Mr Alt Rock MTV Guitar Hero

[AGAP]

Found a gig diary from School for the Dead, who warmed up the May 22nd show in Northampton. Not a review of the show,
just some funny bits about J hanging out before the CV show. I’ll just put the J related stuff, if you want to check out the beck talk & SftD’s stuff you can follow the site link…

School for the Dead

…Walking into the Eagles Club, Cobra Verde were hanging around, and J mascis was wandering, playing an unplugged electric guitar. Murph was there too, and talked to me for a few minutes. We talked about Joe Boyle and his success with the musical he’s playing in in West Springfield at the Majestic theater.

Our set (Ken-less, He was in San Antonio, TX w/ the Mammals) was brisk. "One Lady" was so friggin’ fast I actually missed a couple beats in confusion.
Mascis was up front stringing his guitar, stretching the strings by playing along with us. I think he may have dug Screen Door, but left during Omnivore (perhaps hearing Henning repeat ‘I’m a dinosaur" got to him. It’s true on a couple levels with Mascis).
But as always, I had fun.
Afterwards I was asked if I wanted to play drums on a local songwriters’ album. Not Mascis.( VF) But I said yes and if it all works out, it’ll be a lot of fun.
My ears were ringing, so Andrea and I went to Hugo’s. We returned for 2 Cobra Verde songs. Swaggery, NYC-style punk attitude rock.

… Okay, more celebrity in tha house as we were on a bill that would be featuring another alt-rock god in J Mascis. I like Dinosaur Jr. fine but again, he’s no more special than my Northampton artist friends so I just can’t get wrapped up in it all.

So anyway, as Brian noted, J Mascis spent the majority of our set sitting on a chair just off to the side of the stage down in front, spending about 20 minutes fiddling with his guitar, changing strings, stretching them, toying with the tuning pegs and the bridge, etc. and then for a few songs, he played along, unamplified of course. He was kinda staring off into space but he was definitely playing along. For instance, Henning would sing, "All that makeup spelled out a breakup" and Mascis would slide his fingers way up near the 12th fret and wail off some fast lead guitar lick, diddley-diddley-diddley, bending strings and basically shredding then he’d wait until the next break in the vocal to do it again. Cool and funny. I would’ve appreciated it and found it amusing even if it were just, say, Frank Padellaro doing it but since it was Mr. Alternative Rock MTV guitar hero J Dinosaur Jr. Mascis (by the way, did you all know that, I, Tony Westcott am close personal friends with Sebadoh’s Jason Loewenstein’s sister Samara?) made it that much more worthy of mention.

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