Even Worse (pt. 1) - Thurston Moore

Once upon a time in a band far, far away I played guitar in a little punk rock combo called Even Worse. The singer's name was Kenny Tantrum. The bassist was my college roomate Tim Sommers who went on to work on MTV News, play in Hugo Largo and sign Hootie & The Blowfish to Atlantic Records. The drummer was Jack Rabid, who remains true to his punk roots to this day publishing his long running punkzine The Big Takeover. The other guitarist was a fairly tall fellow named Thurston Moore. You might recognize Thurston as the guitarist songwriter for the extremely popular and influential band Sonic Youth. Our version of Even Worse made one single, "Mouse Or Rat," that you can occasionally find on eBay for about $100US. I'm pretty sure that copies cost that much because it is a limited edition single of a band that Thurston once played in. Truth be told, he's not actually on the record.

If you're paying attention you might have noticed that I refereed to "our version of Even Worse." You see this was actually Mach 3 of a band started by Jack Rabid. They got their name the night of their first gig. They opened for a band called The Worse. You figure it out from there. In the summer of 1982 Even Worse Mach 2 had fallen apart and Jack asked Tim to help him keep the band together. Tim had a popular hard core punk radio show on WNYU at the time called "Oi! The Show". What Tim didn't have though was any musical expertise so I offered to teach him how to play bass. From there it only made sense to sign up as the band's new guitarist. Kenny lived in the same dorm as us so he was asked to come try out as the singer.

When we all arrived for our first rehearsal, Thurston was there too - invited by Jack to round out the line-up (this was before he was Thurston of Sonic Youth - though he had already started Sonic Youth (more on that in a bit) - this was when he was Thurston, formally of the Glenn Branca Guitar Orchestra). Jack got us started by teaching us some Even Worse songs and then we played a few covers (including Motorhead's "Ace of Spades" which was a big song at the time). What was most curious to me at the time was that Thurston's guitar need to be re-tuned after every song and I had to walk over and do the tuning. The reason for his faulty tuning became clear to me a couple of weeks later when he invited us down to the Mud Club to see Sonic Youth play one of their earliest gigs. I was aghast to discover that his guitar playing consisted of jamming a screwdriver in to the strings and banging them with a drum stick. I figured that his tuning problems were the cost of originality.

A few weeks later Even Worse returned to the Mud Club to play our own gig. Halfway through our show Thurston and I were having some fun imitating some of KISS' choreographed moves, swinging our guitars up and down when the stock of his guitar came down "CRACK" on the skull of a skinhead whose smile grew bigger the more blood he sensed falling from the wound. After the show Thurston tried to apologize to the guy who waved him off. If he remembers that night he's got a great story to share with his grand kids. "See this scar? Thurston Moore did this to me before he was ever famous!"