“We had an A&R person at Geffen saying, ‘You guys can be the Pink Floyd of the underground.’ I was, like, No, we can’t.” Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore remembers Nirvana and ‘The Year That Punk Broke’

Thurston Moore: “When I was putting this book together my agent basically said, Give me your Kurt chapter”

Thurston Moore’s acclaimed new memoir Sonic Life may detail his life before, during, and after Sonic Youth, but the vocalist/guitarist also devotes a significant chunk of the book to the rise of Nirvana, and his friendship with Kurt Cobain’s band, who signed with the same management company and record label as the New York quartet such was their respect for Moore and his (then) wife, and Sonic Youth bassist/vocalist Kim Gordon.

In his book, Moore recalls seeing Nirvana for the first time at a New Jersey club in 1989, when the Sub Pop act were touring as a quartet with second guitarist Jason Everman, and remembers standing “agape and transfixed” by Cobain’s band.

“It took all of an electric flash of a second to see how incredibly beautiful they were and how soul-shredding the music was,” Moore writes. “It would soon be clear that Nirvana was articulating something that connected not just with the punks but with the nerds, the freaks, the geeks, the losers, and the weirdos… It was going to be more than just cheap thrills, offering instead a radical reconsideration of musical expression at large.”

In a new interview with MOJO magazine, Moore admits that he knew that his friendship with Nirvana would be a useful selling point when it came to approaching publishers for a book deal.

“I felt that was the aspect of our history most casual readers would be most interested in and I had no issue with that,” he confesses. “When I was putting this book together my agent basically said, ‘Give me your Kurt chapter.’ It was used for finding the right publisher. I understood the value of that.”