YOU’RE RELIVING ALL OVER ME: DINOSAUR JR. REUNITES

Chicago Reader, April 2005

 

It was about an hour after dusk in the early summer of 1991, and I was sitting on a log in the half-woods near my parents’ house with a guy I’d met in the front row at a Dinosaur Jr. show. I had the names of my favorite bands scrawled in pen on the toe caps of my Converse high-tops (“Fugazi” on the left, “Dinosaur” on the right), and I studied them intently, trying to keep my teenage awkwardness under control. Two dorks alone in the dark, we avoided the obvious question by engaging in deep conversation: Was Dinosaur Jr. better with or without Lou Barlow?

I’d hung out with this guy a few times, and every night was the same: as he rattled off Dinosaur Jr. minutiae, I’d nod attentively, hoping that’d charm him. He was one of two boys who would actually talk to me. I was 16, but I still had braces and could easily pass for 12. I also knew more about Dinosaur Jr. (and all his other favorite bands) than he did, but I kept that to myself. If I intimidated him, he wouldn’t want to sit on area logs with me anymore. I decided to act docile and tried not to show my teeth when I laughed.

Maybe it was particular to the time and place—Minneapolis in the early ‘90s—but from what my girlfriends told me, lots of boys thought going to the woods with a girl and regaling her with an hour and a half of Dinosaur Jr. trivia was a perfectly acceptable courtship ritual. If you liked him (or Dinosaur Jr.) enough, you could pretend it was a date. I withstood many hours of Dinologue during those awful teen years, and my memories of the band’s early albums—with their noisy, shimmery solos and shots of warm feedback—are inextricably tied to memories of some dude that never liked me back. Actually, there was a series of dudes—they only seem to blend into one because they all shared the same bell-shaped, grunge-bob hairstyle, unflagging devotion to J Mascis, and polite disinterest in me.

Dinosaur Jr.’s first three full-lengths, Dinosaur (Homestead, 1985), You’re Living All Over Me (SST, 1987), and Bug (SST, 1988), have only been out of print for five years or so and have never been too hard to find on eBay or used bins. Nonetheless, on March 22, Merge Records reissued all of them. They’re the only albums with the band’s original lineup: guitarist and frontman Mascis, one-named drummer Murph, and bassist Barlow, who quit (or was fired) in 1989. Barlow subsequently dedicated himself to the tape-hiss horn of plenty Sebadoh, which he’d started as a side project a couple years before, and Mascis and Murph soldiered on with a rotating cast of bassists. In 1990, Dinosaur signed with Sire, and the following year they issued the flawless Green Mind.

The band was rumored to have become a Mascis dictatorship—an impression confirmed in the reissues’ liner notes—and by the mid-’90s Murph was gone, too. Until Sire dropped Dinosaur in 1997, Mascis and a lineup of scabs rewarded a devoted fan base with diminishing returns. Then Mascis became The Fog, a studio project that only turned into a proper band to tour. He receded into the distance, dwindling to a speck on the horizon—if you’d been able to make him out, you’d still have seen his long hair, his guitar, and his flannel, but he’d lost his spot on the main stage to other dudes, dudes with turntables, who were to become our newest heroes.

In the late ‘80s, though, Dinosaur were magnets for the devotion of teenage weirdos, combining the huge, thralling Marshall-stack overdrive that made Neil Young famous with the jacked-up amphetamine-pulse of hardcore. Like their SST labelmates Hüsker Dü, they connected punk’s mosh-pit machismo to its brooding, emotional side. Often the hiccuping pummel of the rhythm section would pause, as though Murph and Barlow were trying to fake us out, and then Mascis’ guitar would rumble to life, wonderfully too loud, every note gloriously destroyed by the city of effects pedals at his feet. Unlike early punk rockers, Dinosaur weren’t lashing out at the bloated, coked-up corpse of the ‘70s. They were just trying, as Mike Watt suggests in the new liner notes to You’re Living All Over Me, to be an East Coast version of acid-damaged country punks the Meat Puppets. Save for Mascis’ drawling whine, there isn’t much country in Dinosaur’s music, but it’s plenty damaged.

