



It was surprising.”īut then it all ended, as Gordon recounts in her forthcoming memoir, Girl in a Band ( Dey Books) : “The couple everyone believed was golden and normal and eternally intact, who gave younger musicians hope they could outlast a crazy rock-and-roll world, was now just another cliché of middle-aged relationship failure-a male midlife crisis, another woman, a double life.” I didn’t realize how much support there was for me, for the band. It was more about having a family and being committed to keeping the family together. Before the breakup, Gordon tells me, “I didn’t really think of us as that couple. They were cool and hardcore, with a profound seriousness about their art, and they hadn’t sold out or gotten soft.” They thwarted the conventional and the unconventional too: They made some of the most seminal, electrifying, dissonant music of the late eighties and nineties back on the tour bus, they were a family, hanging out, watching John Candy movies with their daughter. “They were in love and married and making art. “Look at them,” wrote Elissa Schappell in Salon. In 2011, when Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore announced their separation, the news came as a shock, not just to Sonic Youth fans who sensed the band’s time was nigh, but to those who had believed the couple were the happily-ever-after story of rock 'n' roll.
