from the boston phoenix- the misfits- from issue date july 1

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http://www.bostonphoenix.com/boston/mus … 789590.asp

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The misfits
The legacy of three geeks from Northampton
BY MATT ASHARE

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TRIVIAL PURSUIT: Lou Barlow played guitar and J Mascis drums in the hardcore band Deep Wound: they released one single on blue vinyl in 1983.

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Glance at the back cover of the Merge reissue of Dinosaur Jr., which was first released on punk ’zine editor Gerard Cosloy’s fledgling Homestead label in 1985, and you’ll see a trio of teenagers who’d be out of place in any era. Lou Barlow’s wearing one of those awful patterned sweaters your aunt gives you for Christmas. J Mascis is in goth black and has his hair done up like Nick Cave. Murph at least looks fairly normal. Inside — along with a thoughtful essay by one of the few critics to have seen the first band to feature Mascis (on drums) and Barlow (guitar), the hardcore foursome Deep Wound — are more photos of three alienated teens trying to find their way in a confusing underground filled with Black Flag’s sludgy aggression, Sonic Youth’s avant-noise, the Minutemen’s jazz-funk minimalism, and the Meat Puppets’ twisted bluegrass. You can hear bits of each, along with half a dozen other post-punk influences, in the disc’s 11 tracks. (The reissue includes the bonus live cut "Does It Float.") But 20 years later, the album still delivers the shock of the new. Nobody else sang and played guitar like Mascis, a virtuoso in the making with a shaky whine that would earn well-deserved comparisons with Neil Young, or projected the same I-don’t-care vulnerability it takes to start a song with "Embarrassed to be alive" ("The Leper"). And even on a Minutemen/Meat Puppety throw-away like "Cats in a Bowl," Barlow’s heavily strummed bass, played more like a guitar, defies convention.

Like other artists who formed the ’80s bedrock on which the foundation of the ’90s alternative nation would be built, Dinosaur weren’t breaking the rules so much as inventing them. In 1987, they’d join Black Flag et al. on SST. And all the pieces would fall into place on Bug, a post-hardcore masterpiece that marked the end of Barlow’s tenure, as he went off to make his own mark on the Amerindie underground with Sebadoh. The reissue of all three albums by the original Dino trio has brought the band back together for one long tour that brings them to Avalon on July 15.

Some credit the alt-rock explosion that Nirvana spearheaded in ’91 entirely to Nevermind. Kurt Cobain did have a special gift for channeling the diminished hopes and frustrated dreams of a generation into fractured poetry and barbed guitar chords. But by their own admission, Nirvana were standing on the shoulders of giants — not the trad-rock royalty of Beatles and Stones but an alternative universe of lesser-known groundbreakers. From this perspective, alt-rock was the product of a decade or more of underground ferment in cities and towns, basements and bedrooms, punk dives and art galleries across the country. A decade that included three geeks from Northampton who by 1988 looked like rock stars with their long hair, sunglasses, and leather jackets. You can see that in a video tacked onto the end of Bug. It’s for a song called "Freak Scene" — a "Smells like Teen Spirit" three years ahead of its time

On August 23, 1994, Lou Barlow’s Sebadoh released Bakesale (Sub Pop) to near-universal acclaim from the indie-rock press. Seven days later, on August 30, the band Barlow had once played bass in, J Mascis’s Dinosaur Jr., delivered the last dying gasp of a once great outfit, the hollow, uninspired Without a Sound (Sire). It seemed Barlow had won the feud that had erupted when he was fired by Mascis, a year after Dinosaur Jr.’s most powerful release, 1988’s Bug (SST).

"I was obsessed to bring you down/Watching your every move/Playing a little-boy game/Always with something to prove/Waiting to cut you down" was one of Barlow’s more pointed salvos on Sebadoh III’s "The Freed Pig" in 1992. And his tongue was in his cheek as he sang "Pedal-hopping like a dinosaur" in the genre-parodying ’91 single "Gimme Indie Rock." Listen closely to either and you’ll detect a grudging respect for Mascis along with a strong sense of self-abasement: "I’m self-righteous, but never right/So laid back, but so uptight/Destroying your patience to tolerate me/With all the negative spirit I bring." Barlow’s feelings were hurt, his emotions mixed. Mascis fired back merely by producing the Breeders’ cover of "The Freed Pig." Or perhaps putting the screamed lines "Why don’t you like me?/What could be better?" in Barlow’s mouth on the Mascis-penned Bug track "Don’t" was the first shot.

