Lou Barlow and his family moved from a moribund auto industry town in Michigan to blue-collar Westfield, Massachusetts, when he was twelve. “It’s more of a metal kind of town,” Mascis says of Westfield. “It’s like Wayne’s World. I can see Lou getting beat up in high school a lot.” The introverted Barlow found it difficult to make a whole new set of friends. “I retreated into my room and that was it,” he says. “I never came out.” Barlow caught the punk rock bug after hearing the Dead Kennedys on one of the many college radio stations in the area. After that, “I just listened to the radio all the time,” Barlow says. “My grades plummeted—well, they were down there anyway—and I didn’t have any friends.”
Soon after picking up the guitar, Barlow met fellow punk fan Scott Helland at Westfield High; they jammed in Barlow’s attic accompanied by a friend on pots and pans. Soon they put up an ad at Northampton’s redoubtable Main Street Records: “Drummer wanted to play really fast. Influences: Black Flag, Minor Threat.”
J Mascis answered the ad and his dad drove him down to Westfield in the family station wagon for an audition. Barlow was awed the moment Mascis walked in the door. “He had this crazy haircut,” says Barlow. “He’d cut pieces of hair out of his head—there were bald spots in his hair. He had dandruff and he had sleepy stuff in his eyes. Everything ‘sucked,’ which was, like, amazing. I was like, ‘Oh my god, he’s too cool!’ ”
And best of all, “he wailed,” Barlow recalls. Mascis convinced them also to induct his Amherst chum Charlie Nakajima, who sported a Sid Vicious–style lock and chain around his neck. They called the quartet Deep Wound and Mascis’s mom soon knitted him a sweater with a red puddle on the chest with the band name on it. They began playing local hardcore shows at VFW halls and the like—someone would rent a PA, an established national band would headline, and a handful of local bands would pile onto the bill.
Deep Wound went on to play a few shows in Boston, opening for the F.U.’s, D.O.A., MDC, and S.S.D. (It is unknown if they ever played with a band whose name was not composed of initials.) Even though Deep Wound didn’t boast much besides sheer velocity, the band managed to get some national notice in a brief (if comically generic) mention in Maximumrocknroll—“Deep Wound are a hardcore band who ‘are mostly concerned with the struggles of youth in society.’ ”
Barlow and Mascis quickly became good friends. “It was almost romantic, I guess—it’s got that overtone,” says their mutual friend Jon Fetler, Deep Wound’s “manager.” “It was these two talented kids finding each other.” And yet they barely knew each other. “He didn’t say much so I didn’t really know anything about him particularly,” says Mascis. “But when he would talk, it would always be quotes from fanzines…. I would be like, ‘Didn’t I just read that in your room?’ ”
Mascis was hardly more communicative. He spoke very slowly, if at all; he always seemed to be in a daze. People consistently assumed he was a pothead, but he’d been straight edge since his midteens. “I think it’s just my general way of being,” says Mascis. “Everyone always thought I was stoned ever since I can remember. Didn’t talk that much. Perma-stoned.”
Class differences within the band sometimes threatened their laconic friendship. “[Mascis and Nakajima] were from Amherst, they went to school with Uma Thurman and all these professors’ kids,” says Barlow. When Barlow wrote a song called “Pressures,” “a very ‘things are all coming at me and nothing seems real’ kind of song,” says Barlow, they made him change the title to “Lou’s Anxiety Song” just to distance themselves from the unsophisticated sentiment.
A friend pitched in some money to record an EP for Boston’s short-lived Radio Beat label. “It was terrifying—total red light fever,” says Barlow. “We played our songs way too fast. There wasn’t really much of a cohesion in the sound, but we tried.” Steve Albini, in a Matter review, said the EP “alternates between really cool inventive hardball and generic thrashola garbage,” although he felt it was mostly the latter.
Mascis had picked up the guitar again and gradually taken over song-writing duties from Helland and Barlow on the grounds that their material wasn’t “hooky” enough. Although he was still the band’s drummer, he insisted on playing guitar on the EP’s “Video Prick,” festooning this minute and a half of standard hardcore thrash with flashy guitar licks of the “widdly-diddly” variety. Even amidst the EP’s shoddy production, it was evident that J Mascis was one hotshot guitar player.
