Essays: Rabbits
1. Azerrad, p. 347.
2. From Simon Reynolds’s interview in Melody Maker, December 12, 1987.
3. See the video “j mascis – little fury things”, found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMXmQS7JjRM, accessed January 31, 2011.
4. Quoted from the interview with J Mascis on Triple J Music Specials, found at http://www.abc.net.au/triplej/music_specials/s1402020.htm, accessed January 31, 2011.
5. See Gaar, p. 54.
Teeth
“J had grown up around the idea” says Thurston Moore, “that it takes 32 teeth to make a perfect smile, right? So I figured he thought 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.”1
I asked J myself what he thought of Thurston’s theory. He has never heard of it before. “Nah …,” he says, and then about five seconds later, “… that’s a stretch.”
So that, apparently, is the end of that. Still, I am undeterred by J’s reticence on this particular point, mainly because I think the perspicacious Thurston Moore might just be on to something. I mean: have you ever listened to a Dinosaur song in this way, labeling the component parts as you go, like a dentist craning over a gaping mouth? It is a pretty strange experience. In short, the young J, in particular, is not one for writing the verse-chorus-verse sequences standard in much mainstream rock, pop, punk, and hardcore. He sticks to those ingredients, of course – and what else would you expect from a rock archaeologist – but, with intro, outro, and numerous solo and bridges thrown in, mixes the whole lot up into a kind of musical gumbo. Back then, says Lou, J’s procedure was simple: he would “throw a bunch of stuff at the wall to see what sticks.”
One of J’s favorite tactics is at his songs’ beginnings, deploying trick trapdoor intros that are never heard again, and that fall open suddenly onto something quite different. Little Fury Things, we’ve seen. Kracked and The Lung do it, too. And, perhaps the best example, Tarpit. Here, the controlled and detailed wucka-wuckas of J’s 20-second guitar intro open into a two-chord blunt instrument of a riff; the A major of the intro plains out suddenly into G major, a shift easy enough to negotiate on the guitar’s fretboard, but one that – try it – has a pressure-drop effect on the ears.
Then there are the little breaks in his songs that, again never to be repeated, seem to exist solely to introduce a new effect: those stunning acoustic/phase moments toward the beginning of Freak Scene, to cite J’s own example. And, a more dramatic version of the same idea, songs that, as if bored of themselves, turn into other songs halfway through. The most extreme example is, again, Bulbs of Passion, which seems to consist of about nine songs all spliced together. But best of all is They Always Come from Bug, for two minutes a simple stop-start punk number, most notable for Murph’s virtuoso drum-muting, J’s son-of-a-dentist braindrill guitar sound, and the mystifying chorus, where J’s beloved unspecified “it” turns plural (“They always come in twos/All the space they always use”). At two minutes exactly, though, it transforms into something else entirely, a twitchy new riff launching about nineteen vapor-trail guitars, each spinning a dense web of ringing melodic hooks, clear-air tremolos and chords pulled in and out of shape.
Pure “head-in-the-clouds outer limits brilliance,” as Thurston Moore once said of J, and probably one of the most appealing noises that 1988 was capable of making.2
* * *
So perhaps, on reflection, teeth is the wrong metaphor. Teeth are all too similar, a uniform row. And gumbo isn’t much better. What springs more appropriately to mind is, funnily enough, Maura Jasper’s back cover design for YLAOM. This is a blurry photograph of a forest clearing, colored in livid red and green only. Something has happened here. Little bits of tree are strewn around everywhere, and the only discernable objects besides are a post with a sign hanging on top and, in the foreground, a human hand.
“I got that [photograph],” she recalls, “from a book called ‘Investigations of Death’ … it was a plane crash, and they were trying to identify the body parts.” The book she is referring to, I assume, is Spitz and Fisher’s notorious Medicolegal Investigation of Death (First edition, 1973), a kind of primer for forensic pathologists, its photos described by one reviewer as “detailed, well-produced, and quite revolting.”3 And revolting they are, but oddly fitting for the songs on this record, even if Maura certainly didn’t mean it in such a specific way. You’re Living All Over Me, the music of discombobulation. Medicolegal Investigation of Rock, by J Mascis?
