Serving Time with Sonic Youth : Part 001

Serving Time with Sonic Youth
by Richard Edson

There were fresh faces everywhere, alive, young and full of ideas and dreams. We wanted to fuck it up, do something new, do something old in a brand new way, and at decibels that scorched your eardrums. We were coming out of punk, new wave, but smarter...

Every night we were doing our musical thing with so much energy, so much liveliness, and so much intelligence. There was music everywhere, in the clubs, the spaces; it was all over the city. It wouldn't stop, it couldn't stop. It was an explosion of music and culture. If you were up for it you let yourself feel the heat and the blast and let the pieces fall where they may.

There was a performance space -- A's --because Arlene Schloss ran it. It was a big loft on Broom Street (where Arlene actually lived). She'd have shows there and all-night parties with bands and one-offs and comedians and word-poets and performance artists and whoever else was around who wanted to be part of the mix and part of the show. It was free and open and the quality of the acts varied, to say the least. There was a courtyard out back to hang out, smoke cigarettes and herb, and mix and match.

It was at A's that I saw a band called The Coachmen. What distinguished them to me was that they had the tallest front line of any band I ever saw. Thurston Moore was one of their two guitar players, and he's tall but he was the shortest dude in the band. Phoebe Legere also played at A's with her band. She was this gorgeous, waspy, upper- class blonde who'd dress up in outlandish outfits and flash her snatch at the audience. I guess it was avant-garde, but it was always good for a laugh and a look-see.


I lived upstairs from A's in one of the other lofts with a crazy French cat named Charlie Dubriel. Arlene heard me messing around on a bass with a drum machine, and she convinced me to put together a band called THE BUMBLEBEES. Even though I considered myself a drummer, I was freshly arrived in NYC and I was without a drum set. I had appropriated my brother's thrift store bass guitar from Boston, and had bought a Roland Dr. Rhythm drum machine. I was working out songs and grooves based upon beats and bass lines and, hearing them, Arlene insisted that we could use those for a band that she was going to call THE BUMBLEBEES. Arlene had marginal musical talent and I was looking for real musicians to play with, but she had a crazy way with words and was friendly and persistent. I finally gave in as I wasn’t doing anything else musically at the time, but I insisted I'd be in charge of the tempos, the keys, the changes, everything. She surprised me by agreeing.


She knew a few people who were game to be in our band. There was Florian the Austrian who kind of played guitar and he at least could follow what I was doing. Then there was Robert, a super nice guy, who'd noodle around on another guitar. He's now living in Los Angeles doing publicity for obscure, independent films. I suppose he was living out the fantasy of being in a band. I was on bass and rhythm machine. Finally, there was Arlene on the microphone doing her crazy thing with words and vocal sounds. We worked up a mini-set of six or seven songs and then we played (conveniently enough) at one of the party nights at A’s.


We did a song based on the William Blake poem: Tiger Tiger Burning Bright, In The Forests Of The Night. While we played these two chicks came out and removed all their clothes and painted themselves with black and yellow stripes to make them look, I suppose, like tigers. I thought it was corny but they were cute and I didn't mind watching them take off their clothes. One was a Chinese/Jewish girl who was Florian the Austrian's girlfriend. Her name was Judith Wong and she was a dancer who would later become my girlfriend after she broke up with Florian. She lived in a tenement on the Lower East Side. Her bed was in a little nook next to a window looking out into the courtyard. One hot, sticky, New York summer night we were drifting off to sleep and I heard someone on the window ledge. I looked up and saw an intruder climbing through the window. I got up to stop him and we started wrestling and fighting. The next thing I knew Judith was slapping me in the face and yelling, "What's the matter? What's the matter?" I realized it was all a nightmare. Once I calmed down I knew Judith and I would never last and it was true, we didn't. I wonder what ever happened to her.


The other girl who took off her clothes and painted herself like a tiger was a performance artist. She was a good friend of Arlene's and, after hearing us do the Tiger Tiger song, she had the inspiration to do the stripping and painting thing. I don't remember her name, but she was a sweet, cute and upbeat girl, and she walked with a limp. She had a progressive disease that made one of her legs shorter than the other and, strangely enough, it was going to keep getting shorter and shorter. We never talked about it but I couldn't help wondering about her shortening leg. Would it keep getting shorter until it just withered away? I never found out.


The high point of The Bumblebees came when we did a public access cable TV show (this was in 1981). It was our third and final gig. The studio was small, drafty and cold. There were one or two cheap little video cameras, and a hairy pot-smoking, beer-drinking pretentious host. The whole thing seemed sordid and depressing, and I felt sorry for the girls for having to take off their clothes in such a cold and drafty place. They didn't seem to mind, though. But that was it for me. I just didn't see much future for the Bumblebees.


At the time I wanted to play things experimental and heavy and funky and grooving and jazzy and improvisational and tight. I was looking for like-minded people to bring these things together. This was when James White and the Blacks, the Lounge Lizards with John Lurie, Material with Bill Laswell were doing their funky, jazzy, beat-driven, semi-improvised thing in Lower Manhattan, so I knew there were people interested in this kind of thing, I just didn't know who they were and where I was going to meet them. The first order of business was to get a drum kit, and a place to play it. I found a nice, vintage set and bought it. Fortuitously, I ran into a bass player named Perkins Barnes (who would later become the first bass player in my other band, Konk). He had a rehearsal studio in the basement of a tenement on Second Avenue between Fourth and Fifth Streets. It was damp and moldy with a tiny frosted window that you couldn't see out of. It was next to a big, black, hulking boiler and we paid fifty dollars apiece for its use. I put my drums in there and practiced my butt off. It was a tiny dungeon of a place, but it was warm and righteous.

[to be continued]