The Smelly Underground Prevails

The Smelly Underground Prevails: Sonic Youth, Die Kreuzen & Laughing Hyenas at First Avenue

A.S. Van Dorston

November 1988

When I recently read the sparkling review of one of the wimpiest bands ever in these pages, I felt a sense of grave injustice being forced upon the valiant population of people who still have good taste. Although Duran Duran were relatively inventive in their own day (1981), they have since been guilty of making some of the most vile candy-coated pop-slop dribble ever to ooze out of the top 40 airwaves. But never fear, for it is possible to escape those wastelands filled with antiseptic sounds where groups like Duran Duran take a wretched commercial ditty and mutate it into an even more putrid pop song. Allow me to escort you from one slime pit to another...

Yes folks, it's pretty dark down here in the underground music scene, and kind of stinky too. That's right, real passion and energy makes you sweat, and the smell is just as real. Here we are at First Avenue and it's Monday, November 7. Opening up this all-ages show is Laughing Hyenas. I'm not sure if they are from Wisconsin or Michigan, but wherever it is, it must be a very, very bad place. If Sam Kinison had been an abused child and grew up in the streets to end up in a rock and roll band, it probably would have sounded like the Laughing Hyenas. I believe “painful” is the most accurate description of their music. Oh god it hurts. The singer screams and screams and he's so pissed off at the world that you just want to go give him a hug and say, "Hey dude, things ain't that bad" but you're afraid that he'll sodomize you with the mike stand. Of course, not all their angst is for real, and I have a feeling that their tongues can occasionally be found in their cheeks while they laugh at the same things that other bands take much too seriously. Laughing Hyenas were fun, even if their songs lacked diversity and rip off The Birthday Party.

Die Kruezen is a band from Madison, WI who released their latest album earlier this year, Century Days. They reminded me an awful lot of our own Soul Asylum, but more bombastic. I was slightly disappointed with their treatment of my favorite tune "Elizabeth", which seemed to lack the fire of the recording. They piddled around with some slower songs and guitar effects that ranged from entrancing to cheesy, until the last fifteen minutes of the set when they raised the tempo and excitement until much of the crowd warmed up like molecules over a Bunsen burner. Tension seemed to continue building in anticipation of the main attraction, Sonic Youth.

Formed in 1981, this New York band defied the general consensus that all the revelatory possibilities in their kind of music had been exhausted. Their influences range from the Velvet Underground to the Stooges to X and Pussy Galore. The end result is a continuing series of groundbreaking albums that have revolutionized the concept of what a guitar band could sound like. Perhaps if Jimi Hendrix hadn't died he would have gotten around to experimenting with the unique type of guitar sounds that made Sonic Youth famous. Guitarists Thurston Moore and Lee Renaldo make sounds that any other band would deliver as merely noise. Instead, it is at once ethereal, menacing, melodic, even pretty. They employed several methods of squeezing out those wonderful noises, including jamming a screwdriver between the middle area of the fret board and the strings, and running a drumstick up and down the guitar or, in a particular moment of frenzy, smashing it against one of the more beat-up guitars and breaking the strings. This would happen during their longer smorgasbords of guitar showcases and between the more sharply concise songs from their new album that would melt down the distinctions between avant-gardism and pure energy. They have refined their competence well on the last four albums, Bad Moon Rising (1985), EVOL (1986), last year's Sister, and the newly released Daydream Nation, which both extends this synthesis and makes it more defined.

Besides "I Love Her All the Time" from Bad Moon Rising, most of the show featured the new album. The songs had the traditional Youth aural maelstroms, frantic chunks of neurotic drones, and grinding, rough music that brings them to the point of grimy yet inspired distortion. Dizzying highlights were "Silver Rocket" and "'Cross the Breeze", when the songs either gradually build up until sparks fly or alternate between the walls of sound and incredibly fast bursts of thrashing guitar. It's almost as fun to observe the people in front of the stage during these whirlwinds. A mix of high schoolers, punks, trendy college-age admirers (including a gaggle of Macalester students who mostly hung out around the perimeters of the club), and PIBS (people in black) would either swirl around in a twisting blur of motion or slam-dance, depending upon the sonic cues given by the band. The slamming occasionally became quite rowdy and painful, and yours truly eventually had to escape after getting slightly ruffled. Stage diving is another sight to admire when the dozens of people who are tightly packed in front of the stage hold up their arms and support people who dive into them, appearing as if they are floating on water.

Nearing the end of an intense encore, Thurston Moore began growling feverishly into the microphone, "This is gonna fuck you up, man...Gonna fuck you up". This went on for several minutes while roadies scrambled to plug extra guitars and microphones into the amplifiers. Suddenly all three bands joined together for a version of the Stooges' "I Wanna Be Your Dog" and it was simply orgasmic. Although the singer from Laughing Hyenas nearly drowned out everything, I had great fun watching band members stage dive and go insane. Yes folks, the underground scene lives on, and some say that it even "rules", the evidence of it reminding me for the next two days within my ringing ears.