Dinosaur Jr.'s You're Living All Over Me

by Nick Attfield

  Most cogent is the argument that has become the familiar one: that it was their different backgrounds that set the scene for their antagonism. In one corner, Azerrad places “working-class” Lou, born in (industrial) Dayton, OH, raised in (industrial) Jackson, MI, moved at the age of twelve to (not-as-quaint-as-Amherst) Westfield, MA.4 Versus, in the other corner, the white-collar son of a dental professional, spawn of the Five College area’s many fine educational institutions, and owner of a gleaming row of thirty-two uniform pearly whites. Not surprising, then, that the one would patronize the other.

  It all sounds pretty convincing, particularly when J’s friends recall the frequent ski trips he went on as a kid, and the money he always seemed to have for records, in spite of his complete antipathy to work (Maura Jasper remembers him, as one example, getting fired from a gas station for bringing in a TV and a guitar with him). His family was, in that comfortable Amherst context, “regular,” “not hurting for things” (Maura’s words). By contrast, Lou tells me that his own dad worked for Bendix Abrasives.

  But, of course, it’s equally easy to overstate. Maura also remembers hanging out at Lou’s parents’ house with J, Lou, and a bunch of other kids, and says that it was just another regular suburban house, not obviously blue collar at all; Jon refers to Lou’s “underclass posturing,” but also says that this was “never the salient point.” And nowadays, Lou agrees: “I’m probably to blame for Azerrad’s impressions – there was a time when I leaned on that crutch (me from shitty Westfield, J and Murph from rarified Amherst) but the reality is that we were all from similar backgrounds … we were all middle-class kids.”

  So Azerrad may quote Lou as saying that Amherst people, J and Murph included, were all “snotty as hell,” but it’s worth remembering that that’s exactly what J has always said too about those Amherst people: he thought he did comb his hair, remember. The contrary attitude doesn’t necessarily divide so much as unite them, three weird haircuts together in the local punk scene.

  * * *

  It seems to me that the tensions in the band stemmed from something a bit more fundamental than royalties, or oral fixation, or working class fury. Jon Fetler talks about the “actual differences being much more psychological,” and this is, I think, a polite way of saying that the teenage J and Lou were not exactly well-adjusted in terms of personality – and that, crucially, they were mangled in completely opposed ways.

  J, after all, was moody and creative, all very aloof and easily taken as effortlessly superior. From his school days forward, musically and personally, he would blast any threat from outside with a barrage of noise; he would “step into the dark side,” remembers Maura Jasper, “and came out from being quiet by being mean.” His lyrics, like his vocal delivery, are always self-effacing, implying inferiority to the objects of their attraction; but they never stray into outright self-hatred, or searching inward analysis. Is it even himself that he sings about? As with anyone who refuses to wear his heart on his sleeve, it’s hard to get involved: I gather that people just left him alone, safe in the knowledge that things would work out for him – and they have. Even today, he gives away no apparent need or desire to rely on others, or to praise them, and so he doesn’t: I can’t think of many moments in interviews with J Mascis where he extols the virtues of some other guitarist, or some other songwriter.

  Weigh this up against Lou. From the days of the Pressures lyrics onwards, he has had what Jon Fetler refers to as a “pseudo-intellectual” attitude, for which he was always mocked by his bandmates, and which frequently fell headlong into an ugly self-demolition. Younger than the others, he apparently never found much to esteem inside, and so turned his worship outwards to people who would only abuse the attention. Still today, years after all the nastiness, he is drawn to give a glowing reference for everyone but himself: “brilliant” and “intuitive” are two words that keep surfacing in his mentions of J, and he calls himself “lucky,” a kid who put an ad in the paper and had J Mascis show up – “it was my good luck,” he says, “to find someone so innovative.” And, sado-masochistic though it might be, now that Dinosaur are back playing together, Lou sometimes uses his latest solo act to open for them, going backstage for a few minutes, putting down the guitar, and taking up the bass again.

