Dinosaur Jr.

In 1982, when we were in High School, I was the kid who couldn’t play an instrument, so I booked the gigs. J told me where he thought it might be cool to play, and then I made the phone calls. Back then, the band was Deep Wound: J on drums, Lou on guitar, Scotty on bass, Charlie on vocals. Hardcore punk: fun, loud, fast as f~~k. But I wasn’t making people listen to the band then. For hardcore shows at The Guiding Star Grange in Greenfield or Gallery East in Boston, kids just got together and put on a show. Everyone pretty much knew what to expect.

By 1984, Deep Wound had fizzled. The interim band, Mogo, was over after only one gig on the Amherst Common. It featured Charlie screaming “F~~k the cops!” before the plug was pulled, a total high-point in my personal catalog of rock-n-roll moments. Then came Dinosaur: Murph on drums, Lou moving to bass, and J bringing all his inner Moon and Bonham (Keith and John) to the guitar. And with Dinosaur came the tunes.

The first cassette I had to take around to get gigs for Dinosaur was a raw but vital sketch of two tunes, “Forget the Swan” and “Cats in a Bowl,” recorded in J’s basement on a crappy old tape recorder. J and I were students at UMass but we spent a lot of time at Hampshire College, where the kids seemed hipper and more inclined to dig what Dinosaur was laying down. But this was not always the case. The guy I went to talk to for a slot on Hampshire’s Spring Concert line-up, half-way through listening to “Forget the Swan,” started talking about how great his own lame 60’s retro-poseur band was. In the middle of “Forget the Swan”! I was incredulous. We did not get the gig, but the real disappointment was that this seemingly tuned-in guy didn’t get it. Listen to the lead riff on “Forget the Swan” again. If you really listen, it will haunt you. This guy did not listen.

And once you get it, you can’t do without it. For me, Dinosaur’s tunes are indispensable; they are songs that have been rattling around my head for as long as the band has been playing them. “Repulsion,” from the first record, still knocks me out. The second record, “You’re Living All Over Me,” is an exception in that I can’t listen to any one tune on that record without needing to listen to the whole damned thing. J once said that he writes songs that he himself would want to listen to, and he’s got great taste. I never took the Cure seriously until I heard what these guys did with “Just Like Heaven,” a monster of a cover that hits the level of what Hendrix did for Dylan with “All Along the Watchtower.”

When Brian at Bleemusic floated the original Dinosaur line-up reunion idea a few years ago, I was dubious. J, Lou, and Murph never had a “stable” marriage to begin with. But, of course, the tensions within their layered relationships as a band helped to make them so insanely powerful. Kids seeing the band on the YLAOM tour would come backstage after the show, dazed and transformed. It wasn’t just the wall of J’s Marshall-driven guitar or Lou and Murph locked in as tight as any bass/drum duo ever has been. It was vitality of the tunes themselves, delivered with emotion distilled to rock-bottom rock-n-roll essentials.

After examining it from all angles, the guys decided the reunion thing was worth a try. The thawing out period was especially interesting. At one point I dug up photos from when we were kids, and now, as grownups sitting around at an Indian restaurant with spouses and houses and lives that are more-or-less “established,” it felt comfortable and right. And then came the tunes again.
“Beyond” was the rejoinder to the worry that Dino was merely flogging the back catalog as a reunion gimmick, and now here’s “Farm.” I’ve had this record for a week now, playing it constantly; it’s pure Dino, great Dino. These tunes are now in my head for good, along with all their other tunes. This is what these guys do best, and they are really good at what they do. So do someone a favor: sit them down and say, “Listen.” Then crank the Dino.

Jon Fetler
Hadley, MA 2009

Jon Fetler lives in Hadley with his four children and his wife, a girl he put on the guest list in Bedford, England, during the Bug tour of 1988. That same year, he was unanimously voted Worst Roadie of the Year by his fellow roadies in Rapeman and Band of Susans.

Beyond

Although always as loud as god, it was easy to convince yourself the music of Dinosuar Jr was far more passive than aggressive. This myth exploded in a hail of flaming toads in the spring of 1989, when the band’s original trio line-up burst like a ripe sac of pus. In the intervening years there have been various versions of Dinosaur Jr, several of which made use of ur-drummer, Murph; but none of them included prodigal bassist, Lou Barlow. Until now. Until Beyond.

