Dinosaur still had not toured, until Sonic Youth, who had just released Evol, invited them on a two-week stint of colleges and clubs in the Northeast and northern Midwest in September ’86. Even without extensive road experience, Dinosaur was a jaw-dropping live act. “There was nothing like them at that point,” says Lee Ranaldo. “They had nothing to lose and everything to gain and they were going for it every night.”
The two bands became quite friendly; they’d often eat breakfast together out on the road, and Mascis would partake of his usual morning meal—Jell-O and whipped cream, cut up and stirred until it was a gelatinous slurry. On the last show of the tour, in Buffalo, Dinosaur played Neil Young’s “Cortez the Killer” with Ranaldo on vocals, then followed it up with an epic jam.
Mascis, Murph, and Barlow were in great spirits on the ride home. As they were driving back into Northampton, someone slipped in a tape of Evol. Mascis turned to Barlow and said, “Man, this is really weird, I feel like I’m going to cry.”
“Me, too!” said Barlow. “We just toured with our favorite band!”
“We were kind of naive but so happy,” says Barlow. “ ‘Wow, man, we just toured with the coolest fuckin’ band in the world! They’re the coolest. And they like us. And we don’t even know why!’ ”
The band recorded three songs for their next album at a sixteen-track basement studio in Holyoke, then recorded the rest of the album with Sonic Youth engineer Wharton Tiers at Fun City Studios in New York. Murph and Barlow played as hard as they possibly could, while Mascis practically crooned over the turmoil. It was a perfect metaphor for Mascis himself—the placid eye of a storm he himself had created.
Mascis was very specific about what he wanted Murph to play. “When I write songs, the drums are always included as part of the song,” Mascis says. “The melody, the drums—that’s the song to me.” Mascis was a powerful drummer himself, and this began to sow feelings of resentment and inadequacy in Murph. “J controlled Murph’s every drumbeat,” said Barlow. “And Murph could not handle that. Murph wanted to kill J for the longest time…. He kept saying, ‘It may be your scene, but I can’t deal with J. The guy’s a fucking Nazi.’ ” Barlow tried to placate Murph by assuring him that Dinosaur was such a great band that it was worth putting up with all the unpleasantness.
Between Mascis’s seeming apathy and Murph’s bitterness, Barlow felt like he was the only one in the band who thought they were anything special. “Maybe because I was the only one who was getting high a lot,” he says. “We played the same set a lot and the same songs the same way and that really lends itself to getting high after a while and really feeling it, being really into it. And just having visions during the set, like whoa, pure power—savage, raw power.”
Although the music was delivered with brutality, it also harbored catchy, serene, positively life-affirming melodies that routinely attained a kind of forlorn grandeur. “J was an amazing, amazing songwriter whose songs really touched me in a way that a lot of material from that period didn’t,” says Lee Ranaldo. “Black Flag or a lot of the bands that were popular from that period had songs that you really loved, but they didn’t touch you in a personal, emotional way the way that a lot of J’s early stuff did.”
Moreover, the music was crammed with absolutely incredible guitar playing. Solo after solo was rich with style, technique, and melodic invention. In the process, Mascis became the first American indie rock guitar hero. His epic soloing fell right in with the perennial tastes of his peers—children of affluent parentage, the kind who drive their parents’ old BMW off to genteel party schools in New England like Hampshire College and go skiing up in Vermont or out in Vail. These folks had favored the likes of, well, dinosaur bands like the Grateful Dead and their ilk since time immemorial. They were complacent, even bored, and their musical tastes reflected that anomie (and the fact that they had a little extra money to buy pot). J Mascis was one they could finally call their own.
Mascis used pedals, and lots of them—wah-wah, distortion, flanger, volume. This was unheard of in punk rock—only hippies played wah-wah pedals! It was the next step from Hüsker Dü’s wall of sound, but while Bob Mould also used distortion and pedals, he used them to create a constant sonic veil that the listener would have to penetrate; Mascis deployed them more strategically, often shifting suddenly from a pensive verse to a huge, soaringly melodic chorus. That technique would provide the blueprint for early Nineties alternative rock.
