Hanging Out on the Fringe : For more than a decade Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore have been an inspiration to alternative-rockers. With its new ‘Jet Set’ album, the band still revels in the spirit and energy of the indie scene

NEW YORK —  Given the frequent irreverence of the music of Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore with Sonic Youth, the last thing you’d expect in the slot next to their buzzer in the lobby of a SoHo apartment building would be their own names.

If not left blank to throw off cult enthusiasts of these revered underground rockers, you’d imagine a wisecrack along the lines of buzz off , or maybe a play on the band’s oddball album titles--something like Evol Goo .

But it’s just their names: K. Gordon/T. Moore.

Not that the couple is home this afternoon to answer the ring.

It’s another 20 minutes before Gordon and Moore arrive from separate directions, both loaded down with shopping bags and wearing heavy coats to protect themselves from the chill.

They’re all apologies as they head up the stairs, explaining that they each thought the other would be back in time to answer the door.

Inside their spacious, fifth-floor loft, Gordon heads to the kitchen to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Moore checks the answering machine for messages.

All this--from the real names on the board to the late arrival--is typical of the surprisingly down-to-Earth approach of a married couple that for a decade has been viewed as the heart of the alternative/college rock scene. It’s a scene that, thanks to the success of Nirvana and others, has emerged in the ‘90s as the new commercial mainstream.

Not only have Sonic Youth’s striking guitar explorations influenced a generation of musicians, but its strict adherence to high artistic standards rather than commercial compromises has also made the quartet a role model.

A chief reason Nirvana chose Geffen Records when it moved up to major-label status in 1990 was that Sonic Youth was already at Geffen.

Gordon and Moore are in an upbeat mood. Sonic Youth’s new album, “Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star,” is due in the stores Tuesday, and they’re pleased with its raw sound. (See review, Page 56.)

On the personal side, the couple are expecting their first child in June--which leaves their fall touring plans up in the air. If they do hit the road, Gordon says, they’ll bring the baby along.

The only topic, in fact, that draws a groan is whether the band, whose first two Geffen albums sold about 200,000 and 300,000 copies respectively, has felt any pressure to begin matching the multimillion sales of some of the bands that cite them as heroes.

If R.E.M. stands as one of the key stories in post-’70s rock for the way it has maintained its quality and integrity in the face of explosive sales and MTV exposure in recent years, Sonic Youth is an equally noteworthy example of a band that has stood by its principles despite what some would call even greater pressure: the lack of that commercial breakthrough.

“One of the unfortunate things about the success of so-called alternative music is sales has suddenly become a big issue to people,” says Gordon, sitting at a big wooden table with her sandwich. “The issue is no longer, ‘Is the music interesting or good?’ More and more you have people asking, ‘Well, how many records have you sold?’

“It’s easy to let it get to you and start measuring what you do by sales. But we’ve never been tempted by that. We are really into it for the history more than the money--and that’s something money can’t buy. That might sound pretentious, but that’s our goal.”

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Much as the rock quartet X stood as the symbol of West Coast rock integrity in the ‘80s, Sonic Youth served as leaders of a corresponding wing of East Coast bands.

There wasn’t a lot in common in the music the groups made--X mixed poetic tales of urban tension with a sparking, highly accessible rockabilly inspired punk backdrop, where Sonic Youth relied on a dissonant guitar experimentation as much as lyrics to express its own aspirations and doubts.

What linked the bands, however, was a recognition of the bankruptcy of mainstream rock at the time. The bands stood at the forefront of the first generation of American groups whose goal was not to make the charts, but to simply make music that was honest and original.

It was revolutionary because most of the great American groups from the ‘60s and early ‘70s--from the Beach Boys to Creedence Clearwater Revival--had always believed that one of the measures of great music was sales. After all, everyone from Elvis to the Beatles and the Stones had hits .

But the pop machinery changed in the ‘70s.

There was no longer underground radio on a mass scale, and mainstream radio was closed to daring sounds. The emphasis was on conformity, not change--reassurance, not aggression. By the time the punk movement arrived in 1977, stations were championing Journey and Styx, not the Sex Pistols and the Clash.

Gordon and Moore were part of a generation of rock fans who sought out the punk heroes and eventually created their own scene--independent of both radio and the mainstream record Establishment.

Sitting in the loft, however, singer-guitarist Moore smiles when asked to cite his earliest pop influences.

“Well, it was either the Beatles or the Monkees,” he says, again exhibiting his own lack of pretense.

“It’s funny how history places a judgment on records and acts--the Beatles are a serious pop group, the Monkees are just like a fabrication.

“But it’s not like that when you are a kid and you are just starting to listen to the radio. I remember way back sitting around with some friends trying to figure out which group was more important to us.

“Some sided with the Beatles because they had more hits or whatever, but some sided with the Monkees because they were a little fresher on the scene at the time. And I’m sure it must be the same today. Some kids probably look at Nirvana and, say, Stone Temple Pilots as being equal.”

