It was around this time, too, that he first met Maura Jasper, an arts student who would become the first cover designer for Dinosaur’s records. Maura, another native of Amherst’s early 80s punk scene, remembers J as being one of the “cool punk kids that you just had to meet.” It was at a Misfits show that they actually did meet, and then, finding themselves put in the same dorm at UMass, they would hang out together with J’s towering stack of records. “You never knew what he was going to put on the turntable next,” she says. Jon Fetler, another close friend and Deep Wound’s unofficial “manager,” similarly remembers hours with J spent listening to metal, all the while “talking music constantly.”
Jasper is keen to point out how entertaining and surprising all this could be. J, full of pranks and general goofery, never treated school particularly seriously – and yet, relying on aptitude alone, could get an A when he actually turned up to class. But “at times,” she adds, “he was not fun to be around.” Unpredictably antisocial, he would spend a lot of time on his own listening to music, and would slip into “deep funks,” sometimes associated with the migraines he was medicated for. He and his hyperactive imagination would wander round in introspective mode, the stereotype of the teenage creative artist, often with a notebook rapidly scribbled in.
It must have been in these moods where the guitar came in handy. The instrument wasn’t only a means, I think, of burrowing deeper, via practical exploration, into the decades of rock history in his record collection. It was also a way to excavate his own personal space by blasting everybody else out of it. Fetler describes J’s room at home as “his little cave – records, fanzines, baseball gloves”; Jasper remembers him, in his tiny Amherst dorm room, making himself unapproachable by turning up his guitar as loud as it would go and playing for hours on end. Some kids, already irritated by J’s tendency to drive two minutes home for free food and laundry, got “royally pissed” at this new amplified twist on misanthropy. “Are you friends with that kid?”, they would ask her.
So when J repeats something that he has said often, that he took up the guitar because there was no-one around in Amherst who could play it like he wanted it to be played, it’s not difficult to see what he means. In a sense, he simply took the sounds he liked to make as a hardcore drummer and carried them over from one instrument to another. He refers to the greater capability for “dynamics on the drums,” where, unlike the guitar, “not everything is on the same level,” and this was the effect he was looking for, a blast beat for six strings. Even today, he claims that he conceives songs as melody and drums, without much thought to anything in between.
But more than this, the guitar was also an effective way to express the old anti-Amherst thing that had been ingrained in him from an early age. Never exactly one to take much interest in politics, finding it “too hopeful,” J nonetheless recalls that his was the only family in Amherst (and probably in the state) that voted Nixon over McGovern – and he says it with obvious subversive pride; over a decade later, the guitar became the medium of the same kind of oppositional message, now screeching out of his overdriven college-room amp. “Amherst was a jealous kind of place,” he recalls, populated by self-inflated “musos” solely interested in finding out “who could play most like Jeff Beck.” In playing this way he could counter them, even while, ironically enough, his rock ’n’ roll halls of fame overlapped with the same ones they had on their five-grand car stereos. “I didn’t care about those people,” he says, “I just wanted to make good music.”
Eventually, all this came down to hair. The Birthday Party, not to mention hair gel, having made it big in the US in the early eighties, J had started styling himself on Nick Cave, exchanging the short-but-bushy Deep Wound look for something much more exuberant, all the five-alarm style of the electroshocked. Maura Jasper liked it (“the crazy kid with the crazy haircut”). Jon Fetler liked it (“he wasn’t into drugs, but his hair sure looked like he was”). J’s dad, on the other hand, was suspicious (“Why do you have your hair like that?”). Also this one kid at an orchestra that J briefly played in. “Why didn’t you comb your hair?” says this kid. J’s reply is inevitable. “I did,” he said.
—so let’s try to imagine that first Dinosaur gig. Hampshire College, Amherst, late 1984.
Here are Dinosaur, in support of local punks Pleasant Planet. J Mascis, a drummer by training and experience, is the guitarist and frontman. His hair an explosion, he is all dressed up in black denim, which may or may not be a reference to the Cure. He has painted a house somewhere nearby over the summer, and that has earned him $400 or so to buy a Fender Stratocaster to play his songs on. Except that by the time he gets out to Slimy Bob’s Guitar Rip Off (this the real name), Slimy Bob – and what else were you expecting – has upped the price on the Strat to $450. He offers J, instead, an old Fender Jazzmaster for $300.
