Cedrick Eymenier

PRETTY STRAIGHT FORWARD
An Interview with Lee Ranaldo

By Audrey Fondecave and Cedrick Eymenier
Originally made for OKFRED magazine #5 (Tokyo Japan)
Sonic Youth photos @ Festival Rock en Seine, 2004, by Cedrick Eymenier

“I'm getting’ lost in the slipstream
Maybe relive the same dream
Of comin’ in from the cold
And losin’ half of my soul
Memory disease
Across United States”
- Lee Ranaldo (“Paper Cup Exit,” from Sonic Youth’s 2004 Sonic Nurse)

It's about: SY’s world tour - Richard Prince – the Beat Generation - Glenn Branca - Craziness - Art - Godzilla - Carlos Castaneda - Andy Warhol - Getting high - Existentialism - Just say Yes! - Politics - Presidents - Morocco - Joujouka - Repetitive – Rock ‘n’ roll - Demon Lover - New York - Tokyo – Paris… Lee speaks loudly, clearly, and straight forwardly! DAYDREAM NATION

Lee Ranaldo: We’re coming to Japan in February.
OKFRED: And will you also come back to France soon?
LR: Either December or April 2005. We like it a lot here.
OKF: How’s the worldwide Sonic Nurse tour going? Do you still enjoy doing all these gigs?
LR: We’ve been all over the place. We started in Australia and New Zealand and just finished maybe the longest US Tour we’ve done in many years. Now we’re in Europe, and then we will go to Mexico, and after that, for the first time, we’ll go to Japan. It’s been fantastic. We’ve been working really hard, and there have been a lot of shows, but I’ve already put two or three of them shows in my top-25-ever Sonic Youth’s shows. So it’s been a really great summer, and I think we’re playing really well. It’s not so evident here, but we have a beautiful light show and when we’re indoors in a controlled situation it can be fantastic. Festivals are another thing: you can go crazy and jump around… So, it’s been a really great summer! Everybody is very happy.
OKF: Listening to Sonic Youth’s complete discography and collaborations/side-projects would take a very long time. How do you look at this?
LR: I don't know. We were lucky enough in the ’80s to become established as a band and to have more and more opportunities open up to us. We’re a group of people that likes to be working, so we work all the time. We’re doing music, books, paintings, whatever. We all like to stay really busy and working a lot leads to opportunities that we basically use to our advantage. We try lots of different things. Obviously, we’re not trying to have pop hits, but want to do interesting work in different forms. And so long as we have opportunities, we will continue.
OKF: Are you at all nostalgic for the early ’80s or any other period?
LR: Well, I have a kind of nostalgic that looks forward. And the ’80s are already a long time ago, and we’re still active and creative and happy with what we’re doing. That’s always the way the band has been. So, we’re happy to be where we are now and that it’s still that way. We’re very lucky to have been a band for 24 years and not forced to play music from 10 or 20 years ago. We mostly play the music we made this year, which is great!
OKF: Do you have any favorite LP-period?
LR: This is one of my favorite periods! The most recent album is always our favorite because it’s the newest work and the work we’re the least familiar with and the least bored with — it’s the work we’re most excited about. So my favorite period is the next one! [laughs]
OKF: What do you think of recent artists like Fennesz or Rafael Toral, who use digital equipment to process their guitars? Don't you want to try that?
LR: Well, I do a little bit of it. They are both good friends of ours. And I perform quite frequently with Rafael, and Fennesz performed with us a few times. I think what they both do is fantastic. We do some of that, but mostly when we play live, and we’re really about the electric guitar. But playing live is a much more direct connection. It’s not about processing the sound. It’s immediate and emotional and connected to the kind of rock music we first fell in love with and which we still think is very strong. I mean, if you see The Stooges today, they’re still really strong and they’re not processing their sound. It’s what rock ‘n’ roll was and is all about… We do a lot of different things in the studio, but when we play live we mostly play straight forward.
OKF: Are you and Thurston [Moore] active collectors of vintage guitars and amps?
LR: Yeah, to some degree. We’re not crazy obsessed, but we are kind of junkies because we need a lot of different guitars to do what we do. We know which ones we like, and most of them are old, so we try and find them when we can. We don't buy the one that collectors buy, which are beautiful because we beat up a guitar. We try to find cheap old ones that have their finish worn off because we like what they sound like not what they look like.
