Remembering & pondering past, & future SY shows.
 

My first time seeing this mezmerizing band was on the "Sonic Nurse Tour". August 20, 2004. @ The Orange Peel, Asheville, NC. (I'm seeing Dinosaur Jr. there in a few weeks) It was a night that changed my life, & I'll never forget.
The Orange Peel holds about 500 people, give or take, so it was a very personal type show. & I was right there in the front row. (G/A) I remember Kim on "Pattern Recognition", when she would sing the lyrics, "You're The One", she would raise her arms like angel wings. & of course, I would point @ her when she sang those lyrics, saying to her, she's the one. & I remember Lee stretching himself & his guitar over the audience, & I think I got a piece of the neck. & when Thusrton was running around the stage, he actually came close enough for me to touch a piece of his leg. & I remember Thurston explaining how the last time they had a gig there, it was canceled, & all the ticket holders started rioting. & to follow the explanation up, they played "Teenage Riot". I will be seeing SY again this June @ the Bannaroo festival.
So, do you have some SY concert stories you'd like to share. Or are you getting ready to see SY?

So, I guess no one wants to talk about SY shows. I can't believe no one wants to discuss this topic. It's just as good as the other threads on this board. What's the matter w/ you people?

Has anyone from the board seen SY in the 80's era? What were there shows like back then?

take it easy man. you don't have to rack up 1,000 posts in a month again. go for a walk or something :D

I can't. It's raining here, & it's 3:00 a.m. Otherwise I might.

!@#$%!- Do you have any SY concert stories?

Just checking out my signature. C'mon there has got to be someone out there who wants to talk about SY shows that they've seen.

I almost didn't get to see them. When I went to hand event staff my ID & ticket, they looked at the ID & said, we don't except out of state ID (I live in TN.) But, after some convincing, they let me in. It was the greatest nigh of my life.

It was quite exciting seeing Sonic Youth headline First Avenue then the next day see them open for REM (two of my all time faves) in a massive place.

CHOUT- Do you know anyone who saw an SY show in the early 80's?

I've seen sonic, 1,2,3,4,5 times so far. I'll talk about them in no particular order
#1 Bonaroo2003-I was stone sober I swear. But the energy was amazing and they played better there than I ever heard them.
#2 Stooges/Sonic@Detroit2003or2005 I got a bad memory - The setlist for that show might of well been my sonic greatest hits mix.
#3 Atlanta2004@earthlink- Allot of what you where talking about Marley, lee throwing his guitar in the crowd, thurston running threw the audience, I have a great regret though I had a chance to talk to lee but I bitched up.
#4 Detroit 2002- my first sonic show, I got as close as I could and divided up my time between staring in awe and shakinghell(inthebestway)
#5 Dublin 2005- they played with the chemical brothers who I wasn't really in to, it was cool to see them outside again and in another country, I remember thurston throwing his guitar off the high stage and wondering how many guitar techs they have.

Yeah, I should of stayed after the show I saw to try & talk to SY, but I did the same thing.

heres my sonic concert history
Manchester Academy/UK/ Murray St Tour
Wittness Festival/ Ireland/ Murray St Tour
Brixton Academy/UK/ Nurse Tour
Marley Park/Ireland/Nurse Tour..

Now happy??
just kidding marley

You've got alot more Sonic experience then me. That's for sure. But, I'm gonna go see them again, @ the Bonnaroo festival. I couldn't live w/ myself if I only saw them once.

First popped my SY cherry on June 24th, 2002 at the Shepherd's Bush Empire London, on the Murray Street tour. Got the overnight bus from Glasgow with two friends, and spent the day tubing it around London in the blazing heat. We'd scoped out the venue earlier in the day, hoping Sonic Youth might be around soundchecking and in need of three extra roadies, willing to work for backstage passes. No such luck. Still, a cracking show was played, the setlist rich with both old and new material.

Next gig was at the Glasgow Barrowlands, September 1st, 2004. An awesome night, a brilliant set - the band played like they were really, genuinely having fun. Best bits: Thurston rallying the crowd to chant 'Arthur! Arthur! Arthur! Doyle! Doyle! Doyle!' before playing '...Arthur Doyle Handcream' and Kim cooing 'Hey, Posh Spice...what are you gonna do for me?' during 'Kool Thing'. Golden Memories! Here's my favourite pic from that gig:

Nice, was this when they played Inhuman together? I would kill to see that live. And that's SUCH a good lineup.

