Pressures
1. See Azerrad, p. 358.
2. Quoted from Marc Hawthorne’s interview with the band in July 2005.
3. For the Azerrad quotes in this paragraph, see pp. 362–3.
4. See Azerrad, pp. 351–2.
5. The second part of the Sesame Street comparison is paraphrased from Paul Shirley’s review of a Dinosaur show for ESPN in 2009, at http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/thelife/news/story?id=4617790, accessed January 31, 2011.
6. Quoted from Marc Hawthorne’s A.V. Club interview.
7. See Azerrad, pp. 362–7.
8. Quoted from the interviews on the DVD Dinosaur Jr.: Live in the Middle East.
9. The recording is currently findable at http://www.freesofree.net/downloads.php, accessed January 31, 2011.
10. Quoted from Jess Harvell’s Pitchfork review.
The Hang
“—an anthem in a vacuum
on a hyperstation—”
Sonic Youth, Trilogy
It was December when I went to visit J Mascis, at his home in Amherst. Snow was on the ground. He opens the front door, doesn’t say much. Except, in the tone of an excuse, this:
“Look, I’m not a people person.”
J’s interview style is legendary, the major contributor to his slacker image. Those who meet him in person frequently complain of the mumblings, the shruggings, the evasive eyes and thousand-yard stares, the orphaned sentences left hanging midair, adjectiveless – all chronic inertia’s laggard horizontalisms. And most of all, the long pauses, the incurious silences, the games of chicken with who’s going to speak next.
Inevitably, these attributes force certain conclusions, which J never seems to have had the energy to contradict. “Perma-stoned,” as he once described himself,1 or, as in this classic piece of argumentation, from an interview sometime in the early nineties:
J: [annoyed] The biggest thing that I hear is like “so you watch TV all day, and you’re really lazy,” stuff like that – I don’t really watch much TV these days, and my friend was saying that people think I’m lazy because I talk so slow, and, um …
Interviewer: Why do you talk so slow?
J: [thinks] I don’t know – I guess because I’m lazy.2
And when Tad got hold of him to produce their 1993 record Inhaler, their frontman wouldn’t have disagreed: “J had a lot of good input … most of the time [he] just sat with his sunglasses in the back on the couch. I swear to God most of the time he was taking naps – he had the sunglasses on so you couldn’t tell what his eyes were doing.”3
So J, like a lot of things about this band, is easy to anecdotalize, or parody, or sling clichés at. He has become the poster-boy for Reagan’s Generation X, and that’s something that’s not exactly difficult to have fun with – I’ve done it myself throughout this book. Like any stereotype, though, it can be stretched too far. For all his apparent laziness, J sharpens right up when you hit certain areas of conversation: guitar effects, the differences between Amherst and Westfield, how certain grunge bands couldn’t play their instruments. And if the stereotype is taken to imply that he’s deliberately unhelpful, or obstructive, or unpleasant, then that’s wrong – at least in my experience.
The thing is, he just doesn’t talk at length, or effuse in the way we expect of a rock star. There could be an overspill of anecdotes about the early Boston hardcore scene, or touring with Sonic Youth in the eighties, or Kurt Cobain and his legendary request that J play the drums for Nirvana. But there isn’t any of it, and this restraint sets him apart from the others. Lou always has something more to add, is enthusiastic and excitable; Murph, a regular kind of guy if ever there was one, is as like to tell you how he never should have bought that second-hand Saab as how he laid down the tracks for the latest record. Where they go on talking, J falls silent, or drums on the table, or makes a noise like a hi-hat, or sings softly to himself. No effusion, and that’s about all you can say. The ball stays in his court, and you have to wait and see whether he’ll knock it back (it was the guitar, not drums, it turns out, that Kurt asked him to play).