OKF: Jim O’Rourke produced the last Sonic Youth LP…
LR: The albums are produced by Sonic Youth, but Jim did have a large hand on the last two albums, that's for sure. But still we produce them all.
OK: People say Jim brought out richer details in your sound. But in the end the mood remains the same.
LR: I love the way these last two records sound. We’ve had our own studio for the past six or eight years. And a lot of thing happened: getting the studio, a new sound technician, Jim coming in, but mostly mixing the record — and doing a really great job. Plus we made a lot of improvements during that time in the studio, so the recording improved on the last two albums.
OK: You featured some of Richard Prince’s “Nurse” painting. Have you know him for a long time?
LR: Yeah Thurston, Kim, and I pretty much met him when we all moved to New York City in the late ’70s, early ’80s. He was in the same situation: moving to New York to be artist and a musician. He played in an early version of Glenn Branca’s group, before either Thurston or I played with Glenn. So, we’ve known him for a long time and continue to follow his career. Back then we thought he was doing great work, but he wasn’t so well known. Now his famous and his work is exceptionally expensive. But we still really like what he does.
OKF: Richard Prince is highly prolific, but why did you choose the “Nurse” series?
LR: We were in the studio mixing the record and we realized we had to find a cover, it just came about you know…We’d seen some of the “Nurse” paintings in a show and thought they were cool. We contacted Richard and the funny thing is: he told he’d made most of those paintings while listening to our album, Murray Street. What a crazy closure of the circle, we thought. Really cool.
OKF: The art direction of your covers consistently features so many great artists’ works: Mike Kelley, Raymond Petitbon, Gerhard Richter, William Burroughs, Dan Graham, Richard Kern… Is visual or contemporary art an inspiration for your music?
LR: It’s an inspiration… Kim and I show work in gallery, Thurston too, to a lesser degree. We’re very involved in the visual art world. Kim and I both trained in visual art at a university, which was why we moved to New York: to play music and make visual art. Over the past eight years, as our schedule became a little less crazy, we started making more visual art again, and showing in galleries and museums and alternative space. It’s very important that we stay in touch with that world and try to be part of it.
OKF: Literature, especially the Beat generation seems to be a massive influence. We can see this in your lyrics.
LR: The Beats and the entire underground poetry movement from the ’40s to the ’80s were very important to us, especially to me and Thurston. We were lucky enough to become friends with some of them at the end of their lives: Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gregor Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti. That was a thrill. They’re not the only inspiration, obviously. Our literary interests are wide-ranging. Thurston and I have been publishing small books. A small book of mine came out this week in the US. We’re all big readers, from across the board. So literature definitely informs our lyrics as well as our thinking.
OKF: Hal Hartley used one of your song in his fim Simple Men.
LR: Yeah. He used one song in the dancing scene he re-created from Godard’s Bande à Part (Band of Outsiders). We’ve done some soundtrack work, such as Olivier Assayas’s Demon Lover, and a few others. Now we’re working on the theme for a remake of the film Godzilla, by Toho studios in Japan. They invited us to do some of the soundtrack. We’re all deeply engaged in cinema, so it’s something we do whenever we can. In October, at a film festival in Switzerland, I’ll show a group of short films I made in Alaska. I also have two other groups, and we do concerts with films.
OKF: Recently?
LR: My group Text of Light played at the Pompidou in 2001 and again in 2002. In 2001 I did my another concert thing with my wife.
OKF: You have to do this again!
LR: Yeah, I would like to.
OKF: The Cartier Foundation welcomes such projects, including poetry readings…
LR: I love that space.
OKF: I’d like to talk about your lyrics. I have some citations, maybe you can comment on them. This is “Eric’s Trip,” the Daydream Nation album, 1988:
There’s something moving over there on the right like nothing I’ve ever seen.
LR: [Laughs.] No one has ever asked about that before! Hm… Most of the Lyrics from that song were taken from Andy Warhol’s film, Chelsea Girls. He took them from Eric Emmerson, who was one Warhol’s sort of house hippies. He was a really freaky character in Warhol’s orbit. Took a lot of acid and so on. The first verse was taken from that movie. I just wrote it down. It became a sort of psychedelic tale and partly from Carlos Castaneda’s books about Don Juan, who talks about a spiritual being you can see out of your peripheral vision, out of the corner of your eyes.
