1 Epiphany Gene bounded into our small South Miami, Florida, house, the summer of 1963, a look on his face as if he had located a gift of gold dropped from a psychedelic UFO. In his hand he clutched an article of sonic subterfuge: a seven-inch black vinyl single deliriously titled "Louie Louie," by a group called the Kingsmen. Their name suggested royal knaves, subjects of a British Invasion-informed notion of aristocracy, and not the four hip, sneering roustabouts from the Pacific Northwest that they were. From that moment onward, my brother's universe and mine would become all flash lightning, "Louie Louie" ringing out repeatedly, a seductive noise machine from on high, the singer wailing, out of control and completely cool, steering us toward an undeniable future-- Okay, let's give it to 'em, right now! I was five years old to Gene's ten, my response to the record driven as much by the sound as by my older brother's excitement. He reverently spun the single, an artifact from preteen heaven that he had somehow stumbled onto. The only other music heard in our house had been our father's classical records and, more profoundly, the sounds emanating from his hours-long performances at the piano--an instrument that commanded most of the real estate in our modest living room. He worked deliberately through a repertoire of Beethoven, Bach, Brahms, Mendelssohn, and other heavies. Classical music ruled our airwaves. At least until "Louie Louie" came breaking and entering in. With that disc in constant revolution, the energy of our existence would change, a new current of electricity introduced. It was as though it had taken the soundworld of our day--our kitchen appliances, our television--and recast it into song, using only guitars, organ, and drums. The lead singer's voice had the air of a boy smoking a cigarette with one hand while banging a tambourine in the other, an insolent distance to his delivery, a vision of being at once boss and bored. The flip side of the record was "Haunted Castle," an instrumental with a simplistic chord figure and a suitably mysterious vibe. The fun danger of "Louie Louie" was offset by the cool otherness of "Haunted Castle." Everything about these subversive vibrations suggested to me a new world; they were changing not only my here and now but my vision of what the future might hold for me. I decided to someday, somehow, be in a band like the Kingsmen. The first order of business would be my hair. From flipping through the pages of 16 magazine, the bible of 1960s pop-rock teen-idol worship, I could see how the cool cats in bands like the Kingsmen all had bangs grazing their eyebrows, the back of their hair hanging slightly below their collars. To grown-ups, my little-boy crew cut was cute, but after my blinding introduction to rock 'n' roll by way of "Louie Louie," I knew it would no longer do. Forget cute. After a bit of pleading, I was given permission by my parents to let my hair grow out. Each day I would check its progress, wetting the minuscule strands of my potential fringe so that it might fall onto my forehead, yearning to flick it casually to the side. A few of my classmates at the Epiphany Catholic School took me to task for my preening and faux flicking-- "You don't have long hair, stop pretending." But I needed the practice. My father's piano had always been our family's great and sacred object. It cost as much as a car, and we were living on a schoolteacher's wages. But it was a necessary extravagance--not just an outlet for my father but a collective beacon of high art, a reflection, I thought, of our commitment to sound and composition. But it wasn't for me. What I really wanted was a guitar. Preferably electric. Or at least a transistor radio. Anything that could bring more "Louie Louie" into the world. 2 Refrigerator Heaven In 1947 my father, George Moore, age twenty-two, met Eleanor Nann, two years younger, in music class at the University of Miami, the two falling forever in love. Just a few years prior, each of their lives had been subsumed by war--my mother working as a soldiers' aide at the Biltmore Hotel, then outfitted as a hospital, in nearby Coral Gables; my father enlisted as a military band leader, though with the good fortune not to be stationed overseas. He had learned music theory and piano from his mother, a society pianist. Both my parents' families had been living in Coral Gables, a charmed and enchanted enclave tucked just below the city of Miami, a paradise of huge banyan trees presiding over narrow streets, their trunks and branches knotty and adorned with thick hanging vines. Green grass lawns were nurtured by tropical rains, which would rage for an hour, then break for high, humid sunshine. Iguanas, lizards, grass snakes, parrots, and peacocks freely roamed. The tolling bells of the Church of the Little Flower--where my parents would marry after three years of dreamtime romance--filled the