Sonic Youth songs that the band has not played live since 1995

Protect Me You

my top ten/dream setlist:

Theresa's Soundworld
Dirty Boots
Brave Men Run
Stereo Sanctity
Purr
In The Mind of the Bourgeouis Reader
Confusion Is Next
Titanium Expose
Pipeline/Kill Time
I Dreamed I Dream

Wish Fulfillment.

JC

Tough call between Disappearer and Wish Fulfillment.

out of the ones i've heard, probably Disappearer.. however, Dirty Boots would be amazing because then teen kids wearing Nirvana shirts can jump on stage and start making out

Theresa's Soundworld
Dirty Boots
Brave Men Run
Stereo Sanctity
Purr
In The Mind of the Bourgeouis Reader
Confusion Is Next
Titanium Expose
Pipeline/Kill Time
I Dreamed I Dream

this is a p good list but sorta not what id expect from you - i mean its not like ive got an .xls on yr sy tastes but yknow. 'bourgeouis reader' is kinda garbage tho

cant really choose btw soundworld/pipeline/tuff gnarl

Bourgeouis Reader is my fav punky lite Thurston jam.

won't force the issue but i am curious what picks you WOULD expect of me!

haha i dont really know specifically - maybe like 'chapel hill'? - i guess just less noisy stuff in general idk...

also yr def sleeping on tuff gnarl in that list imo

The Faith cover "Nic Fit" or the Crime cover "Hotwire my Heart"

Oops, "Nic Fit" was actually by Alex MacKaye's pre-Faith band, "Untouchables"

Alec

Stereo Sanctity

haha i dont really know specifically - maybe like 'chapel hill'? - i guess just less noisy stuff in general idk...

also yr def sleeping on tuff gnarl in that list imo

― Lamp, Tuesday, May 31, 2011 12:35 AM (7 hours ago) Bookmark

my picks are noisy stuff? never really liked "Chapel Hill," much prefer "Purr" for that kind of poppy Dirty song.

"Tuff Gnarl" is great but not my favorite Sister song by a long shot, and in a weird way i like the version on Mike Watt's Ball-Hog Or Tugboat more.

I Love Her All The Time.

Wish Fulfilment

love Sweet Shine. about as underrated as a sy song can be imo

so many id choose...but there seems to be a consensus forming around wish fulfillment so ill go for that too

that's some list. anything off bad moon rising would be interesting to hear them do today really. i guess they stopped playing a lot of these (like stereo sanctity) because steve can't be bothered anymore.

"Wish Fulfillment" is surprisingly one of the songs never played live (on the Dirty tour they played the b-side "Genetic" as the token Lee song at a lot of shows).

Starting a show with "Sweet Shine" would be awesome.

"Wish Fulfillment" is surprisingly one of the songs never played live

That's bananas - I wonder why. There's nothing in the arrangement/tuning that would make it a hassle or anything, is there?

It is insane that "Theresa's Soundworld" is verboten.

well, Dirty does have the largest # of songs of any SY album, kinda makes sense that it'd have a fair number of songs that weren't live staples (in fact 7 songs have been played live less than 20 times!)

theresa's soundworld live is/was an immense, breathtaking thing.

Stereo Sanctity played live a lot last year.

"Chapel Hill" is maybe my fave Dirty tune, so that.

Wish Fulfillment, She's In A Bad Mood, I Love Her All The Time.

why would they stop playing "Dirty Boots"? is TM as dumb as his stage patter suggests?

dear dr. morbius, never change. love, ian <3

I'd like to hear them do "protect me you" but they'd prolly ruin it so n/m

boy they really dislike the Geffen period, don't they?

last time i saw sonic youth, 2002, they played 'she is not alone' and 'skiptracer' and i was ecstatic.

Stereo Sanctity played live a lot last year.

― Badmotorfinger Debate Club (MFB), Tuesday, May 31, 2011 8:51 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

oh shit, i misread the song stats page and fucked that up

SORRY EVERYBODY DO NOT VOTE FOR STEREO SANCTITY MY BAD

That brief run of shows w/o Ibold last year where they played almost nothing from the last 20 years was pretty good. This is a very good and very, very hard poll BTW.

They were doing "Drunken Butterfly" from Dirty fairly regularly as of '06. Of all the tracks from Dirty...

Disappearer for sure, one of my all time favorites.

