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Going through some old shit I had in storage I found this old interview with J and Lou from the February ’88 / # 11 issue of a short lived U.K. music magazine called “Underground”. Thought I’d transcribe here and share it with you guys.
Caption from cover reads, “Dinosaur JNR.- almost speak and spell sensation!”
Junior Tales and Stuff!
Dinosaur kids get minimal, least!
Frampton Disinterred! Can you bear it? Dinosaur Jnr (nee Dinosaur) have the bare faced cheek to exhume the old Peter Frampton conker Show Me The Way and turn it into something approaching a masterpiece. Lead into gold? Phaw, these boys are alchemists of the first order.
J Mascis’ playful couldn’t-give-a-damn vocalising is a million miles from Frampton’s aching sincerity and that stooped voice tube gizmo is shot to hell by Dinosaur Jnr’s swirling gnarl of wah-wah. They can afford to be cocky, the recent SST EP on which Show Me The Way appears and it’s parent record, the LP You’re Living All Over Me, have clear confidence etched right the way through them.
J and Lou Barlow formed Dinosaur a couple of years ago from the ashes of their hardcore group, Deep Wound, roping in Murph to drum and complete the line up. Their debut album on Homestead was issued perhaps a little too soon – it’s a damn good record, but the group are caught on the lam from their past and don’t have a real strong idea of what they want to do, picking up ideas from fellow post-hardcore travelers.
Individual songs like Repulsion and The Leper stand out but the SST recordings are something different, marking out their own turf, somewhere between Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere period Neil Young and recent Sonic Youth. A damn fine place to be.
Two things the record company said about Dinosaur; the advert for You’re Living All Over Me says “They’re know for some of the loudest performances known to man”;
the sleevenotes on the Homestead compilation, Wailing Ultimate, says they’re “famous for answers like “yes’ and “no” in interviews.”I can’t attest to their loudness, their Clarendon show last November was loud but not that loud, in fact it was a tiny little noise compared with the unbearable overload I’d witnessed from Loop a week or two before. I met the group on the afternoon of the show in the freezing ‘dressing room’, empty except for a couple of chairs, one of them occupied by a big silent biker, his head tucked into a book of underworld murder atrocities. Of course the Homestead no comment legend was right, most of my questions were met with “I guess so,” or “it just kinda happened.”
“We hope so,” was popular, and those hoary old chestnuts “yes” and “no” got a look in. What was that J?
“We’ve not done many interviews back home but we come to do this tour of Europe and suddenly there’s journalists all over the place. After a while you can’t think of anything to say so you just end up giving one word answers and you come across like a real cretin. If you do say something it usually ends up being twisted round or just plain misquoted, like when I was charged with possession of drugs in Germany, ‘cause I had a bottle of fuckin’ migraine tablets that contained something like a fraction of a percentage of amphetamine. It was reported in the NME and I was quoted as saying ‘Don’t they have long hair in Europe?”. What’s the sense of that? What I said was “Don’t people have headaches in Europe?”. This guy was obsessed with haircuts, I’d like to put the record straight here – I never have had a Mohawk!”
Whew! I’m glad that’s off your chest. Lou?
“Our biggest problem at the moment is getting our records to people. All these interviews we’ve done lately, you stop and think ‘what’s the point?’ You can’t even get our records over here. We played in Munich last week and the response was terrific, the place was packed. When we went to look around record shops we could find our record anywhere.”
J and Lou didn’t want to talk about their music and were more interested in grilling me as to the best record labels to approach with a view to a European deal and which record shops they should be visiting in London.
The Next day out on the Notting Hill record trail, my mate, Bob, down from Hull for the week, refuses to go home ‘til he gets a copy of You’re Living All Over Me. At Rough Trade he manages toto secure the last copy in the shop and as we leave who should walk in but J,clutching a bag of old punk rock records. Life’s like that sometimes.
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