I put this particular observation to J, or at least something a couple of degrees less gross and elaborate. I had thought that he would just shrug off the whole thing as a hallmark of what lots of people were doing throughout the seventies and eighties, that is, expressing sheer boredom with standard structures, chopping them up, and frankensteining them all back together into an alternative. If that were the case, it would be an old story in music history, a dialogue with the presumed mainstream that can result in some interesting efforts. Some of Sonic Youth’s detuned guitar intros (Candle, Brave Men Run), as beautiful as anything you will ever hear, are countered by the heavy-handed riffs that follow them; Kurt Cobain’s early song Spank Thru pivots suddenly from a cornball parody of a love song (“… and the flowers sing in D minor”) into a dirty grunge number that can only be about masturbation. And, more knowing still, the pseudo-art rockers Pavement, who would sometimes signpost the components of their songs as they went along (“And they’re coming to the chorus now,” sings Stephen Malkmus in the build-up to the chorus of Gold Soundz).
J says two things. One of them is two words: “Black Sabbath.” This is no surprise. J has sometimes cited them as his favorite band, and, if you listen to his preferred album of theirs, Sabotage (1975), you’ll hear epics built up from all kinds of bits and pieces – the six-and-a-half minute Symptom of the Universe springs to mind, a meandering succession of electric sections that closes with a soulful hippie acoustic stretch, Ozzy really reaching for those high notes. Perhaps, in fact, this provides another good way to think about some of Dinosaur’s music – much like Hüsker Dü’s, a peculiar and self-contradictory mixture that cuts hardcore speed across the ponderous structures of seventies prog-influenced rock. Glam rock, too: Bulbs of Passion, as far as I am concerned, is the Bohemian Rhapsody of the alternative world. “[These were] real songs that had all these different parts, like Queen or Sparks,” agrees Thurston Moore.4
More engaging, because unexpected, is the other thing that J said:
“I just thought, the more parts the better. I guess it was a lack of confidence with verse-chorus-verse.”
In other words, what might easily be heard as structural experiment is, says J, just the opposite: a feeling of not being capable of writing real songs with real structures. And, it’s true, there does seem to be a path from the first to the third record and beyond, as if J were getting more confident. If in 1985, the stream-of-consciousness a la Bulbs of Passion was still a possibility, by 1988, and Bug, almost every song signs straight over to the verse-chorus plan. In fact, Yeah We Know, its fourth track, is set on such a predictable verse-chorus cycle that the title seems as if it is sheepishly apologizing for the song.
So this confidence brought its own downside. J once said that he is least happy with Bug, of anything that he’s done;5 Murph refers to the same record having “a little more of a formula,” being “more traditional” – a consequence of the feeling that came in the wake of the second record, the “what do we do now?”.
* * *
One upshot of J’s comment about confidence is that a more recognizably formulaic song on these early records gives a strong signal: something offered up to our ears with particular pride. Repulsion on Dinosaur is one of these – the band’s first single, with a distinct atmosphere of accomplishment, a kind of official rock masterpiece that pres
ents itself as the best on the record.
Raisans is just the same. Its privileged placement on YLAOM – what would be the opener of side two on the LP – is telling, and the attack of its first chords is one of the most committed moments of the entire record. It’s also the song that, of all of them, you will go away singing, because it has a catchy chorus that comes back twice – though it seems like far more, because J, for the only time on the record, uses its underlying chords as the intro music to kick off the song. And each time this chorus returns, Murph’s runaway drumfill between its two halves gets more and more elaborate.
