Vinylogue
Thurston Moore
The Sonic Youth co-founder shares his favorite stories from his journey in record collecting, from New York to Tokyo and back again.
“I always joke around and say that you can’t roll a joint on a download,” said Thurston Moore, founder of Sonic Youth and all around underground music hero.
As famous as Moore is for helping create seminal albums like Bad Moon Rising, Sister, Daydream Nation, Goo, and Dirty (to name a few) his status as a ravenous, lifetime collector of vinyl and cassettes has equally been known for decades. Back in a 1988 video interview, Moore walked the director through his small railway apartment, which had more records, cassettes, and zines than the floor space. Near the end, he grabbed a record, Sly & The Family Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On, from the top of a wobbly stack and offered it to the interviewer as if it were a piece of gum.
I think records, out of anything that a parent owns, are the one thing that is coolest to their teenagers.
Thurston Moore
He discovered his obsession with physical media early. Like many other kids, Moore admired his older brother’s record collection. In particular, he fell in love with the 1963 Kingsmen single, “Louie Louie,” an early garage-rock style track. He cites it as the song that introduced him to harsher rock music. Listening to “Louie Louie” was the first domino to fall in what would lead to a lifetime of music, collecting, and world exploring
After high school, Moore moved to New York City and dove into the burgeoning No Wave and experimental scenes with icons like Teenager Jesus and the Jerks’ Lydia Lunch, Glenn Branca, and Swans’ Michael Gira. In 1981, he started Sonic Youth with Kim Gordon (bass, vocals), Lee Ranaldo (guitar, vocals), and their first drummer, Richard Edson. (The band wouldn’t settle on a longstanding drummer until 1985 when Steve Shelley joined.)
Sonic Youth’s story is now a critical part of rock history. By combining garage rock and punk stylings with a penchant for feedback, prepared guitars, and industrial elements, the group positioned themselves just left of center enough to make those on either side of experimental music happy. Throughout the band’s lifecycle, the members experimented with spoken word, grunge, and other styles to mixed results, but their mission to explore new ground never faltered over three decades.
In the mid-1980s, Moore started Ecstatic Peace!, a Massachusetts-based label that mainly re-released out-of-print electronic music. The label eventually closed due to the cost of running it. More recently, though, he’s been helming the Daydream Library Series with his wife, Eva Prinz, an extension of their publishing imprint Ecstatic Peace Library. The label specializes in limited-edition number vinyl and cassette runs in pristine collector’s edition packaging, including his latest record in a series of many successful solo releases, Flow Critical Lucidity, featuring Jem Doulton, James Sedwards, My Bloody Valentine’s Deb Googe, and Negativland’s Jon Leidecker.
Now in his mid ‘60s, Moore still talks about records as if he were still a kid listening to “Louie Louie.” He laughs about exploits and ridiculous purchases, overfilling the house with vinyl and his love for “Japanese noise cassettes that sound like toilets flushing.” However, his collecting philosophy doesn’t center around listening. That’s the last thing he’s interested in.
I can’t just be living, building furniture out of records. I [still] have a pretty healthy Wantlist on Discogs, though.
Thurston Moore
“A lot of my interest in music goes beyond simply the content of the music itself,” said Moore. “So for me, records were also so much more than that. To the point where, as I got older, listening to the record was kind of the last thing I was interested in, because I felt like I had decoded pretty much what that was going to be. I was interested in these other aspects, like the physicality of the record, the touch, the vibratory quality, the smell of the record.”
Yes, the smell.
Moore claims that his friend and Time Bomb Records proprietor, Kenji Kodama, can accurately guess a record’s country of origin by smell. During the annual WFMU Record Fair in Manhattan, N.Y., Kodama made his powers known. Moore and his assembly of record geeks tested him. “Sure enough,” he was right every time,” he said.
Moore’s life overflows with stories like this: Outlandish tales about hunting the next great record as if it were big game alongside a cast of fellow musicians, journalists, and store owners. Throughout the interview, the guitar hero shared some of his most memorable moments, laughing at himself the whole time.
Record Collecting With Sonic Youth
Although his collecting journey began when he was young, Moore claims he didn’t get “serious” about collecting until his 30s, which was also around the time his love for records moved from sonic to tactile. At the time, Sonic Youth was beginning to see the fruits of their labor and have some disposable income, thanks to the success of their record, Goo. After touring relentlessly for almost a decade and releasing seven albums, Neil Young invited the band to open for the Weld arena tour. The combination of this newfound income and access to their first stint on a tour bus proved to be the catalyst for Moore. “For me, the greatest aspect of the tour bus was that it had so much real estate in it for records,” he said.
On that tour, Sonic Youth found out Young preferred a relaxed tour schedule, a far cry from the DIY grindset mentality they were used to.
“I would be left to my devices quite a bit on that tour, and I’d have one or two days in any town,” said Moore. “And I would invariably find a yellow pages and find where the record stores were. I would find the record stores, and I would tear out that page. There have to be lots of phone books around the world with record store listings torn out of them because of people like me… I must have come home from that tour with 4,000 albums in boxes and boxes. So that decade especially, was big for me.”