Either way, the Barlow/Mascis communication breakdown became much ado about nothing. By 2003 they’d patched things up; last year Sebadoh shared a bill with Mascis at a benefit organized by Lou’s mom in Northampton. And when Merge decided to release remasters of the three albums by the original trio of Joseph "J" Mascis (guitar), Lou Barlow (bass), and Patrick "Murph" Murphy (drums), the three reunited for a national tour that’ll hit Avalon on July 15. Indeed, Byron Coley’s liner notes to the reissues hardly acknowledge the internal strife: "The music here [on Bug] shows the band moving into ever more orderly realms of composition and structure, even as anecdotal evidence suggests that they were coming apart at the physical seams."

"We were falling apart," Mascis admits from his home in Northampton. "We weren’t getting along. My whole relationship with Lou was based on the fact that he didn’t talk. Then he got a girlfriend and started talking all the time: that’s when the problems began. And he had Sebadoh, so he didn’t want to bring any songs to Dino. He thought we’d ruin them. When he wasn’t talking, we got along; when he started talking, I started thinking that maybe I didn’t like this guy or something . . . "

But Mascis is also the first to admit that he was "pretty anti-social in general. I’ve tried to be better about that. But people would freak out at me in college. One of my college roommates made what I thought was a good point about me. He said, ‘I think they get freaked out because it’s not like you’re ignoring people, it’s like you’re walking past them like they don’t even exist.’ "

Barlow also plays down the conflict: "We never really fought," he says over the phone from his LA home. "But a bad vibe hung over everything because it was all always about keeping J in an environment that he could control. When you get into situations like that, you do what you need to survive, which was to imitate the alpha male. J had more to say than people think. He was a genius and he was very funny. I was in his band and I felt lucky to be there. But when I found a life of my own, I started talking. I talked around other people, and Murph’s a talker too. So there were a lot of discussions going on when J wasn’t around. But when he was around, I learned to keep my mouth shut. It’s the thing I found most frustrating: J’s personal comfort was more important than preserving the band’s sound. He was annoyed with me, and that was enough to dismiss the musical chemistry we’d developed. I wished he would like me because I was a good bass player. But he wanted silence. He didn’t want me yammering on about whatever you yammer on about when you’re 20."

Murph was, as he puts it when I reach him in NYC, "the mediator. At a certain point, J and Lou just wouldn’t talk. It was okay because J had a vision and we all had a chemistry. It was pretty clear what that vision was, and I think it was pretty clear to Lou and me what we had to do to realize that vision. We never had to talk about it: we just understood. And we still do. When you’re younger, there’s so much tension because your head’s all over the place. Being older, it’s nice to be able to just hang. And it’s great to have this thing, this band, that you can wield like a sword."

Barlow maintained a high regard for Mascis. "J was really gifted. He’s a highly intelligent person. At that period, he was going to college and he had a lot of energy. I was working at a nursing home, and Murph was delivering pizzas. J was just a cool guy, and it didn’t surprise me that the cool people like Sonic Youth wanted to hang out with him. He was also never a liar. He was so honest. And I believe a lot of that came through on those three albums."

What’s telling are the ways their versions of the past differ. Mascis thought Barlow was holding songs back for Sebadoh. Barlow saw it differently: "I was writing two-chord songs on what was basically a ukulele. J had helped me with the two electric songs I wrote for Dinosaur, especially with the lyrics. He was an excellent big brother. That’s a really personal process. You have to become personally involved when you collaborate with other people. I was releasing these cassettes in the hope that J would listen to them. But he didn’t. He didn’t seem to care. He just seemed constantly really sick of me."

But Barlow does agree with Mascis’s characterization of the years leading up to the détente of 2003, when Barlow showed up to see Mascis play with the Stooges and Mike Watt in London, apologized to J, and was invited on stage to sing. "I apologized for yelling at him the last time I had seen him, and we had a nice time together. And I sang ‘1969,’ I guess. It was so loud. I hadn’t been on stage with J in a long time, and nothing had changed: I couldn’t hear anything. I met his girlfriend, who is now his wife. And I got all kinds of back story on what had been going on. We just hung out. It was like, ‘Wow, I’m growing up and this is great.’ "

The yelling incident had taken place just a few years earlier at a Sebadoh show, as Mascis recounts. "At the Stooges show, he was apologizing for maybe having had some part to do with the problems between us. It was kind of like I was the big brother and he annoyed me and stuff, but not any more or less before or after he was in the band. So I would always go to his shows around here [Northampton] even though he never came to any of my shows. And then, like five years ago at a Sebadoh show, he completely freaked out and yelled at me, and it was as if nothing had changed in the 10 years since we had split up. So many things had changed for me, but it seemed like he was still back there in that mind set. His mom was like, ‘What happened?’, and I said, ‘I dunno, Mrs. Barlow.’ I always liked his parents and got along with his parents better than I did with him," he adds with a final chuckle

"I think the record sounds like shit. As an engineer, I’m embarrassed. The mix is blowing up. The guitars are distorted and too thin. The drums are drowned out."

