Our Band Could Be Your Life

by Michael Azerrad

  But Mascis was no better. “The whole close quarters thing really freaked him out, it really did,” says Barlow, “far more than he even knew.” Rightly or wrongly, Barlow felt Mascis’s anxiety might have had something to do with homophobia. “I thought so,” says Barlow. “I wrote quite a few songs about it.” (“J did have a penchant for just the most disgusting, ass-raping put-downs,” says Fetler. “That just peppered our banter.”)

  “At the time, I was twenty and basically of indeterminate sexual preference, and it was one of those weird times when people did a lot of hypothesizing about whether someone was gay or not,” says Barlow. “There was that going on with Murph a bit and then with me, of course, because I had never had a girlfriend or whatever and chose to put everything in my mouth.”

  The band’s suffocating tensions did fuel some great shows, even when hardly anybody showed up. “Some of these shows were just super because there’d be six kids that would be right up front,” says Fetler. “And then about three other couples talking in the back. That was it. But for the kids that were there, that record, You’re Living All Over Me, was such a pure thing for them.”

  After a show in Phoenix, Murph took the wheel for the overnight drive through the southwestern desert to L.A. while Mascis, Barlow, and Fetler slumbered in the back. Suddenly there was a huge bump as the van ran off the road. “We were all up at the same time in a flash, realizing that we almost died,” says Fetler. Terrified, they asked Murph what happened. “And Murph looks around,” says Fetler, “and says, ‘Well, I consciously decided to fall asleep.’ ” According to Fetler, Murph had been “experimenting with extrasensory driving techniques,” he explained. “I was trying to feel the road, man.” (Murph denies the whole thing.)

  When they finally arrived in L.A., they were welcomed by the enthusiastic SST staff. Fetler’s diary records that they were “greeted by a heavyset, longhaired, wild-eyed fellow who exclaimed, ‘Dinosaur! Way cool, dudes!’ ” You’re Living All Over Me was playing on the office stereo; the receptionist was even wearing a Dinosaur T-shirt, the first the band had ever seen. They all went over to Chuck Dukowski’s house and watched a Lydia Lunch film. It was a good morale booster after the ordeal of the past two weeks. But SST’s local clout was given the lie that night when they played a show in a strip mall in Orange County and drew not one paying customer.

  After San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle, they were on the home stretch of the tour when the van blew a gasket in Mountain Home, Idaho. It would take several days for replacement parts to arrive, so the band set up camp in a motel, just killing time, stewing in their own juices.

  “I remember one day in Kentucky Fried Chicken just ripping Lou apart for an hour or something,” says Mascis. “That was a big turning point. He was really devastated.” It’s not something Mascis is proud of today. “I feel bad about it,” he admits. “I was an asshole a lot of the time when I was younger.”

  After that incident Barlow began accumulating a mental file of the slights Mascis threw his way but never actually confronted his bandmate on them. “I just totally took this martyr role,” Barlow says. “ ‘OK, you don’t like me, well, I’ll just try to be as inconspicuous as possible.’ And I made sure that I didn’t put things in my mouth, and I made sure that I just played my parts.” Barlow says Murph and Mascis would barely deign to break down equipment after shows, so he began to do it. Then he says he started to do more than his fair share of driving as well. “I just totally involved myself in just being the martyr,” says Barlow. “I was totally passive-aggressive.”

  Murph’s own moment came one night when the four of them were in their motel room, watching TV. Barlow had been insisting on arranging their mattresses in a row on the floor; Murph wanted to stay as far away from his bandmates as possible. “I was getting really uptight about this, and I could tell those guys were all laughing at me,” says Murph. “They thought, ‘This is so funny, Murph is taking this so seriously.’ They didn’t realize I was just, like, freaking. Or they probably did realize it and thought it was funny anyway. That’s when I cracked.”

  Mascis tossed some offhand barb at Murph. “And Murph just yells at him, ‘You should be raped by a bald black man!’ ” says Barlow. “And J goes, ‘And that would be you, Murph?’ ” With wicked precision, the remark hit on both Murph’s sexual insecurities and the fact that his hairline was prematurely receding. “And Murph,” says Barlow, “just had a total breakdown.”