TON of my favorite SY songs on here. imfucking possible. love these:

I Dreamed I Dream
Confusion Is Next
Brave Men Run
Society Is A Hole
I Love Her All The Time
In The Kingdom #19
Death To Our Friends
Marilyn Moore
Beauty Lies In The Eye
Pipeline/Kill Time
Tuff Gnarl
Dirty Boots
Tunic
Mary-Christ
My Friend Goo
Disappearer
Theresa's Soundworld
Shoot
Wish Fulfillment
Chapel Hill
Purr
Creme Brulee
Screaming Skull
Self-Obsessed & Sexxee
Androgynous Mind
Tokyo Eye
Little Trouble Girl

finalists:

I Dreamed I dream (close to my favorite SY song)
Death to Our Friends (kind of shocked that they don't play this, such a classic)
Beauty Lies in the Eye
Pipeline/Kill Time
Disappearer
Wish fulfillment
Self-Obsessed & Sexy

wish Stereo Sanctity were on here so i could just vote that and get it over with. guess it's I Dreamed I Dream

protect me you or brave men run

I've got great memories of confusion played in the early days as a clanging meltdown - their first "rocker" - wonder how it would sound now?

Tuff Gnarl

It kind of suprises me they don't play this one.

I'm not surprised that many of the tunes on Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star don't get played live, as they are more moody pieces and some like Tokyo Eye are based around some effects.

hey not to derail here but I saw them play "I Dreamed I Dream" in 1999, at the Seattle Bumbershoot. It was awesome.

ha! i saw that show. you're right, i'd completely forgotten, and i fucking voted for "i dreamed i dream". smdham.

or, well, you might be right. i've seen them play it, but it could have been earlier. memories of that bumbershoot show are pretty vague...

I've told the story that I saw their last show with the vintage gear (Berkeley, 90s... later than 95 though... I think late 90s?) I'm sure missing the vintage gear is the reason why many of these songs haven't been played?

4th of July weekend 1999.

I wish I could remember all the set list from the Nov 1990 show I saw. I remember most of Goo being played (incl a fairly apocalyptic "Disappearer"). I'm pretty sure I remember them playing "Death to our Friends" as well. Great, great show; the Jesus Lizard was the middle band on the bill.

sy setlists: http://www.sonicyouth.com/mustang/cc/sytour.html (posted above too). kind of a fun way to waste some time.

Yeah, I checked it when it was first posted and the Memphis show setlist isn't available.

I have it here WmC:
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3507/4036784425_97dd0e9619_z.jpg

New Daisy, Beale St, 1990 (not listed on SY chronology fwiw)

No Disappearer nor Death fwiw!

bad memory + wishful thinking

yeah, i checked that and another SY set list site, when sleeve mentioned "i dreamed i dream". isn't mentioned, but i went along with it, cuz i don't really remember. what i do remember is that it was only a couple months after the equipment theft and that it was consequently (?) all instrumental and very noise-oriented. crashing sheets of molten sound that went on and on, rising and collapsing like massive lava bubbles. i was bummed at first, cuz i wanted the tunes, dammit, but then closed my eyes and let the patterns fit the music. not the best SY show i've ever seen, but pretty cool.

also to loop back to WmC... written setlist <> audio setlist. there are often variations from what's planned on paper and what happens on stage.

I stand corrected, it was "She Is Not Alone" at the Bumbershoot '99 set (Sept. 5th)... I have it on a bootleg set.

and contenderizer yer memory is correct, it was a crazy instrumental freakout set until the encore.

what's really weird abt that bumbershoot show is that i strongly remember them playing at least one of the long, chill, psychedelic guitar tracks from a thousand leaves, in instrumental form. "hits of sunshine", i think, but it doesn't show up in any of the setlists. suppose i could be confusing this show with another, though.

becuz that was such a cool show here are the notes from the D!ME seed:

1. intro
2. free city rhymes
3. renegade princess
4. nevermind (what was it anyway?)
5. small flowers crack concrete
6. side2side
7. streamXsonik subway
8. she is not alone
9. nyc ghosts & flowers [beginning cut]
10. lightnin' (encore)

---

This was Sonic Youth's 2nd appearance at the annual Bumbershoot Festival held over
Labor Day weekend in Seattle, Washington. The first two years they played ('97 and '99),
they took advantage of their mid-afternoon gorgeous sunny open air sets in the enormous
football stadium to perform nearly all-instrumental sets of brand new material to
tens of thousands of people (in '97 they were doing Thousand Leaves/SYR tunes, and later
in 2002 they did their standard Murray Street tour set).