O.K., Bonnaroo fell through, so I'll be seeing SY @ The Orange Peel, June 17th, in Asheville, NC. My 2nd time seeing Sonic Youth. I can't wait.
Anyone else gonna be there?

my favorite pic from the Aug. 20th, 2004 gig @ The Orange Peel in Asheville, NC

5/7/98. Washington Dc
6/20/00, DC
4/21/01, Philadelphia
3/17/02, LA
8/7/02, Raleigh
8/8/02, DC
8/10/02, Philly
8/11/02, NYC
8/13/02, Boston
8/17/02, Chicago
8/18/02, Chicago
11/24/02, Baltimore
11/30/02, NYC
6/15/03, Pittsburgh
6/20/03, Cincinnati
6/30/03, DC
4/3/04, East Sussex, England
7/29/04, Chicago
7/30/04, Milwaukee
8/4/04, Montreal
8/11/04, DC
8/17/04, Philly
4/16/05, Hoboken (2 shows, 7:30 and 11)
9/4/05, LA

too many stories...too much fun.

^:
Now that's what I've been waiting for. I bet the Hoboken shows were fucking amazing.

the hoboken shows have to be the most amazing shows of that whole list...and there's some greats on there. i have a review of it i wrote online, i'll dig it up and post it in here. also link the pics my boyfriend took.

Watch out marley...you're going to piss off Saturine.

i only saw them one time
last year at the rock am ring festival with like 100 000 of people.
it was a great show though.

security guys were assholes and pulled me out of the crowd
then i stood like 1m in front of lee
he looked at me in a strange way and then he started to smile....
that was cool




there´s some great footage of this concert

this shit is severely edited, believe it or not.

first, the pics:http://s4.photobucket.com/albums/y10...ellsearlyshow/

"the directions say the club is 1039 Washington St.", i inform patrick as we get closer. it's almost 1 PM, and we are still 6 hours from the first of 2 Sonic Youth shows at legendary Hoboken club Maxwells. and the street on which it stands is blocked.
befuddled, Patrick parks the Accord in Central Parking which gives us 24 hours and we walk on over. banners and the processions in the street solve one mystery: today is the celebration of Hoboken's 150th anniversary. dogs ahoy, st. patrick's day floats, little league baseball teams, luckily the sidewalk pedestrians were mostly fleet of foot--oh shit, there was even a shoe store on the block across us called Fleet Foot--and we made the 10 block walk to Maxwell's heartily. sunny, slightly breezy, the kind of weather I like.

how to spend the time? where should we stand? most places I see shows at, there's a door to be in a line next to...it didn't dawn on either of us that, given this was a smaller venue, the line may actually have to start INSIDE the bar area, much like the Black Cat in DC. hmm. it took us 3 hours to find
this out, thanks to a helpful bartender. in that time, i pissed my partner off no
end with my incessant worrisome nature.

in that space, we also walked around 11th street. midway down the block, my nose catches wind of the nastiest sewage smell EVER. the noteworthy thing about this stench is that you can walk halfway down the sidewalk and your sniffer won't catch anything funky. but get to a certain point and BAM--overwhelming. take a step back, the smell is gone. it was wild, like stepping in and out of a portal of odor.

Jim and Lee exit a cab together, Mr. Ranaldo lugging the same
red Nurse satchel Patrick has, and Jim in black-rimmed eyeglasses.

Thurston walks by us in his own black-rimmed eyeglasses. this was not the funny part. he actually tripped on the sidewalk approaching us, but no, that was even the real funny part. see, Thurston catches sight of us and we all exchange little "hi"'s and indie head-nods and that was cool...UNTIL PATRICK ASKED HIM WHERE WE SHOULD BE STANDING. oh, thurston got this look...not a mean look, not a condescending one, more a look like, dude i dunno, what a weird question. the fact i couldn't hold
back my laughter made it a priceless comic moment. Thurston sees two freaks in a Snoopy shirt and Les Georges Leningrad shirt respectively (gee, can you guess which one of us in which shirt?) and probably expects autograph or photo requests, and gets THAT instead.

anyway, once we had established the bar area as the place to be we went on in and took a seat at the bar itself. i was impressed with the general classiness of Maxwell's interior, a contrast to the still-being remodeled exterior ("Now really Patrick, the 150th anniversary of Hoboken and they present THIS?"). tables for dining were set out with those "cocktail 101"-type placemats I remember seeing in my many trips to eateries in the Ocean City area. man, can you make a bad drink that has vodka in it? i don't see how that is even possible! 2 shots vodka, 1 shot cranberry juice, 2 shots yak piss? YUMMY.

