By 1990, Sonic Youth no longer belonged to the cool kids. Before Goo was released that June, they were a band you had to read about in music magazines, as none of the record shops in our area carried the SST catalog. Now signed to the newly established Geffen subsidiary DGC, they were no longer confined to the arty New York scene. Finding the beautiful sadness of Karen Carpenter’s story and inner peace in a whirlwind of guitar feedback, these nine tracks hit their uninitiated new fanbase with the force of a pipe bomb.
Sonic Youth’s sixth proper full-length remains arguably their most culturally (rather than critically) beloved album — whose iconic Raymond Pettibon cover may be surpassing Sgt. Pepper’s as the most parodied ever. As the Black Lives Matter movement fights for justice, it’s equally remarkable and revolting how relevant Goo’s subtext remains: outsiders, particularly women and people of color, uniting against “male, white corporate oppression.” It was an interview that concerned just that, between Kim Gordon and LL Cool J, in this publication back in 1989, that inspired Goo’s signature hit “Kool Thing,” which featured Public Enemy’s Chuck D.
For the first time since the band hung it up in 2011, SPIN spoke to all four members of Sonic Youth, as well as Pettibon himself, about how one of the koolest albums ever made was conceived, unforgettably packaged, and taken out on the road with Neil Young, who became consequently noisier himself as a result.
THE MAJOR LABEL
Steve Shelley: We met with a lot of labels after Daydream Nation; we were having a problem with the labels that we’d been on keeping up with us. It was hard to get paid for the records that you sold. Geffen was still small compared to the other majors. It was still technically an independent label run by David Geffen. That soon changed after we signed with them, the mergers with MCA and other labels, which was a little bit of a letdown. We met more people than just our A&R guy, Gary Gersh. But a big factor to us signing was this guy Mark Kates, who was in charge of college radio at the time. Mark was more familiar with Sonic Youth and our world than maybe even Gary was, and we related to Mark and we are still friends with him today. We all liked the buzz that they had with this rock band Guns N’ Roses at the time, and they seemed to be doing well.
Lee Ranaldo: It was the first record for the major label and we wanted it to be really good. We were getting five or 10 times the amount of money to make a record than we’ve ever spent before. How good can we make a record sound compared to Aerosmith, who spends that much money on every record? We did tons and tons of overdubs. And I remember thinking at one point ,if we had just taken the basic tracks we did as a group and added the vocals that we would have this record that would be even more powerful than what we ended up with. Maybe that’s a dream for someday to try a remix like that.
Shelley: To a degree, it felt like they were putting us in the college rock ghetto. But it turned out to be a good thing, because before you knew it there was Teenage Fanclub and Nirvana and Beck. So we had a little family on DGC.
Thurston Moore: I think we validated the DGC Geffen label for a lot of bands, certainly for Beck and Nirvana. If we weren’t on it, it would have been a different scene. The only reason we worked with Geffen was because of the fact that Mark Kates was working there and he came out of college radio. It was all about following the people who supported you. Nobody else would play our records, but they did. And a lot of them got work at major labels doing their radio divisions. Mark was a classic example of somebody coming out of college radio, who always heralded bands like us, all of a sudden he’s working at a major label and he wants bands that he likes to be represented on the label. And that’s the only reason we would sign to a label like that. If the A&R guy from Guns & Roses came to see us, we probably wouldn’t have been signed.
THE STUDIO
Moore: God only knows what Goo would have sounded like if we did it in Wharton Tiers’ basement. That’s where we did Confusion Is Sex and Kill Yr Idols; maybe Goo would have come out the same way. All I know is that we did some demos for Goo that were more like eight-track demos, and there’s aspects of those that I find more interesting than what happens coming out of a 24-track board. I really liked the energy on those demos, because it sounded like the 24-track kind of spread things out a bit and it’s slightly more dissipating. It’s a learning process, the technology of it all. We were never a studio band in the sense of Pink Floyd or Steely Dan, where they were really utilizing every inch of it. We came to do that when we had our own studio, Echo Canyon, later on in the ’90s.