OKF: What about this one, “Pipeline/Kill Time,” from the album Sister, 1987: I’m not moving doesn’t mean I can’t.
LR: [Laughs.] There are a couple of songs that reference this idea of… Oh I don't know… It goes back to philosophical things that I was studying: Kierkegaard, Hegel, things like that and the notion of a man, a being, and existential kinds of actions, and what’s possible, say, if you’re not moving, standing still, and observing. That’s kind of Zen. I was reading a lot of Sartre and philosophy. It came out of that. I don't even remember the exact reference, but I did write a couple prose pieces about that same thing. One of them included: “God is a man standing still.” Not moving at all, and not trying to get anywhere, just being in the here and now. Be here. Be now.
OKF: You said “prose.” What’s interesting in your lyrics is that they’re like stories rather than poetry.
LR: That comes from reading Kerouac and Ginsberg with music playing in the background. I made whole records of stuff like a few years ago.
OKF: Time is another a leitmotiv in your lyrics, along with cars, driving…
LR: Yeah. Another one was “getting high.” That was in lot of the lyrics. [Laughs.] I don’t mean smoking dope, but more of a spiritual high. Or maybe a little of both…
OKF: This is from “Joni,” again on Daydream Nation. These times can’t add up, Yr life is such a mess/Forget the past, and just say yes.
LR: Yeah! That was the Reagan years, when the government initiated a massive anti-drug campaign. The slogan was, “Just say No,” meaning say no to drugs. It was so negative. I preferred “Just say Yes to life. Just say Yes! [Laughs].
OKF: Can you say something about the last song on Sonic Nurse, “Paper Cup Exit”?
LR: Well, we write about things that are happening: things that we see in movies, or read in the paper, or whatever. Right now there’s so much political stuff going on. It’s a really important time, politically, and quite frankly, we’re all doing we can to see that Georges Bush is defeated. When we play in New York state, we put a voter registration table at all concerts. It’s something we can do.
OKF: He's coming to New York soon for the President campaign.
LR: It starts Monday… But to respond to those the lyrics, I was in an airplane flying back to New York and reading really about all the insane, fucked-up stuff Georges Bush and his administration had been doing in Iraq, in America, and in the world. Basically in just four years they’ve rolled back all the good things that happen in the last 30! So, it was a sort of abstract lyric about that. Land of free speech where speech is not really free at the moment.
OKF: How is New York City these days?
LR: Well, it's a strange place since 9/11. It’s a big powerful city, so it keeps going, but it's definitely strange, especially and now with the Republican convention and all this new talk of terrorism. You can’t tell if it’s the Republican’s using terror as a fear tactic to keep people scared, and simply to stay in power, or if it’s a real threat. It’s probably some of each. New York is great, but occasionally quite scary. I live very close to the World Trade Center site and the Sonic youth studio is also very close, and my whole family lives in New York. So, right now it’s a strange place, but it’s still a culturally important and powerful place.
OKF: New York is very popular in Japan. Do you feel a lin to bands like Animal Collective or Black Dice?
LR: Yeah, we certainly do. We played with Black Dice several times, as well as Animal Collective and other bands, such as Lightning Bolt. The music those people are making is really cool. They are really unknown, but those are the sort of underground bands we feel linked to. In an interview I did yesterday I was asked what bands we listening to and I talked about the various group we took on tour this summer. They are all pretty much unfamiliar groups, even to us even. Yet we exist in this crazy world where we have a big major contract but mostly we hang out with unknown bands. That’s who we go to see and where we get our inspiration from.
OKF: Did you already play shows with Afrirampo?
LR: We’re going to do three shows with them soon, but we didn't played with them yet.
OKF: How do you know them?
LR: they sent us some cds and an email, and Thursthon saw them play. They describe their music as “sexy cute noise” or something like that.
OKF: Afurilanpo are not famous at all in Japan
LR: They’re not famous anywhere! We like to expose bands like that.
OKF: I hear that Morocco is a fascination for you. You made an interview with WSB about Tanger during the international zone period.
