* * *
Right here might be the best place to think about the name of the band. Strangely enough, no-one quite seems to know where the name Dinosaur sprang up from: J makes vague reference to the “cheesy” dinosaur tracks signposted in the Amherst area, familiar from his childhood. Murph vaguely remembers the dinosaur-related title of a children’s book they saw in the basement of J’s parents’ house. Lou says dunno, ask J.
Though nobody will corroborate it (“err … sure,” ponders Lou) my idea is that Dinosaur is a name that, as much as it evokes Marc Bolan, T-Rex, and a whole pageant of seventies’ platform-shoes rock, directly evokes the force of the band’s sound. In much the same way, in fact, as hardcore names – Napalm Death, Terrorizer – often mimicked their musical calling cards. Grunge bands, too: Mudhoney infamously called their first album Superfuzz Bigmuff, after, before you ask, their effects pedals, and J, when he names songs things like “Sludgefeast” and “Tarpit,” isn’t exactly a stranger to this idea either, a strategy that links sounds to primordial emotional life.
In that sense, the name Dinosaur Jr. gets the whole thing even better. As everyone knows, the “Jr.” was appended only in 1987, in the event of a cease-and-desist by an older group of a similar name. Its addition is wryly deferent, if not exactly sincere – the rock family tree, next branch down. But it also neatly encapsulates the instantaneous shuttle of their sound between threatening and childish. Or, if you want the metaphor extending further: between terrifying, like being chased by a furious screaming raptor, and then vulnerable, like being nuzzled by a tone-deaf diplodocus.
* * *
So in influence and sound and instruments and voices: Dinosaur, a raw rock miscellany. And this is nowhere more obvious than on their self-titled debut record, released in July 1985, something that in many ways wasn’t ready to come into existence at all.
It did anyway. J, apparently in the absence of any better idea, had gone along with the suggestion of Gerard Cosloy, a punk friend of his from the Deep Wound days, and the founder of the local Homestead label, that they make an album. Recorded “at Chris Dixon’s house,” to quote the back cover directly, production values were low, the whole thing costing not much more than one of Slimy Bob’s guitars to make.
Inconsistency was high, too, except in the lyrics, which (tellingly) snap back again and again to certain themes. Amherst ennui is one of them: “Ten minutes in this town/And I’m ready to quit” sings J on Cats In A Bowl, the chorus giving away this title as a goofy image of people who “can’t climb out of this hole.” Identity stagnation is another: “Even if I leave,” he adds later in the same song, “Someone just like me/Will pop out of the ground”. Emotional ineptitude is a third, as in the neat second verse of Repulsion (the title is enough):
The silence taps my elbow
It’s good, least that’s what you said
I could run but I stand and greet it
The boredom won’t starve
As long as I feed it
And The Leper (another representative title) opens with a line that provides a decent summary of the whole thing: “Embarrassed to be alive.” And, it sounds like, fairly embarrassed to be on record.
It’s not all a completely self-immersed wail, though. The record also has its fair share of humor, a dry quirkiness that makes the overall experience odd, and close to insincere. Severed Lips, in spite of its title, is more slowdance than slamdance – Jon Fetler recalls two punk kids moving slowly round the floor to it “as if on date-night in 1956” – and yet its romantic pretensions are instantly deflated by one of its inner lines: “I never knew a rubber doll/Could be so hard to please.” Mountain Man, meanwhile, makes fun, in a reverent way, of the big-lamp-chops and jutting-jaws metal thrash of Motörhead.
As these examples begin to suggest, the musical styles of the Dinosaur record are as diverse as the lyrics are homogenous. At times it feels like a guided tour through the Mascis record collection, the archaeological piecework on full display. In Does It Float, J’s fingers eventually slip right off the rails of his clanking riff and – surprise – the song turns into eyeball-popping hardcore, about thirty times as fast as anything else on the record. Cats In A Bowl is jangly guitar noodles thrown out at the rate that a banjo player would be proud of; Quest a kind of cowboy epic that Neil Young could tap his heel to. Repulsion, by far the record’s most accomplished song and its first single (also released in July 1985), is a perfect ears-friendly strum.
