When you heard Thurston Moore planned to release some exclusive Sonic Youth tracks through Starbucks, you probably thought it was a joke, right?
It’s not. Hits Are for Squares goes up for sale June 10 at select Starbucks stores, and online via Starbucks Entertainment’s Hear Music/Universal Special Markets.
The disc collects 14 Sonic Youth famous-people-favorites, plus one brand new and exclusive Sonic Youth jam called “Slow Revolution”. Famous musicians, pals of Sonic Youth, and world-changers who contributed to the comp include Eddie Vedder, Dave Eggers, David Cross, Chloë Sevigny, Radiohead, Beck, the Flaming Lips, Mike Watt, Flea, Mike D, Gus Van Sant, and Juno screenwriter Diablo Cody. Promised but not delivered (scheduling conflicts, we’d guess) Jeff Tweedy and Marc Jacobs.
Moore leaked his roasty Starbucks news to Pitchformedia.com way back in June 2007, joking, “Starbucks is the new record store, right?” Kim Gordon later remarked that Starbucks is “less evil than” Universal, parent to Sonic Youth’s label, Geffen.
Though hoarier readers may prefer to think of kids getting into Sonic Youth via an old copy of Confusion Is Sex, Starbucks is a music retailer with some taste–and it’s clear Sonic Youth would rather work with the coffee vendors than traditional labels.
Starbucks acquired Hear Music in 1999, and in 2004 launched its own channel on XM Satellite Radio. In Seattle, Austin, San Antonio and Miami, coffee and music lovers can download and mix custom CDs at Starbucks Hear Music Coffeehouses. Starbucks wants to do for CDs what it’s done for nonfat grande lattes, and it might just be working: Starbucks reports selling 4.4 million CDs in North America in 2007, up 22 percent from the year before.
Of course, keeping new CDs in stock can hardly be a top priority for a coffee shop compared to keeping enough soy milk around. Many Starbucks locations may only have one Frank Sinatra, or Buddy Holly, or Carly Simons CD languishing, not a healthily filled rack. This new Sonic Youth album’s cover speaks volumes on who may buy the disc: yuppie dudes popping in for a quick recharge of energy. Even if yuppies are not the future, buying music at Starbucks might be.
We were on the sidewalk out front of the Antenna Club in Memphis, late one winter’s eve. I was gassed up with triple-distilled courage and standing next to Barkmarket’s tour manager, Brian. To my other side was my bass player. He and I were brandishing the two components of our van’s steering wheel Club®. The three of us (this is how I remember it anyway) were facing down the venue’s owner and two or three huge motherfuckers–a bouncer and a couple of massive meat mounds–fellas chummier with the owner than with us. The guys from Barkmarket might have been just behind us or on the periphery, but their rhythm section (drummer, Rock Savage and bass player, John Nowlin) weighed all of two hundred pounds between them. Anyway, we were in a shouting match over fifty dollars. Barkmarket, a trio from Brooklyn, NY, had booked a tour and my band had butted our way onto a few of the dates trying to get gas money from California back home to Detroit. Brian insisted that the owner had, in advance, agreed to pay my band fifty dollars as a late add to the bill. It was a Sunday or Monday, the show had been a disaster at the door, and now he didn’t want to pay us anything and was calling Brian a liar and a troublemaker.
After a few minutes of this, the owner went back inside his bar and seconds later a car engine revved somewhere behind the building. All of a sudden a souped-up Mustang with glass packs came roaring and squealing out from the alley behind the club and tried to turn onto the side street. The driver lost control and ran smack dab into a telephone pole. He slammed it in reverse but the front end was wrapped around the pole, so, with tires screeching and smoking, the car started wheeling itself around the pole, still tethered to it by the front end. It finally came loose and the rear end of the car smashed into the corner of a neighbor’s front porch. We could now see that the windshield was spider-webbed where the driver’s forehead had shattered it. When he put it in drive it was instantly clear that the radiator, fan sprocket and whatever else, were jammed up from the collision and the car wasn’t going anywhere. He managed to get it into a spot off the street, right next to telephone pole. With steam billowing from under the hood, the club owner wrestled the door open and emerged unsteadily from the car. Blood streamed down his face as he staggered off down the side street, into the night, and we saw no more of him.
So, with the fifty-dollar issue settled we started to load our gear into the van. Only when we got to Barkmarket’s van, three of the tires were flat, all bearing six-inch long knife slashes to the sidewalls. A note on the windshield read, “Love Memphis. Don’t Dis Elvis,” apparently in reference to some innocuous wise crack Barkmarket’s front man, Dave Sardy, had made at the expense of The King.
While we drank at the bar across the street waiting for the tow truck there was a murmur-cum-rumbling spreading through the local patronage and a number of nasty glances were cast our way. Apparently one of the bartenders sensed trouble brewing and made a phone call. A couple minutes later a cop car appeared on the street in front of the bar, where it sat until the crippled van and all seven of our Yankee asses were spirited away to the refuging hospitality of strangers.
If you are already hip to Barkmarket, I hope you enjoyed the story. If you are not, they started releasing records in 1987. Their third effort, Vegas Throat (Triple X, 1992), saw them distinguish themselves from an immense field of dirgey, drop-tuned, New York “industrial noise” bands. Their distinctive characteristics may have been the novocaine-free tooth-pulling, melodic grind of their music and the sardonic wit of Sardy, which wasn’t immediately apparent in what at first could be taken for unedited, throat-mangling, vocal catharsis.
Barkmarket was all hooks embedded in a tangle of weird noises and franticly precise tribal drum beats, which often got washed over by the preponderance of elegantly distorted and percussive bass guitar underneath Sardy’s (who produced all of their records) deftly open-tuned wall of six-string sorcery. They were rarer still, among bands of such sonic might, in that their records were pert nigh as powerful as their live set.
Rick Rubin signed them to Def American Records after Vegas Throat and Sardy become steadily involved in engineering and producing Rubin-related projects in Los Angeles studios. Barkmarket continued to make beautifully jagged-edged records. Sardy said that after he handed over to Rubin Barkmarket’s freshly completed third recording for Def American–a typically swampy slag heap of infectious metal mash-ups–the enigmatic legend listened to it and his only response was, “I thought you’d be over this shit by now.”
Well, although Barkmarket never got over it, they did, quite unfortunately, quit doing it around 1997.
Discography:
1-800-GODHOUSE (Purge/Sound League, 1987)
Easy Listening (Brake Out, 1989)
Vegas Throat (Triple X, 1991; re-mastered and re-released, Def American, 1992)
Gimmick (Def American, 1993)
Peacekeeper Vinyl EP (Man’s Ruin,1994)
Lard Room EP (American Recordings, 1995)
L. Ron (American Recordings, 1996)