There was a sense that some all-new form of togetherness might happen when J and Lou’s old band, Deep Wound, played a short reunion “set” at a benefit Sonic Youth headlined in Northampton, Massachusetts. For all the acrimony that was predicted to hang over the proceedings, Deep Wound’s set was pretty mellow – for a hardcore band, anyway – and, since reissues of their first three albums were in the works, the possibility of a Dino reunion was something that seemed surprsingly imaginable all of a sudden.

Every Dinosaur Jr album has its share of great songs, but there was something almost holy about that first trinity and the band that created them. It’s true this piece began by calling them passive, but most fans knew it was only their surface that was placid. At its best, the trio’s music (its guts) was like a version of the Stooges that didn’t have Iggy – just one of the Ashetons mumbling vocals while they all slugged the crap out of their instruments. Dino Jr’s sound was actually a roiling sea of emotion and rage and a sense of aggro that had been forged into a bizarre metal-punk-pop-whatsis by obsessive listening to Sabbath, the Birthday Party, The Cure, Blitz and Neil Young. Do you remember that Little Rascals film where Alfala eats a hot dog and a hamburger immediately before he gets into a boxing match? An animated hot dog and hamburger get into a boxing match in his stomach. Well, Dinosaur Jr’s influences were like that – except it was more like a Texas Cage Match where Neil and Nick yanked on each other’s hair while Nidge and Robert and Ozzy threw buckets of boiling urine into everybody’s eyes. How could any band be expected to contain such carnage without cracking?

The reunion was undertaken in ’05. At first it was tentative – a TV show here, a club appearance and some Japanese dates there. Just to support the reissues, you understand. But it actually went okay! I mean, it felt cool and it sounded great. In the 15 years since the original trio had toured a lot had changed. The mix of influences and the sheer volume of the music were no longer a semiotic problem for fans. Heck, some of Dino’s songs were now viewed as Classic Rock – and even the squares were finally ready for it.

Touring continued into ’06 and the band’s strengths were constantly increasing. When their equipment van was swiped a couple days before the Osheaga Festival in Montreal, it didn’t faze them. “No big deal,” J says. “That show was amazing,” Kim Gordon says. “It was almost like they’d been reborn as a hardcore band.”

The last time I saw them was at ATP’s Nightmare Before Christmas festival in England. Their first gig was so packed that another was added at the last minute. The band exploded, but in a far different way than they had in ’89. Dinosaur Jr created a tornado of huzz and howl that lifted the massed attendees into the air then dashed their brains out with power and volume and sheer mass. Total genius.

But I’ve gotta admit, I was a little trepidatious when I heard they’d recorded a new album at J’s Bisquiteen Studio in Amherst. It’s one thing to go on the road, playing hand-picked selections from your back pages, quite another to create a new set, especially when you’ve cranked expectations so high by parading all the hits around for the previous year. But my fears were worth dick.

Beyond is a monster of form. From the staggeringly paced guitar spew that opens “Almost Ready” to classic soft/throb dynamism of “What If I Knew,” Beyond is an exquisite slab of pure Dinosaur Jr. It’s hard to understand the alchemical relationships that exist within certain bands. Some groups can change line-ups without anyone noticing. But that was never really the case with Dinosaur Jr. The pieces that fell away over the years were missed. But now they have all been collected together in one place. For how long no one can say. So just dig it while it is,
Because Beyond is beautiful.

Dinosaur

Sitting here now, in the belly of the 21st Century, more than a decade after Nirvana “broke,” it is possible to look back at certain signal events -- moments, shows and recordings that set the stage for the now-past future. It seems absolutely clear at this juncture that one of those events was the coming of Dinosaur (Jr). There are a variety of reasons for this, but the main one has to do with the fact that Dinosaur’s early shows and recordings represented the first (or, at least, first best) example of a new rock-qua-rock music arising from the germ of hardcore punk.

