Great Magazine Reads: MOJO offers a teaser to the new Thurston Moore book

Legendary Sonic Youth singer/guitarist Thurston Moore just released his first book, Sonic Life, which is a mix of autobiography and music history. MOJO’s December issue has a great interview about it, a nice appetizer for when I get to the book. He will have an uphill battle to make it as awesome as that of his ex-bandmate and ex-wife Kim Gordon. I place Girl in a Band in my pantheon of true classic rock books. 

Here are some of the most interesting tidbits from the interview:

• Moore essentially knew he wanted to be a rock star when he saw Kiss live in 1974.
• The book delves into a lot of discovery in his teen years of the downtown New York punk scene that he explored from his Connecticut home base with his gay friend Harold Paris, who died in 1990.
• A lot of Moore’s Sonic Youth writing was inspired by elements of American iconography. He was reading books about Charles Manson and his “attack battalion of dune buggies” and, at the same time, hearing Ronald Reagan talking about bringing back the good old days. Moore thought, “bring back those old good days?”
• Even though the band’s final album was called The Eternal, nobody in the band knew it would be their final record.
• There is a chapter devoted to his relationship with Nirvana. 
• In 2003, Paul McCartney approached Moore after a Sonic Youth gig to ask him about his unique approach to guitar tuning. In turn, Thurston asked Sir Paul about his brother Mike’s 1974 album McGear. Paul said, “Nobody ever asks me about Mike” and Moore responded that he knew way more about that than he did about The Beatles! (If you haven’t heard that album - and you haven’t - you should. Plus, it was produced and co-written by Paul.)
• Neil Young’s crew called Sonic Youth “smarty-pants noise rock” when they opened for him in 1991. Perhaps feeling bad because of his team’s mistreatment of Sonic Youth, Neil invites them again to play an acoustic set later in the year and it ended in Gordon smashing her guitar to crowd boos.
• Yoko One was seemingly the only audience member - Evan Dando, Liz Taylor, Lou Reed, and many other celebrities were also there - to not hate a 1998 synth-noise performance by Moore and Don Fleming as the band FOOT. They ended the performance at the New York Roxy after five minutes.