Rockpalast, 1996
. . .
The third time I saw Sonic Youth in concert was May 16, 1995 at the the godawful Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View. They were opening for R.E.M. on the Aneurysm ’95 tour, that tour after 75% of R.E.M. almost died on their 1994 European tour. Rox & I went to this the night after an absolutely amazing Wilco show at Slim’s. I guess I got a bunch of time off from work to do all of this.
Of course, being the opening band — and playing “The Diamond Sea” in its entirety as well as “Washing Machine” — meant that Sonic Youth only played 7 songs total, which was definitely a choice. That said, they definitely went over better than they did when then opened for Neil Young in 1991.
That said, one of the songs they didn’t play was my favorite song from Washing Machine, Lee Ranaldo’s “Skip Tracer,” but it was definitely a song that was on their headlining setlist, as it was one of the highlights of show they did for the German TV show Rockpalast in 1996. I came across a bootleg of that show during the early .mp3 days, and “Skip Tracer” utterly killed it, which is one of the reasons that I’m writing about this live version of “Skip Tracer” instead of the studio version.
We’ll get to the other reason shortly.
Lee Ranaldo introduces “Skip Tracer” as “kind of a talking blues, if you will” before the band launches into it, Ranaldo and Moore’s guitars interlacing their screams around each other as Ranaldo speaks, not sings.
This she did in public for us to see
She came in here too drunk to do the show
Between the trains and cars
Broken glass and lost hub-caps, images of a gun
Row house, row house pass through
Let the city rise up to fill the screen
Clothes flung out of closets, doorknobs falling off
The guitar guy played real good feedback, and super sounding riffs
With his mild mannered look on, yeah he was truly hip
The girl started out in red patent leather
Very “I’m in a band” with knee pads
We watch her fall over and lay down
Shouting the poetic truths of high school journal keepers
“Skip Tracer” was a co-write his Ranaldo’s wife, Leah Singer, and while I always thought it was about Courtney Love, it was apparently about the band Mecca Normal. Either way, it totally and utterly burned, and Ranaldo gets more and more breathless and breathless, especially as they barrel into the bridge.
None of us know, where we’re trying to get to
What sort of life?
What we’re we trying to build
Now we tone-soul merge ideas, of song forms and freedom
Seasons out of life, nothing is out of reach
L.A. is more confusing now, than anywhere I’ve ever been to
I’m from New York City, breathe it out and let it in
“L.A is more confusing now than anywhere I’ve ever been to” was a line that utterly slayed me in 1995, as I was flying back and forth there to visit Rox, and it well and truly did seem as confusing as fuck. That was before I had to drive from Glendale to Beverly Hill every single godsdamned day for nearly a decade, and I got wayyy too familiar with it. And that would have been my favorite line on the song, except at the very end, when — guitars still a blazin’ — Ranaldo screams:
HELLO 2015!
HELLO 20-15!!!
I loved that. I loved that so much than on January 1, 2015 — barely three months into the Certain Songs project — I wrote about “Skip Tracer” as the 64th Certain Song because . . . well why wouldn’t I let Sonic Youth help me greet 2015? Just as in 1995, 2015 seemed like a million years away and yet a time when Sonic Youth would still be around, I couldn’t imagine in 2015 that I wouldn’t even get to writing about Sonic Youth until 2022. But here we are.
“Skip Tracer (Germany 1996)”
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