It's Wednesday, June 12th. The year is 1985. You're wandering down 3rd Street in New York City in search of live entertainment. Plastered to a telephone pole, a flyer catches your eye. Most of the poster consists of two figures on crosses, one a woman, one seemingly a skeleton in a police hat. Maybe you've seen Children of the Corn, perhaps you raise an eyebrow of recognition. The largest text reads "sonic youth" in a white-on-black typewritten rendition (taken from the back of Confusion is Sex) with the venue, Folk City, in a much smaller font underneath. Maybe you've heard their new album Bad Moon Rising, perhaps you raise the other eyebrow in recognition. The fine print reads "SPECIAL PSYCHO-ACOUSTIK SET WITH SPECIAL PSYCHO GUESTS", followed by the intriguing offer "FREE ADMISSION IF YOU'RE NAKED", if you find the $3 cover too steep. It starts at 9pm, and you're only a block away, so off you go, eyebrows raised, fully clothed, dollars in hand.

You enter the venue with perfect timing. Three members of Sonic Youth take the stage, but this is not 1981, and they are not a skinless trio. Quite the contrary, since Thurston, Lee, and Kim are joined not only by their brand new drummer Steve Shelley, but also former throne holder Bob Bert, very fresh from his evidently amicable exit. Each of them sit behind their own drum kit in one corner of the room - the other two corners are occupied by Butthole Surfers beatkeepers King Coffey and Teresa Taylor, each assaulting a floor tom. Tape loops begin to blare from amplifiers, and the drummers begin a steady one-two rhythm. When Kim begins her bassline, you raise a third eyebrow of recognition. It's "I'm Insane", one of your favorite songs on Bad Moon Rising! And unlike the album, where "Ghost Bitch" flows into "I'm Insane", the reverse occurs, insanity bleeding into Kim's slow spiritual massacre. You pound your fist into your palm when they get to the "I had no belief before" part, shouting along, surrendering to the surrounding toms. Not bad for $3 on a Wednesday night!

As the whirring noise at the end of "Ghost Bitch" winds down, a strange sound starts to spill from the speakers. A repeated percussive attack, like a metallic squink followed by a mysterious galonk? It's soon joined by another sound, a long ominous crash that sounds like someone pushing a piano down a stairway at slow steady intervals. The first sound fades, then returns after a minute or so, sharply replaced by an arpeggiated piano riff just shy of distorting. Kim steps to the mic and begins reciting "...unseen force, your invisible force, your greatest weapon, your most valuable power, the advertisement's saying, the pleasure's everlasting, i must be dead and gone to heaven, come and touch me here...". "What the hell is this?" you think to yourself. "Maybe it's from an EP or something." Kim retreats from the mic but the piano loop continues for another minute or so, while the band plug in new guitars and start creating a wall of sound that segues into "Society is a Hole", as the piano tape gives way to the Metal Machine Music tape. "Whoa!" you might think. "Society is a Hole" is your favorite song off the new album, and you're thrilled to be present for its last performance (you also witness a killer "Satan is Boring" and the potential premiere of "Expressway", but let's end this tired narrative device, eh?).

This was not Steve's first show with the band, just the first one with a circulating recording. It's entirely possible that "Secret Girl" was debuted earlier, but certainly not by much! While they had employed recordings of tape loop noise via walkman during songs like "Society is a Hole" and "I'm Insane" and "Satan is Boring" (and promoted cuts by Ratt and Pat Benatar between songs while changing guitars), "Secret Girl" was the first Sonic Youth song to use a cassette as the foundation of its performance. Thurston had pieced together some recordings he'd made using the piano at Kim's parents' California home. In addition to the simple, yet haunting repeated figure that Kim sings over, he (perhaps with assistance) also simultaneously bashes as many keys as he can, letting their atonal doom ring with encouragement from the piano's sustain pedal. The third sound, which opens the track and returns before Kim's verse, is apparently also reliant on that sustain pedal - its squeaky return from depression offering a curious, distinctive noise (which may have been further pitch manipulated). No longer in possession of a piano, I've tried to replicate this sound on pianos owned by friends and relatives, inviting only nasty glares - I'd love to hear from someone who can pull of something similar with theirs!