i almost didn't get my bottle of budweiser, as the woman at the bar was taken aback by my state-issued Maryland ID card. "that looks so weird". i couldn't help but agree, but in a prideful way--FEAR THE CRAB! what's the state animal of Jersey, the rat?

after half the bottle was gone, we joined a guy already in line by the doors.
band members walked by us. jim is really short. i think we had both forgotten this. he had on some sweet-ass indiana jones hat, but tweed.. steve is a co-
owner of Maxwell's and so has other business to attend to as well as the show tonight.

we're in! first show. dude stamps our hand. invisible ink? forgot to take the cap off? later it hits me maybe when you go to the bar they have some light they shine over your hand and the mark would show then? eh.

we get right up front, me directly in front of kim's mic and patrick right next to.
the stage is retardedly small. at 300 people this is the smallest place i will likely ever see SY at. i like it.

first up is the opener, loren mazzacane connors and jim o'rourke. i like mr. connors. i admitted to patrick that night the main reason i took to the daggett years cd and by extension mr. connors: a man accompanying himself on guitar and uttering random sound reminded me of the times by father would get loaded, grab his acoustic and go out back in an attempt to ride the alcoholic wave by turning out some classic country tunes. i would hear a guitar riff easily recognizable as "ring of fire" or some other such, but the words...yeeeee. a drunk man with a gruff southern accent and a memory murdered by booze ain't getting too far at the grand ole opry, you know.

patrick and i were among the 10% of the crowd who dug the opening show. loren connors plays simply but it seems like even the easiest thumb-strum is something that sends him out there, and why not when jim is next to him seated, adding on touching chords and notes. jim never lifted up his head until the very end. i found the set a nice journey reminiscent of a canoe ride in the nighttime, so dark it looks like the vessel is traversing black ice.

best thing was when o'rourke took the stage and hearing the convo between 2 girls behind me. i'll sum it up thus: as much as jim has contributed to music, the
production/mixing/engineering, the instrumentation, the composing, it's just great that this guy's enduring legacy is that he wrote a song about wanting to fuck a handicapped girl.

there was no backstage, so SY had to come through the crowd to reach a step that offered easy elevation to the stage. KIM WAS NOT WEARING THE SAME WHITE DRESS AND GOLD SKIRT SHE'S BEEN DONNING FOR THE OTHER SHOWS. patrick was mildly deflated. he is
in love with that look and if she did indeed have that on, 99% of his pics would have been of kim.

started off with "golden blue". immediately after, thurston said hello and lee
announced this was their first gig in hoboken since 1988. wow. thurston beseeched us in the front to not touch the carpet on the stage since it was blessed with what steve called "jersey funk." oh, so apparently this shit is tangible as well.

"new jersey, baby," thurston reflected.

"love it or leave it!" a fan yelled.

"don't give us that option!" lee quipped back.

after "the empty page", thurston felt the need to remove the long-sleeved shirt underneath this very cool looking shirt in the style of a hardcore flyer. "stillborn christians" was a phrase that stuck out. "don't look," he begged us. so we all watched on rapt as mr. moore took off the HC shirt then the hotter one. we all hooted and hollered as steve provided the drumbeat to "The Stripper" and Lee even joined in with his guitar. thurston tossed the shirt at kim, and it landed on her bass head. the roadie behind t's monitors reached out for it, but kim quite nonchalantly threw it into the audience. "i didn't like that shirt anyway," she remarked with a grin.

"that was the first time my tits have been out on stage!" thurston screamed.

"girls gone wild", his wife offered.

"THAT'S jersey funk", jim remarked as he was kneeling on the stage futzing with his 'quip.


things slowed down with "unmade bed" and picked up quickly with "eric's trip." thurston has a hair police sticker on the Drifter Jr now. the next song on the list was "dude ranch nurse", but thurston didn't really want to play it, so they jumped ahead to "stones", which is...ahhh. you know how i feel. lee's backing vocals for the chorus are just the extra fudge on the ice cream on top of the brownie.

dude ranch now? no, "paper cup exit."

dude ranch now? no, now "pch." come on get in the car and all that. so go ahead! (thurston had some incredibly spastic, excitable-boy intros both shows: "Come on let's do it!" "Let's go, let's go!" which the band would, after staring at him in amazed amusement for a few seconds.)

