I’d hung out with this guy a few times, and every night was the same: as he rattled off Dinosaur Jr. minutiae, I’d nod attentively, hoping that’d charm him. He was one of two boys who would actually talk to me. I was 16, but I still had braces and could easily pass for 12. I also knew more about Dinosaur Jr. (and all his other favorite bands) than he did, but I kept that to myself. If I intimidated him, he wouldn’t want to sit on area logs with me anymore. I decided to act docile and tried not to show my teeth when I laughed.
Maybe it was particular to the time and place—Minneapolis in the early ‘90s—but from what my girlfriends told me, lots of boys thought going to the woods with a girl and regaling her with an hour and a half of Dinosaur Jr. trivia was a perfectly acceptable courtship ritual. If you liked him (or Dinosaur Jr.) enough, you could pretend it was a date. I withstood many hours of Dinologue during those awful teen years, and my memories of the band’s early albums—with their noisy, shimmery solos and shots of warm feedback—are inextricably tied to memories of some dude that never liked me back. Actually, there was a series of dudes—they only seem to blend into one because they all shared the same bell-shaped, grunge-bob hairstyle, unflagging devotion to J Mascis, and polite disinterest in me.
Dinosaur Jr.’s first three full-lengths, Dinosaur (Homestead, 1985), You’re Living All Over Me (SST, 1987), and Bug (SST, 1988), have only been out of print for five years or so and have never been too hard to find on eBay or used bins. Nonetheless, on March 22, Merge Records reissued all of them. They’re the only albums with the band’s original lineup: guitarist and frontman Mascis, one-named drummer Murph, and bassist Barlow, who quit (or was fired) in 1989. Barlow subsequently dedicated himself to the tape-hiss horn of plenty Sebadoh, which he’d started as a side project a couple years before, and Mascis and Murph soldiered on with a rotating cast of bassists. In 1990, Dinosaur signed with Sire, and the following year they issued the flawless Green Mind.
The band was rumored to have become a Mascis dictatorship—an impression confirmed in the reissues’ liner notes—and by the mid-’90s Murph was gone, too. Until Sire dropped Dinosaur in 1997, Mascis and a lineup of scabs rewarded a devoted fan base with diminishing returns. Then Mascis became The Fog, a studio project that only turned into a proper band to tour. He receded into the distance, dwindling to a speck on the horizon—if you’d been able to make him out, you’d still have seen his long hair, his guitar, and his flannel, but he’d lost his spot on the main stage to other dudes, dudes with turntables, who were to become our newest heroes.
In the late ‘80s, though, Dinosaur were magnets for the devotion of teenage weirdos, combining the huge, thralling Marshall-stack overdrive that made Neil Young famous with the jacked-up amphetamine-pulse of hardcore. Like their SST labelmates Hüsker Dü, they connected punk’s mosh-pit machismo to its brooding, emotional side. Often the hiccuping pummel of the rhythm section would pause, as though Murph and Barlow were trying to fake us out, and then Mascis’ guitar would rumble to life, wonderfully too loud, every note gloriously destroyed by the city of effects pedals at his feet. Unlike early punk rockers, Dinosaur weren’t lashing out at the bloated, coked-up corpse of the ‘70s. They were just trying, as Mike Watt suggests in the new liner notes to You’re Living All Over Me, to be an East Coast version of acid-damaged country punks the Meat Puppets. Save for Mascis’ drawling whine, there isn’t much country in Dinosaur’s music, but it’s plenty damaged.
Dinosaur structured their tunes like miniature, wank-free, classic-rock epics. “No Bones,” the second cut on Bug, begins as an instrumental dirge with the bass playing distorted chords against a skipping, waltzy beat, segues into a verse where Mascis sounds like the loneliest, most congested kid in all of Massachusetts, and from there jumps to a chorus overlaid with a track of strummy acoustic guitar. On the strength of songs like this, Mascis became not just a fanboy icon but an icon’s icon—Sonic Youth’s “Teenage Riot,” from the 1988 album Daydream Nation, is reputedly about his dominion over the guitar and the kids.
