Dinosaur Jr.'s You're Living All Over Me Read online

Up goes Chris Novoselic, the Nirvana bassist. “Ah, you are a vegetarian,” says the counter man. Right on: Novoselic is about eight feet tall, most closely resembles Jesus and Charles Manson, plays barefoot in orange PVC. This is obvious, and important. Meat is murder, vegetables worth waiting for.

  Up goes J, next in line. The lunch man looks him over for a second, observes quizzically the trucker hat, admires his own reflection in the big shades. J barely moves a muscle.

  “Chicken” is the only word spoken.

  Chapter One – At the Junction

  Amherst, MA is a nice kind of place.

  A main street called South Pleasant St. Population today around 35,000. One of those Romanesque Revival town halls, a series of historic fire stations, a prominent Episcopal church. Lots of used bookstores. A common. Three colleges in the town itself, two more within spitting distance. Professors and their families aplenty: lots of people walking around with lots of degrees, University of Massachusetts by far the largest employer. Votes to the left, but not too far. Somewhat rainier, snowier, and a little less sunny than a lot of other places in the country, but, well—

  If you want celebrity: Uma Thurman grew up here, her dad Professor of Religion at Amherst College. Or history: officially founded in 1759, the town is named for the man who, they say, claimed Canada for the British. Or literature: America’s best-known female poet, Emily Dickinson, was born here in 1830, and Robert Frost taught here, too. Or ball games, even: volleyball and basketball were invented only a handful of miles away, the former originally known by the French diminutive “Mintonette,” the latter using peach baskets instead of nets.

  So when I say “nice,” I mean it in what might just be the most deprecating sense of the word. “Nice”: all high vowel and soft sibilant, a synonym for fawning middle-classness, here a provincial Northeastern strain profoundly respectful of its own history and yet gently inflected since the sixties by a distinct hippie-ish residue. Poetry, professors, peaches, public spaces.

  I wonder what Emily Dickinson would make of hardcore. Because, about a hundred years after her death, in the early 1980s, this particular musical phenomenon sprang up as part of a small and inclusive punk scene in Amherst – similar to that found simultaneously in other towns throughout Western Massachusetts. It’s probably not particularly worthwhile to try to distinguish hardcore too sharply from anything else within the scene, but, in short, if punk was fast and hard and angry, then hardcore considered that a gauntlet laid down: its central aim was to be faster and harder and angrier.

  Imagine Dead Kennedys, Black Flag, or Minor Threat, the scene’s biggest influencers, accelerated to breaking point – not bands always intelligible by any standard, but now pushed far beyond all previous limits. Three or more teenagers, invariably male, take to the stage at the local school or other community building. Set in motion by drop-tuned riff, they begin a musical sprint for the finish line, and let’s not pretend they’ll get there together. “Grindcore” is another name sometimes back-applied to this kind of music, and you can hear why: heavily distorted bass, guitar, and growled voice writhe over one another, driven forward by a “blast” beat from the drumkit – snare and bass drum hit together at bare minimum 180 b.p.m. The lyrics, if only you could hear them, are a seething ball of fury, presumably hurled at something, but not much idea what. Songs flash past. Sixty seconds or more is judged epic, a 20-minute gig easily yielding twenty of them or more.

  So it would seem that there is not very much of rock ’n’ roll about hardcore, and very little rehearsal. It is punk stripped down to its most basic essentials. Esthetics of beauty, and other traditional categories of music, are way off the bottom of its list of objectives, as are more practical things, like instrumental technique or keeping in time and tune. The important point is that it is a statement of resistance against these kinds of controlling regimes. Its practitioners want it to be anti-establishment, anti- in general, something bare bones and “pure,” untouched by the flabby excesses of mainstream society – even if, honestly, the most likely long-term outcomes are not constructive subversion, but chronic laryngitis, repetitive strain injury, and a job at the local grocery store.

