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Sonic Youth - Expressway To Yr Skull (1985-2010)

We closed the book on our #SonicSummer trek last week. Or did we?! Here's a feedback-laden coda — a 2+ hour live megamix of one of Sonic Youth's signature songs, "Expressway To Yr Skull" (AKA "Madonna, Sean and Me" AKA "The Crucifixion of Sean Penn" AKA one of the best jams ever). A quarter-century of finding the meaning of feeling good! Obviously, this is the perfect thing to play over the holidays when you're visiting with loved ones.

But don't take my word for it. Here's Neil Young in 1992:

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.

Yeah! The only real complaint you could make is that Neil himself does not make a guest appearance on this mix. But imagine that! It would be cool, that's for sure.

The details:

"Expressway To Yr Skull" (Hollywood 1985) / "Expressway To Yr Skull" (Baton Rouge 1986) / "Expressway To Yr Skull" (Paris 1987) / "Expressway To Yr Skull" (Los Angeles 1991) / "Expressway To Yr Skull" (Hartford 1992) / "Expressway To Yr Skull" (Mountain View 1995) / "Expressway To Yr Skull" (Paris 1999) / "Expressway To Yr Skull" (Amsterdam 2004) / "Expressway To Yr Skull" (Chicago 2006) / "Expressway To Yr Skull" (Paris 2007) / "Expressway To Yr Skull" (Denver 2010)

See you next year, Doom & Gloomies!

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Sonic Youth - CBGB, New York City, June 23 & June 24, 1988

"This song is called 'Public Rehearsal Is a Good Idea,'" Thurston Moore announces during the first of these two remarkable tapes. And indeed, that's pretty much what we've got here, with Sonic Youth sounding like they just stumbled out of their practice space and onto the stage at CBGB.

Steve Shelley set the scene in my interview with the drummer a few years back: "Before we went to the studio and recorded Daydream Nation, we did a couple weekends where we would go to these different places and try to play the album. We played in Boston and we played CB’s and Maxwell’s, and probably a few other places. During those shows, people are still getting lyrics together and we’re still, you know, winking and jumping for arrangements. Like, 'Here’s the big change!'"

So yeah, things are fairly ragged and wild at points, sometimes going off the rails entirely. The quartet sometimes sounds a little frustrated/embarrassed, but they're also having a blast as they wrestle with the new stuff. There are also some good early titles for these songs — "Dinosaur (Wombats!)," "UBU/Mellencamp," "Huskerrific," etc.

No matter how loose things get, it's thrilling to hear this familiar Daydream Nation material being pieced together — and falling apart — in real time. The arrangements are more or less in place; the lyrics are more or less not in place (a fact most hilariously illustrated when Thurston takes the lead on "Cross The Breeze"). They'd figure it out, of course. But until then, enjoy this cool snapshot of Sonic Youth hitting their stride, when so many of their peers were hitting the wall.

Photo: Michael Macioce

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Sonic Youth - Shoreline Amphitheater, Mountain View, California, August 18, 1995

Weird times in the summer of 1995! Sonic Youth was facing the Alternative Nation as the headliner of Lollapalooza, sharing a bill that included Beck, Pavement, Cypress Hill, Elastica, Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Jesus Lizard and — most notoriously — Hole. Throughout the tour, Courtney Love grabbed the lion's share of the attention thanks to her chaotic antics, both onstage and off.

Lee Ranaldo sets the scene:

"There was this slightly strange pall hanging over the whole tour, like, this is the spawn of Nirvana. . . . For a lot of people in the indie community, there was a bit of ambivalence. People wondered, is this good for our community, that these bands we've come up with are now on this big, high profile tour? Is this the beginning of the end? Or the end of the end?"

Here in Mountain View, we're at the end — of Lollapalooza '95, at least. Following what was an especially crazed/truncated Hole performance, Thurston takes to the mic to dedicate their set to "one of the great hippie punk rock geniuses": the recently departed Jerry Garcia, who had just played Shoreline a few short months later. (Interestingly, former Dead keyboardist Tom Constanten hung out with Sonic Youth backstage this evening at Lolla!) Does SY then break into a Jerry-style "Expressway To Your Heart"?! No, but they do float into a massive "Expressway To Your Skull," joined by Pavement's Stephen Malkmus, howling along on vocals. Incredibly fun.