It’s the B-side of that single, though, that is the most arresting four minutes of all. Bulbs of Passion was added as the last track to later pressings of Dinosaur; nowadays it is found as the opening track of the CD reissue. “Yeah, I asked for that,” J recalls, “because [that song] gave our new direction – it felt like we were our own sound.”
In terms of the intensity and attack of the playing on Bulbs of Passion, I can see what he means. In every other sense, though, it seems far more experimental than anything before, or since. Experimental, that is, to the point of brilliantly incomprehensible, mad as disease. Lou’s basslines head straight for the stomach, making powerful use of the boing-rattle of the Grabber, which pokes through like a hernia; J’s febrile solos, heavily pressurized, sound as from inside the vein itself; Murph’s drums manage to govern, but only just, the erratic pulse of mismatched sections. Early on, an approximation of Sonic Youth-esque soft clock-chiming suddenly spills out loud; later, that most rare of Dinosaur commodities, vocal harmony, finishes off a line with fumbling charm.
Lyrically, too, it’s a big mash-up, vague economics (“… so they sabotage their own livelihoods …”), interchanging with a weird kind of bodily paleontology (“… teeth scrape on the last remaining fossil …”), and personal angst (“I sit queasy, jitter, uneasy …”) giving way to paranoid analysis (“… questioning my treatment of an ego underfed …”). All crammed in underneath, of course, the master sex metaphor of the title, shouted by J and Lou at both ends of the song.
There’s only one word for it, as for the record in general. As for the band’s dress sense, instruments, and live show – as, in fact, for their whole existence up to this point, hairstyles included.
Bizarre.
Archaeological Hard Rock
1. Paraphrased from Jess Harvell’s Pitchfork review of the early Dinosaur records, cited in the general source section.
2. Kim Gordon quoted from the interviews found as a special feature on the DVD Dinosaur Jr.: Live in the Middle East, Image Entertainment (2007).
3. Tad quoted from the DVD documentary Tad: Busted Circuits and Ringing Ears, MVD Visual (2008).
4. The quotations in this paragraph, originally from David Buckley’s R.E.M.|Fiction: An Alternative Biography (Virgin, 2002), are taken from Bannister, p. 78–9.
5. In Simon Reynolds’s interview in Melody Maker, December 12, 1987, found at http://archivedmusicpress.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/simon-reynolds-interviews-dinosaur-jr-12th-december-1987.jpg, accessed January 31, 2011.
Chapter Three – You’re Living All Over Me
It’s a curious expression, the title of Dinosaur’s second record. For one thing, it’s an unusually long string of words for J, who has elsewhere preferred something more pithy for his records: the most recent are named Farm and Beyond, and before that came Hand It Over, Where You Been, Without A Sound, and others. It’s tempting to suggest that, for once in his life, J had been somehow forced by circumstances to say more, rather than less, when he titled the record for its release in July 1987. He comments that it’s a title about “living in a small town, about not being able to express yourself.” Jon Fetler adds that he thinks it has the resonance of J’s “oppressive home life,” where, stuck in close quarters with older siblings, he “felt acutely the challenges of living.”
It makes immediate sense, then, that the title’s first association is the more familiar phrase “you’re walking all over me,” a feeling of subordination, here raised to a higher power, a life forcibly lived as a doormat
for others’ feet. Also, to my ear at least, the intensifier “all” adds a certain fluidity (imagine “you’re dripping/spitting all over me”) and so flows straight into the liquid sex fantasies of the passive-aggressive teen. “The world drips down like gravy/The thoughts of love so hazy,” as J had sung in the best line from the first record, on Repulsion; “what a mess,” as he croaks pre-second-solo in Freak Scene, his most famous song of all. And much like sludge or tar or gravy, sounds and songs, J’s other guiding interests, can drip down too.
Whatever it is, whether something or everything, it weighs heavy. You’re Living All Over Me: the world conceived as a sea of invertebrates, with J at the bottom.