It’s easy to mock, but, in the final analysis, you also have to have some respect for this. For someone who was never a people person, J has managed to stay afloat in the alternative rock world for almost 30 years now, even in the troubled waters of the early nineties. And he’s done this, I think, partly through a continuous output of material, and partly by surrounding himself with people more naturally talkative: friends, managers, promoters, band members – Murph, infamously, did the dirty work when Lou was kicked out of the band in 1989, and someone else phoned him back up when he was needed again. In the small case of our interview, it’s J’s wife, Luisa, who brings out tea and cookies, and chats warmly about German snack food slang and the advantages of the Berlin public transport system.
With the help of those around him, then, J manages to defy the stereotype constructed by his interviewers. Even so, he still doesn’t quite match the character that his friends depict. Those I spoke to about him repeatedly attest not to his aloofness, but to his warmth, his great sense of humor, the teenage goofiness that never got left behind. And these weren’t obvious to me, at least not to any great degree.
Characteristically, it was Jon Fetler, not J himself, who explained. “Listen,” he says, “if you come at him head-on as an interviewer, of course J is going to be defensive.” The scrutiny of the interview question, I suppose, is much like any other, just the same as came out of the mouths of the superior Amherst musos back in the day. Jon stresses instead what he calls “J’s philosophy,” the crucial importance of the band and its friends “just being together,” and letting things “come out naturally and warmly.” “The tone of this band is a hang, not an interview,” he goes on. A hang? A kind-of sideways approach to companionship, I suppose, not a confrontational one – something gradually evolving, and impossible to manufacture artificially or quickly.
My problem is, Jon’s description is in danger of making it all sound a bit like an episode of Dawson’s Creek, and that doesn’t seem right either: it’s not naturalness and warmth that everyone involved has always stressed about Dinosaur, but lack of communication and chemistry, particularly in the early days – as Jon himself wryly observes, when they finally came to blows that night in Naugatuck, they were still hiding behind their guitars, not really communicating with their own selves at all.
I think what he must be describing is a kind of scene entirely typical of groups of teenage boys in close quarters, regardless of whether they are aware of liking each other or not. It’s not what anyone post-adolescence would call meaningful communication, exactly: rather, it’s a bond formed from sick jokes (J’s penchant for revolting put-downs has been noted),4 a love of ultraviolent films, banned if possible, and a harsh scattergun sarcasm from which no-one and nothing was safe. These kinds of traits came together, in long hours spent in parental basements and garages, with a stoned fascination for horrible events and extreme psychological and emotional states – all examined, of course, with a kind of not-me detachment that kept their inquirers safely at arm’s length.
Sounds like fun? In Jon Fetler’s own account:
[E]ven though there was the enormous and well-documented squaring-off between these guys, there was also a hell of a lot of fun going on. The general atmosphere during those early days had an upbeat tone that made hanging together a total blast. Not sunshine-and-pastel-color happiness, safe to say, but a running stream of sharp, genuinely funny banter that always included plenty of debauched and deranged humor.
But still, so far this could be pretty much any group of teenage boys. Let’s not forget that this was a band, and so, adding to this atmosphere, there must have been a kind of communication that centered on music, too. It sounds corny when I put it in this way: I don’t mean that they, like, totally spoke to each other through playing the notes, or whatever; but rather that the playing of the songs provided a common thread that they could all cling on to, in
spite of the obvious frictions of personalities still unsanded.
And here’s the most important point that I will make about YLAOM. Throughout all the questions I have asked people in writing this book, one conviction has come up again and again: the popular idea that this record’s peculiar intensity stems from the band members’ hatred for one another is a huge exaggeration – part of a threadbare mythology that might fulfill a task in spicing up articles or selling records, but doesn’t bear much resemblance to reality. When the songs were first rehearsed and recorded, I haven’t heard much convincing testimony that Dinosaur were constantly fixing to kill each other. Murph may have been deeply and unusually vexed by J’s control-freak attitude, but that doesn’t mean that his every snare hit was J’s face; likewise, Lou’s downward strum wasn’t aimed at J’s guts, and J’s every pedal stomp didn’t kick Lou’s ass. Maybe onstage in Naugatuck at the end of 1987, but not in the middle of the year in New York.