In their lyrics, Dinosaur don’t even toy with the nihilistic sloganeering of many of their progenitors and peers. Mascis’ singing is endearingly amateurish, his voice gentle, his diction thick, his lyrics vague. He never adopts an obvious pose or persona, but his words don’t reveal much about who he is; maybe he’s being honest, but he’s not being particularly forthcoming. In short lines capped with simple rhymes, he often sketches a blurry metaphor about what stands between him and her—listening to this stuff is like reading a teenager’s frustrated, lovelorn poetry, written for an audience of one. Even when Mascis is singing his most somnambulant monotone, his voice cracks whenever he hits the word “girl.” Barlow barely ever takes the mic, but his one star turn on Bug is a doozy. On “Don’t,” he howls with the consuming rage of 10,000 virginal high school seniors: “Why? / Why don’t you like me?” Those are the only lyrics, and he repeats them 44 times—it’s emo distilled to its essence.
In Dinosaur’s songs, the topic is often romance, but it’s hard to tell whether the girl said yes or no or if she never got asked a question in the first place. That fumbling dorkiness is a big part of the charm. It’s easy to imagine that the band spent puberty the same way a lot of their fans probably did: perched on the edge of their bed playing along with metal records on a shitty Ibanez, growing out their hair, smoking weed, and getting ignored by their crush. Dinosaur have bastardized everything from folky pop to feral thrash to turgid classic rock, imbuing it with qualities sacred to the indie-rock fanboy: a nerd’s aesthetic, virtuosity, and emotionally fraught lyrics. Their albums nodded to the most righteous parts of your record collection, and the songs were open-ended enough that they could easily be about you and your ennui. In the late ‘80s, Dinosaur helped create a template that Nirvana would take worldwide when “Teen Spirit” went nuclear a few years later.
Considering how much indie rock has changed since 1986, do these three Dinosaur reissues belong anywhere now? Bug is a great record but feels irrelevant in the harsh light of the current post-post-post-punk world, with its skinny ties and drum machines and leg warmers and hedonism. The twenty-year-old snapshots included in the reissues’ beefed-up liner notes reveal three greasy-looking dudes who wouldn’t have made it past the door at a loft party in Brooklyn in 2005—they’ve got teenage trauma in their eyes and look like they’ve probably never seen a tit in real life.
These three lost-looking dorkboys made totally monstrous records, though: sprawling, adolescent, and sharp. Dinosaur’s early albums were casually elaborate and masterfully sloppy. Unfortunately, the timing of the band’s long-rumored reunion—for their first gig together since 1989, Mascis, Murph and Barlow are playing the Late Late Show on CBS on April 15 (followed by European and U.S. tours) makes the reissues seem opportunistic. Given the epic bad blood between Mascis and Barlow, their reconciliation seems too convenient to look like anything but a cash-in. Why couldn’t they stick to pursuing their increasingly marginal solo careers, leaving us to savor our memories of the great shit they did together back in the day?
At least one beautiful thing might come of this. If Dinosaur’s midlife crisis reunion repels enough of the kids who might’ve fallen in love with these reissues, it could save a generation of teen punk girls from hours of distortion-pedal discourse on awkward dates in the woods.
YOU WILL ACHE LIKE I ACHE: THE ORAL HISTORY OF HOLE’S LIVE THROUGH THIS
SPIN magazine, April 2014
It’s hard not to work through the what-if’s of Live Through This. What if the world had gotten a proper introduction to this album? What if we only had to confront the image of Courtney Love the rock star that week, rather than the Courtney Love we saw in grief, giving away her husband’s T-shirts to mourning teens? How would we have understood such an iconic album, if it had not been bracketed by Kurt Cobain’s suicide? And what would Hole have become if bassist Kristen Pfaff had lived?
That it made its way outside of the long shadow of death is
testament to just how masterful Live Through This was and is—an incontrovertible work that Love and her band fought to bring into the word, to legitimize themselves as a band and worthy peers to Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, and the sensitive boy-geniuses of the alt-rock era. It is a ferocious album that ultimately broke through on the strength of “Doll Parts,” a song so tender it crushes you, a song written years earlier but transmogrified later by collective mourning. Love gave us these wrought anthems, and in them we saw her genius and the absolute power of the band; we reveled in finally having a female icon blessed with the cocksure strut and don’t-give-a-fuck of rock’s true greats. Love’s surety of her band’s rightful place in the hierarchy was permission writ large for every girl with a guitar. She was compelling, terrifying and incandescent, and Live Through This was the portrait of a woman claiming her power.