To be honest, the whole thing is slick as pop, and almost as pretty. It has a chorus lyric that is irrefutable, and irresistible, in its slack-jawed stalker’s logic—
I’ll be down
I’ll be around
I’ll be hanging where
Eventually you’ll have to be
I’ll just stare
And hope you’ll care
It’s only everything
Standing in front of me
—and that borrows its momentum from the potent set-up at the beginning, the lyrics’ explosions and burnings and rippings played out by heavily overdubbed cymbal crashes:
The lights exploded
She stood burning
In front of me
She ripped my heart out
And gave it to me
By some distance, it is the most melodramatic scene that J sings about on the record, and its mood is matched by the fraught guitar solo near the end, a real monster. These construct a song that just about everyone seems to love. Lou talks about it in hushed tones, and it was the first track on that demo tape that, given to SST by Sonic Youth, got Dinosaur just where they wanted to be. Later, in 1992, the Boston alt-rock artist Juliana Hatfield covered it as a brazen pop song, complete with rich angelic harmonies on the chorus.
So Raisans is intense, and popular, and winning. But for all that it brims over with songwriting confidence, its most engaging moments come just when, unexpectedly, this expertise breaks down – leaving little gaps, little pockets of unconfidence, J might say, where, any model to one side, he seems to have just followed his fingers and ears as best he could. The first time comes after the end of the initial verse, a kind of bridge into the chorus, which, responding to a little question (“Have I begun a futile chase?”), opens out into one of the most surprising sound effects on the record – a luminous hook that makes the guitar sound like a harp or something, balanced against a set of ringing chords. And then, as if stunned, the motion gradually tapers off, loses its way: strumming nowhere in particular, J is eventually left high and dry on a hammer trill, as if looking around confused for the others, who have timidly dropped away somewhere into the background. No-one seems to know quite where to lead the song, and it’s not until Murph punches out and defibrillates the whole thing that it gets going again, straight into the comfort of the chorus.
The momentum is crushed again when, after a clunky central section – a bland set of chords, J spitting out the words too fast, like his old friend Charlie Nakajima – the song plateaus onto another extended bridge; this another of J’s characteristic touches, pitting his lonely added-note guitar chords against a reticent rhythm section.
It would be peculiar enough on its own, but then, flown in over the top, there is a new voice that cuts straight through the whole break. Against a flowing tide of fuzz in the background, it sounds like a direct taping off of TV or film, a common enough occurrence amongst these kinds of TV-gawping bands, particularly when it gave the opportunity for a wise word or two from some pornographic flick, or some vague sloganeering about liberty ’n’ stuff. (Mudhoney’s In’n’Out of Grace begins with the classic line from The Wild Angels: “We want to be free to ride our machines, without being hassled by the man!”)
Actually, the voice is not from TV, or a film. It’s the very real voice of a regular old guy, some Western Mass resident of the late eighties, caught on tape by Lou, who, at that time still, would split his daily schedule between playing bass and helping out at an old people’s home. His brain addled by “too many Throbbing Gristle records,” he tells me, a tape recorder would accompany him wherever he went – and it was switched on one day at the home when they were bathing a resident who, unconvinced that they were only trying to clean him up, started to shout out. It snaps suddenly into focus: a multi-pitched, almost song-like wobbly noise (“you’re nearly my …”?) becomes a pleading “you’re killing me! – you’re killing me! – you’re really killing me!”, before other blurred voices fold in over the top of it.
“I gathered the scariest bits I could find from my cassettes,” recalls Lou, “and stuck them in the songs randomly, wherever it worked for J.” Not that he’s proud of having done this nowadays: he admits with some embarrassment, that, aside from being deeply questionable from a legal point of view, it is just plain “sick” – which is the same word used by Dave Pine, the engineer who helped out here and in the case of another similarly positioned addition to In A Jar.
But it’s there all the same, and for those standing back a bit further than the band, this bridge is one of the record’s most acute moments. Not random at all; funny how, like the earlier bridge, it completely halts the confident pop-stride of the whole song, a powerful example of one of those typical Dinosaur undercutting effects that forces a genuinely vulnerable and honest voice straight through the onslaught of noise. And it’s poignant, too, isn’t it: let’s not forget, after all, that over twenty years after the record was made, this is someone surely long dead, a voice etched into this groove and most probably nowhere else.