On the contrary. The words that my interviewees cite over and over are positive ones. The band loved playing these songs together, and were psyched that they could play them in the way that they could – even today, having played with many other musicians besides, they are all convinced that, as a trio, they have “something special, a certain energy” as a band (J’s unexpectedly warm words). More than that, they were thrilled with the response they got from their audiences once they hit New York, particularly in the context of the abuses of their earliest shows. Before they were all twenty years old, they got to tour with Sonic Youth, just about the coolest people they could imagine, and had an album of note on the most eagerly watched indie label of the times.
When it came to recording, too, Wharton Tiers doesn’t talk about tension or hatred or in-fighting in the studio, at least, no more than any other band he has worked with. The main thing he remembers is the “excitement keeping the band together.” Lou, likewise, has recently said that he would have stayed in the band however they treated him, just to play those songs, and has insisted – without contradiction from the others – that the break-up in 1989 was not for musical reasons, but personal ones, and all the more hurtful because of it. In his painfully honest words, “I don’t like you. You talk too much. You’re out of the band.”5
So I think that the songs and their playing provided a kind of connection or warmth, a feeling that papered over, however superficially and temporarily, the fissures in their personalities and the yawning gaps in their relationships with one another. An “agreed-upon tension,” says Maura Jasper, and this is in keeping with the other half of Jon Fetler’s testimony:
Moreover, there was a shared understanding that Dinosaur was in the process of being the best fucking band in the world. I don’t mean that we had that concept as some grandiose mission statement, only that everyone involved knew how good these songs were and how good these guys were at playing them. This provided a solid foundation for going forward as a band, and while all the multilayered tensions certainly added to the power of their presentation, there was a cohesive whole that was more than just a channeling of interpersonal angst and resentment.
It’s an important and balanced statement that I think has to be recorded and noted. All the same, for all the eloquence with which Jon puts it, he is describing something that is not particularly conducive to being written down. It was a social phenomenon: it happened in person, and in playing the songs. Almost 25 years after the record, it resists re-creation on the printed page. The Hang, or, why you shouldn’t try to write a book about Dinosaur Jr.
Still, my final question for YLAOM comes from this. I understand where the sadness is on this record. I can hear the apathy, too, and the anger, and the boredom, and even the dark humor – I get all that.
But where’s the warmth?
* * *
Not on The Lung, that’s for sure – at least, not if you listen to the ten words that constitute the lyrics:
Nowhere to collapse the lung
Breathes a doubt in everyone
A lung, should you be wondering, aside from what you are presumably currently breathing by means of, is a particularly successful device for smoking pot. It’s a variety of bong, a big soda bottle with a plastic bag taped on the end, filled with smoke from the lit drug, and inhaled – collapsed – as quickly as possible. Crude but effective, a massive hit of cannibinoids deep in the pulmonary groove.
For the only time on YLAOM, the collapsing of this lung forces a break-out from the usual monochrome world of J’s lyrics, to a place outside of me and you and what you did to me. It’s a rare reference to everyone, apparently a lung-toking community without any place to pursue this particular activity, a state of affairs that brings with it a certain agitation.
But that’s the lyrics, and there aren’t many of them. Do you even hear them? The central focus of this song is the playing, and that seems to have nothing to do with doubt. From the moment that Lou’s bassnote turns a key in a rusty ignition, The Lung is the opposite of the end of Sludgefeast, its predecessor on the record. That fades out in the iron grip of an implacable juggernaut thrash; this rolls in on a jinky, grungy little wagon, which, once moving, settles down into a weird instrumental that takes its sweet time. There’s no anxiousness at all; if it’s about anything, it’s playing for the sake of playing. “You have to sing something,” said J once upon a time – but not here.