Barlow contributed two songs to the second album. Cowed by Mascis’s songwriting prowess, he worked on “Lose” for months before getting up the nerve to show it to the band. His other contribution, “Poledo,” is a sound collage made completely on his own with a portable recorder and a pair of cheap mikes, a hint of things to come.
Gerard Cosloy was smitten with the entire album. “I was absolutely certain that record was going to change everything for them,” he says, “that that record would completely turn everything inside out, that they would go from being this maligned, hated band to being the coolest band on the planet.” And this, thought Cosloy, was the record that would silence the naysayers and finally put Homestead Records on the map.
Cosloy was awaiting the master tape and artwork when Mascis called with stunning news: They had decided to release the album on SST, not Homestead. Mascis assured a dumbstruck Cosloy that it was purely a business decision and nothing personal, but Cosloy wasn’t having it. “There was no way I couldn’t take it personally,” says Cosloy. “That was one of my favorite bands on earth. I felt like I worked incredibly hard for them, maybe the results weren’t so visible at that particular moment, but I felt like I’d really put my ass on the line for them on many occasions, and this was a really, really shitty way of splitting up. I didn’t take it very well. I was pretty fuckin’ angry about it and probably still am…. I just wish he could have done it a little differently. Yeah, that was pretty fuckin’ cold.”
Mascis says he had been reluctant to sign the two-album deal Homestead owner Barry Tenebaum was insisting on—“I really was not into being bound to anything at that point,” says Mascis, “like, loans and all that kind of thing freaked me out”—but Cosloy says Homestead would gladly have done the album as a one-off. “There’s no way we would have not put that record out,” says Cosloy.
While the two parties had been haggling, Dinosaur’s fairy godparents Sonic Youth had sent a tape of the new album to Greg Ginn at SST.
SST flipped over the record. “The stoners at the label loved the guitar,” Barlow explains. After all, heavy music was making a comeback, largely under the aegis of SST; Black Flag had released the sludge-metal-punk landmark My War, and everybody at the label was openly worshiping Black Sabbath for the first time since they were in junior high. And Dinosaur had simply always wanted to be on the label. As Mascis noted, “We wanted to be on SST since we were like fifteen years old, but it just seemed, like, totally out of reach.”
Abandoning Cosloy and Homestead didn’t come without a price, though. “I wasn’t really friends with Gerard after that,” says Mascis. “So that was a bummer, blowing off Gerard. But we wanted to be on SST anyway. It was a casualty of our ruthless record business.”
And yet even Cosloy admits the choice was obvious. “SST was the label everybody wanted to be on,” he says. “Everyone’s favorite bands were on the label; SST was funnier and cooler and it also had the machinery. It was in the place to do a lot of damage whereas Homestead was just me and Craig [Marks], but mostly me. We were not really prepared to go after things. We didn’t have the financing or the support. At SST the people who were running the company were the people in the bands that believed in it. The people who owned Homestead aren’t very comfortable with musicians and think of them as weasels trying to scam money off them. There’s no real way to compare.”
Unfortunately for Barlow and Murph, the contract Mascis signed with SST was structured so that only he received royalty checks from the label. “I had nothing to say about it,” s
ays Barlow. “I thought he deserved it, actually. But selling records was not how we made our money at all—we were making money by being on tour. It had nothing to do with how many records we sold. That was completely foreign to us.”
So it was Mascis’s responsibility to dole out payment to the other two. And Barlow claims he neglected that responsibility. “J’s a real prime, stinking red asshole—that guy is the cheapest bastard,” Barlow says. “He does not get how Murph and I helped him get anywhere that he was. He could not have done that without us. He didn’t see how we were all integral.”
After recording the album, Mascis moved to New York and left his bandmates behind, and the alignments within the band began to change. Barlow now joined Murph in feeling profoundly alienated from Mascis. “I realized there was no way I’d know what was going on in his head,” said Barlow. “It was really bad. He’s a really, really, really uptight person, and the whole time he comes off as being mellow.”