Most of all, funny how it’s a voice that speaks directly to the title of the record. To deny that would be to subscribe to J’s characteristic shoulder-shrugging stance that says it’s just a bunch of guitar chords with shouting over the top. Jon Fetler, at least, is willing to think about it, this old man’s voice a “primal cry,” he says, called out in endless distress by someone in decline, the epitome of unconfidence, who can’t seem to find a connection with the people around him anymore. A wailing, gaping mouth, teeth like tombstones, silenced only by another return of the chorus and the playing of that solo.
“Jesus, what the fuck is going on, you’re living all over me, man!”, paraphrases Jon, nailing home the point, and it’s hard not to think of the skeletal figure on Maura Jasper’s cover, looking up to heaven, and looking down at the floor.
Teeth
1. Quoted in Byron Coley’s notes for the CD reissue of Dinosaur, found at http://www.dinosaurjr.com/history.htm.
2. Quoted in Stearns, p. 16.
3. See the review by A. C. Hunt, in the Journal of Clinical Pathology 27/1 (1974), p. 86.
4. Again, quoted in Coley’s notes for Dinosaur.
5. Quoted in Azerrad, p. 369.
Girls
One thing I did wonder was how they got from Deep Wound to Dinosaur. One answer: J’s dad’s station wagon. But I mean more in terms of style. How does it happen that a full-blown musical seizure, 90-second songs at most, transforms into something more ponderous – a style that, without the urge to sprint, seems to revel in enjoyment of its different moments, chords, solos, and all the rest?
This is a question that seems to have two ways of asking it. One is why hardcore punk, in general, fell apart as a movement after the mid-eighties. Was it just that it was so stripped down and minimal, such a streamlined statement, that it didn’t suggest any particular direction in which it could go? Once kids came along who loved its force but didn’t feel so strongly about its anti-everything stance, I suppose, it was bound to get merged into other interests. Also some of these kids could really play, and really knew and loved their music – and hardcore was never hip to expertise of any kind.
Another way would be to ask why, specifically, Deep Wound finally ran out of steam. J, in agreement with the above, is characteristically prosaic on this. “Hardcore had just run its course,” he says. “We
came to the end of it, and did something new.” Lou, always more nervy, speaks of a 1984 road trip spent listening to Neil Young, of “restlessness,” of all the “influences converging” on them, so that they “couldn’t play hardcore anymore.”1 Maura Jasper, likewise, remembers them listening to a whole new set of music, specifically jangly country stuff: Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, Meat Puppets, and, again, Neil Young.
Looking back 25 years on, and as a kind of shorthand, it works nicely. Teenage ears deafened by hardcore pricked up suddenly to a different tune, one far more musically engaging, and so there was no looking back. Still, it probably wasn’t anything like this simple. J, for one, has repeatedly said that he was way into the Stones (and before that, the Beach Boys, and before that, Aerosmith) before he discovered hardcore; and that, even if hardcore culture demanded the kind of commitment that saw him selling all his non-hardcore records, he gradually bought them all back anyway. In other words, theories of musical style change are as long as your arm, and twice as ugly. The jangly stuff was already there, even if in the background: I doubt there was any notable influx of different music, or any pinpointable eureka moment that set the course for Dinosaur.
So instead, a snap answer, provided once again by the redoubtable Jon Fetler.
Girls. Girls is what happened.
It’s certainly worth pondering, even if it seems unlikely: J, Lou, and Murph were all at least eighteen when they formed Dinosaur – surely girls weren’t still alien to them? But Jon, of course, is being polite, not to mention euphemistic. Compare J’s answer to Jack Barron: “We had sex … you lose the thrashing drive after sex.”2 This is more plausible, if somewhat icky. Testosterone-fuelled hardball gets softened by sleeker lines, greater attention to beauty, more reflective natures; flagrant gender essentialism turned gratuitous musical metaphor it might be, but still, a more appealing explanation.
Dinosaur Jr.'s You're Living All Over Me Page 6