What Other Band Got You Into Sonic Youth?
 

Maybe you're like me and you just discovered Sonic Youth randomly twisting the left side of the radio dial a long, long time ago (it was "She's in a Bad Mood", and I never turned back!) However, most people I meet were more likely turned onto SY by some other band dropping their name or touring with them. Nirvana of course were huge cheerleaders for them, but so have been other groups. So who, if anyone, got you into SY, and do you still like that first band as well?

as I mentioned before: yes Nirvana
and I still like em, but definately do not listen to them often these days

I saw them on The Simpsons when I was about 11 and thought they looked pretty cool. At that time I took most of my musical tasting from TV, I didn't have the internet just yet.

The first I ever heard of 'em was courtesy of Pete Buck in a R.E.M. interview circa Fables.

An aside, but Confusion is Sex is the first one I got and I worked my way from there (eventually getting the ep).

DDN was my first, I recognised the cover. Then Dirty.

I should have put R.E.M. in the poll. I forgot how much they pushed SY early on as well as touring with them in the '90s. Too late to change the list.

Matt Groening would be very, very happy to hear that.

The Hives. Hmm, not really, but I discovered Sonic Youth because they played the Nevermind (what was it anyway) video at the Virgin Megastore I was in to buy The Hives' albums. I was fascinated by that music, and that's how I discovered the band

i think the first band that made me think "hmmm, maybe these art fags are actually doing something interesting" was thursday.

My older brother brought back his album collection that he gathered from being away at UCLA. I was a high schooler starving for new music at the time so I grabbed them and listened. Daydream Nation was among them.

goo had a cool cover and was used.
i bought it and my life was changed.

I remember seeing the video for 100% on MTV once when I was too young to even care about music. (It was around the time Dirty came out so I couldn't have been more than 6 years old). What got me into Sonic Youth was a progression from The Velvet Underground and luckily finding DDN one day.

I had to go w/ Nirvana, but I do remember first hearing them on, Welcome To Hell the Toy Machine skate video. The great artist/skater, Ed Templeton had, "Titanium Expose" as his music.

Wow, that's awesome! Fables came out in '85 too. Really neat that Peter was into that period of SY.

Anyway, uh, I got into the Yoof through the Pixies. I was looking for similar bands and someone recommended them to me. They weren't really similar at all, which led to my initial disappointment, but I've learned to love them over the years, even more than the Pixies.

It wasn't another band that got me into them, but rather a guy I went to high school with. He sat next to me in biology and used to wear SY shirts a lot. I remember asking him about the band, and he let me borrow a couple cds.

I think I read the same article that Atari did, though I was already into SY by a few months. The one I read was in Pulse magazine (the magazine put out by Tower Records) and it had Buck's list of top ten favorite albums and Walls Have Ears was on the list.

Funny, because SY claimed to dislike that record and consider it a bootleg. Yet when I was at school in Bellingham with Steve Turner (prior to Mudhoney) he had a copy he'd lend me to take to my radio show.

same. and he used mote in jump of building. as well as rain on tin on good and evil. ed templeton is dah shit.

where's pavement in the options? pavement are responsible for a big chunk of my musical tastes.

My parents used to take my brother and I everywhere, so one night when they were invited to a nice dinner at a parishioner's house (my dad was an Episcopal Priest) we went too. my bro and I would be the only kids there. I was 13/14 and my brother was 11 or so. All the other guests were older couples whose children had al;ready left the house.
we were used to entertaining ourselves so we raided their magazine racks. I was reading an old and beat-up People magazine and looking at the music reviews. One of the reviews was for SISTER. It described a band that rocked in a way that made no fuckinh sense to me, a headbanger/metalhead at the time. they described sounds like industrial machinery walking around or squalls of sound or weird shit. wow. the picture showed these people who did not look like a band, not like def leppard or metallica or judas priest loooked like a band, you know?
A few months later I was watching 120 minutes and recording videos on the ol VHS. The title in the corner read "Teenage Riot/Sonic Youth/Daydream Nation" I hit record and sat in silence listening to the song unfold. it blew my fucking mind. the spazz video flummoxed my eyes, and brain and the flashing faces and people and some I recognized and many I did not. It was glorious.
it is hard to explain exactl;y how fuckijng different and cheap and bizarre and unnerving and cryptic that video was in 1987/88. There was nothing else like it.
I went to good ol sound exchange and found the Daydream Nation cassette. The cover befuddled me. a candle. a painting of a caNDLE. that did not jive with the freakazoids in the video I saw.
I bought it. Back then I read every tiny bit of print in the liner notes and on the cassette. bands would hide shit, they would sometimes leave messages to us , THE FANS.
the cassette smelled like mineral spirits/turpentine. The label was Blast First, which I had never heard of. WOW

daydream nation fucking rules all.

after that there was nothing else/ obsession began, and has continued to this day. I consider myself their #1 FAN! yeah! fuck all y'all!!!!

:P
:P

hahahaha, just kidding. I am stoned. I have had to correct so much spelling on this fducking post.

I had never heard of them other than people magazine and then 120 minutes. other bands did not mention them, like they mentioned the misfits or other such bands

uhhh...why is phish in the options?

