Dinosaur Jr.'s You're Living All Over Me Page 5
And one final consistency, the polish of work finished. Not a concept album at all, but still, an overall shaping that reflects its original format, and J’s ear for vinyl. Side one, the four Tiers tracks, the intro scream of Little Fury Things closed out by the metallic shriek of The Lung’s end. Side two, Pine’s four tracks plus Lou’s tape collage, the blistering opening attack of Raisans channeled into the arid landscape of Poledo.
J, now out of Amherst for the time being, had moved to New York and gone back half-heartedly to school, at Hunter College. With the help of SST, Sonic Youth, and a bunch of other bands and newfound fans from college radio, more expansive tours began, including one of Europe in October and November of that year. Characteristically, J, Lou, and Murph don’t recall any particular sense of trajectory. On the contrary, with tour and record and label in hand, they’d achieved pretty much all the coolest things they could think of, became the befuddled inhabitants of an aspirational void.
But even if they didn’t know where they were headed, others did. Wharton Tiers speaks of a “big ripple of enthusiasm” for the band just then. That summer, he went to speak at the New Music Seminar and was introduced as the man who had recorded the new Dinosaur record. “There was an audible gasp from the audience,” he remembers. “People knew who they were, and what they were doing.”
* * *
In the following pages are six short essays and an epilogue about You’re Living All Over Me. I use the word “essays” not in the exalted academic sense, but with the literal meaning of “attempts,” a few words written to try and dig deeper at the songs on this record. I take a deliberately broad frame of reference: from Deep Wound and the debut record up to Bug – the third record, released October 1988, also on SST – and eventually to the new stuff that the same trio has recorded in recent years. I also consider some of the work of other bands important around the time.
I quote lyrics throughout, though I stress that these are just the way I hear them. As far as I know, they aren’t officially published anywhere, and they aren’t easy to decipher, since J and Lou are by no means the clearest of enunciators, not always ending their words, and sometimes not beginning them properly either. And, for reasons that become apparent, this is just the way they like it: J, in particular, is not the kind of person who likes to sit down and discuss his exact choice of noun, supposing that he can remember what it was; he seems to prefer to obfuscate wherever possible.
On a similar note, I let pedal and other equipment set-ups, a massive and notoriously speculative subject, go out with the tide. J says, as on the first record, he used a Big Muff Pi for sustained fuzz and volume shifts, an Electric Mistress as flanger, and a wah pedal; but their exact permutation at any given moment, along with amp and guitar settings, and all kinds of other overdubs, seems to me pointless to try and untangle. Lou still used the Grabber during the sessions in Holyoke, but, at some point en route to New York, swapped it out for a Rickenbacker bass that, his instrument of choice ever since, has a much bigger output in performance. It’s this that can be heard on what became the record’s first half.
One more thing. I’m not too worried about crossing the frontier that rock criticism often doesn’t seem to want to approach: writing in various ways about the music played – structures and notes and chords and all. It’s a perspective that makes me think of the ancient quip that, I’m told, is the most commonplace line thrown at these 33 1/3 volumes, not to mention music criticism in general: “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.”
It’s true, music is an odd thing to write about. It tends to slip all too easily out of the grasp of words – which isn’t to say it is mystically ineffable, just elusive, often banally so. Having said that, I for one wouldn’t mind seeing a dance about architecture, providing it didn’t go on for too long, and didn’t cost too much to get in.
You’re Living All Over Me
1. In the interviews on the DVD Dinosaur Jr.: Live in the Middle East.
2. Quoted in Byron Coley’s liner notes to Ear Bleeding Country.
3. Moore quoted from the interviews on the DVD Dinosaur Jr.: Live in the Middle East.
Chapter Four – Essays
Rabbits
It’s the easiest thing in the world, beginning a rock record.
All you have to do is give a signal. Pretty much anything will do, but how about this: take a loop out of your riff – from bass or drums or guitar chords – let it play alone a few times, then bring the other instruments in all at once. If I can think of a hundred examples, you can think of a thousand. One instrument calls for many. It’s primeval, or something like that, music as marks-set-go, a kind of greasy fetish that activates the body of the listener. Hair flicks back; hair flicks forward. Those about to rock, rock.
This kind of beginning is so ingrained that even most “alternative” music, elsewhere so iconoclastic, shirks a genuine alternative. Which isn’t to say that it hasn’t led to some cool variants. Sonic Youth’s Goo begins with a mystical sound-cloud from which the instruments gradually emerge; Mudhoney’s Superfuzz, surely a template for Nirvana’s Nevermind, comes running at you with something pointy. And the hammered guitar riff that opens Freak Scene – and Bug – is the most famous set of chords that J Mascis will ever write.
But some punk and hardcore records do it differently. With as brief a signal as possible, these hit you with everything at once, a stroke of the play button that smashes your head straight on the punk rock. It’s a part, I guess, of the anti-schlock statement, two fingers up to the average listener. Minor Threat’s Out of Step, Dead Kennedys’ Bedtime for Democracy and In God We Trust, Inc., Misfits’ Static Age and Walk Among Us, Black Flag’s Loose Nut, Bad Brains’ Bad Brains, Ramones’ Ramones: downloading song by song and listening to things out of order risks losing the raw power of these iconic beginnings.
