J Interview-Eye Weekly June ’06

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Eye – June 22, 2006
Interview
J MASCIS
For someone who’s so often held up as the patron saint of slackerdom, J Mascis is a busy guy: in the past year, the soft-spoken, LOUD-riffin’ indie-rock guitar god reformed the original lineup of his legendary power trio Dinosaur Jr., oversaw the reissues of that band’s first five albums and formed a stoner-metal band on the side called Witch, in which he plays drums (his first instrument). So when you’ve got that much on the go, why not get someone else to play your songs for you? In advance of his Saturday set at Broken Social Scene’s Olympic Island festival, Mascis joins BSS Friday at the Mod Club as Broken Mascis Scene, to perform a set of Dino classics at a benefit for Indian humanitarian Amma. Eye Weekly woke up Mascis at his Northampton, Massachusetts home for an early morning interview last week, and he actually opted to answer our questions rather than go back to sleep.

When did you first hear of Broken Social Scene? I don’t remember. I might’ve seen the video for "Almost Crimes" first.

And did you think, "Hey, this sounds a lot like me?" Other people have said that… I don’t know; it doesn’t really occur to me immediately.

You did some shows with Broken Social Scene last summer — how did that turn into them becoming your backing band? Somebody asked me to play a benefit show in Toronto for this lady Amma, and I thought that would be a good opportunity to play with those guys. They live there, right?

What makes you trust them to pull off your songs? I don’t. We’ll see what happens.

You and Brendan Canning have a history — when Dinosaur Jr. played Toronto in 1993, legend has it that you had the opening band, The Satanatras, kicked off the bill because you didn’t like their name. Brendan’s old band hHead opened instead. Oh yeah… I don’t recall any of that. Well, it is a bad name… hHead is a little better.

What was the inspiration for forming Witch — were you just itching to play drums again, or were you inspired by all the psych/metal stuff coming out of the underground these days? Well, that was from going to all these shows around here, just thinking, like, it’s sometimes better to play shows than to just see them. There’s all these Thurston [Moore]-type shows around here, like noise or free-jazz or freak-folk shows, and I was hanging around and just thought I should form a band… and all of a sudden it was novelty, in that it seemed to have songs. Because nobody has any songs.

Are you amused that all the kids are into folk and psychedelia now, when 20 years ago you’d get beaten up if you listened to anything other than hardcore? I’m still surprised by hardcore… there’s a store in Northampton and I went in there and all the records and t-shirts were of the same bands I listened to when I was 15, like Discharge. Like, hasn’t anything progressed?

Merge Records reissued the first three indie Dinosaur albums last year, and then Rhino/Warner’s just reissued your first two-major label albums. Were you just feeling nostalgic? The first three, I’ve been trying to reissue them since, like, 1989. It’s been a really long time. And then I think Warner just jumped on the bandwagon after [the Merge reissues] came out… and I don’t have much to say about that.

Is Dinosaur Jr. technically still together? We’re trying to do a Dinosaur album, and then I have some Witch gigs here and there and some Dino gigs in weird places. We’re [Dinosaur Jr.] just sick of playing… until we have some new songs. STUART BERMAN

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