While both are best known for breakout acts they’re associated with—one co-founded Sonic Youth, the other plays guitar for Wilco—Thurston Moore and Nels Cline share a passion for more experimental, less mainstream pursuits as well. Moore’s side projects have involved solo recordings, soundtrack work, running the Ecstatic Peace! record label, and co-founding the publishing company Ecstatic Peace Library; Cline’s have included collaborations including the Nels Cline 4, Cup (a duo with his partner, Yuka Honda), the improvisational live project Stained Radiance, and the 2012 mixed-media performance DIRTY BABY, a collaboration with artist Ed Ruscha and poet David Breskin, among others. The pair’s relationship goes back to at least 1996, when they played an improvisational set at Rhino Records in Los Angeles and recorded an album Pillow Wand together; it’s a collaboration they’ve revisited several times in recent years, including at MASS MoCA’s Solid Sound in 2011. This weekend, they’ll share a stage yet again in two nights of music and poetry curated by Moore to celebrate the 60th anniversary of his birth. In anticipation of this on-stage reunion, Cline connected with Moore via email to share thoughts on poetry, politics, art, and coming to terms with aging.
Nels Cline (NC)
Seeing as how it turns out that this event is celebrating your 60 years on the planet, have you any reflections you would like to share? At 62, I find myself in a generally heightened—though not exactly panicked—state of awareness about mortality. I am also generally happier, personally. This in spite of my deep concerns about current affairs and the health of planet Earth as we move inexorably forward. Anything you can share with us?
Thurston Moore (TM)
Best thing about 60 is I get a “freedom” card in London, which allows me free rides on public transport! I love saying “I’m 60!” any chance I get. It is completely radical, and I do feel like the reality of it encourages a sense of imperious, though not so ego-infused, understanding and experience with the world, the cosmos.
NC
As someone who has moved both underground and above ground in the cultural worlds (mainly) of music and literature, how has your view of the effect and importance of culture to the world changed over the years (if at all)?
TM
Culture initially tells our shared story of life on Earth in real time and subsequently becomes the historical map, an archive. It is, like nature itself, our group intellect in all its wild dynamism: our communication with spirit, science, emotion, and mystery. How I consider it as important or not is moot as culture is the manifestation of communication with divinity—from the soil to the city to the stars.
NC
I know that you admire Andy Warhol and the world he created and inhabited. In light of this, what do you think or feel (if it matters) about the strange (to me, anyway) concurrent worlds of art and commerce, creative endeavor, and investment/speculation? Is it a necessary evil? A drag? Fascinating? Irrelevant?
TM
I think the fascination with Andy Warhol’s fascination with art and commerce is a gross misrepresentation of an artist who essentially believed in beauty. Price tags were reconstructed, in all their crassness, into lovely images with humanized intention. Money is glamorous yet, in it’s base form, a horror. Warhol turned the darkness light, thus. My understanding is he was in thrall to the lives of contemporary NYC poets, like Ted Berrigan, who himself resounded Jack Kerouac’s cry of “poverty as holiness.”
NC
Apologies if the answer to this question is overly posed/boring, but was there one moment or song or event that you can recall from your early life that set you on your path, that galvanized you?
TM
Yeah, “Louie Louie”/”Haunted Castle” by the Kingsmen in 1963. I initially tried playing it on tennis racket then on a cheap acoustic that I stuck an STP sticker on (faux pas in the group guitar class) and ultimately on the Stratocaster my brother handed to me that his friends “found” somewhere (later to be “found” by someone else in my 1977 New York tenement apartment). The song, in all it’s primal resonance of teenage American love and chaos, was a calling to devote myself to rock ‘n’ roll.
NC
You are a published author, primarily of poetry. What draws you to poetry, specifically, and does poetry have a similar allure as music and sound for you?
TM
Poetry, amongst so many other factors of its timeless distinction, deals with rhythm, cadence, and alliteration with a lingui-musical vocabulary. Poetry on the page is not only a confessional or experimental narration but a visual work of art. Lyricists in rock ‘n’ roll with interdisciplinary activity in the communities of poetics—be it Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, Tom Verlaine, Richard Hell, Chinas Comidas, or Damon Krukowski (to name but a few of “serious” published poets co-involved with music)—are what enchanted me to work in a realm where I could study the distinctions of each discipline while considering how they impact each other. A continuing investigation!
NC
TM
I find intuition can lead to the most interesting, if not rewarding, exposition of music that one can call one’s own. I find if I close my eyes and let intuition bring me to a place of invention, where ego falls away, it is akin to being in a place of grace. I feel like I can always depend on this regardless of limitations of technique or standards of expectation.
NC
Guitar nerd question: you and I both have experience traversing the realms of both large-ish tours, with lots of guitars, crew, etc., and the small world of improvised music, with one guitar (two, if we’re lucky), no crew, etc. You have so many older songs in different tunings. Do you miss having all those guitars nowadays? Have you developed strategies to handle your more modest touring style with the Thurston Moore band?
TM
It’s the Thurston Moore Group, actually (“band” sounds so… well, bland). I don’t miss anything except having techs and engineers setting everything up and making sure your gear works, your guitars are tuned. That’s a comfort and privilege worth aspiring to. And the exponential amount of people listening. And there can be a bit more coin. But ultimately… nah. I feel like I experienced that, to a degree. Sometimes I recall the lifestyle like an addict jonesing for the glory of a comforting shot, but the feeling, especially as a well-adjusted 60-year old (ahem), subsides with reason. I want to be in a space where I don’t perform to the glower and probable misconstruance of any industry eye. I moved to New York to play experimental punk noise art rock, and I think with Sonic Youth, and with assistance from engaged management and record label, people were able to bring it to a fairly high profile in the big time rock ‘n’ roll world. I know there is no other document like Daydream Nation before, since, or after, and I have pride in that. And it’s a shared pride, which makes it all the better. But that’s not really what you’re asking. You’re interested in the mechanics of working with various tunings and machines, etc. I adjusted to what I could afford to do. I like having the limitation of one tuning to do work with anyway. Let’s just say this: any experience or honor to play in front of any interested listener is a blessing. That, really, is all there is to it.
NC
I know that you’re a concerned activist, aware of and committed to personal freedoms and the defeat of oppression and the many ills that humankind keeps falling prey to, repeating, and even heightening. Do you mind getting on the old soapbox and mentioning a couple of your concerns in this space?
TM
I think in the current climate, when thug politics in service to corporate mechanisms of control exact empowerment to ignorance by societal division
NC
Speaking of space, the solar system and universe is in the news again a lot these days in light of some dramatic new scientific discoveries (and bullshit like the USA’s Space Army). I am pleased! Is space the place? Any thoughts?
TM
Let’s first clean and revitalize the Earth. We shan’t escape to space, but it would be nice to travel the spaceways someday, someway.
NC
Did you ever want to die before you got old?
TM
No, no, no. I wrote a lyric in Sonic Youth called “Radical Adults Lick Godhead Style.” It was a bit of commentary on how the radical voices of ’60s rock ‘n’ roll—Neil Young, Yoko Ono, Scott Walker, so many others—were still creating new and challenging work while youth culture music had been corporatized through complete control of the media and sold in all its packaged gloss to the kids. Thankfully, the internet has allowed for the intelligence of youth culture to find its families of music and art which each person can have genuine reflection with either as social group or in isolation. Both places can be amazing. The world now is spectacular. We just need to kick out the jams a little more LOUDLY!!!
Get Walker Reader in your inbox. Sign up to receive first word about our original videos, commissioned essays, curatorial perspectives, and artist interviews.
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)