But for too long, the story of Live Through This and the true impact of the album have been overshadowed by rumors and theories conjured by Kurt-truthers. Here, for your edification and grunge nostalgia, is an accounting of what really happened and how Live Through This came into being, according to the people who made it.
Courtney Love, singer/guitarist: Our first record [1991’s Pretty on the Inside] wasn’t supposed to be melodic. It was supposed to be a really raw expression. It wasn’t designed to sell any records. It was designed to be cool, really. And I don’t mean that in a super-contrived way, but sort of contrived. We had a skeletal band, not very skilled. The next record was going to be more commercial.
Eric Erlandson, guitarist: During the tour for Pretty on the Inside, we had been going more pop, less journal-entry noise stuff. The whole industry was going, like, “Look, you can be melodic and punky and be successful!” We never said “Let’s do this, let’s copy this formula.” It was natural.
Courtney Love: I was very competitive with Kurt [Cobain] because I wanted more melody. But I already wanted that before Live Through This.
Eric Erlandson: Courtney brought that pressure about competing with Nevermind. I thought that none of that’s gonna matter. What matters is just that we make as good of a record as we can with our songs.
Mark Kates, A&R at Geffen Records: When Gary Gersh left DGC around May of 1993, I became Hole’s A&R person. There was no question that there was skepticism within the company about Hole, to be honest. Anytime you sign an artist that has notoriety, some people are going to look at it differently. As far as looking forward to working on it, it’s hard to say. You have to sort of go back in time, and yes, we knew Courtney as Kurt’s wife but this wasn’t about that. It was never—sadly, unfortunately —about that.
Patty Schemel, drummer: That was always the thing looming, that her marriage and her life was bigger than our band. We always had that battle of having to prove ourselves as a legitimate band. All we had were those songs. That was it.
Courtney Love: Kurt got me Patty. I wanted to fire Jill [Emery, Hole’s original bassist] but I still liked Caroline [Rue, Hole’s first drummer]. Kurt made this whole lecture to me about that fundamental fact in rock ‘n’ roll that I really didn’t know, which is that your drummer is the most important person in your band. Patty fit in perfectly.
Eric Erlandson: Kurt was like, “We’re moving to Seattle but we have to have the baby down here [in Los Angeles], so you go up to Seattle and start working with Patty and we’ll meet you there later.” I moved to Seattle in May or June of 1992. And of course, they didn’t move up until 1993, so I was flying back-and-forth between L.A. and Seattle the whole time.
Patty Schemel: Eric and I were practicing all the time; we set up out in Carnation, Washington at Kurt and Courtney’s house out in the woods. We worked while Courtney was pregnant and having Frances and going through that whole drama with Vanity Fair. That was a tense time; I was drinking a lot. So there was party time and there was also the time that me and Eric spent re-learning the back catalog.
Courtney Love: The songwriting process was really easy. We started at [defunct L.A. punk club] Jabberjaw. I wrote “Violet” there. Then we moved to Seattle in the middle of that. “Miss World” was written in Seattle, if I remember correctly. Look, I don’t even remember who I don’t like anymore. My brain is a little addled in terms of my long-term memory. It could be PTSD, which is everyone’s excuse for everything. But anyway, Jabberjaw was the salad days of it all. I wrote “Doll Parts” in Cambridge, Massachusetts in a woman named Joyce’s bathroom. That one was easy.
Patty Schemel: Me and Courtney came up with “She Walks” in the laundry-room studio in their house and put it together when we went to Rockin’ in Rio [with Nirvana]. [Nirvana was recording demos with their sound engineer Craig Montgomery] and when they were done working on ideas for In Utero, Courtney and I went in and worked on stuff. We did the idea for “Miss World” and “She Walks.” Big John from [U.K. punk band] The Exploited came up with the middle section of “She Walks.” He was the guitar tech for Nirvana, and he was like, “Why don’t we go at half-time, at that part?” Me and Courtney went up to San Francisco when Kurt was working with the Melvins on Lysol. We went in and messed around, and came up with “Jennifer’s Body.”