  In music and lyrics, hardcore doesn’t seem to cling overtly to history, or celebrity, or literature. Ball games are right out. Foremost, instead, are the act of performance and the collective of disaffected kids that it serves, called to the community center to experience the musical equivalent of being run over by a train, or put in the washing machine on spin cycle. (And so, as far as she was a transcendentalist, and approved of things opposed to the everyday, perhaps Emily Dickinson could get into it after all).

  Like their vocals, the names of these kinds of bands spat a frothing rhetoric, and, then as now, sound inevitably hilarious to anyone more world-weary than a furious 16-year old. Napalm Death was the early eighties British band to whom the term “grindcore” was probably first applied, the band name doubly resonant with both the explosive sticky stuff that burns off your skin and its much-deplored use in Vietnam. In other words, there was often some tiny, and ambiguous, grain of political or social critique in these names, and this was no less the case in the American Northeast, with – to name a few – SS Decontrol, All White Jury, Siege, and more bluntly, The FU’s. Other names resisted by being just plain gross. Cancerous Growth and Brain Injured Unit spring to mind, as do a couple which came later, bringing with them all the extreme try-hard offensiveness of the late eighties and nineties: “A. C.” (this the censored name) and the best name of them all, Agoraphobic Nosebleed. Outpatients were ok, too, but some of their songs went on for over three minutes.

  Fucking prog-rockers.

  Lou Barlow’s hardcore band was named Deep Wound. Sometime in late 1981, in Northampton, MA, a few towns over from Amherst, the 15-year-old Lou decided with his friend Scott Helland to put an advertisement card up in the town’s Main Street Records. Since Lou could play guitar a little, and Helland had a bass, they were looking for a drummer, preferably one, the ad ran, who could “play really fast.”1 A few days later, this kid called J Mascis knocked on Lou’s parents’ door in nearby Westfield, driven over from Amherst by his dad, a local dentist, in the family station wagon. No surprise, to Helland at least, as he had seen this kid several times before, flicking fixatedly through the freak-music bargain bins of area record stores.

  After a few practices, J began to bring with him another Amherst punk local, Charlie Nakajima, an effusive presence willing to join the line-up as vocalist. As a four-piece, they quickly began to play live shows all over Western Massachusetts, the first in an Amherst youth center, and then in Boston, where they supported a bunch of punk and hardcore bands their senior, including a cameo in the renowned “Process of Elimination” tour. In mid-1982, they made a basement demo-tape, 13 tracks long, which generated a self-released 7-inch EP named American Style; the following year, they released a newly recorded 7-inch on Radiobeat in Boston, simply named Deep Wound. The sessions for this allowed a further two-track contribution to an LP compilation called “Bands That Could Be God,” assembled by Gerard Cosloy’s zine Conflict in 1984.

  These, then, their complete works. Fairly meager by any general measure, and yet actually quite extensive within a scene where one EP, if that, was the norm. And these still being the DIY days, now long forgotten, when international pen pals, tape-swapping, long hours in the record store, and self-published fanzines were rife, Deep Wound became pretty well-known within certain circles in the UK and continental Europe, as well as North America. They were included amongst a few New England bands noted for their “special intensity and/or quirkiness,” by the Californian zine Maximum Rocknroll in June 1984,2 and that’s understandable, since they always met and exceeded the hardcore benchmark of quality – extreme speed – and their titles all showed the necessary irreverent bite: Your Head Is In Your Crotch, Dead Babies, Psyched To Die, Patriots.

  So it wouldn’t be difficult to picture Deep Wound as representative of a hardcore
fringe, screaming a powerful statement against the ingrained, centered niceness of Amherst’s establishment. The band’s EP cover was an ice-cream cone with slugs crawling all over it; a promo text converts a similar spirit into words:

  We play all original material, stand for freedom. … Some club owners do not consider our music a viable type[,] we have had to play out of this area, and were recieved [sic] very well and got great reviews. We also got great reviews nationally through the underground Network of Fanzines across the country. I hope we will be able to play in this AREA more, because despite what narrow-minded old people around here think we do play a type of music that many people enjoy and we are very good at it.3

  It’s definitely an inviting image, a page from the oldest rock story in the book. Middle finger up to the older generation. Do-It-Yourself, as opposed to Have-Your-Maid-Do-It. J, Lou, and the others hanging out and being all alt-culture, while the other strait-laced kids ran around in their britches playing Mintonette or whatever.