Kim Gordon: We were excited. That was our first getting-out-of-the-basement-type recording situation. I mean, we did record at Sear Sound. But Sear Sound at the time was pretty lo-fi. But in a great way.
Ranaldo: It was our first major-label record; we were second-guessing ourselves, like, is this mix good enough? This is pretty easy to do in the studio. And I’ve seen this happen to other bands from our scene that graduated to a major and got freaked out a little bit about making their first record. We weren’t sure the mixes with Nick Sausano were what we wanted, so we stopped working with him after a couple of sessions. We were desperate to try and finish this record, so the label brought in Ron St. Germain and we kind of referred to him as a console cowboy. He was a pilot at one point, I think, so he was really into all the tech stuff. And he did a really good job mixing it, though it was probably not mixed exactly the way we would have on our own.
Moore: I remember the engineer telling us that we would be using the B-room, because Public Enemy were going to be doing their new sessions in the other room. When we found that out, we were like, ‘Where do we sign?’ This was the perfect situation because I was so huge into It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. When we started recording there, I had everybody involved with that record in the studio at the time, so I have the CD that has like 40 signatures on it with the entire crew of PE somewhere. Ice Cube had come by for one day and was hanging out right when N.W.A was hitting and he had to be in New York. I remember Chuck D calling him ‘Cubism’ and things like that.
Shelley: We were recording at Greene Street Studios at the same time as Public Enemy, and Kim invited Chuck to say something on the middle eight of “Kool Thing.” But we would also spend time with Eric ‘Vietnam’ Sadler from the Bomb Squad, and he was really interested in what we were doing. Sometimes Flavor Flav would come by and sit with us for a bit and talk. But Eric seemed to be the most curious about what this band was doing with all these noisy guitars and everything.
Moore: Vietnam would always pop in and see what we were up to. He was the one who asked Chuck about being on “Kool Thing,” and within minutes, Chuck just rambled in. We asked him if he wanted to hear the song first, but he was like, ‘Nah, that’s alright, I’ll just put on the headphones and just run it.’ It was super, man, he did it in just one take. He listened, heard Kim’s recitation in the middle and he just flowed with it freestyle and then boom, that was it.
Gordon: Hip-hop was a really big part of downtown music in a way. It was a place where so many things would collide, whether it was like the tradition of jazz in New York City, and then hip-hop coming from uptown to downtown and then all the new classical music from like Lamont Young and Rhys Chatham. It was all kind of melding together. It felt like walking down a street in New York, just this constant bombardment of sounds.
THE SONGS
Shelley: A lot of the story behind “Tunic” is inspired by the movie Superstar by Todd Haynes that he made with Barbie dolls. That was a big movie for us. You couldn’t see it legally. Todd would screen it around or you could buy a videotape at See Hear in Manhattan.
Ranaldo: I think Karen [Carpenter] really wanted to bust out sometimes but was framed in this cutesy pop sensibility. As you know, she was anorexic and had all these other issues going on. She was definitely a tortured person, and there was something so beautiful about her singing and the way she played the drums and sang. It was very unusual.
Gordon: It was Thurston who turned me onto how beautiful Karen’s voice was actually in their songs. Then we rented a video of their videos, the Carpenters videos, which are all really weird and creepy. I just became so fascinated with how her voice was so soulful and actually beautiful, away from the context of them being seen as part of the establishment and conservative during a time when music was representing the sound of rebellion. Then I started thinking about how basically women started feeling like we only have control over our bodies, but we don’t even have that anymore. The fact was that, tragically, she wanted to make herself disappear.
Ranaldo: For “Mote,” the lyrics were inspired by this poem by Sylvia Plath called “The Eye Mote.” I can’t quote it offhand but I was really affected by it. I just got started and began free-associating off the imagery I picked up out of the poem, and I dunno, just kind of made it my own in a way. It’s been really heartening to see how popular the song has been over the years, a favorite of a lot of fans. It’s always a super fun one to play, especially with that crazy long ending.