* * *
Maura Jasper’s cover art is well aware of all this. For the first record, J hovering in the background, she’d done a kooky black and white nature drawing, an explorer guy standing in a field of what look like giant poppies, in front of mountains and fir trees. The face of their mutual friend Arty is the blazing sun, top right-hand corner. It’s cool, and quite stylish; you could hang it on your wall.
For this second record, the process was different. Maura, listening to the studio tapes, and knowing the intended title, had drawn something straight off in reaction. “I was a depressed kid,” she says, “and parts of the record made me sad … I did some figurative drawings on the subject of someone who is struggling with emotional things, and can’t escape from them.”
It’s not difficult to see what she means. On top of a yellow-green background, gruesome as infection, two identical head-and-torso figures wrestle with one another. They’re drawn in thick charcoal lines, but are otherwise white: sexless, and sort of skeletal, bald. One, as if in defeat, looks down at the floor, eyes closed; the other, thrown backward over the other’s back, has its face turned toward the sky, mouth wide open, screaming. The title of the record virtually conjures itself, then, particularly as a single arc connects their two heads, as though they were conjoined, literally living on top of one another. But by the same token, and taking Maura’s comment at face value, it could equally be a frozen stop-frame of a single individual, two phases of one person’s shifting despair.
The whole thing, as she freely admits, is most reminiscent of Kim Gordon’s classic design for the cover of Sonic Youth’s second studio album, Confusion is Sex (1983), familiar from posters, T-shirts, and record collections of the time, Maura’s included. There, a simple black-and-white line drawing, apparently of Thurston Moore, shows someone looking down toward the floor in a similar pose to the lower figure on Maura’s cover – while something, not sure what, weighs down on the back of his head and shoulders. But if the band name on Sonic Youth’s record is scrawled in fitting characters, all rough graffiti capitals, then Dinosaur’s isn’t anything like so appropriate. In keeping with the band’s drag toward the stylistically various, “Dinosaur” is proclaimed as if proudly, in an oversized seriffed font that Maura refers to as having a “cool psychedelia” about it, a “forgotten sixties look.” Chosen in conjunction with J for the first record, it is here spelt out in his favorite color, purple, curiously regal against the background’s disease-green.
* * *
It’s with the subject of consistency, though, not its opposite, that we can best start talking about this second record’s contents. Consistent because, as Maura’s cover messily grasps, there is an ingrained state of bewilderment about the whole thing – as if a kind of impasse has been reached, particularly in the overall fug blown in by lyrics and vocals; had it not already been taken, Confusion is Sex, in fact, wouldn’t have been a half-bad title. It’s not something that J says he has given much thought to, but that doesn’t mean it’s not there to hear, a flatlined hangover tone that misplaces the inconsistency and manic up-down of the debut.
It’s an atmosphere, I think, that stems from several sources. One, undoubtedly, is the genesis of these songs, the college rooms and bedrooms of moody, migrainous teenagers. Another is the sheer accumulation of practice hours during those two inter-record years; flatlining might, after all, be the same thing as streamlining, and this latter was one distinct outcome of the band’s consistent hard work, learning to play these songs together in many basement hours.
