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that’s all you need to know really … (besides the fact there’s loads of old pics … most of which i’ve never seen … )
just buy it
Thanks for the heads up, definitely gonna pick it up…hopefully our album is back up soon for the pics…
well, officially mojo is supposed to come out mid-month, so i don’t know why this one came out early …
btw, it’s t rex (marc bolan) on the cover … continuing the ‘dinosaur’ theme
pt 1 of the article…
Diary of a mad band
Inspired by Sabbath, Hardcore and Oi!, Dinosaur Jr lit the late ’80’s with their fireball rock while living in a Gulag, learns Steve Chick.
It was at the Night Shift, a ratty little club inside a shopping mall in Naugatuck, Connecticut in the early spring of 1988, that the simmering passive-aggression at the heart of Dinosaur Jr’s volatile, punk-country sound erupted in violence. Years of unresolved hostility had fractured the band’s fragile dynamic. Finally, taciturn frontman J Mascis realised he had to act.
"I kept thinking, Wow, Murph’s gonna hit Lou," remembers Mascis today. "Then I realised Murph wasn’t gonna hit Lou, that it was up to me."
Bassist Lou Barlow was playing a single note of feedback instead of the bass line to Severed Lips, an act of blatant sabotage. Mascis responded by swinging his guitar at Barlow, who deflected the blow with his bass and fell to the ground. After a few further glancing blows, Mascis sloped off, Barlow leapt onto the drum riser, pumping fist and screaming a triumphant, "Yes!"
"…Like he had won some psychic battle by making me react continues Mascis, distaste etched on his usually-inscrutable features. "I walked off-stage thinking, Jesus he’s fucked up. Whatever he was going through was too much for me to deal with"
"I was watching the whole thing and thinking, I should just kill both of them," sighs Emmett Jefferson "Patrick" Murphy III. better known as Dinosaur’s drummer Murph. "I was ready to put them in a headlock and bang their heads together. It was ridiculous."
The dysfunction at Dinosaur’s core was legendary, their friction productive. Hardcore kids and Oi! obsessives, they cannibalised the carcass of classic rock and, like contemporaries Meat Puppets, Husker Du and Butthole Surfers, drew something fresh and strange from the melee. Their intemperate music saw melodic pastorals torn apart by blasts of noise, flashes of hormonal frenzy, the product of weeks the mismatched personalities spent cooped up on tour in a claustrophobic ’76 Dodge van.
Their differences ran deep. Mascis was one of the few punks in Amherst, Massachusetts, a liberal college town. The schools were progressive, they wouldn’t punish students, making them discuss their anti-social behavior in counselling sessions instead, a memory at which the notoriously withdrawn guitarist shudders.
"I picked up a copy of Sounds magazine’s Punk’s Not Dead special at a local record store, and ordered in most of the magazine’s Top 100 Punk Singles Of All Time. I love them all, GBH, Discharge, The Exploited,Blitz,…I even liked Skrewdriver. I didn’t know the politics involved, so I could just enjoy it devoid of any moral judgement. I’m sure a lot of the musicians are dicks."
He shaved off most of his hair and cut the rest to uneven lengths, a style he called "the chemotherapy". Later he’d mimic Nick Cave’s Birthday Party-era hair: "…The’Finger in the power-socket look!" laughs Dinosaur’s first manager/roadie Jon Tepler. "He’d achieve that by frying egg-whites into his hair with straightening tongs."
While at the record store, Mascis met 14-year old Dee Dee Ramone lookalike Scott Helland flipping through the import punk racks, and posting a ‘Drummer Wanted’ ad on the wall, for local hardcore band Deep Wound. A week later, Mascis’s dad drove J to guitarist Lou Barlow’s house in Westfield, 45 minutes south-west of Amherst, for the audition. Mascis remembers that they had similar music tastes and, "Since Lou didn’t talk at the time, he was easy to get on with."
Mascis hailed from rarefied Amherst, Barlow from resolutely blue-collar Westfield, a dying factory town. These class differences would create and rule Dinosaur’s dynamic.
"The kids from Amherst were snots," says Barlow. "I wasn’t at all jaded, I was spastic and excited, saying goofy stuff, reading fanzines. J was adept at making me feel like a fucking dweeb, cutting me dead with a one-liner."
"He was the classic nerd, the kind who would get beat up by jocks," replies Mascis. "I was an angry young man. If people were looking to be abused, I’d abuse them. Lou was a real victim."
Barlow was besotted with hardcore, Minor Threat and Black Flag and their like. "All the songs were 30 seconds long, played as fast as humanly possible, the 7-inchers would come with detailed lyric sheets…" he sighs. "It matched my energy level, my anger level." Helland, Barlow and Mascis (on drums, for now) were joined by singer Charlie Nakajima,and the quartet played shows and released an EP. Video Prick, in the summer of 1983. Their thrashing, super-fast punk, won notices in the fanzines, but they split the following year.
"Hardcore seemed like it was over," shrugs Mascis, who had been writing songs of his own in the downtime from Deep Wound, songs that drew upon different pasions: country music, Black Sabbath, the murkier regions of post-punk, and his beloved Birthday party.
J was coasting in College, taking courses that fed his interest in Adolf Hitler and World War II; one of his lectuers was a former SS officer. He set about forming Dinosaur, recruiting Nakajima on vocals. To achieve the sound he could hear in his head, Mascis would play lead guitar, asking Barlow to move over to the bass. Mascis’s vacated drumstool would be taken by Murph, an old friend of J’s from high school who had played in the "pseudo-Oi!" band All White Jury. "I was a hippy punk, I loved hardcore but I listed to lots of Hendrix too; they weren’t down with that at all," says Murph. " I smoked lots of weed, they were straight edge. I made them feel uncomfortable, because I’d grown up in NYC going to rock concerts and stealing my parent’s car for joyrides, doing stuff they could’t fathom. We had a mutural fascination: they couldn’t believe I was so wild, I couldn’t believe they never said anything."
The band played one show with Nakajima on vocals before J quit. Over the next couple of days, he called Murpph and Barlow to play together again. "I said, You’re reforming the band, but he denied it," laughed Murph. "But he was reforming the band, only without Charlie. Charlie was pretty ‘anarchist’, he and J clashed a lot."
J elected to split vocal duties between him and Lou. "He played me these songs, and the change in direction was obvious," says Barlow. "These were rock songs, not blinding power-chord anthems. There was a country song. J was unafraid to reference classic-rock stuff that wasn’t cool.’ And he had cultivated an idiosyncratic voice, like all the great rock singers:Dylan, Lou Reed, Neil Young."
Almost immediately, the conflicts that would dominate Dinosaur for the next three albums began to surface. "Rock bands are generally miserable people," laughs Lou now. "I knew my rock n roll history. You didn’t have to get along, that was a ‘hippy’ ideal. Rock n rolls about a bunch of ambivalent people getting together, hating each other and playing loud, nasty, hateful music." Dinosaur seemed to thrive on the tension. They would plays shows around Amherst, but were soon banned from most venues on account of their sheer, brutal volume. "I was breaking cymbals, I was hitting my drums so hard" remembers Murph. "We were into the concept of noise pollution."
part 2 another day…
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