Gordon: “My Friend Goo” emerged from Raymond Pettibon’s Sir Drone. It started out as this punk rock story, and then it was all about haircuts. And then Goo was this girlfriend of one of the two characters who hung out. And so by default she became the drummer. I thought it would be funny to just hold her up in a way.
Moore: For “Titanium Exposé,” I wanted to write a straight-ahead urban love song. and when I say urban I mean I always love ideas about two people living within their means. Artists in a place of poverty, but you’re completely enriched by the creative connection you have. And then Kim sings the refrain from LL Cool J’s “Jingling Baby,” where he’s talking about the big gold earrings on hip-hop girls’ ears that would jingle. We were really into LL Cool J at the time, so that’s where I remember that song coming from as well as “Kool Thing,” which is based on Kim’s infamous interview with LL in SPIN.
Gordon: I don’t know how much LL was aware of us, but it was really cool of him to do it. I really loved Radio and I was curious about how much of Rick Rubin’s aesthetic wrapped up on him and what kind of rock music he liked. I was really disappointed to learn that he was into Bon Jovi [Laughs.] The video for “Kool Thing” was actually super based on “Going Back to Cali.” I love that video, it’s so great. I started interviewing people in front of CBGB, just a scene of white kids, and I’d ask them ‘What do you think of LL’s record?’ and I treated it like this sociological experiment or something.
Moore: I had the idea for the ‘Disappearer’ 12-inch cover from seeing that image in some magazine. I thought, here’s somebody who had completely gone through this really challenging period of being a young woman in an industry that was so demeaning, but somebody who was rising above it and changing to become her own dignified self. All of a sudden there’s this photo where she was not on the set of an X-rated movie but actually looked like a woman who was going to survive this thing. I liked how it fit with the idea of “Disappearer.” A lot of that song has to do with these signs and your ability to control them; don’t let people tell you who you are no matter what. That to me was interesting in the respect of seeing this photo and putting a halo over Traci Lords’ head to make her look saintly. The art director sent it to whatever management she had, and she said to us, “This is so cool. Thank you.” She was really sort of touched by this picture that had her with a halo over her head.
THE COVER ART
Ranaldo: We had enthusiasms and we wanted to share them, and one way to do that was put up different artists on our covers from Daydream Nation with Gerhard Richter to Raymond and then Mike Kelley for Dirty and then Richard Prince and whoever else we used for covers. We were all really involved in what was going on in the art world and of course the culture world, talking about books, talking about films. And we wanted all that to be evident somehow in our work.
Raymond Pettibon, Goo cover artist: I had this True Detective magazine, and I saw that picture on the back cover. At the time I didn’t know it was a depiction of the Moors Murders in England. That didn’t register with me because I wasn’t a true-crime aficionado like I am now. It was pretty much a reasonable facsimile of that magazine’s back cover and the photo of David Smith and Maura Hindley. I think the dialogue was the same as well. Usually, I change quite a bit. I have sources from life but mainly reading and art.
Shelley: I didn’t know about the context of his drawing. I knew about the Moors Murders because we had spent a lot of time in England and we drove through that part of the country. And we did hear those stories in our travels. But when we first saw the original photo, I was blown away.
Moore: I had seen the original news photo that Raymond drew from, and I just thought there was something very evocative about this image where you could weave different narratives into it.
Gordon: It’s so funny, our record company and our A&R guy were totally against it from the beginning, almost strictly from the point of view of it being black and white. Then they wanted to put the parental advisory sticker on it, because Tipper Gore is coming out against swear words and language.
Ranaldo: That wasn’t the original image of Raymond’s that we chose for the cover of the record. It was this black and white drawing of Joan Crawford with her big face and these huge red lips. And under it said ‘Blowjob?’ with a question mark. We wanted that to be our cover and were gonna call the record Blowjob? because it was, like, our first sellout record on a major label. The people at Geffen, even though we had contractual control over what we put out, begged us to do another cover, like ‘Please don’t do this to us!’ So we were like, alright. And then we chose something that became even more iconic.
