NYLON - June 2008 - (Page 106) GORDON IS A RELUCTANT MUSIC ICON: “I DON’T EVEN THINK OF MYSELF AS A MUSICIAN I CAME FROM PUNK ROCK, AND YOU JUST KIND OF PICK UP AN INSTRUMENT AND START PLAYING.” Julie Cafritz first met Kim Gordon in 1986 at CBGB, when she handed the Sonic Youth bass player a 12-inch of her band Pussy Galore. But it wasn’t until after Pussy Galore broke up that the two became friends. “I ran into her at a horrible Lydia Lunch gig at Club Siberia,” says Cafritz. “And she approached me and said ‘I heard that you’re not in Pussy Galore anymore and you must be feeling like shit.’ And I think everybody else was too afraid of me to say something like that. She really encouraged me to continue playing, and was just immediately maternal. From that moment on we sort of became instafriends.” Free Kitten was born of that friendship. You would be forgiven for not being familiar with Free Kitten. After all, it has been more than a decade since they released an album: 1997’s Sentimental Education (which featured a remarkable rendition of Serge Gainsbourg’s lost classic “Teeny Weenie Boppie”). On that record, Cafritz and Gordon’s dueling guitars were rounded out by Yoshimi (the Boredoms) on drums and Mark Ibold (formerly of Pavement) on bass. “We referred to it as a ‘second bananas’ project,” explains Cafritz, “because none of us were the top bananas in our real musical incarnations.” For Inherit, their latest album, recorded at producer J. Mascis’s (of Dinosaur Jr.) studio in Northampton, Massachusetts, Free Kitten was short one, well, banana. With Ibold unavailable, Free Kitten became an all girl band, with Cafritz and Gordon at its core. “It’s more like we’re sisters rather than bandmates,” says Gordon, when we meet at the Northampton home she shares with Thurston Moore and their daughter Coco. “When I played with Lydia Lunch and this other girl in the band Harry Crews, I felt much more like I was in a girl’s band because they talked about their periods and stuff. They were really pretty gross, and I just thought, ‘God, I’m really a wimp.’ But the guys in Sonic Youth… they’re pretty civilized. If they’re not totally feminist, they want to be.” Sonic Youth, of course, were the harbingers of New York’s early ’80s post-punk no wave movement, weaving melody between walls of dissonant guitars and feedback, and Gordon is the bad-ass blonde bassist with the breathy vocals and commanding stage presence. Kurt Cobain once called the band the “avatars of grunge,” and nearly 30 years later they are still together, sounding just as radical as they did in 1981. But Gordon is a reluctant musical icon: “I don’t even think of myself as a musician… at least in the sense of traditional training,” she says in her cautious, hushed manner. “I came to music from punk rock, and you kind of just pick up an instrument and start playing.” She has stepped into many roles outside of Sonic Youth: producer (of Hole’s debut Pretty on the Inside), actor (Last Days), both fashion designer (x-girl) and fashion muse (Juergen Teller’s photograph of her performing onstage in a lavender tulle dress was Marc Jacobs’s first ad), art critic (she has written for a number of esteemed publications including Artforum), and visual artist (her most recent show in New York earlier this year was a collection of hazy metallic watercolor portraits inspired by her view of audience members). Needless to say, in the decade since Free Kitten’s last effort, Gordon has been busy. And so has Cafritz. After Sentimental Education, she went to graduate school, started a family, and became a teacher. “When I first stopped playing I didn’t miss it at all,” she says. “I had started teaching and it really satisfied my performance jones in a way that continues to be much more satisfying than playing music.” It was kim gordon photographed by winona barton-ballentine. julie cafritz photographed by andrew kesin.
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