Music Sounds Better With You #5

'Drunken Butterfly' - Sonic Youth

If #4 in this series, Nirvana's 'Smells Like Teen Spirit', has been the single most important and influential song in the genesis of my music tastes up to the present, then this must run it a very close second.

Do you remember the first time a song made left you dumbfounded, breathless, open-mouthed, scraping your jaw up from off the floor? Do you remember the first time a song made you want to pick up a guitar and wreak havoc with it, your eyes having been opened to the sheer fucking COOLNESS of thrashing around abusing musical instruments? And do you remember the first time a song made you realise that, whether on the surface or on some deeper level, all rock 'n' roll is about SEX? Well, I do. For me, it was some time in 1992, when I saw Sonic Youth play 'Drunken Butterfly' on what I think was a compilation show of performances on the American TV programme 'Saturday Night Live'.

Of course, it helped that they were in absolutely impeccable company - the list of fellow performers reads like a 'Who's Who' of early 90s American alternative rock and indie: Pearl Jam ('Alive'), Rage Against The Machine ('Bullet In The Head'), Screaming Trees ('Dollar Bill'), Dinosaur Jr ('Get Me'), Smashing Pumpkins ('Rhinocerous'), Jane's Addiction ('Been Caught Stealing'), REM ('Half A World Away'), Belly ('Feed The Tree') plus, if I remember correctly, appearances from Sugar, Soul Asylum and The Lemonheads. Together with 'Smells Like Teen Spirit', this formed a fantastic introduction to and induction into a whole new sphere of music.

But it was 'Drunken Butterfly' that stood out - a quite glorious cacophonous headfuck explosion of noise that sounded to my wet-behind-the-ears ears like something that had been beamed in from another dimension. A brief synopsis of some of my thoughts: "Is she trying to SING?!" "How can you do THAT with a guitar?" "Is that chorus REALLY 'I love you / I love you / I love you / What's your name?'?!" Straight away, though, I knew this band had SOMETHING. I didn't know what it was - but I just knew I needed it, badly.

And so it was that I availed myself of a copy of Dirty, the album upon which 'Drunken Butterfly' appeared. It was copied onto cassette for me by a guy from school who I wasn't especially friendly with but who I knew was into good music. He'd had an ear-to-ear grin on his face when he managed to get hold of the limited edition Nirvana / Jesus Lizard split single, and when I saw him wandering around school in a Daydream Nation T-shirt I knew he was the person I had to ask. So thanks, Steve H, wherever you are - I'm eternally in your debt.

[Going off on a tangent - I guess everyone has friends they share and copy music with (in this respect I owe huge debts to Olav and Leon, amongst others), but do you ever feel thankful and grateful to those people who you've perhaps only known briefly or in passing but who have contributed to your record collection in some small way? One guy I really didn't like copied Nirvana's Incesticide for me, and if it wasn't for a girl I knew briefly a couple of years back, I'd never have had anything by Unwound. From a personal point of view, I should also mention the small and rather eclectic range of CDs available for borrowing, and therefore copying, at my local library back home - by this means I've added to my collection albums like: Led Zeppelin - IV, Soundgarden - Louder Than Love, Sugar - Copper Blue, Portishead - Dummy, Bananarama - Greatest Hits...]

Despite the opinions of self-styled hipsters and indie elitists, Dirty is a loud, brash and quite brilliant album, and was for many, including myself, a superb introduction to an inestimably influential band - don't just take my word for it, read Andrew Unterberger's excellent review for Stylus magazine of the recently released Deluxe edition of the album. It sounds rather curious to describe a Sonic Youth album as particularly accessible - but everything's relative and Dirty is, at least more so than a record like Bad Moon Rising. One thing about Dirty is that the tracks on it don't sound strange when abstracted and taken out of their recorded context, partly because the album doesn't quite have the aesthetic coherence and wholeness (even if it does have the consistence of quality) of their previous albums. Whether that makes it a "pop" record or not, I don't really care. Daydream Nation may be the absolute pinnacle of their achievements, but there is a piece of my heart that is forever Dirty.

Inspired a love of: experimental / noise / art / indie rock, ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead, Dinosaur Jr, The Jesus & Mary Chain, Pavement, Sebadoh, The Stooges, Come, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, The Velvet Underground, Blond Redhead, Idlewild, Clinic, My Bloody Valentine, Sleater-Kinney, Shellac, Boss Hog, Love As Laughter, Seafood, Unwound, Urusei Yatsura...