  So it’s easy to characterize. Not to mention patronize. Lou, always inferior, spinning around on one foot and strumming like crazy, desperate to impress someone genetically pre-programmed not to care. It’s tragic if you think about it. Lou, always Ernie to J’s Bert; always the Snuffleupagus to his Big Bird.5

  But if that was the starting point, then, as time went on and the band got some recognition, it was inevitable, I suppose, that the balance of these power relations would begin to shift. Lou’s ego, now sitting underneath bigger, floppier hair and a filthy Sonic Youth t-shirt, inflated a few degrees; he was in a band, let’s not forget, that had toured Europe, and that a lot of people in that scene were talking about. He also got a girlfriend. This doesn’t mean that he was about to challenge J’s supremacy directly – that would have been way too assertive – but it meant that he had at least enough self-awareness to try and gently provoke him, either aggressively by being annoying, or passively by playing the martyr. “You couldn’t predict what would come out of my mouth,” he recalls, “and I took great pleasure in that.”6

  All this bait which, of course, J gladly took, tearing into Lou for anything he felt like – the way he spoke, the way he chewed gum, the way he ate chicken – and generating a vicious circle that, locked into the back of a van for weeks on end during the YLAOM tours, was only ever going to escalate exponentially. Eventually, Murph, otherwise placid, got dragged into it, too, and here Azerrad’s account excels, with gory details of all the immature insults hurled, the hotel furniture smashed, and the rooms stormed out of.7

  It all seems to have come down to a single evening, a show in, of all places, Naugatuck, Connecticut, just down the road from New Haven, in early 1988. The vivid reminiscences of one bystander, Thurston Moore, give us an idea of what happened:

  Lou is playing feedback, he’s sort of sitting on his amp just touching his bass strings, and it’s really loud … while J was singing the song and strumming, it was a slow song … J saunters over to Lou and says something, if at all, and kind of gives Lou a little push – and it’s the first real physical sort of connection, interaction, and it’s amazing to watch … Lou is taken by such surprise from this touch, he just goes like, ‘Whoa!,’ [throws hands up in the air] and then it starts becoming a shoving back-and-forth thing, and while they’re doing it, their guitars are, like, cranked through the amps so all you hear is the guitars smashing together. To me it sounded so good.8

  Even better, if you want to hear the actual fight yourself, there’s a chance you still can. Currently circulating on the internet is a bootleg of a Dinosaur show that purports to be from that time in Naugatuck, at the Nightshift Café, and if it is what it sounds like it is, it is one of the most astonishing live recordings you will ever hear.

  J and Murph start playing the seventh song of their set, a super slow version of the old date-night number Severed Lips, and there’s not a bass note within earshot – it’s the inimitably eerie sound of electric guitar over drums alone. Suddenly, a turgid mass of loud, low feedback comes in: it’s unusually overpowering, even for a Dinosaur gig, and sounds like someone decided to mix some cement onstage; it’s followed up by all kinds of random noise that comes and goes for the rest of the song, a good eight minutes. When they’re done playing, there’s more feedback, some scuffled guitar strings, and a long high rasping tone. And then some sarcastic onlookers near the mikes come in: “No, Lou’s going, it’s a good conceptual statement, yes, it’s deep and meaningful” – “You have in your hands the last Dinosaur tape of all time” – “Someone’s videotaping it, d’ya see, he’s got pictures of it.”

  The thing about this recording is that it’s usually labeled 12 December 1987. So Azerrad may have the da
te wrong, or, more likely, it might be that it wasn’t the only time that it happened: perhaps one example only of a catalog of unpleasantness that led finally to Lou being soft-shoe-shuffled out of the band, in typical passive fashion, many months later, in July 1989. “They’ve done something like this before … it’s an act so they don’t have to play anymore,” is another of the comments heard in the Naugatuck crowd.

