Dinosaur Jr.'s You're Living All Over Me
You’re Living All Over Me
Nick Attfield
2011
The Continuum International Publishing Group
80 Maiden Lane, New York, NY 10038
The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX
www.continuumbooks.com
Copyright © 2011 by Nick Attfield
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers.
Library of Congress Catalogue-in-Publication Data
Attfield, Nicholas William James, 1981-
Dinosaur Jr.’s You’re living all over me / by Nick Attfield.
p. cm. – (33 1/3)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-441-19979-9
1. Dinosaur Jr. (Musical group) You’re living all over me.
2. Alternative rock music–United States–History and criticism.
3. Rock music–United States–1981-1990–History and criticism.
I. Title. II. Series.
ML421.D56A88 2011
782.42166092’2—dc22 2011008355
ISBN 978-1-441-19979-9
Digital conversion by katebroome.co.nz
For Kat “And did I ever tell you about the time—”
Contents
Acknowledgments
Forewords: By J Mascis, Lou Barlow, and Murph
Introduction: Punk Breaks
1. At the Junction
2. Archaeological Hard Rock
3. You’re Living All Over Me
4. Essays:
Rabbits
Teeth
Girls
Pressures
The Hang
Epilogue: Just Like Heaven
Sources
Acknowledgments
My thanks go, first, to David Barker and colleagues, for agreeing with me that this was a good idea, then to Amy Abrams, Brian Schwarz, and especially Maura Jasper, for their remarkable fixing abilities.
To J Mascis and his wife Luisa, for their time, repeated help, and kind hospitality.
To Lou Barlow, for talking at length, and with great enthusiasm, and for never shirking my follow-up questions.
To Murph, for the same, even though his car had broken down.
To Maura Jasper (again), Jon Fetler, Wharton Tiers, and Dave Pine, for sharing their personal insights and memories.
To Joe B. Henderson, for his fantastic photographs.
To all the readers of the draft – Emma Syrus, Ben Winters, Dan Futter, Olly King, Charles Thomas, Mike Sadd – for making it better.
And thanks to Kat Hyde, the book’s dedicatee, for everything.
Forewords
We weren’t happy people. College is way more miserable than high school, I don’t know why, I guess you just sit in a dorm room. But we knew the sound we wanted, and we came together with a common goal, which was to make good music. Wharton Tiers, in New York, was the first sympathetic engineer we’d had, in a city where people could relate to us and our music better. We made a three-track demo, which Sonic Youth took and used to help us get on SST.
So with this record, we achieved all our goals, we got our sound together, we got on SST. Everything came together. It was cool to go to Europe and play in clubs, mind-blowing that Europe would give you a hotel, it would feed you. This was unheard of here, it was kind of a luxury experience.
It was weird to achieve all our goals. We didn’t have any other ambitions. Where do you go from there?
That’s when it all just falls apart, I guess.
J Mascis
October 2010
I love that record. To me, it’s perfect. The band coalesced. Before, the songs were great but the playing was awkward and we weren’t quite synched. I had never understood what plans J had for me, how I fit in, what my role was. But now we were on the same wavelength. J was brilliant, as good as any of my then heroes (Sonic Youth, Hüsker Dü, Meat Puppets). Murph and I caught up with him and became a proper rhythm section. The sound of the band took off. J moved to New York and hung out with Kim and Thurston. Doors opened for us.
It’s a cool recording. I felt like I was a part of something genuinely great and fucked up. The production is murky and bizarre, the way J layered the guitars was new at the time. The songs are beautiful and twisted. Love songs that sounded as good to me as the more conceptual, heavy records I liked at the time: the Birthday Party’s Junkyard, Sonic Youth’s Confusion Is Sex and even Black Sabbath.
You’re Living All Over Me helped me achieve the only goals I had in life back then – to get a ukulele/tape collage (Poledo) on record and, somehow, meet a girl. It worked. I met my wife to be and began a life that carried me beyond Dinosaur Jr. I really love that record.
Lou Barlow
September 2010
It was hard work, and we hoped it would pay off. We knew we were laying down something good, and we pushed really hard. SST was the label we wanted.
The main thing about it was the intensity. Everyone was really stressed out, particularly J, and I felt like it was an exam in school, the ultimate test that I had to pass, or I’d get fifty lashes or something. It is our most explosive album, our ultimate burst of creativity, an expression of tension, excitement, angst, discovery, pure inspiration. A real pressure cooker. Completing the record itself was a real “wow” moment: Lou and I, hammering out the parts all day, and listening to the basic tracks in the car at night, couldn’t believe it.
It was like a tornado, a whirlwind of creative energy. Boom, you just go, something carries you away and sets you down somewhere completely different, like you were in the Wizard of Oz or something. Boom, then it’s done, the storm passes. Everyone wakes up: “What happened?”
Wow, look at this, this piece of work we made. Pretty cool.
Murph
August 2010
Introduction
Punk Breaks
“A dance
A dance … to decadence—”
Thurston Moore
Ever seen Dave Markey’s documentary film 1991: The Year Punk Broke?
