DINOSAUR JR
Fuzz pedals, in-fighting and “ear-bleeding country”: a cocktail that exploded with 1988’s alt-banger Freak Scene. The band and their allies look back.
From the wreckage of Massachusetts hardcore extremos Deep Wound, Dinosaur Jr. drew upon noise, metal, folk and more to concoct an exceedingly loud psychedelic punk rock that yielded 1987’s masterpiece album You’re Living All Over Me and ’88’s underground anthem Freak Scene. But fiercely dysfunctional personalities and the frictions of shoestring touring pushed them beyond breaking point. “I needed volume, lots of it,” says J Mascis. “We weren’t a buddy movie.”
J Mascis: Hardcore was over, and I was figuring out what to do next. I had a concept: “ear-bleeding country”. I switched from drums to guitar.
Lou Barlow: J loved The Zombies and Neil Young, and we were into The Birthday Party, post-punk, the Paisley Underground, ’70s metal, and new metal bands like Venom and Raven. I’d just started smoking pot, and I’d get high and listen to J’s demos for our first album [July 1985’s Dinosaur], and his songs were fantastic. J was such a cool dresser back then – like this collision of Nick Cave and ’60s-era, suede-wearing Neil Young, with a little Robert Smith thrown in. He had this fully realised vision for everything, and he was only 19.
J: We were obsessed. We wanted to make good music, that was all that mattered. We weren’t some buddy movie, drinking beers and rocking out. We weren’t friends. We loved the Minutemen, Hüsker Dü and the Meat Puppets, and our ambition was to tour like they did and sign to SST Records, the label they were on.
Murph: I was this happy-go-lucky slacker who’d found myself with these guys who were deadly serious and weren’t very nice about it. They were like, “We need to make a mark and make it perfect.”
J: I needed volume, lots of it. I liked that feeling of just being encompassed in sound. Guitar felt wimpy and unexpressive – I needed to recreate the feeling I got from pounding on the drums.
LB: We’d play New York, and Thurston Moore would whip out his portable tape recorder and start taping every time J played a guitar solo. He played through Marshall stacks, not as some macho heavy metal gesture – he did it to flatten everything and everyone, but expressively.
J: Sonic Youth passed tapes of our new material to [Black Flag guitarist and SST honcho] Greg Ginn, and they signed us for [second album] You’re Living All Over Me. I heard the album in my head, but it was hard to explain to engineers in Massachusetts, these clueless Journey fans. But then we met Wharton Tiers, the first sympathetic engineer who liked our music.
M: Working with Wharton in New York was all about pushing the envelope – lots of weird effects and experiments, a lot of jamming. We would play songs at normal tempo, then super-slow, then super-fast, and would experiment and re-mould the songs, get them really sounding perfect.
LB: You’re Living All Over Me [released in December ’87] was our absolute peak, combining psychedelia, industrial music like SPK and Throbbing Gristle, the shocking noise of Jesus And Mary Chain, and Neil Young. I wrote my first electric song, Lose, and we included my bedroom tape collage, Poledo, as our Revolution #9. I was taking my first forays into psychedelics at the time, and I’d sit listening to the tracks we were recording, having epiphanies, becoming even more convinced of J’s genius. I thought, “We are knocking on the door of something epic here… We are as good as Sabbath!”
“I THREW MY BASS DOWN, SHOUTING, ‘COME ON, LET’S FUCKING FIGHT!’” Lou Barlow
J: It was our best record. We’d achieved what we were hoping to do. But then we went on tour, and the album was supposed to have come out, but hadn’t. Nobody knew who we were, and our van was breaking down every day. We started not getting along. Too much time in the van, with nothing to do but pick apart Lou’s personality.
Jon Fetler: I roadied for Dinosaur on that tour. I didn’t know what any of their gear did, but I could run interference between those three personalities. J called me the band therapist. It wasn’t a light frolic through some Mötley Crüe shit. Girls would come backstage, register the psychic heaviness and just leave.
LB: J didn’t have any problem openly criticising people. He was a jerk, and he embraced that. He was extremely intelligent, and extremely intolerant. I’d be eating meals on the road, and he’d be criticising the way I eat. “How can anyone stand to be near you?”
M: J would get so bored that real-life drama that would stress people out was like a soap opera to him. Whereas I was like, “I’m in hell.”
J: We were playing this club in a strip mall in Naugatuck, Connecticut. During Severed Lips, a pretty mellow song, Lou was sitting on his amp, just making feedback, to be annoying and get a reaction. I thought, “This is bad, Murph’s gonna hit Lou…” Then, as the song came to an end, I realised, “Murph’s not gonna do it. I guess it’s up to me.”
LB: J came at me, and I’m like, “Fuck yeah, come at me!” He hit me, and I threw my bass down, shouting, “Come on, let’s fucking fight! Right now.” And he walked off to the side of the stage. I was ready to beat the shit out of J. It would have been the end of the band right there – there would have been no recovering from that.
