this article was taken from nerve magazine – march 1993 (their 1st issue!)

primal weirdness

slithering around with those terrible lizards – dinosaur jr

by david turin

If it takes a tough man to make a tender chicken, does it take an emotionally shut-down agoraphobic to make Dinosaur Jr a great band ? Apparently so.

Sitting across from the band’s braintrust, J Mascis, at New York City’s Gramercy Park Hotel, it’s no surprise that the stringy-haired malcontent is silently shoving linguini into his mouth. The group’s 26-year-old singer-songwriter-guitarist-producer is notoriously silent. He’d rather stay in his room and watch TV than do almost anything else. Not that he’s unpleasant. He shakes hands, he smiles. He helps get the tape recorder running. But he’s not really here.

That is, until he notices six old ladies at an adjacent table daintily drinking tea and eating finger sandwiches and a miracle occurs.

Mascis goes on his first documented rant.

“There were these older women who I went to school with at Hunter College here in New York. They were really loud, really insane. All’s they did with their lives was do their homework
and they only took one class so’s they had the jump on you. Well, one day this one lady was talking to me and she just fell over in her chair, like backwards – just like straight back, just fell right over.

“I was sitting next to her, watching her head as it hit the floor, and just watching the blood coming out, and everyone was just watching her.

“But this is the weird part – she just kept babbling away….â€