A true classic. Disappointment that it has not yet made it to DVD, fear that it may never. For now, available only in fond memory, and on something you have to rewind.
Markey’s camera chases six American alternative rock bands as, in the dying summer of the title year, they maraud their way through the ancient cities of northwestern Europe. A kind of intoxicated grand tour, its two weeks are condensed for us into 100 minutes of film. Plenty of time to boast some good old-fashioned rock ’n’ roll excess, pushed toward particularly gruesome extremes.
In one memorable moment, Thurston Moore, one of the mop-topped Sonic Youth guitar heroes, and Markey’s tongue-in-cheek narrator, tells a French interviewer about a forthcoming show. “I’m immediately gonna, like, puke on the stage,” he says, “and then douse the puke with lighter fluid, and light it, and then kick it into the audience – this entire field of 100,000 people is going to go up in flames.” And before the last performance, he promises the shattering of the last taboo. “Tonight,” he states in his trademark rhyming sing-song, “I am going to defecate on stage, because I think that is the only way to express the nature of my soul according to rock ’n’ roll: that of waste, and that of especially good taste.”
He doesn’t, but the filmed performances that intersperse the offstage antics often degrade from tight riff and lyric into skittish noise-sludge, a kind of sonic diarrhea. Mid-performance, drumsticks and other objects violate guitar necks, one example only of a catalog of
traumas these instruments suffer at Sonic Youth’s hands, before, unstrung, they are put out of their misery, swung high and smashed to pieces on the stage. Kurt Cobain, meanwhile, lurches around like a drunk fighting an invisible enemy, all the while singing in a profoundly unsettling falsetto; in what will become famous scenes from the Reading Festival, he is spun around on Chris Novoselic’s shoulders before diving, brown leather and ripped denim, into the surging crowd, black Strat first. Later, decked in shorts, sweat socks, and what can only be described as some kind of white labcoat, he headbutts a floor amp before attempting to run over the top of the drum kit; the rabble roars its approval. Daddy’s little girl ain’t a girl no more, stress his lyrics over and over, Daddy’s little girl ain’t a girl no more.
Sonic Youth and Nirvana are Markey’s undisputed stars. Blonde-haired, blue-eyed, a curiously conventional beautiful people, they prance around in the sunlight of the film’s opening sequence like pagan children. Their cultural gaucheness in these European surroundings generates much of the film’s wry humor (“What the fuck is a bratwurst? What the fuck is a bockwurst? We can’t tell the difference between a bratwurst, a bockwurst, a currywurst, a liverwurst, a knockwurst – all the wursts”). And Moore’s mock sermonizing tone, made all the more bizarre by the French subtitles that run throughout, comes to them as fluid as mother tongue. “People of the universe,” he screams, from high above a street of perplexed mid-European onlookers, “tonight will be the night that the skies will open, and spray forth the divine hand with pointed finger – and say, ‘Everybody, you are not just a duck! You are human! Go forth and thrash!’”.
Vous n’êtes pas qu’un canard, vous êtes humain! Allez de l’avant et THRASH!!!
And at the margins of these magnificent scenes, there is someone else. We first catch sight of him in crowds: waiting, bored, in the lunch line in Essen, or slumped at a plastic dinner table. Shuffling past the front apron of the stage, or ducking out of shot in the VIP tent. No Aryan wonderkid at all, he wears his dark hair long and straggly, and sports an outsized yellow trucker hat and big reflecto shades, a shirt with a gas pump, a dinner plate, and a bed on the front. He chews constantly: a roadie, surely, or soundman. Someone employed to drive a big van, or lift something heavy, knees improperly bent.
At one point, Kim Gordon – another of the luminous Sonic Youths – interviews this peculiar individual. She is playful, gently cajoles and kid-brothers him. He sounds as bored as he looks, his voice a downturned drawl, releasing only a slow-cooked, stodgy spew of irony at a rate of about ten words a minute. He edges around the same motif as Thurston Moore (“… the other day, some guy lit himself on fire on the common, and no-one even cared …”) and yet this similarity serves only to emphasize the difference between the two. Moore, the grandmaster of improv nonsensical sing-song; this man, a tuneless mutterer, from whom all passion and effort seems to have been burned out, so sarcastic that he reaches beyond sarcasm into a place where, who knows, he might actually be serious.
If only this film weren’t populated by so weird a crew of suddenly invigorated oddities, it would be a surprise when he – J Mascis – and his band – Dinosaur Jr. – appear on the festival stage, in Göttingen or Groningen or wherever. His singing voice might be only slightly less glacial than his spoken one, and his interest in those listening still minimal, but everything else is different. The hat and glasses, for one thing, are now gone, the gas pump shirt replaced by a psychedelic paisley button-down number, oddly ensembled with pristine white trousers, such as one might wear to play cricket, or make cheese.
And the playing is anything but lazy. The song, after all, is fierce as punk, and demands some serious engagement. J, answering the call, and in a direct provocation to his sciatic nerve, folds over his guitar and works it hard, one knee bent, instep inwards, as if he were performing some intensive woodworking procedure. Stepping forward to activate a pedal, he responds to the different effects unleashed as if hit by a right hand, stumbles back, loses his footing. Then head down, he launches into about two minutes of vertiginous solo, leaving it unclear at times if he is playing the guitar, or if the guitar might be playing him – flesh fist hammering metal string, or wooden body yanking sympathetic sinew.