It’s not quite what J had in mind, and the only person he can think of who plays one of these is Elvis Costello, not the most desired among the rock gods; but, still, he likes the beat-up look of it and, even if he hates the blocky soapbar pick-ups, doesn’t mind the non-standard set-up of this particular instrument: Grover machine heads like Peter Frampton, a Tune-o-matic bridge, a superhigh action. So it’s the Jazzmaster, the first guitar he has owned, that he plays that night at Hampshire College – a guitar meant for jazz, with a special cutaway shape for comfortably seating it on your lap as you play. Standing regardless, he bends over it intently, head down, sways from back foot to front foot. And steps up and on to a pedal, or sings, in a voice, like a lot of these early indie kids, meant for silent film.
Lou Barlow, a guitarist, is on bass. This might be a demotion, but Lou, seven months younger than J and considerably less cool, isn’t about to argue. He sports big spectacles that, hairline to philtrum, look like they may have been generously bestowed by some socialized healthcare plan in the later seventies; topped off by another vintage item of knitwear, his whole style, to paraphrase one recent commentator loosely, suggests a violent inhabitation by the spirits of Sally Jessy Raphael, on the one hand, and Bill Cosby, on the other.1
It’s not just the outfit that smacks of decades past. The instrument slung around Lou’s neck is a Gibson Grabber, most famous as the Kiss bass – a bright, strutting, schlock sound that ought to jut out like Gene Simmons’ big wet tongue, but that, forced out through the 15-inch speaker of a Marshall transistor bass amp, gets mired in sludge neck-deep. Much more active than J, Lou moves around the stage, often adding some vocals himself; he pivots on one foot, spins right round on the really big hits, sometimes even drops down onto his knees, all the while strumming chords on the Grabber whole-arm, high up the neck, just like a frustrated guitarist might.
And behind J and Lou, an Amherst friend of Charlie Nakajima’s. Dressed in some fatigued army surplus, pack of cigarettes outlined in the pocket, Murph—
(Name in full: Emmett Jefferson Patrick Murphy III)
—is a holdover from the one-show-wonders Mogo. Son of yet another professor at UMass, he is a year older than J, and has a reputation as something of a cool laid-back party animal, accrued during his time playing for local hardcore band All White Jury. Which isn’t to say he is necessarily any good. With another shaggy mane of hair, Murph, a drummer, on the drums.
Thank God someone knew what he was doing, I suppose. But what does it all sound like? I don’t know, I’m almost afraid to ask, but one thing is for sure: it was definitely loud, louder than you can imagine, loud with a capital “Ow.” J frequently recounts how, if they weren’t having stuff thrown at them, they themselves would get thrown bodily out of venues all over the local area. This was an inevitable consequence of their inability to speak to any obvious fan base, thrashing out at full volume in clubs where severe ear-damage wasn’t much desired, and playing involved harmonies in hardcore scenes where to hear a sensitively deployed minor ninth was about as likely as seeing Gorbachev go past on his roller skates.
But all this was part of somethi
ng their own, some bewildered, narrow sliver of identity. “We were so focused on our sound, we didn’t care,” says J. The volume seems to have been particularly important. “We didn’t want to be quieter,” he smirks, again with that distinctly subversive satisfaction in his voice. “If you play so loud the bartender can’t hear any of the drinks orders.”
* * *
Dinosaur began, then, with a certain double-helix awkwardness, passed down the evolutionary line from Deep Wound. It has expressed itself in them ever since, in their clothes, their instruments, their relationship to their audience and to one another.