Conflict fanzine publisher Gerard Cosloy had become a big Deep Wound fan while promoting various hardcore shows in Boston. The evening Cosloy moved into his dorm room at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, he went to a hardcore show in nearby Greenfield and bumped into Mascis, who was also just starting at U. Mass. The two kindred spirits became fast friends. “J was definitely a different sort of individual,” remembers Cosloy. “He was sort of quiet, but when he had something to say it was usually something very, very funny and usually something very biting. He was pretty hard on people. Very hard on people…. Especially for people in the punk rock scene, there was this whole sense that ‘Hey, we’re all part of the same thing, we should all be friends! Hey brother!’ J did not really give off that vibe.”
Mascis cut quite a figure on campus. He wore rings on all his fingers and hippie-style necklaces and moussed up his hair into an arty thicket like his hero, Nick Cave of the Birthday Party. “He had huge fuckin’ hair,” Cosloy recalls, “like stick-your-finger-in-the-socket-type hair.” Mascis made a particularly unusual impression during his visits to the school cafeteria. “J would walk over to the table carrying this mountainous plate of food and proceed to sit there and not even really eat it—he’d just begin to organize it in different patterns and shapes,” says Cosloy. “People would be sort of staring, like, ‘What the fuck?’ I mean, it was hard not to be impressed. You just sort of knew you were dealing with a visionary.”
Cosloy often mentioned Mascis in Conflict stories—“He was fascinated with J’s whole thing and he wrote about it really well,” says Barlow—and featured two Deep Wound tracks on his Western Mass.–centric Bands that Could Be God compilation. Cosloy began managing Deep Wound and started introducing Mascis to American indie bands like True West, the Neats, and the Dream Syndicate; Mascis in turn was introducing these bands to Barlow, but they also dug the hyperkinetic stomp of bands like Motörhead, Venom, and Metallica. “We loved speed metal,” said Barlow, “and we loved wimpy-jangly stuff.
“Once hardcore homogenized into this scene and there’s all these bands with the same kind of chunky sound,” says Barlow, “that’s when we all just sort of went, ‘Fuck it.’ ” Just as important, the music was simply not a good fit with such introspective kids. “Hardcore was not a very personal music to me,” Barlow admitted. “I loved hardcore, but I felt like I wasn’t powerful enough and didn’t have enough of an edge to really make it,” he added. “I felt like a wanna-be the whole time.”
Soon they were delving into the Replacements, Black Sabbath, and Neil Young. It was still mostly aggressive music, but it was slower. “We had sex,” Mascis explained. “You lose the thrashing drive after sex.” And since Deep Wound was nothing but “the thrashing drive,” they called it quits in the summer of ’84, just before Mascis’s sophomore year at the University of Massachusetts.
Cosloy had dropped out of U. Mass. after one semester to move to New York and run Homestead Records. The two kept in touch, and Cosloy promised that if Mascis were to make a record, he’d put it out, whatever it was. “Gerard really did give J something to shoot for,” says Barlow. “That was pretty cool, because that gave J free rein to just absolutely redefine what he wanted to do with music.”
Mascis had been quietly writing songs on his own and eventually played some for Barlow. “They were fucking brilliant,” says Barlow. “They were so far beyond. I was still into two-chord songs and basic stuff like ‘I’m so sad.’ While I was really into my own little tragedy, J was operating in this whole other panorama.
” Mascis had somehow incorporated all the music he’d ever listened to—the melodiousness of the Beach Boys, the gnarled stomp of Black Sabbath, the folky underpinnings of Creedence and Neil Young, the Cure’s catchy mope-pop. “Something just clicked with him and he did it,” says Barlow, still marveling. “It was a totally genius little idea.” Within a year Mascis had gone from writing standard-issue hardcore to composing music that had strong melodies, gorgeous chords, and dramatic dynamic shifts. “And he’s playing all this amazing guitar,” says Barlow. “I was like, ‘Bluhhhhhhh.’ ”
Barlow gladly accepted Mascis’s invitation to play bass and took a job at a nursing home so he could buy equipment. He had played guitar and sung in Deep Wound, but he was now content to take any role. “I really accepted my service to his songs,” he says. “Being a bass player can be a great role. I was very keenly aware of how powerful it was. I was very optimistic and very into it.”