Because Phish regularly name drop SY, and SY have actively sought the jam-band neo-hippie crowd at least since 1,000 Leaves and their regular appearances at Bonaroo.

It seemed like a relatively calculated move when Jerry Garcia died that suddenly Sonic Youth were vocally very pro-hippie. All those kids following the Dead around were going to have to find somewhere else to go (mind most of them enrolled at Evergreen, which was really kind of obnoxious if you happened to live in Olympia) and SY were just opening their arms and saying come on board.

So, while I kind of doubt anyone would admit it, I bet there are some people who at least read this board who got into SY via Phish. To me, that would be no more lame than getting there via Pearl Jam.

well yeah, but fuck the hippies, man!

Don't say that in front of Thurston and Lee!

Personally, I think there have always been good hippies and bad hippies. Hawkwind were hippies that inspired the Sex Pistols. Lothar and the Hand People, The Fugs, Syd Barrett, Red Crayola in the "freeform freakout" days, all good hippies. Neo-hippie trustafarians, white reggae, and jam bands (including, no, especiallly Phish) bad hippies. There have always been plenty of idiot punks too, and don't get me started on "noise musicians"...

i was kidding, i said "fuck, the hee-ppies, maaaaaaaaaaaan."

some girl who liked hole.

phish will make you think you had a soul and that they stole it, magnificent stuff live. the records are a pale shadoww
always building building higher fereakoutssss

Well, some girl who liked Hole had me listen to Bull in the Heather.

But some THrobbing Gristle freak burnt me Confusion is Sex... and since we both met and bonded over a liking of Merzbow, I'll say Merzbow really got me into sonic youth.

My older sister gave me DDN to listen to when I was in the 6th grade, followed up by Sister (har har).

In the mid to late '80s, around the time I was finishing up secondary and starting uni, there was a whole bunch of bands that were constantly being credited as 'Velvet Underground followers'. Now, that VU comparison might have been exaggerated, but I first read about Sonic Youth in the same context as The Jesus & Mary Chain, Jane's Addiction, The Pixies, Live Skull, Band of Susans, Sons of Freedom, The Plasterscene Replicas (whoa! that's a blast-from-the-past namedrop that just came out of nowhere!), The Spacemen 3, etc. I gradually started listening to all these groups around the same time. The only things I could hear and see that bound them together were sharp distorted notes, hair dangling in their eyes, army surplus jackets, and a penchant for sunglasses; still, these groups were often lumped together as some sort of genre or movement in the late '80s. Once grunge hit, the illusion of a genre seemed to disappear quickly. That's the way I remember it, from my Canadian perspective.

Holy Jesus! I hunted around, and look what I found:

http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.showvids&friendID=173482 052&n=173482052&MyToken=a9e7a00e-d628-4a13-a431-8103ce452c55

Christ, does this ever take me back to the summer of '88! Everything looks and sounds like REM-meets-Live Skull!

I'd known of SY for awhile (through NY bands like Ramones, Television, The Voidoids), and I saw the Silver Rockets and Kool Things: 20 Years of Sonic Youth documentary on TV, I enjoyed what I heard so I bought Daydream Nation.

Yeah, it was rather like that for me too, though it was definitely the mid and not late '80s. Living in Seattle, by the late '80s it was all about mixing the above with Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, which resulted in what later got called grunge. I saw a whole lot of that before it "hit" and feel fortunate, because it really was a lot better then. I'll stop typing now before I devolve into another rant about why and how much I hate Pearl Jam...

When I was like 11 years old I was at this Wolf Eyes show and they were opening for Sonic Youth. I was following Hair Police and Wolf Eyes at the time and Sonic Youth sounded like noise lite so I checked 'em out. I didn't really dig them but the people on their forum are all down with the harsh static.

I got into SY in the most lame way possible. I was an impressionable 8th grader during that grunge boom. Man, MTV was all over that thing! I'd have to go with all of the above because I couldn'y specify which band of that era put it in my head, but I already knew I was supposed to like Sonic Youth before I heard them. Of course, when I did hear them ("100%", by the way) I was genuinely blown away. As my attention span strayed from MTV's influence I got further into SY and eventually became the discerning fan I am today. But, yeah, I got into them when they were kinda trendy.

it was 120minutes on MTV and it was the Sugar Kane video
then i went and got Dirty and Goo from the local library (we had a dam good library) then i sat in the park in the sun with my Walkman and fell in love.

Brian Molko from Placebo used to go on about Sonic Youth all the time, so I thought I'd check them out. didn't like what I heard at first, except sunday.

My aunt who I hadn't seen for a few years found out that I started listening to rock music and said that I should get into bands like the Pixies and Sonic Youth as "they're the coolest bands ever!" So I did, and bought Daydream Nation.

My aunt rules, she saw Sonic Youth live in the EVOL period.

I've seen SY on TV. No prior band connection was involved.

I watched Linklater's SubUrbia and Sunday played over the end credits (plus there's SY all throughout). Hearing that was definitely uncanny. It was speaking directly to me. I mean, Sunday! If you haven't seen SubUrbia, drop everything and do it. A gem.

Yeah. 120 minutes gets all the credit here, as well. I love to catch reruns of that on VH1 Classic and get all reminiscent...