Nowhere is this awkwardness more obvious than in the question of where to fit their music into a genre. This isn’t easy with any band, of course, and becomes an issue only at the moment that the question is asked. Still, it seems relevant here, particularly since this was music that so obviously confused those who went to listen to it. If we could hear behind the volume at that first gig, how would we describe it? It isn’t fast enough or hard enough or stripped-down enough to be hardcore, or plain punk – though Murph’s drumming, in particular, is tapped directly into these. (Besides, in their songs at least, these guys rarely scream or curse, even). If its hint of technique and big solos suggest metal, then this sense is undercut by the way it keeps dropping its masculine guard by recourse to softer musical sections. That’s not to say, though, that its sound is uniformly nerdy enough to make it an early outpost of emo (even if Kim Gordon is certainly on to something when she identifies Dinosaur as the first “emocore” band).2
One thing it certainly isn’t is grunge – though you will often see this applied to Dinosaur as a kind of convenient journalistic shorthand that spies Nirvana lurking just around the corner. Musical differences aside, it’s the wrong coast, for one thing, and anyway, it predates that stuff by miles and probably had an influence on it. (Cobain was a well-known fan, and the members of Tad, about as close to an ideal of a grunge band as you can get, describe listening to the first Dinosaur record when they were just getting together).3 And Dinosaur lacks the experimental art-rock edge of, say, Sonic Youth, and is in that sense much more middlebrow. Conservative even. Aside from Lou’s ukulele music, Lou and J never use alternate tunings, preferring, in J’s words, “to work within the limitations of the guitar” as given.
As tools for getting at musical styles, “alternative” and “indie rock” don’t provide much leverage, being much better suited to describe a social or commercial positioning. The special tailor-made terms, meanwhile, are all too tongue-in-cheek to be satisfying: “Ear-bleeding country” was J’s suggestion, once upon a time; Murph suggests either “heavy hard rock, more punk than classic” or, similar to J, “country punk.” Likewise, “shoegazing” – taken literally, an accurate description, but now much more resonant with certain UK bands in the early nineties.
Perhaps, most minimal of all, and bearing in mind their live shows, “loud” would be best. A “loud” band, the “loudest in the world,” even. But as anyone who has been to a Swans or My Bloody Valentine show will tell you, probably through a howling haze of permanent tinnitus, that is a much-disputed title. There’s loud – and then there’s loud.
Listen: perhaps all this hair-splitting proves is that labels, though inevitable, are useless, a mug’s game, a way of tucking something away in a little box for the sake of convenience. Influences, too. If you want to play at that, we can go on all night. You say Sabbath, I say Zeppelin; you say Black Flag, I say Hüsker Dü; you say Stones, I say Stooges; you say Dolly Parton, I look quizzical, but nod sagely anyway. The point is that you will always find one more than me, and vice versa, and we will never get to the bottom of J’s record collection. And then J will come along and say, nah, I never listened to that that much anyway, and so the game begins again.
Dinosaur’s music can be heard to overlap with all these influences and labels; it seems to borrow freely from anything on which J could, and did, lay his ears. This is true of any band and its main songwriter, I suppose, but here it seems a point worth making just because the Dinosaur sound is so obviously a rock collage – a funny-looking jigsaw, put together from familiar pieces to make a picture you only just recognize. I once saw Peter Buck – the guitarist from the biggest indie influencers of them all, R.E.M. – described as a kind of musical archaeologist, a “rock aficionado, reader, listener, and archivist” with a massive record collection, a figure entirely typical of that obsessive early eighties scene – the kind who would search avidly through bargain bins for “classics” from the sixties, long forgotten by mainstream ears. It seems fitting to advance this label to J, too, given his own collection, his love of guitars pre-seventies and old effects pedals, and his songs-as-patchworks. Like Peter Buck, someone engaging in an act of writing new music that was “musical archaeology as opposed to innovation.”4
So, J Mascis, musical archaeologist. Not the kind who sits down patiently with trowel, brush, and flask, though. One who dives into the pit and rolls around with the bones.
* * *
Then there are all kinds of little idiosyncratic touches in Dinosaur’s music that, not archaeologic or innovative exactly, seem to stem simply from the equipment used.
