Feel the Skin Begin to Scar
Dinosaur Jr., deep wounds, and 35 years of 'Bug'
The story of Dinosaur Jr. is one of miscommunication, meltdowns, and making up. Rising from the ashes of proto-grindcore quartet Deep Wound in 1984, the trio harnessed hardcore, post-punk, heavy metal, and classic-rock guitar heroics. Fed up with the stylistic constraints of the punk scene, singer-guitarist-songwriter J Mascis, singer-bassist-sometimes-songwriter Lou Barlow, and drummer Murph looked beyond the punk thrash-o-ramas that first gave life to their musical ambitions and turned to the dark sounds of The Birthday Party and the wounded hard rock of Neil Young — “ear-bleedin’ country” as they called it. But although the combustible energy of their musical entanglement would spawn endless imitators — “It seems there is now no one left on the continent…that hasn’t formed a band and released a record. And that record sounds a little bit like Dinosaur Jr.,” wrote Steve Albini in 1991 — the original line-up eventually flamed out amidst mounting tensions.
The band was formed in Amherst, Massachusetts, a liberal college town — so liberal, in fact, that “women’s rights get shoved down your throat” as one of the three young white guys complained in an 1989 interview — which at the time was filled with professors, jocks, hippie hangovers, and a sizable contingent of freaks. The band’s description of the town — ‘90s Dino bassist Mike Johnson called it a “hellish place” — brings to mind films like Tim Hunter’s River’s Edge (1986) or Jonathan Kaplan’s Over the Edge (1979), crime dramas that looked behind the orderly facade of the American suburbs and revealed a profound darkness lurking behind it.
It was against this backdrop that Dinosaur — the “Jr.” tag wouldn’t be added until a bunch of has-been ‘60s musicians calling themselves the Dinosaurs sued them in 1987 — confronted the yawning nothingness at the heart of their pampered upbringings. (It’s worth noting that “pampered” doesn’t apply to the members equally, as Barlow actually grew up in working-class Westfield after his family moved there from a blue-collar town in Michigan.) By 1984, hardcore was slowly fading into stale predictability and they were determined to set themselves apart from the boneheaded machismo with which the scene was becoming synonymous. Gerard Cosloy, a friend and admirer of Mascis’ weirdo disposition, promised to put out whatever the green band recorded on his label Homestead Records and they soon took him up on his offer.
Describing the music on their first LP, 1985’s Dinosaur, as the obvious result of young musicians throwing everything to the wall to see what sticks would be doing a disservice to the extraordinary musical sophistication so frequently on display. “Forget the Swan,” “Repulsion,” “Gargoyle,” and “Severed Lips” all crackle with vitality, bursting at the seams with musical ideas and constant dynamic shifts. Goth rock slips into nervy folk which then slips into psychedelia and so on. It’s unruly and beautiful in its rough-around-the-edges eagerness although quite a few songs have rightfully been relegated to the dustbin of history: “The Leper” is as aimless as the shitty guitar solo that opens it; “Does It Float” has nothing going on aside from a spontaneous, interesting-but-not-really noise-rock eruption; and the instrumental “Pointless” is indeed that.
The next year, seeing something in the three musicians after witnessing a live show, Sonic Youth took Dinosaur on tour with them and high on the validation given to them by a band they idolized, musical maturity came quickly. (The move from Homestead to the iconic SST label surely didn’t hurt either.) Their next offering, You’re Living All Over Me, followed their scattered debut in 1987 and first saw the band truly ride the lightning of quasi-Hendrix guitar fireworks, riotously melodic post-hardcore, and spectral lo-fi experimentation.
The album’s introductory triplet boasts an instructive genre mishmash: the delicate, strum ‘n’ hum-along hook on “Little Fury Things” (“A rabbit falls away from me, guess I’ll crawl,” sings a cryptic and characteristically dejected Mascis with help from Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo) is preceded by piercing sheets of wha-wha guitar and Barlow’s crazed shrieks. “Kracked”’s tense, wiry opening riff careens into a despairing chorus of adolescent heartbreak — “Come on babe/Come on rescue me/Just this last time” — before collapsing into the feedback-fucked odyssey that is “Sludgefeast,” quite possibly Dinosaur Jr.’s most aptly titled track.