  Murph hurled a table, a suitcase, and a lamp across the room and began crying and saying, “I can’t take it, I just can’t take it!” “And it was such a dramatic burst of violence and energy that it caused everyone to just go, ‘Whoa…,’ ” says Fetler. Hours later Murph was still weeping and pacing around, smoking a cigarette to calm his nerves; Mascis was sound asleep in bed.

  Barlow had read enough of the rock & roll canon to know that some of the most powerful bands—the Who, the Kinks, the Rolling Stones—had tumultuous internal lives. Mascis was aware of the effect the tension had on the music, too. “That’s why a lot of people liked us, because we were a psychodrama onstage,” he says. “It’s like a circus kind of show, which might be fun to watch but not necessarily fun to be in the middle of.”

  At times it seemed as if the assault was not just from within. Soon after the initial pressings of You’re Living All Over Me were shipped, a band featuring former members of San Francisco acid casualty groups such as Big Brother and the Holding Company and Country Joe and the Fish laid claim to the name “the Dinosaurs.” Mascis renamed his band Dinosaur Jr, no comma or period.

  Barlow’s nonexistent romantic life was decisively jump-started by one of his own songs. “ ‘Poledo’ was probably my biggest attempt at meeting a girl through music, to totally express myself in a song,” Barlow says. “I believe in music in that way—if you want something to happen, you write a song about it.” It worked beyond Barlow’s wildest expectations.

  To Kathleen Billus, music director of Smith College’s radio station, “Poledo” “felt like the answer to my dreams,” she wrote in a later memoir, “like what I’d been wanting in a song my whole life, something I was aching for but wouldn’t be able to describe.” When Barlow did an interview at the Smith radio station in September ’87, she jumped at the chance to meet him. They hit it off and soon became a couple.

  But the romance had to get put on hold while Dinosaur Jr did a four-week European tour in October ’87. Whatever image Mascis had been cultivating, it came to fruition on that tour. The British press loved his lackadaisical manner, his tasteful mishmash of influences, his offhand wisdom. (Pushed by an English interviewer to name something he was scared of, Mascis was at a loss for words but eventually answered that he was scared of all the butter the British put on their food.)

  “Who do you listen to?” asked Melody Maker’s David Stubbs. “… Uh… everybody,” Mascis replied. “Now, this may not seem like much of an answer,” wrote Stubbs. “This is not Quote of the Year and wants for the delicious aphoristic quality which we so enjoy in an Oscar Wilde or a Nietzsche. But stark print cannot do justice to its catatonic deadweight, more eloquent than any Pete Burns rant, the sprawl of the drawl, the great mental cloud which attempts to conceive of the great swathes of rock history in which Dinosaur are soaked. The pause that precedes this answer is like the death of the word.”

  They were flattered that these Americans liked English bands such as the Jesus and Mary Chain and the Cure. The English press, whipped to a froth by the exotic brutishness of Blast First bands such as Sonic Youth, the Butthole Surfers, and Big Black, had found a new object for their love/hate relationship with American culture. Mascis was some sort of idiot savant worthy of equal parts reverence and condescension. To Americans, the band was readily recognizable as a typical bunch of apathetic Northeast ski bums; to the British, they were like the wildmen of Borneo.

  DINOSAUR JR IN CONCERT AT THE CENTRAL TAVERN IN SEATTLE, 1989.

  CHARLES PETERSON

&nb
sp; And after Dinosaur’s tour, a whole wave of English groups, dubbed “shoegazer bands,” sprang up in their wake, playing folk chords through phalanxes of effects pedals to make swirling, deafening music; they uniformly adopted a nonchalant demeanor and paid lip service to Neil Young and Dinosaur Jr.

  Meanwhile Barlow was retreating more and more. “I was afraid of stepping on anybody’s toes,” said Barlow. “I felt really bad about it and didn’t want to perpetuate the weirdness. I just wanted to play bass.” But Mascis has a different take. “Lou couldn’t really have a conversation,” he claims. “He could just say what was on his mind, but he couldn’t process things coming back. It was just really strange.”

  But very little was coming back to Barlow from Mascis anyway. “We never communicated, really,” says Mascis. “Didn’t really know how, I guess. Too young. We hadn’t learned that yet.”

