Drinking with my friend in Cassidey’s on Westmorland Street, he brought up starting a band. He would sing, and I would play the saxophone. It sounded like fun, but I had one issue: we were both terrible at music. He brushed that aside and showed me a clip of Lydia Lunch’s project, Teenage Jesus and The Jerks. Instantly, I was on board. I never knew being bad at music could be so fun and look so stylish.
Lydia Lunch was part of New York’s avant-garde rock scene in the 1980s, a scene that was home to artists such as Sonic Youth, Swans, and Madonna. The city was in the wake of the New Wave scene and, responding to the massive pop appeal of Blondie and Talking Heads, the No Wave scene made abrasive, confrontational noise music.
The first song we made was mimicking The Closet by Teenage Jesus and the Jerks. I made a grating saxophone noise to pair with Morgan’s shouting, now with Leigh on Guitar, Sam on Bass, and Izzy on drums. At this time, I had forgotten all my saxophone skills; it had been years since I was playing Dave Brubeck’s Take Five. So, to compensate for my lack of skills, I made my saxophone a horrible noise machine. I bought pitch-shifting and reverberating pedals to run my microphone through, then worked on hitting the gravelly low notes and screeching highs. My own bad music forced me to innovate and achieve a personal sound.
Now our music is a bit better (only a bit), but we can tour with our caustic sounds and have amassed some like-minded fans. Our latest review Goo review used choice words, saying we are “phenomenal musicians, with a bag full of weirdness” and “a crowd divider”, but it is among the offbeat that we always aimed to land.
Sonic Youth would be the most inspirational act to rise from No Wave, inspiring Neil Young and Nirvana’s music a decade later. While the movement’s message became refined, and the acts inspired by them created music with mass appeal, it was born from a caustic and unmarketable exploration into pure noise.
