FULL ORIGINAL LINE UP!
J. MASCIS, LOU BARLOW & MURPH

Sitting here now, in the belly of the 21st Century, more than a decade after Nirvana “broke,” it is possible to look back at certain signal events -- moments, shows and recordings that set the stage for the now-past future. It seems absolutely clear at this juncture that one of those events was the coming of Dinosaur (Jr). There are a variety of reasons for this, but the main one has to do with the fact that Dinosaur’s early shows and recordings represented the first (or, at least, first best) example of a new rock-qua-rock music arising from the germ of hardcore punk.

The basics of the band’s origins have been widely retold. In the midst of Western Massachusetts’ “Happy Valley,” there was a small group of hardcore bands. Most notable among them was Deep Wound, with drummer J Mascis and guitarist Lou Barlow. Playing the standard all-ages circuit (Grange Halls, Knights of Columbus lodges and the like), Deep Wound developed a following and released a 7” and a cassette that pair the massive thrust of the era’s velocity with a few strange noise twists. Deep Wound, however, would have remained a mere footnote for record collectors had they not dissolved in the summer of ’84, when they all seemed to realize that hardcore itself had become a music of dead formula.

Attending UMASS Amherst, Mascis began to focus on guitar playing over drums. Just as Sonny Sharrock drew his inspiration from Coltrane’s “sheets of sound” approach to the tenor saxophone, J’s musical model was a different instrument. Having spent years trying to create a wall of sound that equaled the one John Bonham had used to anchor Led Zeppelin, Mascis decided that the real way to conjure up that aura of overwhelming heft was to get an electric guitar (an instrument he had eschewed since fifth grade) and amp the hell up. So he did. And man, did it work!

With Barlow on bass and Mascis on guitar, jams started happening, based upon the buckets of new songs that J was writing. Drawing from a wildly messed-up mix of influences (from Venom to New Order to Neil Young), Dinosaur began to assemble their hair-raising first set of tunes (some of which they would continue playing for years) in the fall of ‘84. Realizing that life as a duo might be difficult, they quickly recruited a drummer named Murph (ex-Connecticut hardcore band, All White Jury). They even existed for a brief period as a quartet, with Charlie Nakajima (ex-Deep Wound) on vocals, but that was over in a flash. Which is where the story really begins.

Another student at UMASS in the fall of ’84, was Gerard Cosloy, editor of the incredible Conflict fanzine, and a staunch supporter of Deep Wound. When Gerard left school, to move to New York, and create a new label for the Dutch East distribution company (in the wake of Sam Berger’s stillborn Braineater imprint), he quickly assembled a roster that included the three most powerful American bands of the moment. There was Sonic Youth, there was Big Black, and there was Dinosaur. But where Sonic Youth were coming from an art rock direction, and Big Black were operating in the (admittedly attenuated) tradition of a certain wing of the British new wave, Dinosaur emerged from the depths of hardcore’s primeval sump. And that gave them a truly special and visceral excitement.

These roots are on display nowhere in their recorded oeuvre to the degree that they are on their debut album. And even this pales in comparison to early live shows, which were amongst the loudest, most ludicrous musical events that ever flattened a small club. Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore remembers some of their early road shows. “They played at Maxwell’s in Hoboken and they were as loud as anyone I’d ever heard, but in this totally undifferentiated way. It was just a wash of noise that made your teeth hurt. But in a good way. By the time they played at the Music for Dozens series at Folk City, their chaos had resolved itself a little. It was still unbelievably loud for such a small place, but you could tell there were all these amazing things going on inside it. There were these real songs that had all these different parts, like Queen or Sparks or something. It was totally impressive.

“I was talking to J after the show and he said his dad was a dentist up in Amherst, so I started thinking of his songs in terms of that. He had grown up around the idea that it takes 32 teeth to make a perfect smile, right? So I figured he thought that it would take 32 parts to make a perfect song. I would always try to count the different parts to his songs after that, but I was never able to absolutely prove my theory. And J wouldn’t tell me if I was right. But I think I was.”

Cosloy had once told J that he’d release anything that Mascis recorded, so Dinosaur went into a budget studio to cut a fast album. The results of that session are in yr hands now, and they gleam with all the spectral glamour of a fresh set of steel dentures. These songs create the blueprint (albeit a rough one) for the synchretic fusion of much of the post-core American underground. New wave guitar washes dissolve into banshee screams of Midwest hardcore noise, which erupt into intensely wrought guitar wankery, before settling down into loser-folk mumbling. It is an incredible and original pastiche of sounds, changing channels like a bored television viewer, each miniaturized segment perfect unto itself, and almost indescribable as a whole.

From,“Bug,” (an unlikely fusion of ferocious nada-raunch and bedroom hermeticism) through the Meat Puppets-like discontinuity of “Quest,” Dinosaur Jr offers gobs of more disparate style-moisture than anything this side of John Oswald’s Plunderphonics project. Some listeners seem to get hung up on the perceived disconnect between the expansive overload of J’s guitar work and the nearly claustrophobic involution of his vocal style. But heard from this temporal distance, with its dynamic qualities amplified by the myriad bands who have mined Dinosaur Jr as a sound source, this should no longer be a problem for anyone with clean ears. Anyone, that is to say, like you: lucky owner of this protean example of a new musical culture in the making.

Enjoy it, as you enjoy yr own teeth, and everything will be just ducky. Scout’s honor.

byron coley Deerfield ma 2004