Oh yeah. He's my favorite. The "real" Bubbles was described by Simon as being intellectually curious. He would read one book a year and then he'd chat up everyone he could find about that book. Obviously my memory is getting sucky as I get older, but I seem to recall that Simon specifically referenced Bubbles reading Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy. Now that is an ambitious read. There is a great story under there but Dreiser wrote it while he was depressed and at the tail end of his career and suffering from writer's block. it's by far the worst editing I've ever seen of a great work. Incredibly tedious. I can see why such a character would resonate so highly with Simon. I work for our local chapter of the Arc, and we serve folks with intellectual and developmental disabilities, and I've got one guy who loves presidential history and I would venture to say he's read as much history as any person on this board. Eric is true intellectual. And he's got a IQ of 60. If I was writing a story, Eric would be in it...
RIP. Here's a link to the article he wrote that resulted in what we call "Moore's Law": https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~fussell/courses/cs352h/papers/moore.pdf
I went Wiki'ing, because I seem to remember that she actually had a string endorsement! Her middle name is Althea.
She & Thurston were the first couple of indie rock for many years. Then he stepped out with a younger gal and his marriage & band went kaput Thurston Moore has said that he finds the fact fans blame him for Sonic Youth splitting “strange” as he was not the one who called time on the band. Sonic Youth split in 2011 after Moore and Kim Gordon divorced. It was subsequently revealed that the frontman cheated on his wife with a woman he then moved to London with. https://www.nme.com/news/music/sonic-youth-5-1192915
Their glory years were long long over before that happened. To be honest, when I learned they'd called it quits, I was surprised to learn that they had still been together.
Yeah, I can see that knowing how easily some marriages can disintegrate. Her biography was a good read and went into it. Girl in a Band is a study of her subsequent disillusionment. The book begins in 2011, with Gordon looking out at the audience in São Paulo during Sonic Youth’s last ever concert. The band is on a tour of South America following the end of Gordon’s 27-year marriage to guitarist and fellow singer Thurston Moore. As they take to the stage, the two are not speaking to each other. Moore has left the marriage for another woman after a secret years-long affair. The tour has become a forced march, where Gordon endures the performances of her ex-husband as “an adolescent lost in fantasy again”. His “rock star showboating” feels phony; it grates on her nerves. She pulls through with bitter resignation and the occasional Xanax. The news is now known, by their audience and everyone else: “The couple everyone believed was golden and normal and eternally intact, who gave younger musicians hope they could outlast a crazy rock’n’roll world, was now just another cliche of middle-aged relationship failure – a male midlife crisis, another woman, a double life.” https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.th...d-kim-gordon-review-autobiography-sonic-youth
Boy, she's really bitter, Should have left him as soon as she found out. Betting her ghost writer is female, too. Funny how rock is just rock until the groupies start to look better than she does. THEN it's adolescent (whatever tf that means), "rock star showboating", phony, yada, yada...
I guess they could've continued with Mark Ibold (Pavement bassist) but 30 years is a lot for any band. Ibold still bartends in NYC. At the time of Pavement's 2022 reunion, Ibold was working as a bartender in New York City: "My mind races sometimes when people come up to me at work. What are they thinking? 'Oh God, this guy’s been in two bands that mean the world to me, but he’s serving drinks behind a bar?' Maybe we help put things into perspective – that there are few artists left not named Jagger or McCartney who have no financial worries. But still: I’d drop my shifts for Pavement any day of the week."
I'm reminded of this commercial where some scruffy-looking dude is in the kitchen preparing shit while the band tries to figure out where the bassist is. Scruffy dude's had enough. He comes out from the kitchen and plays this idiotic bass line to whatever song it's supposed to be.
I remember my dad saying that he "could have been as great as Mickey Mantle." and he was a Brooklyn Dodger/NY Mets fan. I also knew his niece in college J-school and we worked at the Boston Globe together for a short time.
Seymour Stein, founder of Sire Records Seymour Stein, whose Sire Records launched Madonna’s career and signed such early punk rock and new wave icons as the Ramones and Talking Heads, died Sunday morning in Los Angeles after a long battle with cancer, his daughter Mandy confirms to Variety. He was 80. Though Stein’s imprint, which he co-founded in New York in 1966, enjoyed major-label distribution, he approached the record business with an independent’s zeal, and took a multitude of risks on unproven, often underground talent that paid off on the charts. Depeche Mode, Ice-T, Lou Reed, the Pretenders, the Smiths, the Cure, Seal, the Replacements, Aphex Twin and many more artists released some of their greatest music on Sire, whether via a direct signing or a licensing deal. A well-curated mixtape of Sire releases from the ‘80s and ‘90s is like the soundtrack to an era. https://variety.com/2023/music/news...ec-madonna-talking-heads-dead-1235571169/amp/
I learned about those late, when I got the Just Say Sire set. They're not easy to come by these days.