No one has better personified Sonic Youth’s aesthetic—pop-culture commentary meets existential-art snobbery—than Thurston Moore, the band’s fearlessly experimental leader for the past 25 years. In addition to the band’s 2004 album Sonic Nurse and the publication of the book Mix Tape (a compendium of cassettes-as-communication), Moore has recently overseen the deluxe reissue of SY’s 1990 major-label debut Goo. MAGNET caught up with Moore moments before he walked onstage for his band’s set at the Greek outdoor festival Rockwave.

So how’s the tour going? This is the second leg, right?
The tour’s OK. This time of year, we’re playing all these weird festivals, you know? Usually outdoors. Secret Machines are playing right now. We’re going to play next

What’s in the set list now? Is it mostly stuff from Sonic Nurse?
We play everything. We play stuff from Sonic Nurse, but also stuff from all our records. We have enough songs now to mix it up. The older stuff, though, the kind of guitars we used, we lost a lot of those guitars at one point, so we can never play some of those songs again. They’re hard to remember because they’re so weird. At the time, it was like, “We’ve even listened to the master tapes, and we still can’t figure out what we did.” I don’t know what we were thinking, or what we did. We don’t remember! We never notate our music, so it’s impossible. You can try to replicate it, but you don’t really have it

What does it feel like to have been playing rock ’n’ roll for 25 years? What’s changed, and what’s still the same?
Well, we’re a hell of a lot older than when we started, that’s for sure. Twenty-five years older! [Laughs] We’re like old people now playing music. I’m so glad we stuck it out because it’s a lot better. I feel really great about what we’re doing; I used to feel conflicted, kind of anxious. Now I feel like I can do anything. I do feel like our apprenticeship is over. I really recommend—if you can, if you feel devotional about it—sticking it out. It’s hard for bands to stick it out because people grow up, you know, and it never really pays off. If you’re looking for some sort of payoff, it’s not gonna happen. I mean, no one really gets rich doing this. A couple people do, Black Sabbath does. [Laughs] There’ll be one or two bands at these festivals headlining, you know, like Black Sabbath, they sell lots of records and make money, but everybody else underneath them ... I mean, we don’t sell any records anymore.

Well, I buy your records, but clearly, I’m not enough to support a band.
Thanks very much. We really appreciate it. But we’ve never had a gold record or anything. We make more money from being active, working, publishing, we have a great catalog at this point. We never really had any “hits,” we had some songs people seem to know better than others, and we do play those, but we don’t have to play “Sweet Home Alabama” every night.

For being such big music fans/record collectors, you guys have never really been known for playing covers, either live or on record; maybe “Hotwire My Heart.” Are there any in the set list now?
We never really played one live a lot. We did “I Wanna Be Your Dog” really early on, when we first started. And we really took liberties with it. But no, we’ve done some others: “Hallowed Be My Name” by Alice Cooper. We recorded it but only played it live once. We think about it all the time, but we’re not set up as a standard rock band, so it doesn’t really lend itself to us doing it very often.

What has people’s reaction been to the Mix Tape book so far?
Pretty good so far, except for the people I solicited to participate but aren’t in the book. They’re like, “Hey, man, I FedExed this thing to you and it’s not in the book, what the fuck?” The only reason that happened is because I got told by the publisher it was more of a technical question than an artistic question. I didn’t really conceive of that project, it already existed at the publishers. [They] called me and said, “Would you like to be the editor of this?” And I said, “Sure, it sounds a little goofy, but at the same time, I’d like to do it if I could make it more personalized and not try to be some kind of academic study on mix tapes.” To me, it was too large a cultural thing to deal with it, so I said I only wanted to deal with it on a personal level. There are aspects of it I don’t want to get into because they’re too large. Like the whole hip-hop mix tape thing—that’s a whole book unto itself, really. And it’s a different aesthetic as far as what I think they wanted, which was more like people giving mix tapes to each other as love letters or something, and more as outlets for creative visual-art ideas. So I reached out to a bunch of artists I knew, different musicians, basically everybody and anybody in my address book. So people came back to me with ideas, and I put them in a huge envelope and sent them to the publisher. Then I only really had to “yes” and “no” to certain aspects of how it looked. I wrote pieces for it, for each chapter or section. I did a lot of work on it, but I’m happy with how it came out.

It made me wonder what other sorts of things you might bring to a publisher given your involvement in poetry and other written arts.
What I really want to do is a book on the history of the no-wave music scene in New York, how it extended out and formed lots of other things. It was such a great visual culture, something that I was living amongst, so I have all the information about it. I really want to get all the photographs; there has been some documentation but not specifically of it. Books like the one Henry Rollins put out, (Stephanie Chernikowski’s) Dream Baby Dream are good, but I wanna do one that’s specifically about no-wave. So I wanna get someone like Byron Coley to write the text, get all the photographs and lay it out, research, discographies, filmographies and talk about the different artists that were involved at that time. Why doesn’t MAGNET do some book publishing? You know, MAGNET Books? C’mon—tour diaries, you could just do it. No, I’d love to do some more book publishing, I really would. Like you said, I sort of edit a poetry journal we put out independently. I helped publish this journal of punk-rock photography from late-’70s San Francisco. That’d be something I’d like to do more of; another non-money-making activity. [Laughs]

Speaking of the mix tape, what’s on Sonic Youth’s road tape?
Flipper. Flipper still rules. Montrose. Sparks—like, pre-Georgio Moroder Sparks. But some of that’s on there. Bar-Kays. You know, that kind of stuff. The new CD-Rs from (former Hardkiss vanity label) Sunburn, we’ve been listening to those a lot, they’re really good.

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