From there, the album scrapes messy fuzz prog (“The Lung”), anticipates shoegaze (“Tarpit”), and imagines bandleader Mascis as a bug being carried around in a glass jar by the object of his affection (“In a Jar”), a pathetic fever dream cobbled together from bizarre teenage jerk-off fantasies and draped in scorching noise pop. The mid-album showstopper, however, arrives in the form of “Raisans” which repeats the wink-wink-nudge-nudge misspelling from track two and opens side B with a punk-rock fury that belies its bleeding heart.
“The lights exploded/She stood burning in front of me/She ripped my heart out and gave it to me,” drones a lovesick Mascis, open chords roaring behind him. The hook blazes with forlorn romanticism (“I’ll be down, I’ll be around/I’ll be hanging where eventually you’ll have to be”) while the eerie vocal sample heard on the bridge evokes loony-bin non-sequiturs, a voice wailing “You’re killing me, you’re killing me” over and over. (The strange snippet actually came from Barlow, who, inspired by Throbbing Gristle, had made a habit of recording elderly residents while working as an orderly in a nursing home, something he doesn’t look back on fondly.) Mascis’ fire-spitting guitar leads rupture the tune’s second half in a moment of intense, orgasmic release — simultaneously mellifluous and jagged — the instrument articulating the taciturn musician’s feelings better than his words ever could.
Though routinely neglected, Barlow’s contributions are substantial. Matching the effects-laden textures of his frontman’s guitar playing, the timid, bespectacled bassist — relegated to the role by the commandeering Mascis after having previously played guitar in Deep Wound with Mascis behind the kit — channeled Lemmy Kilmister’s distorted bass attack and Johnny Ramone’s buzzsaw guitar, even momentarily outshining Mascis on the aforementioned “In a Jar” with a spry bass line that bounces off the translucid guitar chords drifting low in the mix, at least until Mascis’ Big Muff pedal inevitably comes into play.
While he no longer evenly split vocal duties with his Cousin Itt-haired bandmate like they did on Dinosaur, Barlow kicks in and leads two songs of his own: the chaotic bummer anthem “Lose” and album closer “Poledo.” While the former rages with numerous noisy guitar solos and a final stanza that rivals indie rock’s mopiest moments (“Sometimes thinking right, I can’t believe I was chosen to exist/ ‘Cause only Jesus Christ can slit his wrists, he says”), the latter is a low-fidelity curio, essentially two sketches of ukulele ditties strung together by a collage of miscellaneous tape recordings — a pivotal moment for lo-fi music at the time.
While on the road, ostensibly in support of You’re Living All Over Me — in actuality, SST bungled the release, leaving them to tour a record that wasn’t even out yet — a fateful tour stop in Mountain Home, Idaho would cause the band dynamic to disintegrate forever. Barlow had been in awe of Mascis since their Deep Wound days, intimidated by his I-don’t-care posturing, patchy haircut, and blitzkrieg drumming. When that band imploded and Mascis switched to guitar, Barlow was awed all over again when the former drummer presented his songs to the newly-formed Dinosaur — “J was the man,” as Barlow said in 2013.
The admiration wasn’t mutual. The initial cordiality quickly gave way to mutual psychological torment (though the guitarist was arguably a lot better at it) as Mascis’ leadership deteriorated into tyranny. There is an interesting psychosexual dimension — and some hilariously white-bread racial anxieties — to the strife within the band: at one point during the Mountain Home breakdown, Murph yelled at Mascis that “[he] should be raped by a bald black man,” to which Mascis replied, “That would be you, Murph?” zeroing in on his drummer’s juvenile sexual hangups and prematurely receding hairline. “J did have a penchant for just the most disgusting, ass-raping put-downs,” says Jon Fetler, a friend who joined the group on their ill-fated 1987 tour. Murph responded by destroying the hotel room in a fit of desperation and rage.