  So it’s strangely heartbreaking. A band falls apart before your very ears, and I wonder if the video of that night will ever surface in full. A cut, and then in the midst of more wiseass heckles (“Hey Lou, maybe you should stop taking J’s medication”) and sporadic applause, Lou can be heard explaining. “I’m sorry, I’m really sorry, I was freakin’ out,” he whines, “I couldn’t play the songs anymore, I just freaked out, everything was really fucked up, I’m really sorry, it was a harsh scene – it was all my fault, I’m really sorry.”9

  * * *

  All the more amazing, then, that Lou could get two of his own songs on to YLAOM. It’s so much J’s record that the inclusion of these marks a real victory, I think, and the reaching of a new checkpoint of confidence – without which, I suspect, Lou’s solo career after 1989 wouldn’t have developed in quite the same way. Not that J, characteristically, seems to have encouraged debate on the subject; he seems to have just let it go, perhaps reflecting that, without the inclusion of Lou’s compositional efforts, the record would only be a meager 25 minutes long.

  Asked about Lose, the first of these songs, Lou’s instinct is, again, to talk immediately of the others. “I wanted to write a cool electric song for J and Murph to play,” he says, adding proudly: “J played my chords, and he also had typically great ideas for hooks, and for Murph.” Could the whole thing be a kind of homage to J, then, at that time Lou’s object of worship and biggest influence? He doesn’t disagree. “It was a pastiche of half-baked songs – I took the verse melody from an earlier three-string acoustic guitar song of mine, and then added every single riff I’d thought of over two years,” he says, “a la J.”

  He’s right, the structure is all screwy and unpredictable, new section leading into new section – much like one of J’s songs. Still, the differences are all there to hear. Lose is not, for example, a song that shows much facility with those affecting chord changes that J so often trades in: once the opening bass descent reaches the bottom string, E, it pretty much sits down there for the whole song, as if sucking its thumb or hugging tight to a comfort blanket; it takes a lot of fancy lead soloing and bass acrobatics to decorate this and stop it sounding like a total drone. And Lou’s singing voice, though it sounds at times like an impression of J’s, is distinct: he tries to stay in tune, for one thing, and for another, the song’s first line is pitched much higher and effortful than J will ever go – vocal cords pulled tight, teeth bared, a kind of hypertense version of the Mascis drawl.

  Anyway, there’s way too much self-hatred in the lyrics for them to have come from J. Pretty much any line from the song would suffice. “Can’t believe a single word I said” it begins; “chained to this corpse for one more day”; and harshest of all:

  Little lies start around

  And I deserve to feel so down

  And I deserve to rot inside out

  Jesus! you might say, and funnily enough, at the song’s very end, that very individual is introduced, in the most unlikely lyrical twist since the rabbit at the record’s beginning. As if Lou didn’t have enough to fret over already:

  Sometimes thinking right

  I can’t believe I was chosen to exist

  Cos only Jesus Christ himself

  Ever will exist

  He says: “Son, go and kill this need

  To always understand –

  Cut the world until it fits

  On the back of your hand”

  All this faded out on a musical question mark, with the same single-fret minor-major slide as the opening, and Murph hitting straight out one-for-one.

  I was eager to know more about these closing words, since they feel directed towards unusual profundity. They seem to mean something, but, beyond the signal of a general disaffection with being alive, I’m not quite sure what it is. Like the savior in the Pressures lyric, they also add a peculiarly Lou-like touch, as religion isn’t a subject that ever even gets into the same ballpark as J’s songs. But besides a vague reference to his being raised Roman Catholic (unusually for the Massachusetts area, and in common, he says, with J and Murph), Lou recalls no particular religious anxiety connected to those words, and has no particular explanation of why Jesus should express himself like an apple-pie Uncle-Sam patriarch. “I felt lost in the details of everything (in that 19–20-year-old way) and wanted some clarity,” he remarks, “I wanted to see the ‘big picture’ … It felt whiny even then but I felt I had to express my weaker moments.”

  Whatever it’s about, Lose, thanks to a combination of lyrics, voice, the lead hooks that run throughout, and the intensity of the playing, is the record’s edgiest few minutes – played right at the tipping point of complete chaos, clinging on desperately to that bottom E. Even so, it’s probably best summed up as a curtsey to J Mascis, written by his greatest ever fan. And on that note, it’s funny, isn’t it, that say Lose out loud and you get Lou’s: another label handed over from outside, not really his at all.