The basics of the band’s origins have been widely retold. In the midst of Western Massachusetts’ “Happy Valley,” there was a small group of hardcore bands. Most notable among them was Deep Wound, with drummer J Mascis and guitarist Lou Barlow. Playing the standard all-ages circuit (Grange Halls, Knights of Columbus lodges and the like), Deep Wound developed a following and released a 7” and a cassette that pair the massive thrust of the era’s velocity with a few strange noise twists. Deep Wound, however, would have remained a mere footnote for record collectors had they not dissolved in the summer of ’84, when they all seemed to realize that hardcore itself had become a music of dead formula.

Attending UMASS Amherst, Mascis began to focus on guitar playing over drums. Just as Sonny Sharrock drew his inspiration from Coltrane’s “sheets of sound” approach to the tenor saxophone, J’s musical model was a different instrument. Having spent years trying to create a wall of sound that equaled the one John Bonham had used to anchor Led Zeppelin, Mascis decided that the real way to conjure up that aura of overwhelming heft was to get an electric guitar (an instrument he had eschewed since fifth grade) &the hell up. So he did. And man, did it work!

With Barlow on bass and Mascis on guitar, jams started happening, based upon the buckets of new songs that J was writing. Drawing from a wildly messed-up mix of influences (from Venom to New Order to Neil Young), Dinosaur began to assemble their hair-raising first set of tunes (some of which they would continue playing for years) in the fall of ‘84. Realizing that life as a duo might be difficult, they quickly recruited a drummer named Murph (ex-Connecticut hardcore band, All White Jury). They even existed for a brief period as a quartet, with Charlie Nakajima (ex-Deep Wound) on vocals, but that was over in a flash. Which is where the story really begins.

Another student at UMASS in the fall of ’84, was Gerard Cosloy, editor of the incredible Conflict fanzine, and a staunch supporter of Deep Wound. When Gerard left school, to move to New York, and create a new label for the Dutch East distribution company (in the wake of Sam Berger’s stillborn Braineater imprint), he quickly assembled a roster that included the three most powerful American bands of the moment. There was Sonic Youth, there was Big Black, and there was Dinosaur. But where Sonic Youth were coming from an art rock direction, and Big Black were operating in the (admittedly attenuated) tradition of a certain wing of the British new wave, Dinosaur emerged from the depths of hardcore’s primeval sump. And that gave them a truly special and visceral excitement.

These roots are on display nowhere in their recorded oeuvre to the degree that they are on their debut album. And even this pales in comparison to early live shows, which were amongst the loudest, most ludicrous musical events that ever flattened a small club. Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore remembers some of their early road shows. “They played at Maxwell’s in Hoboken and they were as loud as anyone I’d ever heard, but in this totally undifferentiated way. It was just a wash of noise that made your teeth hurt. But in a good way. By the time they played at the Music for Dozens series at Folk City, their chaos had resolved itself a little. It was still unbelievably loud for such a small place, but you could tell there were all these amazing things going on inside it. There were these real songs that had all these different parts, like Queen or Sparks or something. It was totally impressive.

“I was talking to J after the show and he said his dad was a dentist up in Amherst, so I started thinking of his songs in terms of that. He had grown up around the idea that it takes 32 teeth to make a perfect smile, right? So I figured he thought that it would take 32 parts to make a perfect song. I would always try to count the different parts to his songs after that, but I was never able to absolutely prove my theory. And J wouldn’t tell me if I was right. But I think I was.”

Cosloy had once told J that he’d release anything that Mascis recorded, so Dinosaur went into a budget studio to cut a fast album. The results of that session are in yr hands now, and they gleam with all the spectral glamour of a fresh set of steel dentures. These songs create the blueprint (albeit a rough one) for the synchretic fusion of much of the post-core American underground. New wave guitar washes dissolve into banshee screams of Midwest hardcore noise, which erupt into intensely wrought guitar wankery, before settling down into loser-folk mumbling. It is an incredible and original pastiche of sounds, changing channels like a bored television viewer, each miniaturized segment perfect unto itself, and almost indescribable as a whole.