air, resounding off the walls of homes, some made of old Spanish stucco, others built from coral rock. My brother, Gene, arrived in 1953, followed two years later by my sister, Susan. I was conceived in the autumn of 1957 in Mount Dora, Florida, in a tiny house outside of the grade school where my father had found a teaching job. For my birth, my mother traveled back to Coral Gables; a family physician delivered me on Friday, July 25, 1958, at 7:37 in the evening. I was named after Thurston "Doc" Adams, my father's stepfather, a larger-than-life character who had become the vivacious patriarch of our extended family. Doc himself claimed to have been named out of his parents' admiration for Thurston the Great Magician and his self-proclaimed "Wonder Show of the Universe," which had traveled the Southeast early in the century. At the end of the 1950s, our family of five would relocate, first to McKenzie, Tennessee, where my father had found a new job teaching at a local college; then back down to Florida a few years later, setting up house in South Miami; before packing up all our belongings once again and heading north, in 1967, to Bethel, Connecticut. My father had found a more desirable academic position, at Western Connecticut State College, in nearby Danbury. He was to teach art appreciation, philosophy, humanities, and phenomenology. I was ten years old. Leaving behind the perennial sunshine of southern Florida, I would for the first time experience true seasons: dying leaves, snow, and ice. Before heading north I had been gifted an inexpensive acoustic guitar. The idea was that if I could figure out how to play the thing, I might possibly advance to an electric. The acoustic had nylon strings--not very rock, but they could still make a kind of thrum. I went to the town hall in Bethel to take lessons with a bunch of other aspiring preteen guitarists. I had stuck an STP decal on the guitar in hopes of imbuing it with a bit of cool--STP being the iconic race car motor oil brand, denoting speed, or so it seemed to me. The serious guitarists in the class looked down their noses at my STP machine, particularly as I'd brought it in without a case, naked and battered. The teacher attempted to show us how to play "Kumbaya." I quickly realized that I would not be returning. As the seventies got under way, Gene acquired an electric Fender Stratocaster, which he played obsessively. He was eighteen to my thirteen. I managed to glean a bit of fretboard familiarity from simply observing him, watching him play day and night--chordings, fingerings, strumming techniques. Gene and his hippie friends often sat around our house, endlessly riffing on their axes, spinning records, smoking cigs, laughing, talking about bands and concerts. They each had one group that was all their own, taking it upon themselves to collect every record, becoming the designated aficionado. One guy would be all into the Moody Blues; another would pledge allegiance to Emerson, Lake & Palmer, or Santana, or the Mothers of Invention. Gene's choice was Jefferson Airplane: San Francisco acid rock with wah-wah guitar leads, far-out lyrics, psychedelic album jackets--all things pretty alien to our rural Connecticut world. Initiated by the Kingsmen, the expansive music of Jefferson Airplane zapping out of Gene's stereo opened my eyes yet again to rock 'n' roll, a mysterious world far beyond my bedroom window, cast loose from a musical culture that was barely more than a decade old. When Gene went off to work at one of his various jobs--bagging groceries, mowing lawns--I would sneak into his room and remove his beloved Stratocaster from its felt-lined hard-leather case, playing it until, invariably, I broke a string. Either Gene didn't have any extra strings or I hadn't figured out how to put one on. At any rate, I would guiltily stow the guitar away. He would return home later and race up to his room, only to find that the guitar he'd left in pristine condition now had a broken string. He knew the culprit. Rightfully pissed off, he would warn me to never touch it again. After a few such instances, he found a solution: the case had a simple lock-and-key clasp. He decided to lock the guitar up, taking the tiny key with him to work. But I quickly figured out how to jimmy open the lock with a screwdriver. And sure enough, as I practiced my rudimentary strumming technique, a string would once again snap, only for the minor drama to repeat itself. Gene stepped up his security, wrapping an industrial-sized chain around the case, fastened with a formidable padlock. This was daunting at first, but I realized that given a solid pair of pliers and twenty methodical minutes, I could pry apart one of the metal chain links and get inside again. The guitar liberated anew, I would, without fail, break another string, before returning the guitar to its case and spending another twenty minutes rejoining the heavy-duty chain