  * * *

  So if not here, just where is Lou?

  Poledo is where we finally catch up with him, the last track and most extreme outpost that the original cut of YLAOM has to offer. It is a significant departure from the rest of the record, a weird title for a weird six minutes.

  This is nothing unusual for rock, of course: there’s a longstanding convention of the last track being in some way different. But after half-an-hour or so of three-minute electrics, you might well skip over it, in the same way that you might ignore a secret track, or that song before Candle where Sonic Youth just recorded their answerphone, or those little songs that Dave Grohl used to record while waiting for Kurt to show up at the studio.

  Don’t forget, though, that this was Lou’s life’s work up to this point. To put it grandly, for six minutes, you are listening to an oeuvre. “It’s the culmination of a few years’ work,” he says, “my big statement.” Not that that should imply any hi-tech expertise. “It was two songs on the ukulele – I put them together with no editing, just hitting pause and stop on two tape recorders wired into one.” It was framed – a few seconds at the beginning, a couple of minutes at the end – by a swirling soundscape, a “four-second swell from an orchestra thing” layered over itself hundreds of times. “There isn’t any pitch shifting involved,” he adds, “though I did jam a pen into the mechanism.”

  The title, Lou states, is pronounced “Po-lee-do,” (not “Po-lay-do”), and he ought to know, since it is a “nonsense word” that he invented, possibly by allusion to Toledo, the city a few hours from where he was born in Ohio. It was a word of great importance to him at that time, a “declaration of conviction” or mantra that he would chant or scream – and record, as is all too audible in the various breaks of the finished track.

  So Lou’s tape-recorder habit is center stage. “Stockhausen-by-way-of-Fisher-Price” said one review:10 “that’s pretty cool,” responds Lou, but still he doesn’t claim any pretense to the sixties’ high art experiment. He points instead to his “childhood obsession with radio,” fuelled by “ten different college radio stations that played everything,” and the way that he could use the technology to make “songs emerge from static.” More specifically, he talks about the tape-collage influence of the Beatles, the Velvet Underground, and the symphonic mash-up of Neil Young’s Expecting to Fly.

  And all this got channeled back into Lou’s own personal agenda. “I tried to puzzle it out in Poledo,” he says, “it was my struggle to come to terms with guilt.” Toward Jesus again? The voice in the second of the two songs that make up the track (after the two-minute mark, or thereabouts), after all, keeps calling
out his name, along with the frank admission “I’ll tell you about everything.” But, no, Lou is again coy about this. “Guilt toward all people,” he clarifies, and this taps into the track’s closing message, a set of pseudo-profound lyrics that, steeped in bong-water philosophy, are also tainted by the stifling air and tepid bathwater of the old folks’ home:

  Good doesn’t live

  And there’s no evil hand

  Only this great power we misunderstand

  So please relax

  Take the pain

  Laugh out loud

  When you forget your name

  * * *

  Poledo, I think, acts not as a destination, but as a signpost. Pointing toward Lou’s own precarious antisocial-but-lonely existence a la J, amply evoked by the toneless, tuneless, and yet curiously resonant ukulele sound bouncing off the close bedroom walls; the 20 seconds of solo after “afraid to be alone” are among the most directly affecting on the entire record. But also, as other commentators have said, with its hypnotic strum emerging from a dense cloud of sound, the whole track points forward: to bits and pieces of My Bloody Valentine and other lo-fi shoegazers, perhaps, but mainly to Lou’s later work. Sebadoh (the name of Lou’s first solo act, and another of his nonsense words) starts here: it was through playing exactly these kinds of collage songs at Dinosaur shows that he began to hone a knife-edge of self-esteem; to assert something that, if not yet Lou, was recognizably Not J.

  “I tend toward simplicity,” he remarks. “I gravitate toward pop music and country music, which is where I started out as a kid.” We’re speaking on the phone – he’s somewhere in California – but I imagine that he adds a nonchalant shrug. “This music is just what comes out of me,” he says.