This show is interesting -- 2 months after their gear theft in California, they'd
already written 6 new songs to add to the 2 they'd debuted pre-theft, and on August
26th, 1999 (during a surprise gig at the Knitting Factory in NYC), debuted the 8 song set that would essentially become the 'nyc ghosts & flowers' LP. All songs were still instrumental, except for the encore 'Lightnin'. Just over a week after that show was their next appearance, for the huge Bumbershoot crowd, and they performed all 8 songs again, as
well as 1 track off their very first (soon to be reissued!) EP. Listed on the set list
but not performed was the James Tenney piece "Having Never Written a Note For Percussion"
from the SYR4 project.

At this show, the songs sounded very abstract compared to the versions that were
released on 'nyc ghosts'. With familiar guitars now gone, the material was quite different from the previous record, less 'pretty' and more sinister, with Thurston using objects
such as a mallet, chisel, and bike horn (!) between his strings for his parts on various
songs. Jim O'Rourke's production worked well for the material, but I do like hearing
it in its original form -- listening to this tape I always find it hard to believe this
was recorded in a football arena, the music diplays an almost claustrophobic violence at times.

A little about the recording -- I taped it with a rented Sony Walkman, with an external
mic, from the front row. At times you can hear security walkie-talkies, on-stage off-mic
speech, amplifier hum, and planes (?). Oh, and the motherfuckin' whistler. I apologize
in advance for this guy, who was about 3 feet away from me, if I recall. He makes
his presence known all too well, fortunately mostly only between songs (in some extreme cases, I actually had to remove it). There's a lot of crowd noise from my general location,
but it usually doesn't interfere with the songs.

This show features one of only two performances of "streamXsonik subway" (the other
being the aforementioned Cooler set). It also features a great version of "She is Not Alone"
from their first EP. Aside from some very small benefit things + the infamous UK ATP 2000,
this was basically one of their last shows as a quartet.

i remember listening to that Bumbershoot set online somewhere shortly after the fact and thinking the new stuff sounded really cool, then being so disappointed with the vocals they added on NYC G&F. actually, i had a less extreme version of the same experience with A Thousand Leaves after hearing instrumental versions of those songs beforehand, too. which is why i kind of make a point not to seek them out anytime SY debut new material live now.

thanks, sleeve! duh, i was confusing the 97 and 99 sets. the 97 set was noisier, though they were both instro, and had the mille feuille tracks. #seesthelight

Ha! I remember that bumbershoot show--it was at 11 am, and in-between tunes two dudes complained about how unprofessional SY were. I was too busy getting the top of my head blown off. Great concert memory.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

no fulfillment

Fuck, would have voted Theresa's Sound World. Love it to death:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVvteK1XLBc

surprised by the strong showing for "Tunic"!

No love for Hot Wire My Heart. Shame. Like their version (though not enough to vote, obv).

i could see that one being more fun in the context of a show more than on the album (although it's not on the Hold That Tiger, which is my only frame of reference for Sister-era shows, so i've never heard it live)

tunic is great

I really love "Tunic" as well, but I have trouble imagining it being great live for some reason. Seems like an album track that wouldn't be quite as majestic live. Guess they are pretty anti-cove live (excepting those Ramones covers from Hold That Tiger). Haven't looked at the archive though, maybe they did more covers once upon a time?

wouldn't say they're anti-covers but yeah for the most part they've never played covers live regularly, and most of the ones they have were things that also appeared on albums (I Wanna Be Yr Dog, Nic Fit, SYR4 etc.). probably more of a headache to learn covers for them than most bands given the alt tunings.

makes sense. the alt-tunings is what made me not ever want to learn any of their songs on guitar

Not anti covers, but just live they seem to stick to originals. Seems they have recorded way more covers than they have played live. Would actually love to hear their Plastic Bertrand cover live one day. Fuckin love it. (Never happen of course)

have there ever been any particularly good Sonic Youth covers by other bands? I seem to recall hearing Cat Power do "Schizophrenia" which was exactly how you'd imagine it. Trying to think of any others.

elf power did a twee cotton crown iirc

o yeah i have heard that too. i have a weird fantasy/nightmare about a straight up country dude doing "diamond sea." probably w/o the freeform jam.

my band in high school played "silver rocket."

Missed this, but "Beauty Lies in the Eye" is the reason I got into them.

kinda surprised at all these songs they don't do! eird

WEIRD

eird too

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zForRqJMDpU

crazy 'titanium expose' didn't get any votes

Brave Men Run wuz robbed. And why the heck won't they play that? That's one of the best songs Kim ever did with them.

they haven't played anything but "Death Valley '69" from that record in the last 15 years (and for a while before that "I Love Her All The Time" was the only other)