Monday, May 9, 2016

the last book I ever read (Kim Gordon's Girl in a Band: A Memoir, excerpt twelve)

from Girl in a Band: A Memoir by Kim Gordon:

It was complex, since Steve and Lee were in New York, and for the most part, Thurston and I were in Northhampton. After 2000, the studio in the city became more and more theirs. I was busy trying to balance and schedule our lives. If Thurston and I were rehearsing in New York, for example, that meant it made more sense to fly out of New York on tour, rather than flying out of the nearest airport in Massachusetts. If we were heading out for a short series of dates, that meant I would have to enlist a babysitter or caregiver to watch over Coco while we were gone.

Thurston didn’t have that same amount of forethought. Most people saw him as an exuberant, seemingly joyous person who lived entirely in the present. Privately, I knew that he was more calculated, because his lyrics were always well crafted, with rock allusions, and he put a lot of thought into his rock-and-roll strategy. Dan Graham once saw us play the song “Confusion Is Sex” at CBGB and said later, after watching Thurston self-consciously trying to make a “rock moment” happen, “You’re supposed to scream and then fall down on the stage, not fall down onstage and then scream.” I would never have attempted something like that—it just wasn’t me, and Thurston was the true rock-and-roller, the punkologist, the guy who idolized Richard Hell with his music, his poetry, and his self-adoration.



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