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1). YLAOM
2). Bug
3). Beyond
4). Dinosaur
5). Where You Been
6). Green Mind
7). Without a Sound
. Hand it OverPutting Hand it Over last may be a little unfair, seeing as I’ve barely ever heard the record.
OK, I got to go to the Osaka show. Great concert, and nice mix of tunes! I’ll write more about it later. In the meantime, the setlist:
1). Pick Me Up
2). Budge
3). In a Jar
4). Lighting Bulb
5). Little Fury Things
6). Out There
7). Feel the Pain
. Pick Me Up
9). What If I Knew
10). Wagon
11). Freak Scene
12). GargoyleEncore:
13). Forget the Swan
14). Just Like HeavenI’m going to try to go to the Osaka show tonight… see if I can get tickets at the door. If I go, I’ll post the setlist.
Here’s my brother’s description of the Seattle show–his first Dino Jr. show, despite having been turned on to them big-time (by me!) back in ’87 when YLAOM came out:
"That was funny about the decibels, because it really wasn’t that loud to start with, but then I did feel a bit shellshocked by the time the show was out. One ear is still a little bit deaf. I did get some earplugs but it wasn’t loud enough to use them from where I was at. The way the Showbox is set up, if you’re close in front of the stage you don’t get blasted by the PA speakers. The sound is totally different up there; you’re catching Jay’s multiple Marshalls and the monitors more than you do the PA.
I was really interested that some of the best songs from the new stuff were sung by the bass player. That one "Back to Your Heart" for example. Plus there was an old one sung by him that I never knew about; thought it was all Jay.
Seems like the show started out kinda slow and quiet and got louder and better as it progressed. Jay’s guitar didn’t seem as inspired at the beginning. I would say they aren’t an extremely lively show act, but the music really rocked. Jay tends to get into the groove of a song and starts swinging his whole body and the guitar left and right like a mother cradling her baby. The crowd was totally in to it, even a large and pretty wild mosh pit erupted and stayed put till the end. 4 security guards pulled one guy out of the audience with various painful looking holds on him. Eyes all popped out, he looked like he was gone, a character out of a Freak Brothers comic or something. I really wasn’t expecting such a response to this band.
You know what’s weird, I don’t even think they sold out the show. A guy I went with bought his tickets that very evening. Strange. But their new album is so good, I’d be surprised if by the end of their tour they aren’t selling out everywhere."
"Starlight " wrote:It wasn’t until he died that people really started to notice that what they were hearing wasn’t just noise. But it was too late, just another legacy dead, that soon got picked up by others, who advanced the style to hiigher limits, and so on down the line.In all due respect, ANY Hendrix biography will completely refute the notion that no-one started to appreciate Hendrix until he died. On the contrary, his fellow musicians, especially guitarists, were in absolute awe of him, and this includes people like Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Pete Townshend. There are no shortages of articles and reviews from the late 60’s that commented on the fact that Hendrix was taking the electric guitar far farther than anyone had ever done before. He was widely considered to have revolutionized electric guitar playing DURING HIS LIFETIME, and that’s to say nothing of his legacy.
I’m not a huge Hendrix fan–it’s just not what I personally choose to listen to most of the time. Also, I think that the whole concept of the "best" guitarist is highly subjective and completely unprovable (also, as I mentioned above, the very idea that the world’s best guitarists are rock musicians is highly suspect–try jazz and flamenco). I agree that some people are overly dogmatic about Hendrix. But, leaving aside the concept of the "best" player, whatever that is supposed to me, I do think that there are very good reasons why he’s considered to be the most influential guitarist in rock music.
As for J, he’s one of my personal favorite guitarists, and I enjoy listening to him more than Hendrix, but that’s just my personal taste. I put J in the league of a certain kind of guitar player who combines noise and melody well–as I mentioned above–people like Neil Young, Bob Mould, Lee Ranaldo. I might add Tom Verlaine of Television and Adrian Belew of King Crimson/Talking Heads/Laurie Anderson/David Bowie to that list. Some odd choices of heavier guitarists who remind me of J (though definitely less noisy) are the God-like Buck Dharma of Blue Oyster Cult and also Kim Thayil of Soundgarden. Anyway, of those guitarists, Lee compares very favorably, but they all have their moments. I would give J very high marks for his combination of underrated technical skill and control of noise and texture. On the other hand, Buck Dharma definitely has better technical skills, Neil Young and Bob Mould have more seat-of-the-pants spontaneous inspiration, and Lee Ranaldo, Adrian Belew and Tom Verlaine have the edge in terms of sheer ability to combine noise and melody.
J.’s single biggest contribution to rock guitar, to me, is just in the fact that he played a big role in making lead guitar "cool" again in alternative rock. That’s a major contribution… but it’s piddly compared to Hendrix, and I’m sure that J would be the first to acknowledge that fact.
Thanks for the setlist! Sweet setlist, too… My brother was there, his first Dino show in 20 years of fanhood! I haven’t been able to communicate with him about it yet, because he lives in Seattle and I live in Japan. Anyway, if anyone has the exact order, please post it. Knowing my brother, he had a good time, but can’t even remember what they played, let alone the order.