LR: Yeah It was his last interview before he died. I’ve been fascinated by Morocco for a long time, reading Burroughs but especially Paul Bowles. I became friends with some musicians from Joujouka, a little village in mountains, musicians who call themselves that and work with Bachir Attar. He lived in New York for half a year because he was married to an American who was friend with my wife. We went to Morocco, and now I’ve been three or four times and made a small book about traveling in Morocco and going to Joujouka — no electricity or running water — spending the night there and playing music with them. I have a full-length manuscript on Morocco that, hopefully, will be published next year. I’m talking to different publishers now. It’s something of interest to me. Morocco’s a very romantic place on one hand and a very dark place on the other. There’s a lot of interesting music being played there, especially by the Joujouka guys. The Rolling Stones went there, when Brian Jones was alive. There is a strange correlation between that music and rock ‘n’ roll.
OKF: Did you record anything?
LR: A few different things, but nothing has been released. Sonic Youth even did a concert with them in Grenada, Spain. First they played, then we played together. It might seem strange to play with such a group because they are so different from what we do, and yet it was so normal and easy I could imagine even when the Rolling Stones went there why they reacted. There’s some kind of relationship with rock ‘n’ roll. The notion of a trance-like state, getting into it, the ecstasy one feels. All these rock ‘n’ rollers — the Stones, Jim Morrison, Patti Smith; rock is the same: a repetitive cycle of music. I also hear a connection with, say, Ornette Coleman and a type of jazz music that is circular and repetitive.
OKF: The only album Sonic Youth recorded outside of New York is Washing Machine, which you made in Memphis, Tennessee. Did you ever think about recording somewhere else? What would it be like to record in a studio in Tangiers, Morocco? Would it change something?
LR: It might be really cool. I don't know if it would change the music, but we would get into the spirit of the place. I know we got a lot of the spirit of Memphis when we were there. Mostly we stick to New York because we all have such crazy schedules, and are based here. A record takes two to three months, so to go somewhere else is too expensive. I would love to do something like that. A few years ago recorded something here in Paris with Brigitte Fontaine. It was really interesting to be in another studio. But at this point we mostly record in our own studio, which is set it up exactly how we need to record. It’s very comfortable. And we don’t have to pay $100 dollar per hour, which is good for us.?OKF: You’ve all travelled a lot. What places do you like?
LR: We like Paris a lot. I don’t know why, but in relation to the city I feel the same in Paris as in NY. Yet they’re such different cities. And yet Paris has more of the New York spirit than Tokyo, London, LA, or anywhere else. It’s the same kind of urban city: you take the metro, you don’t need a car. It’s very different but I feel very much like NY here. But we love to go to LA, to Berlin, to Melbourne, Australia. We have a lot of favorite places. Small towns, big towns, big cities. We’re lucky to have a life in which we have friends in different places. Now we’re going to South America. We went to go Russia…
OKF: What do you think about Tokyo?
LR: We love Japan. Just walking around is so much fun. The food… My wife lived there for a while. She does a lot of commercial work with Japanese designers. We love to spend time there.
OKF: What about this festival in Paris, Rock en Seine?
LR: This place? Yeah it’s ok. We have been doing such amazing shows and have learned how to play at a festival. But it’s not the best way to experience what we do. Festivals are not intimate. Sound-wise they are great but we like to control our environment. Last night we played in Geneva in an ancient theater. It was very rococo. Franz list played on that stage. It was the stage’s first rock show, ever, and it sounded great. It was such an amazing theater, but that’s the kind of place where Sonic Youth is best heard and best understood.
OKF: Because in bad sound conditions, you can’t hear the subtlety?
LEE: Exactly. In festivals you have to play twice hard and there’s no subtlety at all, which is a big part of our music. We sacrifice that to play a festival.
OKF: What did you played in this Tour?
LR: We change the set list every night. We do a lot of the new songs in different ways and every night we choose different songs from our other records. Until this year, the longest show we ever did was like one hour fifty minutes. On this Tour we’re pretty much playing two hours every night, which is crazy long for us but we’re having so much fun on stage, doing a lot of abstract stuff and a lot of songs. So, it’s been really cool.
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Reproduction of photos and words with permission from ADAGP.