As the band continued to gain success and tour, Moore’s appetite only increased. While touring Europe, he learned how to say “record store” in a variety of languages and subsequently ranted on stage about said stores being closed on Sundays, when the band typically had off. Japanese shops, were open on Sundays, though, which became one of the many reasons the location has become one of Moore’s favorites.
“Japan was a gold mine of record shopping once you first figure it out,” he said. He began studying the kanji symbols he could use to identify stores. Since many shops lacked street presence, he would have to scan the massive office buildings for those symbols among a sea of other neon signs several stories off the ground. Eventually, with the help of a published record store guide he found, he started to decode his way through the busy streets of Tokyo and Osaka.
“[You would] go into [the skyscrapers] with a wish and a prayer in the elevator, which is usually just the size of one human, and go up,” he recounts. “The door would open, and there’d be a hallway with warrens of rooms. You’d peak into the rooms, and there’d be different places for shipping clothing or other companies. Then, sure enough, you’d open a door, and there’d be some proprietor at the desk smoking a cigarette, just packed full of albums. Usually, it was almost fetishistic. There’d only be Beatles albums or the Rolling Stones albums or certain genres. So you had to start figuring out where the genre stores were.”
Enamored by the vinyl scene in Japan, Moore found even the chain stores, like Disk Union, to have underground releases stocked. He also cites Banana Record as one of his independent favorites. On another trip to the country, he went with Jim O’Rourke and Mats Gustafsson. Together, they were part of a free improvisational trio named Diskoholics Anonymous, a nod to their vinyl addiction.
“I could write a book about that tour, as far as record collecting goes,” said Moore. “We actually made a record of free improvisational noise music and brought it with us, just so we could trade it in Japan for records. That record is very rare. It only exists in Japan. Not many of the stores wanted it. So it didn’t really work out as planned, though.”
Looking back, Moore laughs at how far he would go to build his collection. At one point during a trip to Europe, while performing at a free improvisational music festival, someone approached him and told him about a record collector who passed away, and left thousands of avant-garde jazz records up for grabs. Moore leapt at the opportunity, traveling to the house several hours away, despite being scheduled to play later that day.
“We got to this place and went through the collection,” he said. “I bought 200 albums. I had no idea how I was going to get them back to the States. I had brought over my amplifier with me [to Europe], which was in a road case. I took the amplifier out of the case and filled it full of the albums. I gaffer taped it up and loaded it onto the plane. So, I had to put the amp on the plane without a case. ‘Fuck the amplifiers, as long as the records are safe,’ I thought at the time.”
Moore’s Record Collection, Circa 2024
In recent years, Moore has cut back on his collecting. However, he maintains most of his massive collection, which he has scattered across the U.S. and U.K. His most public downsize came in 2019 when he sold approximately 300 highly collectible records at the World of Echo Record Store. Ultimately, that’s a fractional amount of his total collection. Now living with his wife and their two dogs, his buying habits have slowed, but he certainly hasn’t stopped.
“I kind of have to draw some limitations with my responsibility toward my own budget. I can’t just be living, building furniture out of records. I [still] have a pretty healthy Wantlist on Discogs, though. I continue to buy records all the time. I’m always interested in going to record stores, and I get my Discogs alerts for records I want. I would say I purchase on Discogs at least two or three times a week.”
With a solid amount of material still coming in, Moore’s listening time is spent almost exclusively listening to physical music. Originally sticking to vinyl and cassettes, CDs have also made their way into his collection. At first he was apprehensive of the medium when it initially exploded in popularity, but now he thinks they aged well.
Ultimately, if it’s a physical release, no matter the format, Moore’s likely to be interested in it.
“I heard a story about Sun Ra going to tour Egypt, and he asked the promoter to send him some fabric from there,” said Moore. “The promoter asked him, ‘Why?’ Sun Ra supposedly replied, ’So I can feel the vibrations of where I’m going to from the people. So if you send me some weave from Egypt, I’ll be prepared.’ In some ways that’s completely esoteric Sun Ra. In another way, it totally makes sense to me. There’s something I glean from the actual physical property of the physical format of a recording that tells me so much more of the story that is being exchanged from the artist to the listener.”
Moore does have issues with streaming and artist payouts, he doesn’t cast judgement on the younger generations who spend most of their time digitally consuming music. He has noticed the increase in teenagers getting into records, despite them being “outdated.”
“I also noticed that 15-year olds are very interested in records,” he said. “They know records are cool. They know records are from their parent’s era. And therefore, that equals somethings that is of another generation, which they have all the right in the world to be resistant to. But, at the same time, I think records, out of anything that a parent owns, are the one thing that is coolest to their teenagers.”
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Interested in reading more editions of Vinylogue? Check out our features with The Black Keys, Colleen Murphy, and Peanut Butter Wolf.
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Rock N Roll ConsciousnessThurston Moore2017Alternative Rock, Indie RockVinyl, LP, Single Sided, Etched
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