From,“Bug,” (an unlikely fusion of ferocious nada-raunch and bedroom hermeticism) through the Meat Puppets-like discontinuity of “Quest,” Dinosaur Jr offers gobs of more disparate style-moisture than anything this side of John Oswald’s Plunderphonics project. Some listeners seem to get hung up on the perceived disconnect between the expansive overload of J’s guitar work and the nearly claustrophobic involution of his vocal style. But heard from this temporal distance, with its dynamic qualities amplified by the myriad bands who have mined Dinosaur Jr as a sound source, this should no longer be a problem for anyone with clean ears. Anyone, that is to say, like you: lucky owner of this protean example of a new musical culture in the making.

Enjoy it, as you enjoy yr own teeth, and everything will be just ducky. Scout’s honor.

--byron coley Deerfield ma 2004

You're Living All Over Me

You’re Living All Over Me is Dinosaur’s second album and one that some claim to be the best guitar record ever waxed. Listening to it a few times in a row, as I’ve just done, one begins to appreciate how goddamn right that sounds.

Although Dinosaur’s eponymous debut LP didn’t exactly set the world on fire commercially, the music’s sheer power and brutally strange style fusion (new wave meets hardcore meets rock meets metal meets goth and so on) made an impact on everyone who did notice it. The trio were all still based in Massachusetts’ “Happy Valley” when it came out on the Homestead label, and the forays the trio made to various East Coast clubs in ‘85/86 were met with undisguised disdain. The unprecedented volume that marked their live shows obliterated everything else for undiscerning soundmen and clubgoers. But for a few people, it was obvious that there were some amazing things being done by Dinosaur inside the orgone cloud of noise-terror in which they were so often hidden.

With the release of that first album, it became possible to understand that there were songs lurking underneath the metallic haze, and what’s more, they were great songs. Songs loaded with left-field pop hooks and the kind of true emotional content that was then lacking from a scene that often seemed frozen into one of two textual poses: the archly ironic or the preposterously aggressive. But even a song like the album’s opener, “Little Fury Things,” with its seemingly impenetrable lyrics about a rabbit that might be a girl (or a rare oi! single or a bulldog or a rabbit) (or might not), has a depth of feeling that touches the listener on a subconscious level. Its very inarticulation of specific textual content makes is an open template for each listener to impose a personal narrative upon it, to personalize it. The meat is there on one level, on another you must supply your own. And this grants a special collaborative power to each person who spins the disk. Which is a pretty spectacular move when you think about it. And in the almost two years between the release of Dinosaur and You’re Living All Over Me, the underground vox pop began to think about it a lot.

Touring with Sonic Youth and on their own, Dinosaur slowly found an audience willing and able to penetrate their curtain. The band’s presence mixed savagery with lethargy in a wickedly captivating way. And Mascis’ effects-laden guitarwork was something of a revelation to a generation that had forsaken solos as old hat. The Sonic Youth connection is actually quite heavy on You’re Living, too. Lee Ranaldo sings back-up, the bulk of the sessions were done with Sonic soundman Wharton Tiers, and, to cap it off, the tape of the finished album made its way to Sonic Youth’s then-label, SST. Gerard Cosloy has always felt that this was a personal kick in the teeth, but it made sense in the greater scheme of things. SST was as hot as tar right then, with Black Flag, the Minutemen, Meat Puppets, Husker Du, Sonic Youth and more.

Mike Watt (of the Minutemen, Stooges, firehose, et al.) laughs, “Greg Ginn must’ve liked their long hair or the guitar jams. I know the Dino guys told me their whole goal in life was to make an SST record. They just loved that label. SST was such a collection of weird individuals and Dinosaur fit right into that. You could never tell what an SST band was going to sound like. There were no clones, no rubber stamps. Being an SST band had nothing to do with the sound, it just meant you knew there were going to be some weirdos involved. I thought Dino, even though they were years down the road, were totally in that tradition.

“That first album had been real interesting. I remember D. Boon got a test pressing somehow, and he said, ‘It’s the East Coast version of the Meat Puppets!’ When I told J that, he said that’s what they were trying to do. Both those bands were like stepchildren of Neil Young. And of course, J was way into the Birthday Party then. Just look at that back cover with the hair and the pendant! But D. Boon really dug that album.

