If Kim Gordon’s first-ever Grammy nominations for her current album, The Collective, intrigued anyone enough to investigate her former band, Sonic Youth, they will be given the perfect opportunity to do so when a rare live recording is officially released next year.
Hold That Tiger, recorded at Chicago’s Cabaret Metro in October 1987, was first rolled out as a semi-bootleg on the long-ago Goofin’ indie. On February 7, the Superior Viaduct label will finally make the album more widely available (and on vinyl and CD to boot).
Featuring the band’s seminal lineup of Gordon, guitarists Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo, and drummer Steve Shelley, Hold That Tiger captured Sonic Youth at a pivotal moment. After establishing themselves as rock & roll dismantlers and disrupters earlier in the decade, the band had begun sculpting its sonic whirlwind into somewhat more traditional song structures while still retaining its New York scuzz. At the time, they were promoting Sister and were a year away from releasing their landmark 1988 double record Daydream Nation, which went on to become one of the most lauded albums in indie rock annals. (It’s even in the Library of Congress, where there is a collection of historic recordings.)
Hold That Tiger leans heavily on songs from Sister, including “Schizophrenia,” “White Cross,” “Tom Violence,” “Kotton Crown,” and “Catholic Block.” But the set also dips into earlier rattlers like “Brother James,” “Death Valley 69,” and the epic “Expressway to Yr Skull.” To wrap up the show and give a nod to their predecessors on the CBGB’s scene, the band also tore through four back-to-back Ramones covers: “Loudmouth,” “I Don’t Wanna Walk Around with You,” “Today Your Love, Tomorrow the World” and “Beat on the Brat.”
In an interesting side note, the band was introduced onstage that night by Steve Albini, the equally iconoclastic producer who died this spring. “We pulled up to the Cabaret Metro to find our musician-friend Steve in front of the club telling us he couldn’t go to the show tonight because he was banned for some previous verbal or other provocation,” Shelley told Rolling Stone. “We refused to accept that situation and demanded that our friend be allowed into the club in order for us to perform that night. Surprisingly the club caved.” As heard on the recording, Albini told the crowd, “Ladies and gentlemen, from NYC, the kings of cough syrup — Richard Kern and the Black Snakes!” (Kern was the underground filmmaker who’d helmed their gruesome “Death Valley 69” video.)
Adhering to Sonic Youth cheekiness, the reissue of Hold That Tiger includes its original cover art — a photo of Bob Bert and Julie Cafritz of Pussy Galore, their peers in noise rock, rather than a shot of Sonic Youth themselves.
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