best "pch" i've heard, i'm glad they're sticking with this one. kim shocked the
living hell out of me and perhaps everyone when she took a step down and decided to just sing and hang out in the crowd during the part before the breakdown and right up until she had to go back up for her trumpet part (jim handing her the horn was great). patrick, myself, and everyone around kim had some stupid dumb grins on our faces--KIM'S TOTALLY RIGHT NEXT TO US, DUDE! out of all the band, i would expect thurston to get interactive--not kim, at all. patrick got a really good shot of her in the crowd, he was inches from her, so no excuse for him not to.

so NOW dude...nooooooo, "new hampshire." thurston doing some jive talk about the aerosmith boys during the instro intro. i glanced and saw that the crowd was actually moving, which i was wondering about, with a city so rich in indie lore as this and indie lore being so filled with crowds who don't dance just put their hands in their pants (now look bored, look bored...oh christ, i'm quoting fat joe, help!)

then they left, right back down the steps. except for steve and jim who just stayed on the stage, ahahahahahhahaa. damn, wonder if an encore is imminent? as it was they did a "sister" encore, with "catholic block" and "schizophrenia". CB featured some funny/cool yowling from thurston during the buildup. "schizo" had to be restarted when thurston fucked up the intro.

more funny thurston came when they got back onstage for the encore and he proclaimed, "i just kissed jim's girlfriend, all sweaty 'n shit. i just got offstage and gah!"

so...we head back out and almost immediately move back up to where the line was for the first show. we're behind like 5 people, so not bad. you? ANOTHER fucking sonic youth fan who's also a slayer fan. someone should do a survey on this."

some guys in front of us brought up the rumor that Jim skipped out on the Providence show not due to family crisis but rather the "fact" that there is a warrant for his arrest in Rhode Island. internet rumor, first perpetrated on the offical forum. i don't put much stock in this yak for one reason...arrest for WHAT? come on, if you're gonna start a sad-ass rumor at least offer up an offense and make it a good one. like, he's wanted for pissing on a david grubbs fan who started shit with him in a bar. fuck outta here.

the setlist was unchanged save 5 songs: "plastic sun", "skip tracer", "rain on tin", "expressway" and "shadow of a doubt". the show was perfectly fine, but the crowd was heavier in yahooing yahoos and the band was noticeably lower in the tank. not that they sleptwalk or crawled through these songs, but damn i feel bad for people who didn't get to see the first show.

"party at steve's house!" yelled one yahoo.

"kim gordon's panties!" (dude, that woulda been funny to yell out the LAST time they played here!)

thurston was not actually lower in the energy tank, but this was perhaps due to his POSSIBLY being higher in another tank. wink nudge.

"it's great to be back in new jersey." pause. suddenly, he grabs the mic and
brings the mic stand down with him to scream in one girls face, "IT'S REALLY FUCKING EXCELLENT." as i was right next to that girl, i can tell ya, that guy was feeling no pain. bam, oh shit, a cinderblock just bounced off your head thurston. oh...is THAT what that was?

"You're the man, Thurston!"

"Well, thanks. We all die, man. So it doesn't really mean much, does it."

"Speak for yourself," Kim quipped.

"Play whatever you want!" a girl in the crowd hollered.

"Ha, you got that off that album," Thurston sneered back. "That fuckin' uh, that chick says that and then she goes, 'right on', or some other hippie shit."

patrick was up front in front of t-money snapping, i was a couple people behind him.as my visual field was slightly hampered, i had more opportunities to just chill out, bob, even on occasion shut the orbs and phase the fuck out like those chicks in the Murray Street booklet. no drugs, though...just a growing exhaustion.

sure enough, Thurston brought up the Hoboken parade.

"I learned a lot of interesting factoids."

"Such as?" boomed out one tall dude behind me.

"Well...the first baseball game was played here."

"Before steroids!"

"The banana...um..."

"The zipper," Lee added.

"Oh yes, the zipper was invented here."

"Back door delivery!"

"Oh yeah", Thurston acknowledges, "BDD. Didn't know the gang was here tonight."

SY shows are fun to go to not solely for the music, but also the educational value. i would have NEVER known that about the zipper.

Some fuckface with a snap machine asked to let me get in front of him "just this one song" so he could get some pictures. being the nice girl i am, i let him. i didn't get my spot back. if i were a bitch, i would have started some shit before smacking him on the back of his weak pussy neck for a pain
imprint with a expiration date a month from now. i am certainly of the size to do such, if not the mind.

ah fuck it.

during "plastic sun" i was doing the standard head-bob until the "tired of the time" breakdown, at which time my cranial motions slowed to match Steve's intermittent drum punches. i noticed, to my amusement, i was the only one within eyeshot doing so. heh. much like devo, i'm through being cool.