What follows is equally fun, with the band dipping into the back catalog for excellent renditions of "Mote," "Brother James" and "100%" in addition to a heaping portion of Washing Machine, which wouldn't be released into the wild for a few more weeks. The title track is a motorik marvel, with Steve Shelley surging and soaring, Kim Gordon delivering an impossibly cool/enigmatic vocal.

The peak, of course, is "The Diamond Sea," a nightly ritual that boils over into a seething cauldron of beauteous feedback, stormy clangs and ineffable noise. Is this the end of the end? For some other bands, it might have been ... but it's inspiring to see that even at this midpoint in their career, Sonic Youth was forging forward, making some of the best music of their lives. Time takes its crazy toll ...

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Sonic Youth - Grande Halle de la Villette, Paris, France, August 29, 2007

"The new face of jazz!?" Lee Ranaldo proclaims at the close of this set, which was part of the La Villette Jazz Festival in 2007. And ... yeah! Rather Ripped, from the previous year, was perhaps Sonic Youth's most pop-rock album ever. But they had not lost their avant-garde bona fides — not by a long shot.

The opening number on this tape is a 45-minute freeform improv, with the band joined by underground luminaries Jean-Marc Montera, Michel Doneda and Mats Gustafsson. Is it jazz? I don't know! But it's awesome.

After that trip into unknown zones, Sonic Youth play a more standard set, mixing Rather Ripped numbers with Daydream Nation chestnuts; they'd start playing that latter album in full in the coming months. But it's not the usual Daydreamers here, no "Teenage Riot" or "Silver Rocket." Instead, SY lay into "The Sprawl," "Cross The Breeze" and "The Wonder," rediscovering these abstract ragers with glee. There are a few technical hiccups, naturally — check out the "Cross The Breeze" false start with Thurston filling in a cappella-style.

The night ends with another freakout — Montera, Doneda and Gustafsson re-appear for a post-"Expressway" jam that gets even wilder than the previous one. This is the real Sprawl!

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Sonic Youth - Central Park SummerStage, New York City, June 26, 2003

Just over 20 years ago, Sonic Youth was back in NYC, back in Central Park. This time, they were opening for Wilco, who were then riding high on the Yankee Hotel Foxtrot wave. It would've been an odd pairing a few years earlier, but the two bands' paths were converging in the early 00s — thanks primarily to Jim O'Rourke. Thank you, Jim.

Murray St. was still dominating setlists in 2003, but the band was already cooking up some new stuff that would eventually appear on 2004's Sonic Nurse — this show kicks off with a long, languorous "Peace Attack," one of Sonic Youth's loveliest reveries. Less lovely is "Mariah Carey and the Arthur Doyle Hand Cream," a tune I've never quite cottoned to, in spite of its title.

Oh well! Plenty of other rad sounds to get into, including an extremely nice "Rain On Tin" and a "Karenology" that's even longer than usual, its feedback spilling out onto the Upper West Side. "Sympathy for the Strawberry" is magnificent, too — listen closely and you'll hear that strangest of sounds: a keyboard on a Sonic Youth song! I had always thought it was Jim on the organ, but no, it's Lee, adding some Terry-Riley-plays-"Sister Ray" vibes to the proceedings. Very very nice. Sonic Youth hadn't forgotten their scuzzy Lower East Side roots; the encore includes a ripping version of the old Confusion Is Sex fave "Making The Nature Scene."

And what about Wilco!? They too were looking towards the future, playing a bunch of tunes from the then-in-progress A Ghost Is Born. Most interesting is the new-to-me arrangement of "Spiders (Kidsmoke)" which is inching towards its final monomaniacal motorik moves but retaining a certain melodic power-pop bounce. I like it! Check out the whole show here.