MASCIS, MURPH, AND BARLOW IN AN EARLY SST PROMO PHOTO. NOTE MASCIS’S OLD “DEEP WOUND” SWEATER.
JENS JURGENSEN
Barlow felt bandmates should be close friends, but Mascis was utterly uninterested in that kind of intimacy. “J was one person who just seemed to think that was absolutely nowhere in the whole realm of what was going on,” says Barlow. “He just had nothing to say, yet he had everything to say. That was really quite a puzzle for a while. It really drove his music.
“It was really frustrating,” Barlow says of the alienation between him and Mascis. “It was kind of weirdly heartbreaking.”
Barlow had been spending more and more time at home smoking pot and recording his own songs. “That’s where I started to discover that I had an ego,” says Barlow. “I just became so involved with writing my own songs and really getting into my own sound of things. Just getting totally self-involved. It was pretty great. So when I played for Dinosaur, I was able to play for Dinosaur—do my thing and be quiet.” In the Boston area, early pressings of You’re Living All Over Me came with a tape by Barlow titled Weed Forestin’. It was under the name Sebadoh, a nonsense word Barlow sometimes sang on his home recordings.
“He put out the Sebadoh record and then it was like the door shut—‘I’m not going to contribute anything [to Dinosaur],’ ” says Mascis. “That was always a bummer.” Mascis says he would have welcomed more participation from Barlow, but Barlow says he was both intimidated by Mascis’s songwriting and frustrated by his bandmate’s inscrutable demeanor. In response, Barlow suppressed his own wishes and became an almost literally silent partner in Dinosaur. “I figured out a way to be myself despite being in the band,” says Barlow. “I was super passive-aggressive.”
“We both did that a lot,” says Murph. “But that causes tension. You can’t do that without feeling a certain amount of resentment and negative energy.”
Mascis’s insularity was getting to Murph as well. “J’s way of maybe saying thank you or acknowledging something was so subtle that I wouldn’t see it,” says Murph. “And so I thought he was just being a dick, he wasn’t even acknowledging the effort I’m putting into trying to execute his work. That was a big thing for me.”
And yet Mascis could exert a powerful effect on his bandmates. “J, just for the longest time, if he saw somebody socially having fun or doing something that he wasn’t able to do, he would probably try to put a damper on you and just bum you out or say something negative to the other person so they would see you in a more negative light,” says Murph. “That was the major part of it, J being such a control freak and just not letting up.”
But when a show went well, Murph explains, “and you really felt like you had executed something as a band—really pulled something off—there would be those really short moments of true glory where we would all feel like, ‘Wow, this is worth it.’ But it was very fleeting and it would always come back down to reality. For me, that taste of euphoria would make it worthwhile.”
“There were few bands that could blow people away like that,” adds their friend Jon Fetler. “Dinosaur was one of the ones where people would come back after the show and say, ‘Man, you blew my circuits.’ ”
Barlow and Mascis were an odd match from the start—Barlow was the type of person who needed to pick over his feelings like an archaeologist at a dig; he needed a lot of feedback and encouragement and deeply wanted Mascis’s approval, whereas Mascis cruised through life unquestioningly and was maddeningly self-sufficient. Barlow was skittish, tense, insecure; Mascis didn’t seem to care about anything whatsoever, and as the band’s singer, guitarist, and songwriter, he called the shots.
All that pain was manifested on their second album, You’re Living All Over Me, in the lyrics, in the music, even in the title. “All this struggling that we’d been doing since 1985,” said Barlow, “bouncing off each other and having no clue, not being friends, not knowing if anybody liked our band, not knowing why we’re playing really loud everywhere and being really obnoxious, and all of a sudden everything was channeled into this one record—this is the reason why, this is it.”
It was amazing how Dinosaur turned one of rock’s traditional equations on its head. The volume and noise didn’t symbolize power; it just created huge mountains of sound around the desolate emotions outlined in the lyrics. Mascis’s vocals, cool and collected amidst the chaos, suggested resignation and withdrawal. It was, as one critic put it, a powerful sound that didn’t suggest power.