The song is basically two sections - the sinister repeating cha-chunk accented by the big doom drops, and the melodic minor key piano riff which serves as the verse. This is the backing tape that would be played onstage via walkman or boombox, and Kim would sing live. Lee would usually play some rickety drumstick noise guitar, like they also added to the studio version, destined for EVOL. The song was often a segue point, for example from "Ghost Bitch" to "Secret Girl" to "Flower", where Thurston and Lee could switch to their GDD# guitars for the next part of the set. It also gave Steve an opportunity for a quick break (and Kim had a minute or so of crashing piano to check her phone or whatever).

Part of the lyrics ("The advertisement's saying the pleasure's everlasting, I must be dead and gone to heaven, come and touch me...") originally appeared in early versions of "Halloween", during the band's first west coast visit in January 1985 (this may have also been when Thurston recorded the piano parts, but they could have visited again before June). Folks present on the 17th in LA or 19th in Seattle heard the additional lines, woven into the general script of the very long, loose "Halloween" openers on that tour. The first few months that Sonic Youth performed "Secret Girl", it still had early lyrics that evolved each time. An undated, likely December 1985 CBGB gig is the first known occasion of the final lyrics being in place. The song's key line - "I am the boy who can enjoy invisibility" - is taken from James Joyce's novel Ulysses, and originally appeared etched into the "Halloween" side of the Flower/Halloween 12", curiously enough (Blast First edition only). Also curious, it was the only song whose lyrics weren't printed in the vinyl edition of EVOL, though they're included with the CD release (again, Blast First only).

"Secret Girl" (or "Secret Girls" if you refer to the vinyl label, or cassette) appeared in the earliest sets with Steve, but was sidelined for most of the August 1985 tour of the United States. It did sneak in on August 11th in Chicago, which you can hear on the Smart Bar release. Here it served as a segue into "Flower", but on the 22nd in Los Angeles it was played between "Ghost Bitch" and "I'm Insane"! It developed a heavier presence on the fall European tour, though unlike "Green Light" and "Expressway" it did not get a pre-EVOL sneak peek courtesy of Walls Have Ears. The EVOL sessions were in March 1986, where they probably just added squeaky reverb guitars and vocals to Thurston's existing "piano tape" (as the song was identified on set lists up until April). It was played frequently during the three tours of 1986 (Europe, a summer run through the States, and a fall trek with fIREHOSE dubbed Flaming Telepaths). As with most of the EVOL material, the song was immediately shelved once Sister was written. It did, however, find new life through a different audience...

Would you believe...Hollywood? That's right, "Secret Girl" became Sonic Youth's ticket to big screen soundtrack action, when the crew working on USA Today decided that the song matched its aesthetic perfectly. The band was contacted and agreed to provide more material for the film eventually retitled Made in USA. You can read so much more here, but "Secret Girl" is one of the primary themes recurring through the score. It appears in the film, trailer, and on the 1987 various artists soundtrack. When the band released their own freshly mixed soundtrack in 1995, it included three alternate mixes that all contained elements of the piano tape.

"The Velvet Plug" opens with the typical pedal sample (a very clean reproduction of it, I might add), which noticeably shifts in pitch for a moment around 7 seconds in. This is the first indication that they will be playing around with the speed of the piano material on the "remix" tracks. The big all-keys doom crashes begin 13 seconds in. Around 17 seconds, the pedal drops in pitch and then out of the mix completely, leaving just the crashes for nearly a minute. The pedal returns around 1:10, with the crash soon departing, and a brief snatch of "Made in USA" type slide guitar creeps by. The pedal tape slows again, and then at 1:29 the piano riff enters, playing two steps down from its original pitch. It's augmented by "Made in USA" style harmonics, slide, cymbals, etc. Eventually the piano fades, leaving only the harmonic aura. This piece would later appear on volume 2 of the band's web-only "Mix Tape" series.