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Sonic Youth - Freilichtbühne Loreley, St. Goarshausen, Germany, June 20, 1998

We heard embryonic versions of the Thousand Leaves material in last week's #SonicSummer installment. Now, we can check out that same stuff in full bloom just about a year later, when Sonic Youth was taking the just-released LP around Europe. Here, they're playing in the German countryside — in the (recommended) video of the event, I like how the editor cuts from nasty noize freakouts to bucolic visions of boats bobbing on the Rhine. Wunderbar!

For the very best live tape from this era, I'll direct you to the Los Angeles gig from a few weeks prior, which the band has kindly made available via Bandcamp. It's amazing (and I was there!). But this festival performance (an alterna-grab bag bill featuring the Beastie Boys and Pulp) has a nice edge to it; some of the Kim songs hearken back to the Dirty days in their feral energy, while other moments point towards the free-flow of Murray St. and Sonic Nurse. I especially dig the surging rave up that rises out of "Wildflower Soul," with Sonic Youth still finding new textures within their now tried-and-true sound.

In the video, it's also cool to see who's doing what at this stage in the band's three-guitar attack; it's often not who you think it is, with Kim regularly taking the lead. Mainly, it's a very sweet tapestry, the players giving and taking, trading lines and riffs back and forth, jagged at times, gorgeous at others. (Im)perfect harmony!

The set is made up of Thousand Leaves and SYR numbers, with one big exception: the closing "Death Valley 69" blowout, which is as magnificently malevolent as ever, despite having been out of rotation for the past several years. It rolls into an extended feedback orgy, something slightly at odds with the pastoral outdoor setting, but radical all the same. Adventures in modern music, baby!

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Sonic Youth - Double Door, Chicago, Illinois, August 5, 2006

Enter Ibold! We're on the downward slope of the #SonicSummer mountain and in 2006, Sonic Youth drafted Pavement bassist Mark Ibold to help hold down the bottom end. He might not be the mad scientist of sound that Jim O'Rourke was ... but who doesn't love Mark Ibold?! No one, that's who.

This particular summer, Sonic Youth was on the road promoting Rather Ripped, their final album for DGC. I'm kind of convinced that Rather Ripped could have pushed SY into the mainstream — if they had released it in 1994. Chiming guitars, plenty of hooks, catchy choruses, crisp tempos, a pseudo power ballad ... it has Buzz Bin written all over it! (You remember the Buzz Bin, don't you?)

Anyway, it's a solid album — perhaps not as exciting as the handful of records that came before it, but pretty exciting nonetheless. Here in Chicago, playing a post-Lollapalooza gig at the Double Door, the Rather Ripped material, er, rips, whether it's the mystical musings of "Turquoise Boy" or the sweet jangle of "Jams Run Free." I love the extended ambient segue from the latter tune into a magisterial "Pink Steam" (though I'm not sure I love the lyrics of that one). Does Thurston forget most of the words to "Tom Violence"? Yeah, he does!

Things wrap up in fine form with two dips into the past: an appropriately ferocious "Shaking Hell" and a massive "Expressway To Yr Skull" that threatens to bring the entire venue to the ground.

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Sonic Youth - Liquid Room, Tokyo, Japan, January 24, 1996

Lollapalooza 1995 was just the beginning of Sonic Youth's time spent sailing the Diamond Sea. The band subsequently took Washing Machine all over the world — including several shows in Japan in early '96.

A very sweet audience tape from the Tokyo stop shows what a well-oiled machine SY had become at this point. Sleek and steady ... not words you would have used all that much in the past. But the professionalism just adds to the power. This is a band that has mastered the art of dynamics and texture, sculpting their feedback-laden songs into perfect forms, whether it's tightly coiled momentum of "Bull In The Heather" or the beautiful whiplashes of Washing Machine's title track.

Once again, you've gotta hand it to Steve Shelley, whose drumming feels almost orchestral here (in a minimalistic way, perhaps), blending abandon with focus, leading everyone skywards. The dude knows how to take a song to the next level.

And speaking of next levels, "The Diamond Sea" in Tokyo is reaching a state of transcendent bliss, sinking into the depths, luminous leviathan vibes. Love is definitely running wild ...

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