M: I remember thinking, “I really should have punched both of those guys, they can’t get away with being this spoiled and self-centred.” They needed a wake-up call.
J: I recorded our third album Bug mostly on my own. The other guys were in the studio maybe two days. We just wanted to get something out, capitalise on our momentum. It wasn’t too good. There was no energy coming from Lou – he was completely checked out.
LB: I’d stopped talking to J. I had a girlfriend now, who would listen to me talk for hours. And I’d met [Sebadoh bandmate] Eric Gaffney, and we’d started swapping cassettes of our homerecorded music. I was finding my own voice.
M: We really thought we were flogging a dead horse as far as the three of us trying to exist together and get along. It wasn’t working. But looking back at the tracks, they’re really great.
LB: Freak Scene [released September ’88] became the anthem, but there are much better songs on Bug, like They Always Come, Let It Ride, No Bones… I was surprised Freak Scene was so simple, and I was also surprised by how much people embraced it.
J: Freak Scene is about a relationship with someone you wish it was easier to be in a relationship with – like, it should work out, but somehow it won’t. No, it’s definitely not about the situation in Dinosaur Jr. (sighs)
LB: I only sang one song, Don’t. He said, “This is your song to sing, because you didn’t bring any songs in.” This is him prodding me. “Go sing ‘Why don’t you like me?’ over and over again, because you don’t know why I don’t like you.” It wasn’t passive/aggressive, it was totally aggressive. And he was right. “Yeah – why don’t you like me, J? You want me to sing that over and over again? I will. And I’m going to bring every bit of passion that I have in me.” Because I still thought everything he did was great. So I sang that song until there was blood in my saliva.
John Robb: Dinosaur toured the UK in October 1988, just before Bug came out, and they were amazing. People talk about Pixies inventing the whole “quiet/loud” thing, but Dinosaur had that, every time J stomped on his pedal. Dinosaur were more like “loud/really-fucking-loud.”
LB: England was really exciting, and the music weeklies were so sensationalistic and fickle and personality-driven. I just knew, “Once England gets a whiff of J Mascis…” We were getting great reviews, and people were latching onto J.
M: We’d spent so long in the States with people booing us because we were loud and we were sloppy. And in the UK, it was completely the opposite. We were so well-received, when we got back to the US, people thought we were a UK band, because they’d read so much about us in the British press.
Ajay Saggar: You’re Living All Over Me had blown me away. I’d seen them in Chester and charged in afterwards, yabbering, and we became friends. We went to The Membranes’ house [in West Didsbury, Manchester] for the Freak Scene video shoot, which was like my second home. All the stuff in the video – the totem pole, skeletons, masks – is stuff we made, triple-bad acid art everywhere [also featured is a fisherman statue lifted from outside a Blackpool fish and chip shop].
LB: That was so fun. The Membranes were cool as shit, and our friend Ajay was there… I wanted to say, “See, J, it can be fun being in a band! It can be fun hanging out! Why can’t we drink magic mushroom tea together? Why can’t we all live in a crazy, fucked-up house together?”
AS: By 1989 [UK spring tour], there was a lot of tension, and they were like, “Come with us in the van for the whole tour, alleviate the misery of the black cloud hanging over us.”
J: We just couldn’t stand each other, so we decided to kick Lou out [Barlow’s last show was May 13, 1989, at the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre, Hollywood]. Murph did the talking. Lou thought we were breaking up, but we thought we’d kicked him out. We were very bad at communicating. Two days later he called back, screaming – someone had told him we were planning an Australia tour. He screamed at us for hours.
LB: Then I began my long crusade against J Mascis… (laughs) It’s hard to look back on it. It was a heartbreak. I loved the band.
M: Lou was angry for a long time, but it fuelled him to get Sebadoh off the ground.
J: One time I went to a Sebadoh show with Kevin Shields, and Lou just started freaking out. One second he was really happy we were there, the next he was screaming. We were walking out of the club, and his mom was like, “J, what happened?” (Laughs) “Mrs Barlow, I’m really not sure…”
LB: Slowly but surely, I came to the realisation that harbouring this thing against J was increasingly pointless.
J: In late 2002, I was playing with the Asheton brothers in England. Lou came backstage and finally apologised for his crazy behaviour. That had to happen before we could get the band back together, for him to let go of his anger [the band reformed in 2005].
M: It’s like leaving a puzzle alone for years, and then coming back and starting on it again – we just resumed where we left off, without the crazy dysfunction from when we were kids.
LB: I love the records. I love Murph. I love J. And what is fascinating is, the closer I step towards J, the more I get out of my comfort zone, the better it is.
J: Are we better friends than we were back in the early days? I don’t know. But we recognise we have something cool when we make music together.
Dinosaur Jr.’s Sweep It Into Space is out on April 2 on Jagjaguwar. Jon Fetler was speaking in 2004. Hear Ajay Saggar’s recordings with Bhajan Bhoy, King Champion Sounds and University Challenged at Bandcamp.