As the band began falling apart internally, their acclaim grew and they had gone from something of a joke — even twenty years after their debut, Pitchfork couldn’t help but quip about the pendant that “dungeon master” Mascis wears on the back cover photo — to one of the underground’s most celebrated bands. But by the time they recorded their third record, Bug, in 1988, Mascis had begun exerting total control over the band’s sound, fussing over every single one of Murph’s snare hits while simultaneously treating Barlow with cruel indifference. Turns out, this was the sweet spot between offering a singular vision and sufficiently bruising that vision with interpersonal conflict, petty jealousy, and the passive-aggressive male desire to upstage one’s peers. If You’re Living All Over Me got their foot in the door, then Bug cemented their place in the alt-rock pantheon.
Bug was recorded a year after its predecessor and the game had changed considerably by then. Far from having bottles thrown at them by sound guys, frustrated with the excruciating volume with which they performed — even Yo La Tengo’s Ira Kaplan, working as a sound man at Maxwell’s, pleaded with them to turn down after suffering through a punishingly loud soundcheck — Dinosaur Jr. suddenly found themselves being heralded as one of America’s foremost noise merchants. A successful European tour brought them further notoriety, especially amongst the British music press who took a (sometimes condescending) liking to their idiot-savant Americanness which seemed to exist in sharp contrast to the molten rock ‘n’ roll they conjured.
Opening with the country-tinged jangle of “Freak Scene,” Bug birthed the band’s first alternative hit. The song was on heavy rotation on college radio stations and it’s easy to see why: Mascis drawls his famous drawl and Barlow and Murph, locked in through relentless rehearsals and the two-against-one rift that had begun opening up, propel the track forward, the guitar by turns shimmering above and growling along with them. While the song has (somewhat unfairly) eclipsed the tracks that succeed it, it’s hard to argue with the glorious ruckus that emerges whenever Mascis works his maniacal lead-guitar magic.
Lyrically, the song, as indicated by its title, is a kind of snapshot of the band’s milieu at the time but it is also about the complicated companionship between Mascis and Barlow: “The weirdness flows between us/Anyone can tell who sees us.” In spite of Mascis’ reputation of letting his guitar do the talking, he does allow himself a surprising moment of vulnerability in the last verse, singing “Sometimes I don’t thrill you/Sometimes I think I’ll kill you/Just don’t let me fuck up, will you?/‘Cause when I need a friend it’s still you,” before letting his guitar scream anew. The solo appears to sap his motivation to speak since all he can muster is a hopeless “What a mess,” his voice swallowed by swirls of noise.
There’s conflicting reports as to whether or not Bug constitutes the high point of Mascis, Barlow, and Murph’s original output or a disappointment after the lightning in a bottle that was You’re Living All Over Me — a relic of a time when critical opinion wasn’t as uniform as it is today. Indeed, Bug does sand off some of the band’s rougher edges in favor of a more approachable spin on what was slowly congealing into the Dinosaur Jr. formula.
However, this still paints an incomplete picture. Bug not only refined the group’s sound but also expanded it in every direction — the fact that “Freak Scene” opens the record by cramming all the Dino hallmarks into the contours of a pop song and the six-minute noise bomb “Don’t” closes it with a repetitive three-note riff and blasted-out shreds of weapons-grade guitar noise illustrates this beautifully.
In between these two extremes, Dinosaur’s sonic assault coalesces into different shades of ‘80s alt-rock across the album’s nine tracks. The melancholy waves of lush feedback and acoustic guitar strums heard on “No Bones” once again gave the burgeoning shoegaze scene a sound to rip off and the hazy track decays into a cavernous bridge that oozes like a wound, spraying reverb-drenched guitar all over its careening rhythm section. Later, “They Always Come” provides one of the album’s most gorgeous moments, its verse-chorus-verse structure broken off by a rapturous, sunlit second half. “Can’t face them, man/The ones you left/You can’t trace me,” laments Mascis, his voice thick with a sadness that nonetheless refuses to be consumed by despair just yet (“The sky broke down/That rainy sound/Gotta save me”).