Courtney Love: We had this great rehearsal space [in Seattle]: It was just perfect, up on Capitol Hill, near the Urban Outfitters. Everyone got really close. There was just a great flow. This all came about after the whole Vanity Fair thing and all the stuff with the baby. Those rehearsals were a really great escape from all that shit; the only way to escape it was drugs and music.
Eric Erlandson: It was a refuge. It was an emotional time for Courtney and Kurt. I was involved in their drama and was trying to hold it together and replace members and get a record together. So how did I feel emotionally? I was a wreck.
Patty Schemel: Courtney would come in and add vocals and her guitar ideas—which were great—and Eric would fine-tune her ideas and make them amazing. But her initial guitar ideas were really, really cool. That’s what Hole is: that sound of Eric’s guitar and Courtney’s vocals. Hole isn’t Hole without those two together.
Eric Erlandson: Even if it was just the three of us playing, you could tell something was happening that was bigger than all of us.
Courtney Love: The rehearsals just flowed. On this record, we didn’t really need anyone to help us.
Mark Kates: It’s one of my clearest memories ever from doing A&R, going up to see them rehearse in Seattle, and I thought, “There’s an album here.” I think it was always going to be great—it was just a question of how great.
Courtney Love: I put a lot of energy into the music because it was the place I could put my energy. And the title of the record is not a prediction of the future. It’s, like, fucking live through what I already lived through, you motherfuckers! It wasn’t meant to be about anybody dying. It was about going through fucking media humiliations like this. You try it—because it ain’t fun.
Patty Schemel: Being a wife and being a mother, and all the drama that came with that; being a feminist, and then being known as Mrs. Kurt? I think a lot of all of that frustration and competitiveness went into lyrics, went into the force behind that record.
Eric Erlandson: I found Kristen [Pfaff, bassist] in L.A. and said, “Come with me to meet Courtney and Patty when you get to Seattle.” She joined the band, she moved to Seattle, and that’s when all the songs came to life, literally. She was the star of her band and so she was bringing that to Hole and that created sparks in everybody; we all saw an even greater potential than before.
Mark Kates: I remember sitting in that very small rehearsal room, watching them and thinking, “No one knows how great this is. No one I work with has any idea how great an album this is going to be.” That was really special. I knew it would blow people away.
Patty Schemel: She was in a band called Janitor Joe. We saw her play, and she was amazing. She was just cool. Her playing was heavy, and she was knowledgeable, and she had command of her instrument. When she played, that was it: We knew.
Sean
Slade, engineer and producer: When we got the Live Through This demos, I realized very quickly that Hole had gotten a new rhythm section—it was much more musical.
Courtney Love: Kristen was just really, really, really good. She had studied music, studied cello. She couldn’t do backup vocals. And that was okay because her playing was like, you know.
Eric Erlandson: I kept on making her listen to the Beatles to expand out of that driving, aggressive boy-rock that was big in Minnesota at the time. Kristen was very into that. We got into fights over it. And I’d be like, “I like that, too, but you’ve gotta pretend you’re Paul McCartney playing a country song right now.”
Patty Schemel: There was such a confidence in her playing that it just all happened, as soon as she started to play. It was really natural for her. “Plump” was one of her ideas.
Courtney Love: I was really anti-heroin while we were working. And everyone did heroin anyway. If you recall.
Patty Schemel: Kristen became Eric’s girlfriend, so they were tight. They had each other. Then there was me and my addiction with alcohol and drugs. Kristen and I would get together, and we were always trying to keep the amount of drugs we were doing secret. “Don’t tell Eric.” There were so many secrets. We were all frustrated, and we all had a lot of downtime. And so to deal with that, there was a lot of “hanging out.” I was frustrated. I wanted to play. I wanted to record.
Eric Erlandson: Kristen came on tour with us in Europe [in 1993] and we did a few festivals and a few shows, and there’s people going nuts for a song that’s not even on record yet.
Patty Schemel: At the Phoenix Festival, we were playing all these brand new songs and there was just this sea of people moving up and down. It was amazing. Kristen was so great live. That was the one tour that we had Kristen on, but it was a glimpse of what was to come.
The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic Page 7