published 23/02/2024 (652 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

During his time in the groundbreaking New York rock quartet Sonic Youth, guitarist Thurston Moore was revered for reinventing what the guitar could do.

So it’s unexpected and disappointing that his new memoir, Sonic Life, is not only turgid and tedious, but utterly conventional in structure.

If you want an exhaustively detailed description of what feels like every gig the band (which formed in 1981) ever played and every show Moore ever witnessed, you’ve come to the right place.

If, however, you were hoping for a window into Moore’s personal life, a modicum of self-reflection or even a juicy backstage exposé, you’re out of luck.

Sonic Life is a chronological slog through the guitarist’s indoctrination into New York’s punk and no wave scene, the formation of Sonic Youth and its gradual move into the edges of the mainstream.

Along the way he marries his bandmate, bassist/vocalist Kim Gordon, and they have a child, but both of those relationships are given short shrift.

One might imagine that reminiscences about his years spent touring and recording with Lee Ranaldo, Sonic Youth’s other guitarist, and drummer Steve Shelley (not to mention his now-ex-wife) would fill these pages — stories about life on the road, late-night conversations, bonds forged in the fires of foreign stages — but Moore seems happy to skim the surface, skittering from gig to gig, littering the pages with dropped names.

Moore is a decent writer in the main, but he’s prone to using words that are just slightly wrong or overly lofty.

“Linguistics had always come naturally to me,” he says; surely he just means words in general, not the study of the science of language and semantics.

The book is desperately in need of an editor, both to trim the unnecessary anecdotes from its 470-plus pages and to save Moore from his predilection for using three words when one would do.

On his romance with Gordon (who penned her own, much better memoir, 2015’s Girl in a Band), he recalls, “I sensed that I had something that thrilled her too… expressing my own organic intellect and my penchant for humor.” (Note: this book elicits not a single chuckle.)

He also has the irritating habit of — perhaps a penchant for? — starting chapters with stories that feel portentous but go nowhere.

The most egregious comes in Chapter 60: “In late 1991, our friend Joe Cole was murdered by a Venice Beach drug gang as he and his roommate, Henry Rollins were returning home one night… Kim and I had come to love Joe… (we) would allude very specifically to Joe in the lyrics to songs we were constructing for Dirty, our next album.”

In the next paragraph, he moves on the reasons they selected producer Butch Vig to record Dirty, Cole’s death a mere segue into another recitation of musical credits and connections (he’s not mentioned again). There’s no pause to dwell on thoughts of mortality or talk about the tragedy’s effect on Rollins, who escaped with his life.

There’s little contemplation here and even less insight. Moore comes across like someone who has devoted himself to his passions to disguise the fact that he doesn’t have much personality.

And it’s impossible not to bristle at the three paltry pages he devotes to the affair that would break up his marriage and the band, pages in which he fudges timelines and fails to mention she was also married and pregnant at the time.

“The circumstances that led me to a place where I would even consider such an extreme and difficult decision (to leave Gordon)… are intensely personal, and I would never capitalize on them publicly, here or anywhere,” he writes, a sentence that’s simultaneously a dig at his ex — who had no such compunctions in her book — and an abrogation of his memoir duties, which essentially call for exactly that kind of soul-baring revelation.

Sonic Life is, to riff on the title of their 1994 album, non-experimental boring trash. One star.

Jill Wilson is the Free Press Arts & Life editor. Her uncle was the cinematographer for Backbeat, the Stuart Sutcliffe biopic on whose soundtrack Thurston Moore played guitar.