Listen to Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth cover Wire’s ‘Fragile’
Sonic Youth were formed in New York City in 1981 by core members Thurston Moore, Kim Gordon and Lee Ranaldo over a shared passion for rock music. The band were praised for their pioneering service to the genre as they took the seeds of post-punk and progressive rock from years past and tamed them into a pet of their own. Sonic Youth’s style was based heavily on a loud electric guitar sound as they experimented with alternate tunings and became a leading force in America’s noise rock scene.
When it comes to musical influences, the band was primarily focused on picking up where The Velvet Underground left off. In the mid-1970s, after growing up in Florida and later Connecticut, Moore moved to New York City, mainly because he was infatuated with Lou Reed’s pioneering rock group.
Despite their guiding passion for The Velvet Underground, Moore once explained how Sonic Youth’s approach to rock music differed in a conversation with The New York Times. “With the Velvet Underground, you think about depravity a lot,” he said. “We definitely don’t deal with situations of depravity. We’re pretty much a milk-and-cookies outfit”.
By 1980, he had bonded with Gordon and Ranaldo over a shared interest in the local proto-punk outfits, including The Stooges, New York Dolls and Patti Smith. By this time, however, they were also subject to contemporary influences from across the Atlantic.
After a short-lived punk era in the mid-’70s came post-punk, a genre that brought a little more artistry to proceedings. Moore and Ranaldo, in particular, expressed their love for London bands like Public Image Ltd, Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Slits and Wire. “I used to have these fantasies in the 70s about leaving New York and coming to London to hang out with Public Image,” Moore once said during an on-stage interview.
Sonic Youth have never shied away from praising these post-punk influences with a live cover. Of all the band’s live and studio covers, the below cover of Wire’s ‘Fragile’ performed solo by Lee Ranaldo is among the finest.
Check it out here.