The effects pedals provide one. Flanger, distortion, wah: deliberately vintage and lo-fi, wired personally, trialed and errored, to give a particular, often abrasive sound – not “subtleties” but “harshities,” as J once put it.5 On record, these effects are layered up and overdubbed with others, sometimes as many as four or five tracks thick. The Jazzmaster, too, has its input here, its boxy pick-ups showing a particular predisposition toward interesting feedback, while its extended tremolo arm, long scale, and (in J’s specific case) bigger frets may also tend toward easier pitch-shifting. It’s tempting, in fact, to suggest that J’s constant string-bending and whammy-barring – big chords and solo notes pulled up and down and in and out of shape – is as much inspired by the build of the guitar itself as by the techniques of the sixties and seventies guitar gods. (Jeff Beck, funnily enough, springs to mind).
Another unique contributor to the Dinosaur sound is J’s voice, a peculiar arrangement of reluctant and strained vocal cords. If we’re talking rock history, there have been some remarkable voices. J’s is not one of them. It’s the part of his music that he seems least able or willing to control: it’s uncrafted, artless, inarticulate, and bored – much the same, in fact, as his speaking voice. He didn’t even want to sing at first, sharing it out with Lou as often as possible in a kind of Lennon–McCartney arrangement. In my experience, his voice is the problem for most newcomers to Dinosaur: Well, I liked the guitar playing, but that guy really can’t sing.
Rest assured, some people love it. Lou Barlow, for one. Always in awe of J, he describes how blown away he was in the early days by J’s “totally laid-back, concise vocals,” his effortless delivery the polar opposite of Lou’s own “frightened yelping” in front of the studio mike. Neil Young has often been cited as the most direct source for J’s singing, the major proponent of that kind of withdrawn, croaky, country voice. This seems just about right, however much J might choose to distance himself from it; still, it’s worth noting that Young’s vocal sound is far more aged, weazen, like a tired seabird, and at the same time shrilly nasal, like an elf playing the oboe. If J is inspired by anything, it seems like it would be Neil Young slow-filtered through the early bands on the SST label: listen, for example, to the Meat Puppets’ II, also a central inspiration for Kurt Cobain.
The important point is that, if you prize accurate pitch, musical line, or tone warmth, or any other kind of traditional vocal conceit, then J’s will probably not be the voice for you. Nor does it score highly in terms of gravelly rock presence. But then again, it is precisely this lack of pretension that fits it to his overall esthetic perfectly. It’s very much not a voice for the Amherst musos; untrained, it comes across as a direct expression of the sadness, isolation, or apathy that his songs are so often about. And this perfect
fit of voice to expression can be very effective. Thurston Moore, circa Daydream Nation, is a 30-year-old mop-top who delivers lines about riots and rockets in a stylish, urgent future-speak; Tad, circa 8-Way Santa, is a big fat man who sings songs about alcoholism, in a voice that sounds like he’s throwing up in a bucket.
It doesn’t always work this way, though. Misfits’ Last Caress has the most disturbing subject matter of any song you will ever hear, and the scariest thing about it by far is Glenn Danzig’s Brylcreemed vibrato.
* * *
At the same time, if the uniqueness of Dinosaur’s music comes from the sounds themselves, it also comes from the way in which the songs traffic between them. Switches flicked or kicked, one effect gives way to another: the crushing to the vulnerable, a kind of zoom effect in sound – observer to observed, like Charlie Nakajima’s cameraman on I Saw It. Or the other way up: from nothing into the big smash moments, the ones that double J over and send Lou spinning. It’s an effect that can even be massively influential, if you want: just about anything on Nirvana’s Nevermind, or, Atlantic crossed, Pablo Honey/Bends-era Radiohead (as a couple of examples of a whole barrage of nineties’ alternative rock) seems to find its cue here.
And here back to where we, and they, started. It might seem overly indulgent, but I think the loudness itself is a vital component of Dinosaur’s music, too – even if their live set, in which a familiar sight is J and Lou trying out a few notes and then “diming” every knob on their equipment, expresses it a little too enthusiastically. One thing I am sure of is that they have trained themselves, over years of auditory damage, to hear nuance within ear-splitting sound. And you can too: it may not align with standard otologistic advice, but it’s important to have the volume cranked out of your comfort zone when listening to these records. In part to slam properly into the wall of sound, and to hear the things layered up within it. And in part to foreground the crushing shifts between loud and soft, overbearing and pathetic. Too quiet and the whole effect plains out into blandness; and what else did you want those perfect cochleas for, anyway.
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