Wherever it comes from, all this virtuosity is caught tight within the framework set out by bass and drums. Where Sonic Youth deliberately smash open their songs, halting the rhythm section to let wild sound bleed out in an unstaunched ooze, J’s band remains completely rigid. The song stays afloat: everything, more or less, keeps to the instruction manual, J’s rig is left entirely intact, and he doesn’t headbutt anything. So if it is excess, then it is also control, good old-fashioned rock ’n’ roll in the most hidebound fashion; perhaps, weirdly, the most controlled few minutes in this crazy film. No bodily fluids are expressed whatsoever.
* * *
For all that J Mascis stands at the margins of Markey’s film, he is also, in a funny way, its most central character. He and his music are, after all, best prepared of any to accept the doublespeak of its title. Because if punk breaks, then punk breaks: if 1991 was the year punk broke – in the sense of broke through to mass ears – then it must also mark the moment at which it broke down, finally coughed up its revolutionary insides and accepted the white handkerchief of the mainstream. Not that J particularly approves of this transaction. It’s just that he and his music don’t much seem to care.
Whereas Thurston Moore’s sensibilities are obviously rattled. “1991 is the year that punk finally breaks through to the mass consciousness of global society,” he laments in the film’s morosest scene, sitting politely next to a croissant, breakfast napkins neatly folded. “Modern punk, as featured in Elle magazine … Mötley Crüe singing ‘Anarchy in the UK’ in a European arena in front of a hundred thousand screaming people … one of the most sickeningly candy-assed versions you’ll ever hear of it … and you read an interview with John Lydon, he just doesn’t give a fuck. To him it’s a larf.” And even when he talks the anarchic talk, it’s empty of commitment – a verbal stunt or riff of language only, the same as the unfulfilled promise of the onstage shit and puke. Surrounded by four gawky German teenagers, he answers his own demand for a manifesto: “I think we should destroy the bogus capitalist process that is destroying youth culture by mass marketing and commercial paranoia-behavior-control, and the first step to doing it is to destroy the record companies, do you not agree?” Well, no: Christian, Jens, and the others cannot agree, since, as he well knows, they clearly have not even the faintest idea of what he is talking about.
When punk breaks, Markey’s film seems to suggest, it is not Sonic Youth that will thrive. They are too much the children of the fifties, the adolescents of post-1968. It will have to be the next alt-rock generation, a decade Sonic Youth’s junior. This includes Nirvana, of course, but they will burn out shortly anyway. And, considerably less reckless, Dinosaur Jr. J’s focus seems to be turned inwards, not outwards; he seems just to do what he does, with no intent to make any particular statement to society. Completely aloof, a total “slacker,” he seems somehow less constrained: free to shrug his shoulders at anything anyone says to him, and, onstage, free to fuse punk abrasiveness with the indulgence of rock much more traditional.
The bottom line is, they love it all. Moore, the manic MC, can’t help but throw out references to J throughout the film. (“Is J Mascis your boyfriend?” he asks two little German girls waiting for a bus). Kim Gordon’s big-sister affection is obvious. And, in an oddly out-of-place, but telling mainstream-rock moment, the crowd sings back to J what has fast become one of his most celebrated lines, the last of a culminatory verse that strikes a particular chord in this world of 1991, and demonstrates its author’s paradoxical position – stuck awkwardly out there somewhere between total alienation and total inclusion:
Sometimes I don’t thrill you
Sometimes I think I’ll kill you
Just don’t let me fuck up will you
’Cos when I
need a friend it’s still you
* * *
This book is about gaps.
Between old punk and new. Between lackluster voice and brilliant accompaniment. Between caring and not caring; between trying and not trying. Between the members of a band; between an adolescent and the objects of his affection. In between parts of a song, and in the middle of a gleaming row of pearly whites. Under the strings of a Fender Jazzmaster, sunburst finish.
My focus falls a little before Markey’s, on the year 1987, and the second album that Dinosaur Jr. recorded, You’re Living All Over Me. Nine songs that brought together all the contradictions and contortions that made up this band, forcing opposite poles together to create a vibrant and peculiar spark. Which, used to ignite the next record, 1988’s Bug, and enthusiastically shopped to college radio by the band’s label, SST, helped redefine and question the meaning of the “alternative.”
And, very soon after, a real, physical gap got created. Watching Markey’s film, you will see J in 1991. You will also see Murph, the Dinosaur drummer, a blur of rapid fill technique and curly hair (“do you think you played differently when you were a skinhead, than you do now as a ‘hair’?”, inquires Thurston Moore). But nowhere will you see Lou Barlow, the band’s first bass player. So where’s Lou? Someone else takes his place adequately, but leaves, still, a Lou-shaped niche at the right-hand side of the stage, just next to the drums. Later, we’ll look into it.
* * *
And whatever did happen at the front of that Teutonic lunch line, the place where we first met J Mascis?