link. Gene, returning home, would head to his room, unlock the case...and realize there was no use. What could he do? His kid brother was as enchanted with the guitar as he was. Eventually he presented me with a crazy-beautiful sunburst Fender Stratocaster to call my own. He had been able to acquire it for next to nothing, its provenance mysterious--likely it had "fallen off a truck." I wasn't too bothered with its origins, though. I was overwhelmed with excitement and gratitude. I had just turned sixteen years old and now had my first real noise machine. My days of illicit guitar playing now behind me, I plugged my hot new Strat into Gene's amplifier and large speaker cabinet setup, which he kept in his bedroom. With no one else in the house to disturb--my dad off working at the college, Gene and Sue out with their pals, my mom off somewhere shopping--I blasted away at the instrument, creating squalling, squealing, screeching electric noise. One afternoon in mid-wail, cranking out high-volume crunge, I could just barely make out a pounding on our front door. I ran downstairs only to be met by a shaking, petrified woman who lived across the street, tears welling in her eyes. "Please...can you...lower...the music?" --she stammered. "I'm...having...a nervous...breakdown." Gene enlisted in the air force, where he would service fighter jets. To my misfortune, he took his amp with him to his base in New Jersey. I was temporarily bereft, but I soon figured out a solution. I could wire one end of a guitar cable into the back of my dad's cheap stereo receiver, which sat atop the refrigerator in our somewhat cramped kitchen. My wiring was precarious, but it created just enough of a connection for me to send my guitar's signal through the receiver's tiny, crummy speakers. It sounded amazing--crazy and savage, with weirdo distortion, sort of like the first Stooges album, which I had found in a record store discount bin a couple of years earlier, curious about the four stoned-immaculate boys peering out at me from the cover. I had become a frequenter of the cheap bins by then. Wanting to buy albums, but not having the money to purchase them at full price--usually around three dollars--I would settle on picking up discs with corners clipped off, denoting their unpopular "cutout" status. While many of them proved unrewarding listens, there were some, such as Can's Ege Bamyasi and Captain Beefheart's The Spotlight Kid, that captured my imagination, that showed rock 'n' roll could be soulful and poetic or else brash and abrasive. That first self-titled Stooges LP, released in 1969, was a sinister masterpiece of minimalist fuzz. It would become my best friend. When I tried to share it with others, it would be met only with shaken heads. Its sub-mental drone, its delirious, decadent drawl--I had to keep it to myself. It was that first Stooges album, a successor in my heart to "Louie Louie," that I was thinking of as my electric guitar shredded the speakers on my dad's stereo rig, scorching hot atop the humming fridge. If the first Stooges LP represented a bit of record store serendipity, it had been in discovering the Stooges' second LP, Fun House, from 1970, that I'd had my first taste of bin-digging elation: of sifting through the dross and finding a nugget of sonic gold. The Stooges were a long way from what was most popular in music in the early 1970s--"progressive" rock with its emphasis on sophisticated technique, from bands such as Emerson, Lake & Palmer and Yes. The band rarely strayed from their simple, fuzz-box drone, Ron Asheton occasionally punctuating it with his singular brand of wicked lead-guitar psycho-rip. Iggy Pop's vocals sat within the chaos as he poured his inebriated soul into your ear. His performances were notoriously kinetic-bordering-on-manic events (not that I had ever seen them--I'd had to settle for reading about them in the far corners of rock mags). His laments about getting old, at age twenty-two, were to me a thrilling alternative to the foppish, starry-eyed prog rockers crooning about mountains coming out of the sky and standing there. There was no frill, no jamming, only direct-to-the-heart intensity. It was a hypodermic needle of noise, and to freaks like me listening alone in their bedrooms, it delivered a high like nothing else. With Fun House, the Stooges had taken their sound to an even more blown-out realm. It was hotter and fatter. Music that had once been simply sinister was now downright raving. Each track on the record burst with scalding energy, fairly oozing off my turntable. When the session concluded with the free jazz of "L.A. Blues," it was as if a lid that had attempted to contain all the band's clamor was released at once, the sonic snakes of heavy metal hell creepy-crawling every which way, ravaging my very reality. Excerpted from Sonic Life: A Memoir by Thurston Moore All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