“The other way I heard about them was through the Sonics. Lee sang on the second record, and Kim used to get these cassettes from Lou, with songs like ‘Poledo.’ And the first time I saw them was playing in Western Mass with the Sonics at Hampshire College. I really liked that one. And I really like the way You’re Living All Over Me is recorded. It’s so weird. The guitar jumps out so big. It’s almost like Raw Power. There’s that song, ‘Sludgefeast,’ where it goes between a 12 string sound and RAWWWR. J told me he went to guitar because he didn’t like the way anyone else was doing it, and I can believe it. The gtr sound is massive massive massive on the record.

“Also, I really like the bass sound, especially on “In a Jar” with its melodic lines. By that time I’d stopped using a pick and I could tell Lou was using one. It almost made me want to go back to it, because of the chords he’d use and all that stuff. Lou’s bass also reminded me of Lemmy, which I found out was J’s whole idea. When I played with the fog, J had me play with a pick for the first time in 17 years, and he made me go through Marshalls!

“But Dino were part of this thing I saw with the later punks and hardcores -- these guys who were too young to react against rock and roll. Where a lot of the ‘70s punks were in reaction to that, and trying to be ironic and satirical about the whole paradigm of rock and roll, by the time it got to hardcore, they didn’t really have an old music they were fighting against. For them, punk was a kind of pre -school so they could learn to be rock and rollers. It was the training wheels, so they could learn how to be heavy metal guitarists. I was into a kind of ideological war, but for these hardcore guys it wasn’t that much of an issue, especially for hard rock or heavy metal. We were all, f~~k this stuff, we went through that.! For the hardcores, it wasn’t so much against rock and roll as against their parents. I’d talk to J about old stuff and none of it turned his stomach. At rehearsal he’d say, ‘Let’s do a Dio song!’

“One time I was telling him about how great I thought the production on You’re Living was, and he was saying it was inept and incompetent and f~~ked up. Well, I thought it really had its own sound for the time. To me the crux of the punk ethos was to find yr own voice, and the record does that.”

This is certainly true. The sound on You’re Living All Over Me is mesmerizing, both distant and close at the same time. And the guitar playing is f~~king unearthly. The Ron Asheton cops on Dinosaur had given way to a much broader palette. On a song like ‘”Sludgefeast” the model seems to me something more along the lines of Sonic’s Rendezvous Band, and everyone should be able to admit – that’s a pretty nice line. The album also features Barlow’s songwriting swansongs. And listening to “Poledo” it’s easy to understand why he devoted all of his songwriting focus to Sebadoh from this point on. But playing the album it is also easy to understand why it’s considered such a f~~king monument. It is just about a perfect wobble into the hot ring of the o-mind, and you can’t ask for much more than that.

--Byron Coley Deerfield ma 2004

BUG

Bug is the third and final pearl in the string of albums released by the original formation of Dinosaur Jr. The music here shows the band moving into ever more orderly realms of composition and structure, even as anecdotal evidence suggests that they were coming apart at their physical seams.

After the release of Bug, Dinosaur changed their name to Dinosaur Jr, due to the protests of a band of San Francisco ballroom-era leftovers. This seemed incredibly stupid at the time, but now it is possible to see as both a remark (by the hippies) that the band was starting to become known, as well as one by the band that they didn’t give a f~~k. It was in this time that people truly began to appreciate the power of the songs that had always lurked inside the band’s sonic cataclysm. Live shows of the period were incredible. They harnessed a very special kind of aggression like no one els,e and the emotional turmoil inside the band frequently erupted into something cathartic and Brobdingnagian. J had moved to New York City, and there was a new sense of disconnect within the band. Lou was doing his own recordings for Homestead, Murph was playing more aggressively than ever, and J was kinda doing his own thing. Without any songwriting input from Barlow, the material for Bug was scripted entirely by Mascis, and when it was time to record the stuff, J had very specific ideas about how everyone’s part should be played. If the band prior to this had been operating in at least a faux-democratic way, that pretense was now shucked. It was, it seemed, J’s band. And this knowledge (both within and without the group) loaded some of their live shows with a particularly furious edge.