In a way, Hendrix isn’t the best comparison to J anyway. More relevant guitarists to compare him to would be melodic-yet-dissonant people like Lee Ranaldo, Bob Mould and Neil Young. I can see a little similarity with Hendrix in that they both use some noise/dissonance, but Hendrix had a much funkier approach and more diverse playing style.
I’m thinking about it some more, and I’m pretty sure that "Bulbs" was added years after the album first came out.
Here’s why: I bought YLAOM on cassette when it first came out–it was my first Dino album. At the time, they were still just called "Dinosaur"–I still have the original cassette, and it has no "Jr." on it. I really liked it, so I went out and bought the debut on cassette, too. Since YLAOM came out in 1987, then it would seem that Bulbs still hadn’t been added to the debut in 1987. As we know, the debut came out in 1985–quite a long time earlier.
It’s also possible that "Bulbs" was on CD releases but not on the cassettes. I doubt it though, because in those days, if an extra track was on the CD version, it was usually on the cassette version too. This is because vinyl albums can’t be more than about 45 minutes without seriously losing sound quality, but cassettes and CDs don’t have this limitation. If an extra track was added to the CD version of an album, then there was no reason not to add it to the cassette version, too.
As far as I know, the answer is "no." Back in the day, I had "Dinosaur" on cassette, and it did not include Bulbs of Passion. I’ve heard that Bulbs of Passion was included on later vinyl/cassette versions of the album, but I did not personally hear the song until I bought the CD remaster. I think that they basically released that it was a great song and decided to add it to the album in retrospect.
Good question. I’ve been noticing that the bass isn’t as prominent as I had hoped, too, though I’m not having trouble hearing it most of the time–just that it’s quite a bit less massive than on the other albums by the original Dino lineup. It varies from song to song: it is very easy to hear on Lightning Bulb, louder than the guitar in fact. It’s fairly easy to hear on This is All I Came to Do and Yer My Son, but fairly difficult to hear on Almost Ready. I’m listening to it on some shitty computer speakers (OK, they are relatively big for computer speakers, but all computer speakers suck), and I can almost always hear the bass, albeit not very well compared to, say, Bug. The most important thing is that I can FEEL the bass, and the album brings back the monstrous J/Murph/Lou mash-up sound for the first time since Bug.
What I can’t agree with is your statement that there is no low-end in the mix. Actually, there is plenty of low-end in the mix–it’s nothing like Green Mind, which is a good example of a mix without much low end. It’s not that the album doesn’t have a lot of bass frequencies–it’s just that actual bass guitar isn’t that audible, which is a different thing. One of the reasons why the bass is so easy to hear on an album like Bug is actually that Lou is often playing pretty high, thus making the bass more audible (No Bones is a good example of this), and he also used to use a more trebly tone, even when he was playing low. On Beyond, Lou simply isn’t doing a lot of high-end bass stuff on this album–he’s doing a lot more conventional, low-end stuff, and that makes him harder to hear. To use Bug again as an example, compare the audibility of the bass on Freak Scene compared to that of No Bones–the bass is FAR more audible on the latter, because Lou is often playing higher and using a lot more chords. On Freak Scene, the bass is pretty much at the same level as it is for most of Beyond, despite a more trebly guitar sound.
Which brings me to another factor: another thing that makes the bass more or less audible is the guitar parts (and of course, how they are mixed and panned). On Beyond, there are a lot of low-end, distorted rhythm guitar parts that are operating in similar frequencies to the bass, and that naturally makes the bass less audible. In some of Dinosaur’s past stuff, even when J has done a lot of guitar overdubs, it’s been much more high-end, trebly stuff, but a lot of the guitar stuff on Beyond is much lower in frequency. My real problem with the mix that they didn’t manage to isolate the bass enough, so sometimes the rhythm guitar parts and the bass end up being all balled together. There are a few places where I’m not actually sure whether what I’m hearing is a bass or rhythm guitar–not surprising considering the fact that Lou’s bass sometimes sounds quite rhythm-guitarish, and then there are low-end, distorted rhythm guitar chords operating in the same frequencies. On the bonus tracks, the bass is really quite prominent, but I think it’s largely because those songs have fewer guitar overdubs obscuring the bass. And, of course, the bass is always going to be relatively easy to hear live because you only have one guitar part going on at once.
All in all. I think that this is a great album, their best since the 80’s, but I think the biggest fault is the mix. My problem isn’t really the volume of the bass, though, and it certainly isn’t a lack of low end, it’s more that not enough care was taken to keep all of the low-end frequencies separate, so you kind of get a mash-up on the lower ends.
From a certain point of view, the best guitarists in the world are probably not rock guitarists at all… if it’s pure technical skills you’re after, jazz guitarists are, on average, a lot better.
J is a wonderful guitarist, one of my very favorites, and I actually listen to him more than Hendrix. However, I wouldn’t ever say that he was better than Hendrix, for a few reasons. One is that, as pointed out above, there probably wouldn’t even be a J Mascis if there had never been a Jimi Hendrix. But, more importantly, Hendrix just had amazingly variety of music in his playing–blues, jazz, soul, funk, folk, Indian music, to name a few, and J Mascis doesn’t even come close in that respect.