A third is, simply, an affecting sense of reputation and confidence. Toward the end of 1985, driver’s licenses in hand, the band was able to play shows further afield. A certain buzz began to build up around them, particularly in the big cities: losers still, perhaps, but cool, noisy ones, fresh and ill-fitting in scenes that thrived on exactly those kinds of contradictions. It was in New York, most iconically of all, that Sonic Youth began to attend their shows, apparently drawn in to look closer at the weird mixture of languidness cut with sheer amplified power. Kim Gordon fondly remembers seeing Dinosaur at Folk City, at a show where J, heavily medicated for his migraines, played his leads lying flat on the floor.1 Thurston Moore, encouraged to hear the band by J’s old Amherst friend Gerard Cosloy, recalls a “blur of amp overload … and a sense that all of their personal circuits were shorting out.” He labels it, in fact, “one of the great noise debuts of the decade.”2
By the summer of 1986, J had the keys to Kim and Thurston’s place in New York, and a short college-town tour got under way later that year, Dinosaur opening for Sonic Youth. With this instant benediction and legitimation, from one of the most revered bands on the scene, it’s not difficult to see how what before might have been rough difference, inconsistency, and accident got smoothed over into positive things: reputation, identity, all the warm exudation of hallowed auratic presence. “I knew right then that this was something that was going to be legendary,” says Moore, and it is this kind of statement, I think, that inflected the experience of the second record – as much for those playing as for those listening.3
* * *
It was all finally laid down on tape in the spring and summer of 1987. At first, as with the debut, the band stayed local. They drove out to nearby Holyoke, home of volleyball, to record at one of the few studios in the area, with Dave Pine, who was running his sixteen-track operation out of the basement of his parents’ house. Pine depicts himself as something of a renaissance man of the Western Mass scene, recording all-comers, regardless of their fit with his own personal inclination toward the heavier end of prog rock – “he was into Rush,” says Lou, a tiny hint of sarcasm in his voice. Still, Dinosaur was something that Pine could not understand. “They were the loudest band that ever recorded there,” he recalls, “and all the pictures on the walls upstairs were crooked when they were done.”
His relationship with J, who he describes simply as “a weird dude,” stayed friendly enough until it came to mixing the tracks. “He pushed up the feeder as loud as it would go on the guitar,” recalls Pine, “and kept asking ‘doesn’t this thing go any louder?’” Meanwhile, “the other one was all about driving his bass rig to the max, turning it up so loud it was quivering, and the screws were falling out.” Pine draws what seems like an honest conclusion about the Dinosaur sound, echoing plenty of bartenders and club-owners from the local area: “Back then I hated it. I didn’t know what to do with it.” The exasperated sentiment is clear.
So, with the record’s second half complete, J and the others looked around for somewhere else to finish up. Quickly, they hit on New York’s Fun City and its founder, Wharton Tiers. Tiers is not someone, I gather, to be easily fazed by loud noises – he describes his “specialty,” in fact, as being “surprising sounds, recorded at fuller levels and louder volumes, using less than state-of-the-art devices.” Just about Dinosaur’s dream engineer, then; one who, even better, had already worked with Sonic Youth in that same studio on Confusion is Sex and Kill Yr Idols. “In New York, everything took on a much more serious, important tone,” remarks Murph.
And with these days in the studio, back again to the subject of consistency. Because, time being money, it was all done in only a few sessions, a blaze of pressure-cooker intensity. Because Tiers, the master of oppressive
fogs of noise, mixed the whole thing. But mainly because, here as never before, J’s stubborn, uptight streak came powerfully to the surface; for the band as for the engineer, his controlling hand rarely loosened its grip.
Pine and Tiers both recall the sessions as being very much “J’s show,” the arena of someone who clearly knew “the overall sound that he was looking for” (Tiers’s words). Murph, sat precariously behind J’s first instrument, seems to have suffered the worst of it: everywhere described as the easy-going shock absorber at the heart of the band (“a beer in his hand and a smile on his face” says Maura Jasper), even he began to get riled at J’s anxiety. “J was very stressed out, and so particular – like a bandleader, so stringent and unforgiving,” he recalls. In fact, in rehearsals before the sessions, J had set up a second drumkit next to Murph’s, so that he could show him exactly the beats and fills he wanted. “Back then, J was a better drummer,” he says, “but he wasn’t very diplomatic, and I took things very personally.”
So for all that reputation, sound, and control had built this record smooth, it can’t be denied that there were tiny cracks in the surface, too; the Murph–J dynamic is one obvious example. All this can easily be overemphasized, and we’ll need to come back to it. For now, sufficient to say that the record finally appeared, the parochial Homestead ditched, on Greg Ginn’s SST label in July of 1987 – at that time still the home of the hippest post-hardcore bands, “independent” but with feelers into lucrative markets, including college radio. Here again, Sonic Youth helped out, handing a three-track Dinosaur demo tape (“Raisans, In A Jar … Tarpit,” says J, struggling to recall) to the label’s scouts. Legal challenges settled, the record was re-released a few months later with a lower-case “jr.” on the end of the band name. Purple font.
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