"pattern recognition", which had the flu the first show, got downright pneumonic this time. all i saw was thurston's eyes glazed and glaring down at the front row, namely patrick, who caught sight also and had the presence to move to his left. thurston unstrapped his guitar and tested the speakers with first his sheer weight then his guitar. i won't lie, in tandem with the thrill of seeing one your favorite musicians give themselves up to the whirlwind comes a fear that reminds you, oh christ, don't fall in the audience and hurt someone you dumbass. he didn't, a pro as he is at submission to the momentum.

thurston was mad intense; kim didn't smile very much this show, unlike the first show where she seemed happier than i've ever seen. there was one moment of classic spontaneous merriment, when thurston futzed around with his little radio onstage and picked up some old-school, boom-bap hiphop. he did his own head-bob (the traditional neck-snap, in rap parlance) and amused himself with this for a few seconds behind kim's back. when kim, still turned away, started to do it as well, thurston cracked up and pointed at her. she turned finally to face her husband and for a few more seconds the great couple engaged in some nicely synchronized neck-snappin' to the hard drumbeat. steve was loving it behind the drums, lemme tell ya.

i have never felt so tired.

rain on tin" was the shit. some guy was yelling it for the first show, sure hope he made it back to this show. i still maintain the best "rot" ever (other than Satan Laughs As You Eternally Rot, of course) was Chicago '04, but there is no bad rendition of this song. yet.

SY left, Thurston eschewing the step altogether and deciding to get off at the side where i was standing. seeing this, i stepped aside to give him room. not confident enough to just hop on off, he reached out with a massive right hand and grabbed hold of my right shoulder, gripping it a second or two before making the jump and rushing off. "did that hurt?" patrick asked. i shook my head, amused that i was now able to say that in one night i saw thurston moore with his shirt off AND he touched me.

this one nice girl asked me how different the setlist was this show, and i told her. she was taking some pics and moving merrily, i quite like it when i'm next to someone at a show with a pleasing presence.

"expressway" ended with a wave of noise that reminded me simultaneously how fortunate i was and how weary i had become. the music was beating me down as it was telling me in LOUD CERTAIN TERMS what a lucky card i'd drawn in this game. "this ends one of two ways", i thought. "they drop or i do." they did. i was at once relieved and pissed off.

over...first show better than second, but second no slouch. nice town, nice people more or less.

out of Maxwell's into the breezy night, we were regaled midway by an older gentleman singing a song in Italian. "of course, i could sing it better twenty years ago." he walked on, as did we, and i couldn't help but murmur to Patrick, "yeah, and i bet you could hold your liquor better twenty years ago too, pal."

patrick has a pic of thurston with his shirt off, i didn't know he had
managed to get one till just now. thurston's upper body is like...i don't know how you can get a sunken chest with a beer belly, but this man has both!

DC. What?

Why's that?

-jennthebenn-
The reviews & posts are much appreciated.
I wuold love to see any pics that you might be able to post.

http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v4...gpatty/syindc/

pics from the 8/11/04 show at the 9:30 club in DC.

Thanks again jennthebenn!

Damn jenn you've been to almost all the shows that I've been to as well. Thanks for the 930 pix:D !!! I was drunk as shit and kept yelling "Expressway" during the encore and they played it instead of Making the Nature Scene. Ha!

I just noticed you snagged a setlist. I did too!

Speaking of set-lists, here's the one from the show I went to:

I'm looking forward to my first show ever in Seattle. I've been a fan since DDN but never saw them when I lived in NJ. Living in Anchorage for the past 12 years hasn't made it any easier. Thank god for frequent flier miles

I know what you mean Saturnine.

akprodr:
Have fun @ the Seattle show. Of course, post the story here.

:cool: ...glad they did, they ended the '02 dc show with "nature scene" too if
you remember, got to switch it up a bit.

so far, out of all those shows, that's the only setlist i have. i always felt a little empty inside before then. patrick got a little rapport going on with one of the techs earlier on in the tour (the chicago show) and after the dc show he gave us a setlist and then said, "hold on a sec". went to the side of the stage and came up with a discarded, bendy-as-hell thurston pick. tremendous.

Yeah Expressway really made my night. I'm all about switching it up too. I can't wait to see what gems are in store for us this tour! Something off of Washing Machine other than Skip Tracer would be excellent.