  As Gerard Cosloy had predicted, You’re Living All Over Me was a big hit in the indie world. Throughout the country little pockets of fans had been slowly but surely spreading the word about Dinosaur. “It built up to a critical mass of people,” says Cosloy, “disaffected hardcore fans, indie rock fans who wanted something that wasn’t so fuckin’ bland, people who were into noisier and more experimental things who were beginning to open up to things that were a bit more melodic—this whole new consortium of bands, writers, DJs, musicians, freaks, whatever, all began to come together. Dinosaur was the band that they came together around.”

  But the more successful Dinosaur became, the more that success displaced their creativity. For better or worse, soundmen weren’t throwing bottles at them anymore. They rarely practiced and professed to have little interest in advancing their career. “We’re totally lazy,” Barlow admitted. They’d realized their longtime dream of being on SST but had set no bearings beyond that.

  “It’s different to function without a goal than with a goal,” says Mascis. “It was, like, ‘Well, we’re still around. Now what?’ ” The band never did regain that sense of purpose, although they did have a powerful incentive to keep going. “I knew I didn’t want to get a job,” Mascis says with a laugh. “That was always motivating me.”

  Success was the worst thing that could have happened to the band. “It seemed to kind of kill J’s motivation,” says Barlow. “Once the shows became packed, it just became another thing J had to do as opposed to what it was early on. He just made it clear that he really couldn’t be bothered and he’d rather just go back to sleep—if it was all really up to him, he wouldn’t be doing it.”

  So while Barlow was so idealistic about music that he wrote a song specifically to get himself a girlfriend, Mascis just wrote songs because that’s what he was supposed to do. “And that was why his songs were so fuckin’ amazing and why he had such an amazing grasp of the guitar,” says Barlow. “He wasn’t idealistic, he was just insanely pragmatic.

  “Once he knew that people demanded something in particular,” Barlow says, “he just sort of figured out a way he could live up to those demands but not really give too much of himself.”

  Mascis told Spin’s Erik Davis that he found the guitar to be a “wimpy instrument.” “You really don’t like guitar?” Davis asked.

  “No,” Mascis replied.

  “Why do you do it?”

  “Dunno.”

  It’s no wonder that the songs of Dinosaur’s third album, Bug, didn’t quite have the spark of You’re Living All Over Me. The songs didn’t come as easily to Mascis, and it didn’t help that they were in a hurry to capitalize on all the acclaim they’d received over the previous year or so. Mascis says he had been hoping that Barlow would take up the song-writing slack, but Barlow was in full retreat and deeply immersed in his homemade Sebadoh tapes, which Cosloy was now releasing on Homestead. Despite his prolific Sebadoh output, Barlow wrote no songs for Bug. “I realized that if I wasn’t going to be able to interact personally with the people in the band, there’s no way I’m going to be able to give them songs I really care about,” said Barlow. “If I had tried to interact with J and tried to write songs, the band would have broken up a lot sooner.

  “I was really afraid of him,” adds Barlow. “After a while my fear of him just exceeded everything else and I couldn’t even play him my songs anymore. It kind of devolved to that point.”

  “We were just in a bad state,” says Mascis. “The band was going down already.”

  Many of the songs on Bug were recorded not long after they were written. Barlow and Murph were only minimally involved in the sessions. Mascis told them exactly what to play, they’d make slight modifications, then record their parts and leave Mascis to finish the rest.

  The band tried on a lot of different ideas on the first album, as if they were seeing which ones fit the best; on the second album it all jelled. By Bug it was starting to become a formula. “It’s the album I’m least happy with of anything I’ve done,” says Mascis.

  But Mascis’s appraisal of the album is probably colored by the experience of making it—despite some filler, Bug is a powerful record. “Freak Scene,” the album’s single, was classic Dinosaur, probably because it so directly encapsulated the band’s roiling inner life. One passage alternates a guitar sound like a garbage disposal with bursts of glinting twang; there’s a completely winning melody delivered in Mascis’s trademark laconic style and not one but two memorable, molten guitar solos. On top of all that, the lyrics seem to be about Mascis and Barlow’s dysfunctional relationship: “The weirdness flows between us,” Mascis yowls, “anyone can tell to see us.” The song was a big college radio hit and seemed to be blasting out of every dorm room in the country that year.