There might be true havoc on stage, now and then, as J and Lou’s antipathy towards each other increased, but more often this negative gush was channeled into an orgy of magnificent meat music. The trio’s roar – one that had initially seemed impossible to contain or control -- began to assume a comprehendible shape in front of an audience that was familiar with the material (from the records) and attuned to its details. Not all their live shows were perfect, but there were lots of great ones, and their first trip to Europe in late ’87, brought them before a group of people who were both delighted and mystified by their utterly American combination of explosions and mopery. The British press fawned over them (in their own tongue-in-ass fashion), but Dinosaur Jr’s true impact was on the audiences, who were absolutely ready for the stylistic shift into post-core non-ironic-rock that the band’s music suggested. Indeed, it is postulated that a whole generation of British “shoegazer” bands sprang up as a reaction to that first visit. Even if this is hyperbole, it is undeniable that Dinosaur Jr were offering a way out of the noise morass for certain group of misfits.

Their songs were complex in a way that seemed both simple and intuitive, their lyrics were sad and reflective without appearing obnoxiously introspective. These were graspable creative tenets, so it made sense that they would be aped. And aped they were. The band’s profile on the American scene was growing exponentially at the same time. This had been something in the making for a while, but their popularity was blown wide open by Bug, and its accompanying single, “Freak Scene” -- a classic slab by any known yardstick.

Robert Pollard (of Guided By Voices) remembers, “I bought their first album when it came out and I couldn’t figure out what the f~~k it was. I couldn’t tell if they were nerds or goth heads or what. I thought they looked cool, but I couldn’t figure out what time period they were about. That first album was mesmerizing, but it was so strange. The picture with the sun on the cover just confused me. The music was recorded real lo-fi, but they didn’t fit into anything that was going on. When you listened to it, you might think parts of it were from the late ‘60s or early ‘70s. I mean, what was it? Sort of a dark psych metal but with punk roots.

“The band’s whole approach reminded me of something our band was doing a little later, because they were burying strong melodies inside of this total sonic attack. There was almost something sinister underlying everything, but it was beautiful, too. There was always something hidden inside their songs. When I thought my lyrics were corny, we would use tape hiss to cover up the sentiments and f~~k things up. It seemed like they were trying to f~~k up their music by the craziness of their attack,
“And each of their albums just got better and better. They really are one of the few bands that, to this day, I get out all of their early catalogue and listen to them all in a row, all the way through. I still do that every so often. The amazing thing about their songs is that even though they were all sonically heavy, almost every one of them has the ability to give me a chill. The first songs on their albums were always great. Like ‘Forget the Swan.’ That may be my favorite. But they had so many great ones – ‘Little Fury Things, ‘Budge’ – they’re all great. I even like ‘Poledo’! (laughs) That one actually sounded more like the way we were doing things then. But my favorite album is definitely Bug. They were so solid musically by that time, and every song on it is good.

“It was also around that time that I saw them play in Cincinnati. I saw them with Murph and Lou one weekend at this club that had all the heavy bands right then, like Big Chief and Nirvana. They were really loud, and J was such a great guitar player -- one of the best in the world. I just loved that band.”

As they rolled on, there was no lack of people who’d second Pollard’s sentiments. “Freak Scene” became one of the great college rock anthems of ’88. A beautiful blend of confusion, neo-folkie yearning and guitar belligerence, the songs still slays. But there’s so much great stuff on Bug. One of my personal faves is “Don’t,” which is like a perfect post-core version of a track from the Stooges’ Funhouse. Repeat-o sludge riffs up the wazoo, absolutely raunched guitar textures, and bellered vocals (which J, perversely, had Lou sing) that ask a perplexingly simple question, “Why don’t you like me?” What could be better?

Well, one thing that could have been better, one presumed, was morale inside the band. They didn’t last all that long after the completion of Bug and the tours to support it. Dinosaur Jr continued in name for a good while, and they released some great records. But there is something totally organic and beautiful about the first three albums. They represent a creative arc that begins with teenage hardcore sput and ends with the dream of guitar heroism. And its an arc that many followed, but one this trio defined. Once and for all. Over and out. Amen.