  * * *

  But how indie was indie? It’s a question that’s always worth asking. After all, even if Deep Wound’s sound might be far from the jangly-guitar musical style that the word “indie” came to represent, still the activities by which the band defined itself – self-organized tours, tapes, penpals, fanzines – were an early and vital part of that cultural movement of supposed “independence,” a continuation of punk’s DIY spirit that began with hardcore and quickly metamorphosed outwards.

  There are some things that shouldn’t be overlooked. Let’s not forget J’s dad in the family station wagon, plying the 30-mile stretch from Amherst to Westfield, and let’s not deny that J had drum lessons too many to count, and played percussion in school orchestra and jazz band (you’ll sometimes hear, actually, that it was in jazz, not hardcore, where the blast beat originated). Let’s remember the Moms and Dads, those dentists and professors and other professionals, who stayed in the crowds for some of those gigs having dropped off the instruments – how else would they get home again? – and, for all I know, divided up the picnic on the town common while Nakajima screamed “Fuck the cops!” in front of them. These were supportive parents, of punk kids primarily from the town’s bloated middle classes. Hardcore was as much a suburban and provincial scene as it was a concrete inner-city one.

  So let’s give Joseph Donald Mascis, Jr. and Louis Knox Barlow their full names. And let’s listen to J’s complaint about Amherst from a few years later, that the town is “so educationally based, you just can’t do anything … no one’ll hit you or anything if you spray-paint a wall just to piss the teachers off. They just wanna like talk to you and try and figure out what your problem is instead of like smacking you like they should do.”4 Let’s factor in, too, what Lou refers to as another central aspect of hardcore, its “inner politics”: inward-turned criticism and self-hatred, epitomized by Ed Colver’s iconic cover art for Black Flag’s debut album, Damaged (1981), which showed Henry Rollins smashing a mirror with his fist. A lashing-out against alienating society that damaged him in the first place; but also self-abuse, an awareness of not measuring up and having no-one but yourself to rebel against.

  Independence and rebellion, in these social and cultural senses, are a matter of compromise, the result of a complicated ongoing transaction with the perceived mainstream – their purity more an ideology floating in the air than something that actually existed. They need to be taken with a pinch of salt, not overindulged as their practitioners and fans would sometimes like them to be. And if we are prepared to dub Deep Wound – and the band they turned into – with the catch-all “slackers,” then we should be aware that this term, too, is comparative, not absolute, doled out on precisely those whose backgrounds we were expecting to pull them up taut: the offspring of bank managers, accountants, academics, and other people who sit up straight behind a desk.

  There’s a classic image of J from slightly after this time, snapped in someone or other’s front room, in which, arms politely behind his back, he’s wearing a handsome sweater with the Deep Wound logo on the front. Now, it was very much part of this scene to have a logo, and to have it emblazoned on some garment: the ideal was magic marker on a white T-shirt, probably done by your crazy friend shortly after he shaved your head. But J’s sweater is knitted, and that in itself ought to raise the eyebrow of suspicion. Look: 16-year-old boys don’t know how to crochet. They can’t even cross-stitch. This was done by his mother, who even included (cute) a splash of knitted blood around the logo for extra impact.

  Similarly, a couple of publicity photos for the band show them leaning against the trunk of the station wagon, or standing in someone’s suburban garden. In this last one, they’re all glowering at the camera, fists raised in defiance, but the overall effect – and not just because Helland bears a striking resemblance to River Phoenix and Lou, big glasses, to Corey Feldman – is of the posters for Stand By Me, the iconic coming-of-age Rob Reiner film from a few years later. I guess you never have any friends later on like the ones you have when you are fifteen.

  * * *

  So for all Deep Wound’s furious anti-society posturing, fists raised, their resistance has a peculiarly lame quality. Punk’s second generation, they are twice at a remove from the movement’s roots – temporally detached and geographically dislocated from the fascistic straight-edges of the urban centers.What might have been fizzing resistance seems, for them, to risk being numbed into things far more passive: withdrawnness, boredom, apathy, sadness, childishness, all the favorite and longstanding rebellions of the middle-classes against their own world.

