Youth Against Fascism II: Teenage Riot

In the December of 2007, I was sitting with Mellie as she went about the activities of her receptionist job at the community we lived in. Trying to relax on my break (I worked in the kitchen as one of the staff preparing dinner for the community in the evenings and with much of our prep work done, the lot of us were taking the afternoon to relax before resuming work shortly before dinner was to be served), I struck up a conversation with Mellie about the possibility of culinary school. As mail was piling up and she was actively in the middle of filing all of it, Mellie raised her eyebrow and made that fascinated 'hrmph!' sound that folks make when something intrigues them but not quite enough for them to break their activity and engage in a full on conversation on the subject being brought up. Realizing that her head was elsewhere, I began to do some clicking around online and came upon the Le Cordon Bleu institute downtown. Thinking there was nothing to lose but the two minutes of time it took me to fill out the inquiry form, I e-mailed it off and promptly forgot about the light (onion) bulb that had flashed over my head moments before.

Within ten minutes, I received a phone call from a representative of the school. Thinking for a second time that I had nothing to lose save for the time spent actually going to check the place out, the rep scheduled a meeting for me to take a walking tour of the school. Upon hanging up the phone, I looked over to see Mellie now fully attentive. Having forgotten her mail filing duties in the process of listening to my phone call, she asked me in a voice equal parts excited and unsure as to whether I was actually going to consider culinary school as a real option. Shrugging as I got up from my seat to make my way back to the kitchen, I answered to the effect that I loved cooking, so why not consider it? With the bulb of inquiry now hanging over both of our heads, we went about our activities for the day and didn't discuss it again.

Fast forward to two weeks later where Mellie and I are now downtown on Chestnut Street touring the facilities. As we walked along the corridors, looking into each classroom we passed, I watched students in impeccably put together uniforms scurrying about like lab mice as they hustled and worked on their respective projects. Looking back on the sequence of events as they happened, I'd like to say that I would have been more patient with my decision to enroll then and there, but if I were given the chance to have a do over, I'd imagine I'd repeat the entire act verbatim without hesitation. Within two hours time, I had crossed the road from a civilian back into academia. Well, food academia anyway - they made the end product look flashy by affixing "Applied Science" at the end of it. Sure I wasn't studying Descarte, but in his time Descarte most assuredly fussed over what he wanted to eat at some point or another right?

Moments after I took this, Chef Gerard pulled out a chainsaw to finish off this ice block. I wish I were kidding.

By the time Spring had ushered itself in to the cheering throngs of Winter tortured Chicagoans, Mellie and I had secured an apartment in Lakeview as well as jobs within walking distance from our new front door. Still a month from moving into our new place (June 1st) and three weeks away from my first day of class (May 19th), Mellie and I were slowly starting to remove ourselves from the contact of the community we had spent the last three years dwelling within. Such a disenfranchisement was hard for the both of us but at the same time it had come as a bit of a relief (the band we had been playing in had seen a bitter turn as the vocalist trounced us from the project because I had the audacity to think about my own future and attend culinary school instead of continuing to live on in the community and play second fiddle to his grand standing and antics to the two dozen odd people we would play in front of at each show we had managed to find the good fortune of being a part of). Our new jobs helped us somewhat in finding reasons to not be around as along with our new duties, we took our first baby steps with the opening of fresh bank accounts, our registration of new cell phones and the now brilliant ability we had acquired to pay for a good or service with a debit card instead of cash.

One day, Mellie's boss had her work a shift at a second location (hint: she worked at a popular ice cream franchise) in Old Town and as I had the day off (hint: I worked at a popular Chicago based tea franchise), I tagged along. Now let's be honest here, where Mellie was working, it wasn't like the gang's hang out in ‘Happy Days’ - as the establishment was one amongst legion in a world wide franchise, there were rules to be followed - having someone's S.O. hanging around for hours on end just wasn't going to wash. Knowing this, I brought along my iPod and walked around Old Town exploring the area. As I continued to walk, I found myself on Chestnut Street and within my field of vision, I could see the culinary school that would own my life for the next year and a half.

Whatever I had been listening to up to this moment had faded out and in its place, chiming, plaintive guitar strums began to fill my ears. As I continued walking and made my way closer to the institute, drums moving at the speed of drone began to float before me and Kim Gordon's voice rode atop them with a re-assuring whisper. The built up sounds meandering through my head came to a stop and were quickly tossed aside by a distorted guitar with considerable tooth as it ripped its way through my head phones and into the swelling space between my ears. Standing in place now as I stared at my new school, the drums came crashing back in with rambunctious fervor and before I could register protest, Sonic Youth proceeded to lift me from where I was standing and carry me off into the future I had spent six months since December awaiting.

“Everybody's talking 'bout the stormy weather
And what's a man do to but work out whether it's true?
Looking for a man with a focus and a temper
Who can open up a map and see between one and two...”