Soon Mascis enlisted frontman Nakajima and Nakajima’s high school buddy Emmett Jefferson “Patrick” Murphy III, better known as Murph, on drums. Mascis had also been listening to George Jones, Hank Williams, and Dolly Parton, and the music had rubbed off on him. “Ear-bleeding country,” says Mascis. “That was the concept behind the band.”
Murph had played in a local hardcore band called All White Jury, but his roots were in prog rock and fusion bands like the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Rush, King Crimson, and especially Frank Zappa. He hailed from the well-to-do New York suburb of Greenwich, Connecticut; his father was a professor at U. Mass. Murph had some doubts about the group; a self-described “hippie punk,” he was pretty seriously into partying, something the straight edge Mascis and Barlow turned up their noses at. “They always thought I was a pot-smoking jerk,” says Murph. “They totally had that righteous, fascist attitude. I used to laugh at them and say, ‘Wow, you guys are really uptight to be so secular in your thinking.’ ” But Nakajima, also a stoner, convinced him that it was two against two and it would balance out. And all the while Barlow continued to worry that as the working-class Westfield kid, he was the odd man out. “Oh, they were fuckin’ snotty as hell,” says Barlow. “People from Amherst were assholes.” “It was really tense and weird,” says Murph. “But we couldn’t deny that we could play together.”
They called the new band Mogo, after a book in Mascis’s mother’s vast collection of romance novels, and played their first show on Amherst Common in the first week of September ’84. The stage was within earshot of the local police station, and out of nowhere Nakajima began spouting a punk anticop rant into the microphone. Mascis was appalled. He also didn’t like the fact that Nakajima regularly got stoned for practice, and the next day he broke up the band. Then a few days later he called Murph and Barlow and asked them to form a new band, a trio, without Nakajima. “I was kind of like too wimpy to kick him out, exactly,” Mascis admits. “Communicating with people has been a constant problem in the band.”
Mascis decided to do the singing himself, with Barlow taking the vocal on a few numbers. Barlow took the job very seriously; he would go out for a jog every day and sing the lyrics as he went, then come home and practice playing the songs on bass.
This time, they called the band Dinosaur. Dinosaurs were just beginning to enjoy one of their periodic revivals in the public imagination, and besides, the word fit their music to a T: “He was also playing tons of leads and we were listening to a lot of old Sixties and Seventies heavy rock,” says Barlow, “so it just seemed really appropriate.”
Locally the band wasn’t noted for much besides its ear-splitting volume. “The one sort of statement that J had was, ‘We’re going to be really fuckin’ loud,’ ” says Barlow. “And he was very serious about that. He was very serious about being excruciatingly loud.”
According to Mascis, the reason for the volume wasn’t power madness or better distortion. “After playing drums, guitar seemed so wimpy in comparison—I was trying to get more of the same feeling out of the guitar as playing drums,” Mascis explains. “That’s why I tried to have it get louder and quieter with pedals and stuff—it was hard to get it to have any dynamics like drumming. I was trying to get the air coming off the speakers to hit me in the back, to feel playing as much as hear it.”
As a result, it was hard to tell exactly how the songs really sounded, even to the people in the band. “I could never really hear anything [J] was playing because he played way too loud,” says Barlow. Barlow would have to wait until the band was in the studio to hear the true beauty of the songs’ construction.
The band’s audiences couldn’t fathom the intense volume either. “We ran into a lot of problems playing early on,” says Mascis, “because if you have no fans and you’re really loud, no one wants to deal with you. The clubs are like, ‘What are you doing? Get out!’ We got banned from every club in Northampton.” Dinosaur even had trouble when they later traveled to Boston to open for Homestead bands like Volcano Suns and Salem 66. One soundman actually threw beer bottles at the band—afterward, recalls Mascis, “we were just sitting there driving home, saying, ‘Why are we in a band again?’ We just were driven to do it for some reason, I don’t know why. Just because we had nothing better to do.”
