Sonic Youth Gossip - Thurston & Verlaine on the next Harp magazine

here it is, Thurston at his best:

http://www.harpmagazine.com/articles...rticle_id=4284

Thurston Moore + Tom Verlaine

By Trevor Kelley
Merely calling Tom Verlaine and Thurston Moore “kindred spirits” is a bit of an understatement considering the staggering influence they’ve had on the way indie rockers have played guitar for the past 25 years. If, for instance, you’ve ever watched a guitarist with a shaggy bowl-cut shake the shit out of his instrument as if it were on fire while a wave of feedback wafted through the room, that’s probably because of Moore. And if you’ve ever heard a band and thought it sounded a bit like one of the so-called “new New York” acts that came to mainstream prominence a few years back, they were probably just ripping off Verlaine. Between Marquee Moon, Verlaine’s 1977 debut with post-punk pioneers Television, and the numerous albums Moore has released with noise-rock legends Sonic Youth, it’s hard to think of two bodies of work that have had more of an impact on the way indie rock has sounded over the past 10 to 15 years.
But when Moore and Verlaine showed up at Harp’s “Rock of Ages” photo shoot on the West Side of Manhattan, it was pretty much impossible to get them to talk seriously about their respective legacies. The two have been friends for nearly 30 years, which means that sitting in the same room with them involves a lot of inside jokes and a lot of silly memories from their days coming up in the early New York punk scene. But is that surprising? Not really. What is surprising is how active they continue to be this late in their careers. This June Sonic Youth will release its 16th album and this past spring Verlaine released not one but two new albums, Around and Songs and Other Things, marking the end of his 14-year hiatus as a solo artist.
Allowing Harp to sit down with them just before the shutters started snapping, Moore and Verlaine discussed their early days in New York and why punk rock doesn’t really exist.
Harp: I’m sure Harp would love to believe that we were the first to get you in a room together, but obviously you’ve met before this.
Verlaine: Yeah, we have a group.
Moore: [laughs] We’ve never played live, though. Tom comes up and visits my house in Western Massachusetts and we play around there. It’s kind of cool. We’ve got some amps in the basement. I actually put a drum kit in the basement. I’ve got a P.A. in the basement and everything now. Next time you come up you should check it out.
Harp: What eventually brought you two together back in the ’70s?
Moore: You know, Tom was brought up in Virginia—
Verlaine: No, Delaware.
Moore: Sorry, Delaware—and I was living in New England. But I’d heard that he had moved to New York in ’68. He was a little older than me. I was 10 years old in ’68. But I was really into this whole idea of moving to New York. So I’d heard that he had moved there and I figured that if he could do it, I could do it. I finished high school and immediately moved there. He was pretty much well on his way, so he wouldn’t give me the time of day.
Verlaine: I still don’t really talk to people. I talk to the floor.
Harp: People look back on your respective periods in the downtown music scene here as very iconic. How do you two remember it?
Moore: It was a much smaller community. There was no real media eye on the whole thing. There was a media flashpoint going on, but nobody was really able to distinguish it culturally. It was just this thing that was really kind of autonomous. That’s what I remember.
Verlaine: There was a lot of crime. I got robbed at knifepoint twice. That was good.
Moore: Yeah, everybody had a gun.
Verlaine: And the only media that Television got covered in was the gay press. They used to come and photograph us, so for a couple of Sundays there was nothing but gay guys in the club. They heard that there was this new club on the Bowery with these wild punk boys. It’s pretty hilarious. The magazine was called After Dark.
Moore: After Dark was great. It was sort of a gay-centric, downtown culture arts magazine. It was kind of a big deal. It sort of coexisted with Interview. But Interview was a little bit impenetrable because there were these kind of unreadable interviews with people in it. You know, unlike an interview like this, where we’re so focused.
Verlaine: Our first manager was a coeditor at Interview for the first year. I remember they wanted a serious film magazine, so they began as this journal writing about French film directors. Then [Andy] Warhol, who was bankrolling it back then thought, “Well, we’re not going to sell anything this way.”
Moore: I started going to see bands at CBGB because of what I read in After Dark. And there was this huge article on Television in Screw. Do you remember that magazine Screw?
Verlaine: It was a porn rag with a bunch of girlie ads in the back.
Moore: “Punk” was sort of a porn word. It was basically a jailhouse term for anal sex.
Verlaine: Is that so? [laughs] I didn’t know that. Is that true?
Moore: Yes!
Verlaine: [Laughing hysterically] I went to England in 1976 and there was all this punk crap in the papers and I was walking with this girl and I said, “What is this punk crap?” Because I only knew garage music. But she said it was “Personal Underground Nutty Knowledge.” She said, “Yeah, look!” And there were, like, six kids with mohawks. That was really the extent of punk in London. Everything else was newspapers taking pictures of these people because it was so shocking to the English society to see someone walk down the street with a mohawk or a torn shirt or something. I think it’s fair to say that punk didn’t exist. It was kind of amped up bubblegum music.
Harp: Wait… you don’t think that punk actually existed?
Verlaine: Nah, it’s not really a form of music. It’s just louder bubblegum music with more angry lyrics.
Harp: So would you say what you were doing wasn’t punk?
Moore: It was more like algae. [laughs] That was a long time ago. I was so under the influence a lot of the times—as a lot of young people are in New York. You know, psychotropic drugs were very common and readily available in the streets of New York in the early to mid-’70s, so for me the whole recall we have from that period is somewhat suspect.
Verlaine: Look at this. [Begins pointing out the window of the studio, at a nearby elevated walkway.]
Moore: This is a beautiful view. Actually, I used to walk along this. Back then, we used to have so much fun walking around New York. I used to see Tom shopping for magazines at magazine vendors on the street and I would follow him around to see what he was buying. He would always flick, but never buy. I was curious what this guy was buying because maybe it would lead me to some kind of communication.
Harp: How long did it take you to befriend him?
Moore: He used to write me letters.
Verlaine: Oh, that’s not true.
Moore: Yeah, he used to send me postcards like, “What did you think of the Arizona Highways June issue, because I know that you were watching me.” And…well, I didn’t really know how to respond to that. [laughs]