Dinosaur’s fondness for all things gooey, icky, and sticky, was reflected in their song titles as well as their lyrics (“The world drips down like gravy,” goes the chorus on “Repulsion”) so it’s fitting that they traded You’re Living All Over Me’s tarpit for the comparatively clear waters of a pond on “Pond Song.” The song strips away the noise, showcasing Murph’s drumming finesse and Mascis’ Byrds-inspired arpeggio — an influence rarely brought up when discussing his guitar playing.
It’s a sign of things to come: the song is beautiful, breezy, and seemingly unrestrained by the dysfunction that permeated the band as the ‘80s drew to a close. It’s an early glimpse at a version of Dinosaur Jr. that is all Mascis, the ideas flowing freely from his brain. Contrasted with the rest of the album, it offers some much-needed respite but the breather is short-lived as the trio hurtles into “Budge,” a shoot-first poundfest designed to break drumsticks and rupture eardrums. The dirgy verses of “The Post,” meanwhile, segue into one of the band’s most anthemic choruses — “She’s my post to lean on/And I just cut her down,” confesses Mascis in a moment of painful self-awareness — and a rock-out middle section that features yet another heroic bit of guitar noodling.
If anything stands out about Bug, it’s the fact that, in spite of the breadth of styles it covers, it’s easily the most cohesive Dinosaur Jr. record. The assurance in Mascis’ songwriting meshed with the unprecedented degree of hatred between himself and Barlow to produce a work that was paradoxical in its mellowed restlessness. The band had slowly begun trading punk spontaneity for Mascis-brand solipsism but their third would be the last time they tapped into what Barlow called “the gnarl,” that elusive, organic quality which seems to permeate rock history’s greatest opuses — tension and inspiration converging to create something genuinely invigorating. In many ways, the Bug era was the height of the gnarl and the forceful live performances that always appeared to be in danger of spinning out of control certainly bore this out.
Of course, by that point, things had already spiraled out of control. During a December 1987 show in Naugatuck, Connecticut, a rancorous Barlow sabotaged an insultingly sloppy performance of “Severed Lips” with loud squeals of feedback. Mascis and Murph held it together until the end of the song when, in a rare display of overt emotion, the former tried to hit Barlow with his guitar, prompting the bassist to use his own instrument to shield himself from the blows. Barlow yelled a triumphant yell before the band walked offstage. They returned to finish the set: Barlow mumbled something to the scattered crowd about not being able to play the songs anymore, being “freaked out,” and everything being “so fucked up” before the band tore through cacophonous interpretations of “Lose” and “Mountain Man.” They didn’t speak a word to each other for the rest of the night.
Mascis, for his part, used the dictatorial grip he had on the band to get back at his bandmate for his perceived transgressions. In a deliciously sadistic bit of behind-the-scenes psychodrama, Mascis had Barlow scream “Don’t”’s only lyric — “Why? Why don’t you like me?” — until he coughed blood. The fact that the song was conceived as something of an afterthought makes this even more perverse, the guitarist immediately defaulting to nastiness even while ostensibly extending an olive branch by having Barlow contribute a vocal to an album from which his voice is otherwise completely absent.
Barlow would be kicked out of the band in 1989. Or rather, the band “broke up” only to reform the next day — sans their mop-headed bassist. Barlow caught wind of the “reformed” Dinosaur heading out on an Australian tour with new bassist Donna Dresch — with whom the group went on to play some of its best, most wonderfully haywire post-Barlow shows — and vented his frustrations through indie rock’s bitterest (and most one-sided) post-breakup spat when he formed the band Sebadoh, which would grow to be a highly influential act in its own right.
