The Castro Theatre is seated in the most prominent gay position in the city. I have stood in front of it in the late ’90s and on Halloweens past and have enjoyed many a sparkly, fabulous night in and around it. But in 2024, a large budget and a reconfiguration began to change this venue into something almost unrecognizable, which is a big shock for a Bay native.
I am admittedly resistant to change, and I have seen San Francisco, Oakland, and the Bay Area change and resurrect venues over the last 30 years, but this one was a little bit of a shock, and I’m glad Kim Gordon was the one to usher me in.
To be honest, the theater feels like Coco Chanel was told to take off a few pieces of jewelry that night. The pomp and circumstance feel gone. The front still feels like Dame Edna could come running out of it, but when you get inside, it feels like you are at a Santa Cruz punk club with makeup on.
To judge that good or bad feels very strange, or to even try to categorize the vast differences, doesn’t really touch what’s happened to the theater. Kim Gordon held my hand through this experience because in the past, walking into the Castro felt like walking into the Paramount. You were just in awe. Everything was pristinely managed and beautiful.
But what happens when you turn a movie theater into a music venue? Well, I imagine the first night, beer gets spilled all over the floor. And I just can’t imagine the uptight, historically designed staff managing beer all over the floor during a screening of Casablanca. So I had to take off my fancy gloves for this one. And worse, I had to adjust to change.
The theater is no longer a beautiful, seated movie theater ready to have a queer aficionado come out and announce a movie, and then suddenly you’ve watched The Wizard of Oz with 200 gay people. That is a different experience than seeing a rock show here.
I also don’t want to judge the sound at this time. I was a little nervous about how the speakers were set up because they weren’t bolted down. As a photographer and writer, they let me get very close to them, and I remember thinking to myself, this feels like an oversight.
That said, the staff, including security, was incredibly kind, which is a rarity worth mentioning. Everyone I dealt with was gracious, even while the venue is clearly still figuring itself out.
As for the sound, I’m withholding judgment. I don’t think it’s fair to decide what a brand-new music venue sounds like based on one night, especially in a room that spent more than a century being something else. Give me up to three shows there. Then I’ll tell you what I think.
Kim Gordon is on her third solo record, Play Me. Her voice, going all the way back to the beginning of Sonic Youth, has always had the quality of someone disappointed or frustrated in a very blank way. Blatantly stating the facts, ma’am. Kim Gordon comes off as a slow female rapper. Her tone doesn’t change often, but the words are so powerful when put together that there is always a picture painted in the color of ennui.
In the past, I would say her lyrics, alongside Thurston Moore’s and even on her earlier solo work, carried a certain kind of mystique and surrealism. An abstract way of singing and speaking in a language that was very alternative at the time, always rife with Thurston’s guitars ripping through time with funny anecdotes.
Well, Kim ripped off that Band-Aid, and now we are saying flat-out, ridiculously true things.
On the last record, The Collective, there is a song called “BYE BYE” that is literally about getting ready to go somewhere. It’s a list of all the things she takes with her:
“Contact solution / Mascara / Lip mask, eye mask, earplugs…”
And as you’re listening, you’re thinking, this is boring, and then you’re realizing women have a lot of things they have to carry with them to be women.
And underneath it is this screeching, looping synthesizer and chronic feedback. It’s a slightly painful listen, and you want it to end, but do you? Because once you start listening to the words, she’s got you. It’s like Sonic Youth. We’re still listening.
The band she has mustered up is absolutely beyond compare: Sarah Register on guitar, Emily Retsas on bass and synth, and Madi Vogt on drums, with Gordon herself moving between vocals and guitar. Register comes from the Brooklyn noise-rock duo Talk Normal. Retsas has played with Phoebe Bridgers and boygenius, and Vogt has played with FINNEAS, Julien Baker, and TORRES.
Kim donned a large, sequin-laden cocktail dress, and the rest of the band looked like glamorous Lost Boys.
The crowd was excited, but I feel like the venue is so new that people didn’t quite know what to do with themselves. Everyone stood slightly farther away from each other than I’ve seen at shows lately. It was very hipster.
But I think Kim Gordon just commands a room like that. Stand up straight and listen, bitch.
I had seen her at Bumbershoot on the last tour with a similar lineup for the band, and it was daytime. She commanded that stage like you wouldn’t believe. This time we were in a dark theater at night, and it felt more appropriate to see her this way. I was way more aghast to see this outdoors in daylight.
The new album feels almost like a second part of The Collective. The same chronic feedback, loops, and uncomfortable noise are there, but something has moved forward. The songs feel connected enough that Play Me doesn’t feel like Kim Gordon starting over again.
She uses her platform without having to stop a show and talk to you because she wrote her platform into the record.
“Dirty Tech” and “Post Empire” are two songs on the new record that take this from feminist or modern-world hopeful to a thorn in your side. In “Dirty Tech,” she keeps coming back to:
“I like it when you talk dirty tech / To me.”
Somehow, Elon’s ketamine got into the recording room because there are a lot of references to things that none of us want to think about.
Or maybe we’ve been thinking about them collectively so hard that it’s like popping a zit, and they are just showing up everywhere, all over the media. Thought crimes, energy weapons, dirty tech, billionaires, algorithms, the things floating around in the back of our collective consciousness that we would really rather not look at.
The opener that night softened the whole thing.
SASAMI is the project of Sasami Ashworth, a classically trained French horn player who studied at Eastman and spent time teaching music before becoming part of the Los Angeles music scene. She played synth with Cherry Glazerr before setting out on her own, and her own records have wandered through indie rock, metal, industrial noise, and straight-up pop.
I walked in three songs late, and I’m going to blame the box office on that one. But I’m also going to give them a pass because the venue had only been open for six months, and a smooth entrance is not going to happen every single night. I was there on time. I got in late.
I had never heard of SASAMI before, but the editor of the magazine told me I had to get there for her, and he was right.
A very tall, very kind, and very gentle commanding presence. At one point she asked, “Are there any lonely little babies out there tonight? Anyone going through a breakup who’s just been super lonely? We’re here for you tonight.”
And the songs were absolutely encompassing. Underneath all that gentleness was a Jimi Hendrix psychedelic guitar, crushing cans and rising punk underbeats. There was something adjacent to Cherry Glazerr (EDITOR’S NOTE: Sasami Ashworth was briefly a member of Cherry Glazerr) in there, but completely its own thing.
And underneath all of that is a 100% pop underbelly.
The vocal is pure, kind, and aware. Soft and enormous at the same time. There was an incredibly gentle way she commanded the same room Kim Gordon was about to command in an entirely different way.
I would go see this band any time they came to town.
And then Kim Gordon did what she came to do, and she did it perfectly.
Seeing Kim Gordon isn’t a choice if it’s available. I’m going. Akin to Patti Smith, Gordon is a force of nature, and that is something you cannot argue with.