  I don’t pretend that you would get this from Deep Wound’s music, which is rarely less than closely engaged and ultraviolent, all incendiary instrumental playing and ranting voice. It crops up, instead, from time to time in the lyrics, and the scenes they set. “I saw it on the news/The victims had no shoes” begins Nakajima on I Saw It, the eponymous EP’s first track, and then, second verse:

  I saw it through my lens

  The suffering never ends

  I zoom in on the tears

  High ratings secure my job

  It’s an attack, needless to say, on mainstream media and its exploitation of misery, set to one minute only of up-then-down riff – a typical hardcore song if ever there was one.

  But at the same time, Nakajima can’t help but outline a familiar I-saw-it experience, of sitting in front of events distanced by the safe haven of some switch-off-able, put-down-able technological means. It’s the life of the TV kid who, glued to the phosphorescent tube, finds it increasingly difficult to draw the line between real life and fiction, and begins to ask why it matters anyway. At the end of the song, when Lou’s guitar drops to a holding chord, and the lyrics shuttle suddenly into a position in front of the camera (“My house is gone/I’m all alone”), even the put-on whine of Nakajima’s voice can’t make him sound quite like he means it – it’s about as convincing as the cruel sneer of the imagined media mogul after “the suffering never ends.” It all seems to be a distant experimentation with the possibility of feeling rather than genuine feeling itself.

  Here, for now, is where we leave Deep Wound behind. Aside from a few cameos later, they’ll have to wait for a 33 1/3 of the future. Still, we’ll make use of some of these images: the slack-jawed kid on the couch, J in the lovingly knitted Deep Wound sweater, Helland as River Phoenix and Lou as Corey Feldman, a fist punching a mirror. And a station wagon waiting at the junction of Pleasant and Not-so-very-Pleasant. All these symbols of precarious balancing acts and weird half-formed hybrids: between the distinctive kernel of mother’s-milk respectability and the old anti-attitudes of punk, the placing of one foot in a community and one foot outside it, and an expression of numbed apathy cast adrift in the raging sea of a furious sound.

  At the Junction

  1. Quoted from Azerrad, p. 348.

  2. Quoted from Jeff Bale’s review in Maximum Rocknroll 14 (June 1984), found at http://www.killfromtheheart.com/a
lbums.php?id=2056&rec_type=comp, accessed January 31, 2011.

  3. Quoted from an image on the back of the Deep Wound compilation Almost Complete, released in the UK by Baked Goods (2006).

  4. From an interview by Steve Sutherland in Melody Maker, May 6, 1989, found at http://archivedmusicpress.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/steve-sutherland-interviews-dinosaur-jr-and-robert-smith-part-1-6th-may-1989.jpg, accessed January 31, 2011.

  Chapter Two – Archaeological Hard Rock

  So in the middle of 1984, Deep Wound folded. Nakajima and Helland dropped into the background. After one night only, a similar outfit, Mogo, got sloughed off like a bunch of scaly skin.

  No-one seems to quite remember, but it must have been sometime late that year when a new band, Dinosaur, clambered up out of the primordial hardcore soup and made it, extremely bedraggled and confused, on to the local stages—

  J, in the interim, had left school, enrolled at UMass Amherst, and moved into the dorms there, even though it was only a mile or so from the family home. His eventual major, declared but never completed, would be Comp. Lit., but his real focus, entirely under his own direction, was now guitar. Inspired by a growing collection of records, some rock, some hardcore, some borrowed from his older brother, he’d already been playing for some time – it’s J, not Lou, you hear soloing on the EP version of Deep Wound’s Video Prick – and here an obstinate, uncompromising streak surfaced, as if hardwiring itself into a permanent circuit. He wouldn’t play on Video Prick unless he could play a lead, he told them; and when the other kids asked him why he had given up drums (something he could play) to take up guitar (something he couldn’t, yet), he just shrugged.