And I stood there. As Thurston proselytized about kids and shows and amplifiers, those opening words rang through my head over and over much like the sounds of bells Moore himself had managed to conjure from his instrument time and again from here to Glenn Branca. Across the street, not fifty yards away - the smell of caramelized onions, freshly minced garlic cloves and chocolate melted over a dozen bain-maries rushed towards me like a gang and worked their way into my nostrils with force and not even a minuscule amount of courtesy. Punk rock had been the catalyst for my veganism so many years before and now I could see in this intimidatingly large building before me the way that my decisions were now congealing. My future was here and Sonic Youth were more than ready to provide the score to the opening scenes.

Upon my first set of listens to ‘Daydream Nation’, I was put off by the sheer scope of it. Running nearly fifteen minutes over the hour mark, it isn’t hyperbole to say that the record is the band’s opus. Certainly, critics have traced the progression of the group’s sound from ‘Bad Moon Rising’ to ‘Sister’ and have been able to describe in far more academic (and frankly dryer as well) terms than I how the band had been able to so seamlessly arrive in 1989 with such a fully formed opus to lay out before the alternative nation. The guitars of Moore and Lee Renaldo worked in tandem with one another like dancers who had spent years mirroring one another’s choreography and certainly, their aesthetic sense of alternative tunings - hatched mutually in their days of acting as faceless peons amidst the masses of other musicians in Glenn Branca’s larger than life self named ‘guitarmies’ - had been refined two years earlier and in half the amount of running time on ‘Sister.

While the guitars stretched themselves across the aural canvas, slashing obtuse swaths of color against the walls of the studios the tracks were being laid down within, Kim Gordon’s trademark bass throb - primitive in its simplicity yet precise as the inner workings of a clock in its execution - worked in tandem with Steve Shelley’s steady hands as he sat behind the drum kit with all of the swagger of an old pro while enjoying all of the vitality of the youth befitting his then 27 years of existence. Their taut rhythm section provided the De Stijl-ian blocks of consistent and repetitive hypnotism to Moore and Renaldo’s abstractly expressionist outbursts. While the Youth had experienced a comically Spinal Tap-ian series of drummers with a drum stool that had seen near constant rotation before Shelley had joined four years prior, ‘Daydream Nation’ saw a tightness the drummer had only hinted at in ‘EVOL’ and ‘Sister’ now that he had been behind the kit long enough to keep the stool still.

While I enjoyed the faster numbers on the record, my feelings didn’t sit so well with the more ambient parts - the sections of the record where everything had a chance to breath before the band began raging again. It wasn’t that I was so daft as to not grasp the idea of something slower than mid-tempo, I just hadn’t given myself enough chances to understand the nuance, to grasp the idea that music can speak just as much when it’s whispering as when it’s yelling. Certainly I had long been a fan of progenitors such as Eno by this point, but his records were meant to be background noise - aural wall paper if you will - that was a completely different context. That wasn’t rock music. Perhaps my first mistake in my dis-connect upon venturing into the parts of the Sonic Youth discography the band weren’t shilling at Lollapalooza was not giving them the chance to convey that they weren’t simply rock musicians.

Cage in the midst of his life's work.

When you listen to ‘Daydream Nation’ free of the constraints of expecting something on par with ‘Bull In The Heather’, ‘100%’ or any of the other in the small handful of singles their label attempted to push onto the then blossoming ‘modern rock’ play lists of the time, you can see the myriad ways in which the band built complex, almost pointillist skeletons beneath each tune, constructing entire structures with which to frame their John Cage-ian influences. Certainly elements of experimentation were bleeding through Moore and Renaldo as they composed - and I use the word deliberately, these guys were composers straight and simple - and channeled Cage’s life long fascination with deconstructing a basic instrument to build it back up into something new. Just as his exercises in prepared piano bent the ears of those who ventured to give it a listen, so to did Moore and Renaldo take a near identical approach to their guitars.

According to lore, these guitars were all stolen from the band only to turn up several years later in the same condition in which they had been in prior to their loss.

While the guitar as an instrument was no stranger to distortion, mutilation and general mischief, the two musicians shaping SY’s road map were going far beyond Link Wray punching holes in his amplifier to the horror of Archie Bleyer. In much the same way as Cage had meticulous notes detailing his placement of marbles, bolts and metal objects on the hammers of his piano to create wildly different sounds for each of his compositions, Moore and Renaldo were infamous for the obnoxious quantities of guitars they would have in tow at any given time - each ax (to use a ‘rockist’ designation of the instrument) set to a different tuning and tone and each one requiring lavish amounts of attention to stay honed to where the musicians wanted them.

These fully formed sculptures of sound melding the rock music of their underground with the avant garde of their idols can be heard in full on ‘Daydream Nation’ and certainly, this would be the last time folks would hear such sounds at their most unleashed and visceral for a number of years until their attempts at Nirvana comparable heights were extinguished and they returned to stretching guitar laden skin across bass and snare derived bone on 1995’s ‘Washing Machine.’

As the notes of ‘Teenage Riot’ faded out and were quickly replaced by the opening notes of ‘Silver Rocket’, I stared at the Le Cordon Bleu School of Culinary Art and felt the smile of confidence stretching across my face. My time preparing television dinners for senior citizens and par baked potatoes for fussy and entitled mothers at the JPUSA community had now come to an end and I could practically taste the mushroom duxelles I would be learning to prepare on my first day in ‘Intro To Culinary’. Silver rocket indeed.