Moore: Those Pettibon images [inner sleeve photos] I basically Xeroxed out of one of his books. I had all of his art and fanzines, hundreds of them. They go for hundreds of dollars now, but they were 50 cents each when I got them. So I found two images I thought would be really cool and just laid it out like that. The guy who was doing the design for us at Geffen looked at the layouts for the cover where I did all the scotch taping and he would see one of my hairs and a dirty thumbprint or something. I was like, “Don’t get rid of that. Leave it as it is.”
Ranaldo: There’s like a million mashups and takeoffs of that cover, like Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie or Jerry Seinfeld and George Costanza. We are actually going to try and collect them in a book.
Shelley: Before the pandemic happened we had a number of things we were thinking about for the anniversary of Goo. And then all sorts of things went to the side as our priorities changed. But one of them was a book filled with what we call Goo mashups. We will see if we get it out this year.
Pettibon: That cover took on a life of its own with other people and appropriations. When something is done, I just leave it alone. But there is no escaping Goo. All the parodies of it are amazing. Every time I see them it really tickles me.
THE NEIL YOUNG TOUR
Shelley: I’m the biggest Neil Young fan in the world. [The tour] was a lot of fun, but it was also a weird time for the country, during the first Gulf War. There was also a lot of downtime, because Neil was a little bit older than us, and older guys tend not to want to play four or five nights a week. So we found ourselves with lots of days off in this ugly, late winter period. Neil’s crew were having growing pains of having opening acts because Neil used to never have opening acts. We had to fight to have the sound at the proper volume, so people could actually hear us. So opening for him was a tough gig and in an arena is even tougher. Then again, we got to see Neil Young every night, and he was amazing.
Ranaldo: We played with Neil for three months, and we felt like he was getting wilder and weirder on the solos, and the endings of songs that eventually became Arc. We really felt like he was being influenced by what we were doing. We were on right before him, and he always told us he would be doing his calisthenics under the stage listening to our last song of the set, which had this crazy free-form ending that was different every night.
Moore: We only had about 30 or 40 minutes tops on stage during that tour, and almost a third of our set was extended-drone feedback improvisation at the end of our last song, “Expressway to Yr Skull.” Neil started coming into our dressing room and telling us how these sections at the end of our set were blowing his mind. He would leave his dressing room and stand underneath the arena stage just so he can hear the vibrations.
Shelley: Thurston suggested that Neil make a record of all these extended endings and I guess light bulbs went off in Neil’s head. And now [Arc] is considered one of his weirdest records in a very strange career.
Moore: One night I said to him, ‘You know what would be really cool is if you took all these endings that you’re doing and make a record out of it.’ And his manager, who was standing there at the time, was looking at me like, ‘Please don’t say that.’ [Laughs.]
THE LEGACY
Moore: Entering into the ’90s, to me, it was super interesting to see young people who were in the audiences for bands like us and Butthole Surfers and Meat Puppets and Black Flag. I’d start to see these new creative voices coming up in the ’90s like Stephen Malkmus and Kurt Cobain. I was right there, thinking this is incredible. These are the new voices. Both those guys had a certain voice that really galvanized so many young people to just express themselves in a way that wasn’t just a throwaway. It was creative; it was resonant. It was smart. It was also completely open; anti-sexist, anti-racist. Kurt was all that, and Steve showed this proto-intellectual style of songwriting that I just thought was great. They were looking to Sonic Youth as a model for what they were doing as much as anything. And we really prided ourselves on never dumbing down what you do in order to appeal to the radio.
Shelley: Mostly, we were trying to please ourselves. But in certain instances, we were trying to shine a light on certain things we thought other people would enjoy.
Ranaldo: People were surprised at how melodic Sonic Youth can be. That record is full, full of melodies from top to bottom.
Gordon: We weren’t really making music for kids. But one thing I became aware of around Goo and even more so, later into the ’90s and ’00s, was seeing all these young kids in the front. You know, the Internet does work [insofar as] people can discover stuff on their own. It still surprises me to see so many young people in the crowd. All the girls.