  “Yeah We Know” finds the band in thunderingly good form—Murph’s pounding, musical drumming powers one of Mascis’s best songs to date. Perhaps the song draws some of its vehemence from the fact that, as Mascis now admits, it’s about the band itself—“Bottled up, stored away,” Mascis yowls, “Always ready to give way.” But the album reserves its most harrowing psychodrama for the closing “Don’t,” a dirge-metal noise orgy with Barlow screaming, “Why, why don’t you like me?” for five minutes straight. It was a bit ironic, to say the least, for Mascis to have Barlow sing such words. “That was kind of twisted,” Mascis admits. “ ‘All right Lou, sing this: “Why don’t you like me?” over and over again.’ That was kind of a demented thing.”

  Barlow sang the song with such violence that he began coughing up blood afterward.

  In October ’88 Dinosaur Jr did another European tour, once again with Fetler in tow as confidant and referee. In Holland they stayed with their European booking agent. Barlow had been annoying Murph for some reason now lost to the sands of time, but that was nothing unusual. “There were always little bitter bickerings going on,” says Fetler. “That was part of the chatter—‘blah-blah-blah fuck you blah-blah-blah.’ ” But tensions were apparently higher than anyone realized.

  That night, when Barlow went into Murph and Fetler’s room to get an extra blanket, Murph started growling ferociously in his sleep, then stood up—still sleeping—and started heading for Barlow. Mascis saw the whole thing. “I just remember Murph sleepwalking, getting up like some primitive animal, this caged animal, going at Lou like he was going to kill him,” says Mascis. “I was standing behind Lou watching Murph come at him in his boxer shorts. I was thinking, ‘Either Murph’s going to wake up or he’s going to kill Lou.’ And I was waiting to see what happened. And right when he got there, he woke up.”

  “It was very heavy,” wrote Fetler in his diary, “and kind of weird.”

  And yet the tour was hardly a complete nightmare. In Europe the halls were huge, the audiences enthusiastic, the accommodations top-notch. But the band’s internal strife was plain to see, especially as the tour culminated, in a string of U.K. dates with Rapeman. “They were near disintegration at that point, and the drag-ass depression hung over them like a bad smell,” recalls Rapeman’s Steve Albini. Of course, Rapeman didn’t help Dinosaur’
s morale by stink-bombing the band’s van, dressing rooms, hotel rooms, sound checks, and even meals.

  The British press had fastened itself even harder on to the idea that Dinosaur was a bunch of sleepy-headed apathetic types—Mascis’s vocals were “a sculpted yawn,” the band were “titans of torpor,” “Numbosaurus Wrecked,” “a cult of non-personality.” One writer compared Mascis to the “giant three-toed sloth.”

  One of the few British journalists who got it right was Sounds’ Roy Wilkinson, who actually made the journey to Amherst to see the place that had birthed Dinosaur. Said Murph, “We have to have been affected by where we came from. Around here it’s the easy life. There’s no harsh things—no poverty, no crime…. And people don’t struggle that hard to live.” Dinosaur, then, seemed to answer a very American question: What happens when you get everything you ever wanted?

  Dinosaur came to represent “slackers,” then a new term for the particularly aimless subset branded by the media as Generation X, the group of kids who had grown up in relatively comfortable, uncontroversial times, kids whose parents, as Kim Gordon once put it, “created a world they couldn’t afford to live in.” Slackers didn’t care about much except music, which they consumed with discernment and gusto. Mascis, with his listless demeanor and guitar heroics, became something of a slacker poster boy, even though he and the band rejected the mantle wholeheartedly. After all, he and Barlow had grown up on committed, hardworking bands like Black Flag, Minor Threat, and the Minutemen. “The whole thing at that time was to be like you didn’t give a shit about stuff,” says Barlow. “I was always a step behind that. I never really could get into it.”

  Barlow had moved in with his girlfriend Billus in her room in the Friedman dorm complex at U. Mass. in the spring of ’88. The relationship gave him confidence and self-esteem, enough to drop his subservient relationship to Mascis. “I just started speaking my mind and not giving a shit what he thought,” says Barlow. “I could just see it really bugging him, but I really enjoyed it.” And that’s when it really started to go downhill.