Dinosaur structured their tunes like miniature, wank-free, classic-rock epics. “No Bones,” the second cut on Bug, begins as an instrumental dirge with the bass playing distorted chords against a skipping, waltzy beat, segues into a verse where Mascis sounds like the loneliest, most congested kid in all of Massachusetts, and from there jumps to a chorus overlaid with a track of strummy acoustic guitar. On the strength of songs like this, Mascis became not just a fanboy icon but an icon’s icon—Sonic Youth’s “Teenage Riot,” from the 1988 album Daydream Nation, is reputedly about his dominion over the guitar and the kids.

In their lyrics, Dinosaur don’t even toy with the nihilistic sloganeering of many of their progenitors and peers. Mascis’ singing is endearingly amateurish, his voice gentle, his diction thick, his lyrics vague. He never adopts an obvious pose or persona, but his words don’t reveal much about who he is; maybe he’s being honest, but he’s not being particularly forthcoming. In short lines capped with simple rhymes, he often sketches a blurry metaphor about what stands between him and her—listening to this stuff is like reading a teenager’s frustrated, lovelorn poetry, written for an audience of one. Even when Mascis is singing his most somnambulant monotone, his voice cracks whenever he hits the word “girl.” Barlow barely ever takes the mic, but his one star turn on Bug is a doozy. On “Don’t,” he howls with the consuming rage of 10,000 virginal high school seniors: “Why? / Why don’t you like me?” Those are the only lyrics, and he repeats them 44 times—it’s emo distilled to its essence.

In Dinosaur’s songs, the topic is often romance, but it’s hard to tell whether the girl said yes or no or if she never got asked a question in the first place. That fumbling dorkiness is a big part of the charm. It’s easy to imagine that the band spent puberty the same way a lot of their fans probably did: perched on the edge of their bed playing along with metal records on a shitty Ibanez, growing out their hair, smoking weed, and getting ignored by their crush. Dinosaur have bastardized everything from folky pop to feral thrash to turgid classic rock, imbuing it with qualities sacred to the indie-rock fanboy: a nerd’s aesthetic, virtuosity, and emotionally fraught lyrics. Their albums nodded to the most righteous parts of your record collection, and the songs were open-ended enough that they could easily be about you and your ennui. In the late ‘80s, Dinosaur helped create a template that Nirvana would take worldwide when “Teen Spirit” went nuclear a few years later.

Considering how much indie rock has changed since 1986, do these three Dinosaur reissues belong anywhere now? Bug is a great record but feels irrelevant in the harsh light of the current post-post-post-punk world, with its skinny ties and drum machines and leg warmers and hedonism. The twenty-year-old snapshots included in the reissues’ beefed-up liner notes reveal three greasy-looking dudes who wouldn’t have made it past the door at a loft party in Brooklyn in 2005—they’ve got teenage trauma in their eyes and look like they’ve probably never seen a tit in real life.

These three lost-looking dorkboys made totally monstrous records, though: sprawling, adolescent, and sharp. Dinosaur’s early albums were casually elaborate and masterfully sloppy. Unfortunately, the timing of the band’s long-rumored reunion—for their first gig together since 1989, Mascis, Murph and Barlow are playing the Late Late Show on CBS on April 15 (followed by European and U.S. tours) makes the reissues seem opportunistic. Given the epic bad blood between Mascis and Barlow, their reconciliation seems too convenient to look like anything but a cash-in. Why couldn’t they stick to pursuing their increasingly marginal solo careers, leaving us to savor our memories of the great shit they did together back in the day?

At least one beautiful thing might come of this. If Dinosaur’s midlife crisis reunion repels enough of the kids who might’ve fallen in love with these reissues, it could save a generation of teen punk girls from hours of distortion-pedal discourse on awkward dates in the woods.