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ACL scene report: Sonic Youth taping at ‘ACL’ studios Thursday
Gotta love a band with a roadie who wears a white dress shirt and skinny tie. Or maybe it was an “Austin City Limits” staff member. Whatever. Some dude in a white dress shirt and skinny tie was making sure everything was just so before the kings of noise rock, Sonic Youth, stepped onto the venerable TV show’s stage.
It was weird but somehow felt right, as did the fact that a band like Sonic Youth was playing a room more commonly associated with Willie Nelson, Jerry Jeff Walker and, uh, Willie Nelson. Like the show, Sonic Youth has had a long and unlikely evolution since coming together at the dawn of the ’80s, from atonal, abrasive and grating to atonal, abrasive, grating and improbably melodic. (Fun fact: “Hey Joni” from “Daydream Nation?” That’s a shout-out to Joni Mitchell, one of founding guitarist Thurston Moore’s songwriting heroes.) Everybody talks about the tricked-out guitars in this band, with their weird tunings, and sometimes played with screwdrivers or drumsticks. That’s undeniably the band’s calling card, proof that, pound for pound, no other act has done more to push the limits of the instrument since Hendrix. (It’s also the reason it’s almost a theoretical impossibility to cover a Sonic Youth song.)
But there’s great melodic beauty buoyed by all that noise, and that’s quite a trick. “Sprawl,” to pick just one song out of Thursday’s killer set, has hooks that a lot of pop songwriters would envy, gorgeous and scary at the same time, the sound of the future and dread. If Sonic Youth wrote novels instead of made albums, they’d be somewhere on the literary continuum between Williams Burroughs and Gibson. And they are breathtakingly tight, which is what happens when you’re heading into your fourth decade — !!! — playing together. (We’re not factoring in the relatively recent addition of bonus bassist Mark Ibold into the equation, but adding him gives the band even more of a whomp.)
It’s a good thing that after few more tapings the show is moving from its old home on the UT campus to new studios downtown next year because after that set, there’s a chance the building is structurally unsound. Terry Lickona told the crowd, “They’re gonna blow the roof off this place.” And just this once that wasn’t hyperbole.
As it happens it was Lickona’s birthday Thursday, as well as band manager John Silva’s, which made for an even more festive occasion, complete with the crowd singing to Lickona. Before the show Lickona mentioned “our little picnic in the park starting tomorrow,” a reference, of course, to the ACL fest in Zilker Park, where Sonic Youth is playing tonight at 7. There’s a whole bunch of bands in town this weekend, but I walked out of the studio pretty sure that the best show I’ll see this weekend was the first one.
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