It might be pretty fast, and Murph might gradually push the tempo on, but still you can luxuriate in J’s guitar tone, which finally reaches an ideal glimpsed at moments throughout the rest of the record. Over the splash cymbals and distortion of the rhythm section, it’s his approximation of a wobbly surf sound, throwing out all these poignant little whammy-bar hooks. You can sit back in the resonant wash coming off the instruments, and best of all there’s not even a voice in earshot: it’s like we’re in an alternative 1956 where they’d invented hard rock drumming, listening to Hank Marvin or someone. Black-and-white TV, immaculately fitted suits, guitars hoisted nipple-high.
The actual song riff, when it eventually arrives, is much punchier, of a classic vintage about 20 years later. A snap-rhythm, three-chord hammer with a little melodic fanfare on the end, it busts in – surprise – mid-phrase, and blows the instrumental out of the water. In turn, it pales completely when, a few seconds later, the solo comes in. I mentioned it earlier, particularly the way the warm talky guitar completely outbreathes J’s human lung, opening out suddenly from short notes onto all these long plateaus. But the real killer about it is the ease with which the whole thing takes place. Unlike so much on this record, the solo unfolds and ascends slowly through its 40 seconds; the leap up to the higher register halfway through, and the hitting of the stratospheric top note, are completely effortless, two more moments of pure head-in-the-clouds outer limits brilliance.
* * *
Actually, what The Lung reminds me of most is something that doesn’t sound like it at all.
Teen Age Riot, from Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation (1989), is the best song of the eighties, from what is probably the decade’s best record. Beyond a broad resemblance of fanfare-type riffs, the two songs aren’t alike. But that doesn’t mean they don’t have a lot in common. There, as here, an agitated community is pictured, though Sonic Youth, over the course of their seven-minute song, have time to work it out in much greater detail. Their lyrics are iconic: Everybody’s talking ’bout the stormy weather, Everybody’s coming from their winter vacation, Teenage riot in a public station, and so on. And at the center of these events is a man, a leader – someone with a focus and a temper, someone who can open up a map and see between one and two, someone who acts the hero and has a zero painted on his hand, a one-man showdown to teach us how to fail. Someone who, in front of Marshall stacks, comes running in on platform shoes.
Guess who?
It’s never been a secret that the man imagined by these mysterious lyrics is none other than J Mascis. From the days of Dinosaur’s New York debut onwards, Sonic Youth have repe
atedly cited their fascination with him and his band. Kim Gordon has referred to them as the “perfect band,”6 in fact, and parts of Daydream Nation, and its follow-up, 1990’s Goo, could easily be heard as a tempering of their established experimental urge with the new influence of Dinosaur’s structured power-rock attack. The Fender Jazzmaster also became their guitar of choice around this time. Teen Age Riot itself followed hot on the heels of their first meetings with J and the others, and is apparently meant as a song that envisages the world if J were President of the USA.
It’s a strange thought – even if you set aside the reference to J’s (figurative?) choice of footwear and crack map-reading skills. But, Sonic Youth may have thought, what if? Thurston Moore once referred to the Dinosaur stance as “a new politic”7 – what if the President were the ill-spoken leader of a Daydream Nation, not a people person, but a blistering practitioner, someone who does to the utmost rather than says—
But the image isn’t supposed to be taken that literally, or that seriously. Like so many things that come out of Thurston Moore’s mouth, it comes ready-wrapped in irony. If the song is a tribute to J at all, it’s not so much about his readiness for presidential office as a testament to his obvious lack of suitability, his goofiness, and the contrary nature of the scene in general. Ultimately, it’s not punk politics, it’s not-politics, and this is where it connects most directly to Dave Markey’s documentary film, and to The Lung. Three products of a late eighties culture that still sometimes talked the talk of rebellious ferment, vague and vaguer, but had lost the acute point in an inebriated fug, completely overpowered by a sense of alternative community and an all-encompassing playing that sounds utterly contented.
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