Dave Dyment
My Friend Goo
Toronto, Canada: Paul + Wendy Projects, 2025
38 pp., 25 x 17 cm. staple bound
Edition of 200
Today several people wrote to say that they heard Lee Ranaldo mention my Paul+Wendy Projects book My Friend Goo on a couple of recent podcasts. He’s making the rounds promoting a great new LP: a paired down ‘reimagined’ version of the soundtrack for Joris Postema's celebrated 'eco-doc' The System.
In both interviews Lee is asked about Goo, Sonic Youth’s major label debut. He points out that they signed to Geffen Record in part because they were offered full creative autonomy, but then recounts a story about wanting to use a Raymond Pettibon drawing of Joan Crawford with the word Blowjob and a question mark, and title the record Blowjob. Geffen wrote to say “Ah, we know you have complete creative control, but please don’t do this to us.”
Ranaldo: "We acquiesced and went with this cover, which is a way better cover and which has spawned a thousand variations. An artist in Canada named Dave Dyment put out a publication last year with about two hundred variations. You know: Luke and Leia, Dre and Eminem, Bernie and, ah, I don’t know who else was in that one, but there’s a million of take-offs. Ren & Stimpy in the car. So it was the right move."
A few days before the subject comes up on The Broken Record podcast:
LEE: "As a matter of fact, last year this Canadian artist put out a book - there’s a million spin-offs of the Goo cover: Obama and Hillary, C3PO and R2D2, JayZ and Eminem, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie - there’s hundreds of variations on that cover, they keep coming out all the time. There’s one called Islamic Youth with a woman in a burka, and some artist wrote this long conceptual essay about it and published this zine-like book with two hundred different examples of these spin-offs.”
The System is released today and can be purchased here.
My Friend Goo: Memes, Mashups and Remixes can be purchased from the publisher, here.
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