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Moore, who is in his mid-30s, has more in common with R.E.M.’s Peter Buck than the fact they are both lanky guitarists. They are also obsessive music fans, as quick to talk about other bands as their own.

Just as it’s impossible to visit Buck’s house without spending half an hour looking through his beloved record library, there are record shelves everywhere you turn in Gordon and Moore’s loft--in the office sanctuary next to the kitchen and behind the couches in the living room.

He’ll spend 15 minutes just talking about his 8-track cartridge collection--and how really obsessed some of his pals are about the old, disgraced album configuration.

This enthusiasm has led him to be active as a musician and producer in various side projects. The same goes for Gordon, who produced the first album by Courtney Love’s band, Hole (Sonic Youth’s lead guitarist Lee Ranaldo produced the latest album by Love’s rival/counterpart Babes in Toyland.)

Born in Coral Gables, Fla., Moore moved with his family in the early ‘70s to Connecticut, where he got into music seriously while in high school. He even put out a record on New Alliance Records with a group called the Coachmen.

In his late teens, Moore became intrigued by the punk/art scene in New York and started going there to such clubs as CBGB as soon as he had a driver’s license.

“I used to read Rock Scene magazine and see all these pictures of people just hanging out at these clubs,” he recalls. “It was really the most influential thing for me and a lot of people my age on the East Coast.

“That magazine really spread the word that the underground scene was much cooler than the big arena-rock scene, which looked kind of like a whole other world . . . one you could never get into and which looked kinda stupid anyway.”

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Unlike many young musicians who fell under the spell of punk, Moore didn’t want to start a hard-core group. He was drawn to the Sex Pistols’ ideal of creating a new form of rock ‘n’ roll--not the Pistols’ hard-core sound.

“I remember (the Sex Pistols’) John Lydon saying, ‘We want to see more bands like us’ . . . and a lot of people took him at his word and started bands like the Sex Pistols,” he says. “But later he said he never meant more bands that sounded like the Pistols. He wanted to see more bands with the Pistols’ attitude . . . bands that would take the music in new directions.”

In that spirit, Moore was more influenced by Lydon’s next band, Public Image Ltd., and by the experimental sounds of Glenn Branca, a visionary New York composer-guitarist who was big on the New York scene at the time, than by the music of the Pistols.

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About the same time, Gordon, who is now in her early 40s, was also looking for something original in music. She grew up in Los Angeles, where she graduated from University High School. As a teen she listened a lot to classic acts, such as Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones, then began turning increasingly to jazz.

But art was her main interest, and she moved to Toronto in the late ‘70s to attend art school. After a year, Gordon moved to New York, where she saw one of Branca’s bands and began thinking about switching to music.

“Music offered the kind of emotional outlet that I didn’t find in art,” says Gordon, who plays bass and sings in the group. “Art was difficult for me because I felt restrained . . . maybe because I had studied it so much and knew all these rules. Music was something I knew nothing about so it was easier for me to be intuitive and free about it.”

Moore and Gordon met on the scene and started Sonic Youth in 1981 with guitarist Lee Ranaldo (the band now also includes drummer Steve Shelley). The group made a series of highly acclaimed independent-label albums, then moved up to Geffen Records’ DGC label in 1990, where its work continued to be hailed.

Gary Gersh, who signed the band at DGC and is now president of Capitol Records, calls Sonic Youth one of the most important American rock bands of the last decade.

“I believe history will look back on Sonic Youth as a band that was as important musically as the Rolling Stones were in their day and time,” he says. “They are a natural extension of the greatest rock ‘n’ roll bands that came before it--unpretentious, not easily categorized and constantly changing itself.”

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After spending two months in the studio polishing their last album, 1992’s “Dirty,” Sonic Youth wanted the new collection to be more spontaneous and natural. So they recorded it in just a couple of weeks.

The result is a fresh and striking collection that is receiving the fastest radio acceptance ever for a Sonic Youth album, according to Geffen Records. “Bull in the Heather,” a track from the album, is already being played on KROQ and other key alternative-rock stations around the country.

But Gordon and Moore don’t want to get caught up in the numbers game after all these years.

They say they still don’t feel the pressure to break through to Nirvana- or Pearl Jam-like sales.

“We don’t feel we have to live up to anything,” Moore says, looking across the table at his wife. “In fact, sometimes I think it’s almost like we have to live down to what’s going on. . . .

“There are a million bands out there totally off the edge, experimental . . . bands who are just putting out 7-inch singles in mom-and-pop retail stores. That’s the scene where I turn for inspiration because there’s all this frenzy. We still want to take chances . . . push ourselves.

“That’s one of the main reasons we did this festival tour of England last summer where we didn’t play anything except for stuff we wrote a week before we went on the road. I’m sure a lot of bands look at that and think it’s a crazy thing to do, but there are others who’ll understand perfectly--and they’re the ones we feel close to.”*