"Tulip Fire 2" (unlike other numerated tunes, there is no "Tulip Fire 1" present) is basically the EVOL version of "Secret Girl" without the main piano melody or vocal. It's definitely the same squeaky drumstick guitar during the first part, and it sounds to me like the second part (where the piano should be) is actually the squawky bird guitar sounds that call out underneath the vocal. I think there's an extra guitar that's not on the album, and this section may have been recorded during the Made in USA session, but it sounds an awful lot like the guitar on the album, just mixed differently (and faded earlier).

"O.J.'s Glove or What?" must have been a shocking title to see on a dusty old tape box from 1986! This is actually the mix of "Secret Girl" that appears a couple of times in the movie itself. It begins a few lines into Kim's verse, but the tape has been slowed down one step from the album version. This abruptly stops 45 seconds in and the remainder of the track is floaty "Made in USA" style whammy bar shakin'. There's a faint voice starting at 1:02, but I can't decipher it.

Despite the revival in 1995, the song did not have much hope beyond 1986. For some reason, when they did their first tour of New Zealand, Australia, and Japan in early 1989, they would play the "Secret Girl" backing tape between songs, but Kim never sang it. Secret Girlies would have to wait another four years for a chance to hear their favorite tune, and only in a quick summer's blink - two warm-up shows in NYC and three weeks in Europe, where "Secret Girl" was restored as a segue into "Flower" (which had only been dormant for a couple of years). And if you weren't fortunate enough to catch one of these gigs, you can check out its penultimate performance on July 14th, 1993 in Lisbon on the "liberated" Blastic Scene bootleg, or the phenomenal video which you can dig on YouTube. You can also scope out live versions from August 1985 and April 1986. It remains a unique song in their catalog, the only tune to use a pre-assembled backing track cassette both on the record and during live performances. It's too bad they didn't utilize it more - it seems like the perfect "break" song - but I suppose with roadies at the go to hand guitars over, it no longer needed to serve that purpose. Still, how about just being an awesome song? And a segue point into something else. "Secret Girl" into "Side2side"? Move over "Nevermind"!

Alright, well...I no longer have enough access to a piano to confidently work the melody out, but I'm pretty sure I've got the jist of it. I wanted to transpose it to guitar, but I also drew a probably-not-helpful chart for the keyboard notes. I'm trusting that the pitch played on the record is the original pitch, even though it's heard being played one and two steps down on the Made in USA soundtrack. Regardless, this "is" the pitch of the song as released, so here you go. I remember in the 90s I tried foolishly to tab it in F#F#GGAA - I think standard is good enough! Contact me here if you have any comments or corrections, so I know that I'm not there.

A SECTION				00:00-01:14

This section uses two non-melodic piano "samples" recorded by Thurston.

The first sound at 0:02 is the piano's sustain pedal being pressed and released.
The pitch may have been altered. It leaves the mix around 0:22 and returns 
around 0:56, continuing until the end of the section.

The second sound at 0:07 is just lots of keys being slammed at once with his arm or
something, while holding the sustain pedal down. He does this 17 times.
                
Lee can be heard making squeaky reverb noise with a drumstick guitar, no notes in
particular, just shaking the stick and letting that springy thing ring. There is also
some droning feedback hum.

It's possible that one of the guitar overdubs is Thurston and not Lee.

In early versions Kim did thundering bass notes during the first half, but does not
play on the final version.

B SECTION				01:14-02:54

Thurston plays a figure like this on piano. Hold the sustain pedal down. The bass
or root notes would be D# then E.

E---6-------6-------6-------6-------0--------0--------0--------0-----------
B-------7-------7-------7-------7-9---9----9---9----9---9----9---9----11---
G-----8---8---8---8---8---8---8---------11-------11-------11-------11------
D--------------------------------------------------------------------------
A--------------------------------------------------------------------------
E--------------------------------------------------------------------------
                
Lee's drumstick maneuvers continue throughout the verse, though they're less
steady and more accentual, swooping in here and there til the end, where some
strangled notes are squeezed through the fade.

Kim only sings during this section.


text + tab by Chris Lawrence