Mascis took Cosloy up on his offer and the band recorded an album for about $500 with a guy who ran the PA for local hardcore shows and had an eight-track studio in his house in the woods outside of Northampton. Musically the album was all over the place, incorporating elements of the Cure, R.E.M., the Feelies, Scratch Acid, and Sonic Youth, not to mention SST bands like Hüsker Dü and the Meat Puppets and their hardcore-country fusion. “It was its own bizarre hybrid,” says Cosloy. “This was definitely music that hardcore punk was the foundation for, but there were more classic influences that turned it into something completely different. It wasn’t exactly pop, it wasn’t exactly punk rock—it was completely its own thing.”
But in a way, it was very punk rock, and not just in the way the rhythm section’s bludgeoning force was so clearly derived from hardcore. “The most punk rock thing about J’s stuff was how much he mixed all his influences,” says Barlow. “He was playing new wave guitar next to heavy metal guitar next to crazy Hendrix leads next to weird PiL single note things. He threw all that stuff together. That was probably the most punk rock thing about it.”
Mascis’s whiny low-key drawl, the polar opposite of hardcore’s boot-camp bark, provided an evocative contrast to Dinosaur’s roiling music. Mascis traces his quasi-southern twang back to John Fogerty and Mick Jagger, both of whom grew up even farther from Dixie than Mascis did. But while his vocal phrasing may have had roots in Stones songs like “Dead Flowers” and “Country Honk,” Mascis’s voice itself more closely resembled Neil Young’s, and the comparisons came early and often and indeed never stopped. “I definitely like the Stones more than Neil Young,” Mascis reveals. “That got annoying, being compared all the time.”
And the comparison probably didn’t help the band, either. Indie rock was becoming very circumscribed—if it didn’t hang on an imaginary laundry line between R.E.M. and the Replacements, few people wanted to hear about it. “People’s initial reaction to them,” says Cosloy, “was, ‘What the fuck is this?’ ”
Dinosaur’s self-titled debut didn’t make much of a splash commercially, selling but fifteen hundred copies in its first year. The larger rock publications and influential critics completely ignored it, although not for lack of trying on Cosloy’s part. He tirelessly championed the record, buttonholing press, radio, and whoever else would listen. But most people thought Dinosaur was a joke. “There were people who literally laughed at me,” Cosloy says. “I remember [Village Voice music editor] Doug Simmons, any time he tried to bring up the fact that Homestead was a flop label, that it would never get anywhere, he’d say, ‘What do you guys have? Dinosaur?’ That was the example of the loser band on the label.”
A small flock of fanzine writers and bands did recognize Dinosaur’s greatness. Boston’s Salem 66 gave the
band some opening slots, and Cosloy got Dinosaur some New York shows, which Barlow would drive the band to in his parents’ station wagon. On one such jaunt, Dinosaur opened for Big Black at a sparsely attended show at Maxwell’s. After sound check soundman Ira Kaplan (guitarist in a new band called Yo La Tengo) begged them to turn down. “You guys have really good songs,” said Kaplan, visibly frustrated. “You really should turn down, you can’t hear anything you’re doing!” It only made the band dig in their heels more.
The members of Sonic Youth caught the show but didn’t much care for what they saw. But a few months later they caught Dinosaur at Folk City. The first song began quietly enough, but then the band suddenly erupted in such an overwhelming blast of volume that Thurston Moore felt himself pinned to the back wall. The set ended a few songs later when, after playing an epic solo, Mascis fell back against his amp and slid to the floor in an exhausted heap. This time Sonic Youth walked up to Mascis afterward and declared themselves Dinosaur fans.
Barlow was a little bewildered by the attentions of one of his favorite bands. “It was so weird to have Thurston and Kim showing up at shows, going, ‘Oh, you guys are really great!’ ” says Barlow. “We’re like, ‘What? How could the coolest band in the world like us?’ ”
Mascis had no problem with it at all. That summer he took a bag full of canned tuna and Hi-C down to New York and house-sat Gordon and Moore’s apartment on Eldridge Street while they were on tour. Barlow and Murph stayed up in Massachusetts and practiced together. “That was the only time I could hear what Murph was playing, because J played so loud,” says Barlow. “So me and Murph just practiced together to lock on, which helped the band immeasurably. [J] never seemed to appreciate it, but that’s what we did. Me and Murph just locked on.”
Our Band Could Be Your Life Page 45