The year of Bug’s release just so happened to be the year major labels smelled blood in the water and Dinosaur Jr. — along with Sonic Youth, Soundgarden, Nirvana, and others — were soon courted by major labels, eventually settling in at the Warner Bros. imprint Blanco y Negro. With Barlow gone, the sound began opening up, blossoming from a knobbly ball of anxiety into the brisk wave that was 1991’s Green Mind. Its opening track, “The Wagon,” is a rousing slab of guitar pop, chock-full of chiming guitars, falsetto harmonies, and rollicking drums. The heavenly, achingly melancholy chorus — “You won’t see me/There you are and here I stand/Tryin’ to make you feel my hand” — might just be the band’s greatest songwriting achievement.
Throughout the ‘90s, Mascis would burn through band members while releasing the most commercially successful music of his career. But once the alt-rock craze died down in the back half of the decade, Dinosaur Jr., like many of their indie confreres, were pushed to the wayside in favor of the corporate post-grunge vulgarities they unwittingly helped create. After 1997’s underrated Hand It Over flopped, having received no promotion from the label, Mascis dissolved the band and toiled away with projects such as J Mascis + The Fog which, curiously, had a hand in reuniting proto-punk icons the Stooges. (Jim Jarmusch’s 2016 Stooges doc, Gimme Danger, explores this particular bit of history in detail.) Barlow, on the other hand, would spend the decade slagging off his former bandmate in songs and interviews while still finding time to land a hit when his side project the Folk Implosion released “Natural One” on the Kids (1995) soundtrack.
Against all odds, the original trio not only reformed in 2005 but has also released five albums — more than they managed during their ‘80s heyday — which run the gamut from enjoyable to pretty great. Even though none of them can match the undiluted forcefulness of their initial union — 2009’s Farm comes surprisingly close — theirs remains an explosive unit. And while Mascis’ voice has gone from a neurotic croak to a soothing yawn, his guitar is as fierce as ever, serving up some of the best leads of his entire discography even as the playing that surrounds them has taken a turn for the harmonious — a far cry from the wild sonic cornucopias he previously couched his melodies in.
Their music no longer springs from the murky, ectoplasmic depths their ‘80s tunes clawed their way out of but instead calls on longing, heartbreak, and loss, experiencing angst with the semi-clarity of middle age. The fury has diminished, the vocabulary has become streamlined — Mascis has developed into something of an indie rock auteur, approaching the same fundamental idea with only minor variations each time — but the sadness and confusion remain every bit as potent as they did when they were in their early 20s.
Upon their return, they were often praised as pioneers of the sound that shaped ‘90s alternative culture. Now that the post-reunion elation has calmed down a bit, it’s perhaps appropriate to consider the possibility that their supposedly singular role in shaping what would become grunge has been slightly overstated — Black Sabbath did the loud-quiet-loud thing in 1970 and both Hüsker Dü and the lesser-known Louisville, Kentucky combo Squirrel Bait released hardcore-inflected alternative rock in 1985, the year Dinosaur were still busy aping their heroes with varying degrees of success.
It remains undisputed, however, that the music they created ranks amongst some of the best and most innovative indie rock that the ‘80s and ‘90s produced. Sonic Youth singer-guitarist Thurston Moore has even claimed that Bug was better than his band’s 1988 classic, Daydream Nation — a fact the Library of Congress apparently isn’t hip to — and taken as a pair, the albums do neatly represent two major strands of the post-hardcore era, Daydream Nation being the sophisticated book-smart older sibling to Bug’s rowdy, depressed punk brat.
It’s to the band’s credit that, almost forty years on, they can still wring this much emotion from a sound they have been working with for longer than this fan has been alive. The hair has either grayed, grown more unruly, or vanished completely while the awkwardness has remained. And yet they have kept going, still wrestling with their inability to connect with each other and the world around them. By all accounts, the communication still isn’t exactly great but growth has definitely occurred. So much so that Mascis even eschewed a guitar solo for 2009’s “Over It” and instead let his words do the talking: “All the things you say are true/I’ll get over, I need to/When I needed you came through.” Maybe in another forty years, Mascis won’t need to write a song at all to let Barlow know how he feels.
Oh man, what an incredible piece.
Hell yeah. Good stuff. You're Living All Over Me is up there as one of my favorite album titles.