Song titles like “Sludgefeast” and “Tarpit” certainly bespoke a consistency of vision, and indeed You’re Living All Over Me had an overall murkiness that lent the band a mystique. When the master tape of You’re Living All Over Me arrived at SST, the label’s production manager promptly panicked because the meter was “pinning,” meaning the level on the tape was so high that it was distorting. But Mascis confirmed that that was the way he wanted it to sound. (The group reasoned that since an electric guitar sounded better with distortion on it, a whole distorted record would be even better.) On top of it, Mascis sang like he had marbles in his mouth, while his guitar effects garbled what he was playing. The music was dense and heavy; it was like a pond one could never see the bottom of, so it never grew tiresome to listen to.
Mascis insists that most of the lyrics are about people’s responses to him—nobody was sure if he was oblivious, aloof, or just shy. “A lot of people had intense reactions toward me because I guess I was so blank,” he says. “I was intense but not giving back anything—not normal, like other people would act. And that freaked people out sometimes.” Still, it’s easy to feel that Mascis was writing not about others but, scathingly, about himself: on the debut album’s “Severed Lips,” Mascis drawls, “I never try that much / ’Cause I’m scared of feeling”; “Got to connect with you, girl / But forget how,” he whines on “Sludgefeast,” from You’re Living All Over Me. Countless other songs outline alienation and an inability to connect with another person.
Mascis’s lyrics took on new meaning for Barlow when he began connecting them with his bandmate’s interior life. “I started to see his songs as probably his only noble act as a human being,” Barlow says, “to describe this bizarre ambivalence that was floating around.”
With their buddy Jon Fetler along for the ride, the dysfunctional band began a U.S. tour in June ’87 to promote You’re Living All Over Me. Unfortunately, SST missed the release date and the record didn’t appear in stores until the band had reached California. But minuscule turnouts weren’t the half of it—the band’s frictions hit a hellish peak.
Right off the bat, their clunker ’76 Dodge van broke down somewhere in Connecticut, about an hour and a half into the tour. And that was the least of their problems. As Fetler wrote in his diary, “Band tensions somewhat high. Murph feeling disgruntled, undervalued. Seems like it’s building—he wants to quit after Europe tour or before if he hits J. He keeps saying, ‘I’m gonna pop him, man.’ ” And it was still only the first day of the tour.
The simple fact
was that these were three neurotic young men barely twenty-one years old, all cooped up in a van and living on $5 a day. Murph’s genteel Greenwich upbringing didn’t stand him in good stead when it came to the rigors of the road, and he grumbled often about the conditions. In such close quarters, small personal tics began to loom large. “The guy chewed like a cow,” says Barlow of Mascis. “Loudly.” Barlow had his own irritating quirks. “I would put things in my mouth,” he says, “just random things, and chew on them.” This led to the infamous Cookie Monster episode. “I bought this Cookie Monster doll on the tour, and I looked in the van once and Lou was there sucking on its eyeball,” says Mascis. “Something about that disturbed me to my core. I couldn’t handle it. I think I had to throw the thing out. It was weird.”
Another of Barlow’s schticks sprang from his insecurity about where he stood with Mascis. He’d deliberately do something obnoxious and then when someone pointed out that it was “annoying,” he’d claim he didn’t know what the word meant. “He’s going [makes loud chewing sound] some weird annoying sound for, like, an hour and you’re like, ‘Lou, shut up!’ ” says Mascis. “And he’s like, ‘What?’ I didn’t understand how he could not know what ‘annoying’ meant in the first place and how that meant that we didn’t like him or we’re not his friends because we’re annoyed by him…. That was one of our bizarre things on the road.
“Murph and Lou would fight a lot, too, which was hilarious,” Mascis continues. “I just remember sitting in the van—the argument would just be like, ‘Murph, maaaaan!’ ‘But, Lou, maaaaan!’ ‘But, Murph, maaaaan!’ Just like that—for half an hour. Lou had no real ability to listen at that point. Murph would say something and Lou would just be saying the same thing, as if he’d never heard anything Murph said. And Murph was trying, but he’s weird, too.”
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