That’s how Paul Kolderie feels about Bug, the landmark 1988 Dinosaur Jr. album that secured the Northampton power trio’s place in America’s post-hardcore, pre-grunge underground. The disc, along with the band’s 1985 Dinosaur debut and 1987’s You’re Living All Over Me (the Jr. was added in 1988), was reissued by Merge in March. And Kolderie, who worked with his long-time production partner Sean Slade on Bug, isn’t kidding. "I even remember thinking at the time that it was the best that I could do but that I wasn’t very happy with it."

It’s a quiet afternoon at Kolderie’s Camp Street Studio, the same complex of rooms Dinosaur frontman J Mascis, drummer Murph, and soon-to-be-fired bassist Lou Barlow pulled up to in a station wagon almost two decades ago to begin work on what would be their breakthrough album for SST, a label whose late-’80s roster included a who’s who of Amerindie luminaries: Sonic Youth, Black Flag, Hüsker Dü, the Meat Puppets, the Minutemen. Back then, Camp Street was Fort Apache, and Slade and Kolderie were on their way to becoming players in the alt-rock explosion, with credits that would include Hole’s Live Through This, Radiohead’s Pablo Honey, and sessions with the Pixies, the Bosstones, Uncle Tupelo, Buffalo Tom, Morphine, and more.

"We can’t make any claims to producing it," says Slade of Bug. "J produced and we followed his lead. So I take issue with negative hindsight. We weren’t producing. And there’s no way that any suggestion by us would have made a difference. It would have automatically been rejected. The reason J got along with us is that we went along with him. We both like massive guitars, and J had these experiences with engineers who’d told him he was too loud, or who tried to mix the guitars in a nice polite spot. We might have been some of the first guys who didn’t care about that."

"I don’t mean to say that I don’t like the record," Kolderie counters. "It’s just that with what I know now we could make it sound so good . . . "

"But I think the reason the British loved the album so much was that it was so eccentric," Slade explains. "The English were much more into deliberately freakish sounds. A lot of it had to do with these records being made outrageously quick. We did the whole thing in two weeks. And because J was so uncommunicative . . . "

" . . . we were totally in the dark," Kolderie interjects. "J would say things like, ‘Put up the Led Zeppelin one,’ and we’d look at each other and be like, ‘I dunno, do you think it’s this one?’ So we’d put it up and he’d be like, ‘No, no, the other one.’ "

"Yeah, yeah, there were no lyrics or titles," Slade continues. "J would write the lyrics right before he had to do the vocal, and it still wouldn’t have a title."

Kolderie adds, "I remember he was lying on a couch right over there and he said, ‘Ah, I gotta write some lyrics.’ And the next day he came back with ‘Freak Scene.’ "

With its massed wall of distorted guitar and bass, its sense of frustrated alienation, its artlessly uncertain vocals, and its searing guitar solo, around which everything coalesces after J mutters "What a mess" and everything almost falls apart, "Freak Scene" is the song. Mascis’s unusual talents were already apparent in "Repulsion," "Little Fury Things," and "In a Jar," to name three from the first two CDs. But for all the drama that’s rumored to have surrounded the Bug sessions, something special did happen on that one. "Freak Scene" is the focal point, the song that distilled the essence of the original trio into an anti-anthemic three-and-a-half-minute melodic mess of yearning, confusion, and miserable joy.

"That was certainly the point at which our careers reached a new level," says Kolderie. "The Pixies were influential, but that took a while to build. Big Dipper were a big deal locally. But ‘Freak Scene’ made us big in England, and it enabled us to be seen as real producers. In America, they don’t take you seriously until you get a gold record. But in England, the climate was much different. NME raved about ‘Freak Scene,’ and it became the single of the year in England. I can’t complain about any of that."

Slade and Kolderie would go on to work with Mascis through 1991’s Green Mind (Sire), in large part because they didn’t let him get under their skin. "J decided that he could get along with us," Slade recalls. "We could get sounds fast and not argue with him."

"He said," Kolderie says, imitating Mascis’s morose voice, " ‘I need an engineer with a clue.’ "

Slade laughs. "He played games with us. We’d say that a guitar was too loud, so he’d reach over to the fader and make it a little louder. Or he’d say, ‘This isn’t your engineering-school final exam.’ So I’d throw up my hands and say, ‘Okay.’ "

"He had two 100-watt stacks full on," offers a bemused Kolderie. "It was so loud that you had a hard time walking into the room because the sound pressure was so intense."

"The volume was stunning," Slade continues. "What was so fascinating is that he was using volume as a thing unto itself. We didn’t know that much about technology at the time, but we found microphones that could withstand the sound pressure levels and . . . to this day I don’t know how we got away with it."

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