And You’re Living All Over Me is one of them. A split-second drumfill – Murph trips over his next step, falls down the stairs – and then straight in, the screw-loosening throb of Lou’s bass rig and the full blaze of J’s guitar, all sliders up, all dials dimed. It is frighteningly direct: in the time it takes you to blink, the band has shown its entire hand, thrown down all its trump cards in one go, everything J painted that house for audible in an instant. And this is even before Lou has started screaming his lungs up, at first something indistinct, but on bringing your ears closer to the speaker:
What is it?
Who is it?
Where is it?
Slackers? It’s an opening that is as intense as it is hard-hitting – a gigantic sanatorium scream for three teenagers. And in this sense, if it leans on punk in its abruptness and abrasiveness, then it is equally magnetic for metal: Slayer’s Reign in Blood begins with a gorgeous pitch-perfect scream, more angel than devil; Death’s charming Scream Bloody Gore starts with a spectacular act of expectoration; Metallica’s Kill ’Em All with a sort of choked yelp that sounds like James Hetfield caught his leg on the coffee table.
* * *
But if a scream means abandon, the loss of control, then that’s not quite right either. Because, if anything, the beginning of YLAOM shows remarkable restraint, with gripping rhythmic playing and searching harmony that, like Lou’s screamed questions, demand closure. And funnily enough, it is J’s wah pedal that, in spite of all the unhinging work it does for the sound, keeps the lid firmly on – it needs to be rocked steady, after all, under his right foot, in strict time to Murph’s beat, heel toe toe, heel toe toe.
So there is a kind of signal here, after all: that the massive momentum of this introduction (because it is an introduction, it turns out) will be undercut – that it will disappear suddenly in a whine of feedback, evaporated by Murph’s hammering on the snare, and will open out, not into metal thrash—
—but into a little song about a rabbit.
Rabbit falls away from me
Guess I’ll crawl
Rabbit always smashes me
Again I’ll cr
awl
Tried to think what’s over me
It makes me crawl
Then she runs away from me
Faster than I crawl
What is this anyway, Alice in Wonderland? It’s a surprise, the complete opposite of the intro’s scream, a kind of alternative nursery rhyme, perhaps – except, of course, that it isn’t even that sophisticated, not so much rhyming “crawl” as flatly repeating it, and sung over a ringing guitar that closely follows the main tune. The bedroom floor of J’s childhood was apparently “covered with stuffed animals and records,” and you can well believe it, listening to this.1 The song is named, too, Little Fury Things, the middle word of which J pronounces “furry” – adding, irritated, and with confusing obscurity, that “bad spelling is no excuse for bad pronunciation.”
And just because it is so simple and childish, it is sad. (“My turtle ran away,” as the young J recalled from his earliest days, “very slowly, he ran away”).2 In fact, sadness, in just this peculiarly nostalgic sense, is the main thing about Little Fury Things, a kind of depressive languor hanging over it that makes it feel far slower than it actually is. You’ll sometimes see footage of a five-o’clock-shadow J playing this song by himself on an acoustic (glasses are medium-sized: probably the early nineties), and this is a pretty telling experience.3 Every great guitar song sounds good on an acoustic alone, I guess, and this is no different: with all the effects, the intro, Lou, and Murph dropped out, it is a pathetically beautiful song, every phrase-end falling backwards like the first-person of its lyrics, a vocal line held wistfully long over the poignant added-note chords that support it, and syllables stretched out in all the wrong places.
On record, the vocal style, too, adds to the melancholy. Lee Ranaldo, the Sonic Youth guitarist, was living in the same New York apartment block as Wharton Tiers’ studio at the time, and he makes it downstairs to the basement to sing back-up here. To be honest, it’s not the most ostentatious cameo you’ll ever hear, since all Lee’s voice does is add a kind of mysterious backing fug to J’s; this is made all the more obvious in the middle section, when, for the first time, we hear the rough grain of J’s voice alone, in the staging of some sort of odd, possibly rabbit-related, sex encounter:
I stopped to call
Tried to feel it all
Stuck my hand in, pulled real hard
Got stretched in miles, not in yards
Then I read
’Bout all those who bleed
All over your lies
Sunlight brings the red cloud in your eyes
So it’s easy. Once we’ve exchanged rabbit for girl, the lyrics outline an old rock ’n’ roll story about sex and lies and blood, now told with neat rhyming couplets and snappy rhythms. In an unexpected glimpse of poetry, sunlight appears, figured by hippie tambourines shimmering off the big collisions of the song’s center, Lou’s whole-arm bass notes hitting hard against J’s chugging chords.
* * *
But how about a different hearing of the lyrics:
Grab, it falls away from me
Guess I’ll crawl
Grab, it always smashes me
Again I’ll crawl
And so on. This seems much better, partly because (in this version at least) what it loses in furriness it gains in proximity to what it sounds like J is actually singing. Also, for a record so wrapped up in its own hangdog depression, it’s the perfect opening line.
Pleased with myself, and basking in that peculiar smugness that results from thinking you have got a song’s lyrics down, I asked J if these were correct. I was disappointed. “Zuh,” he shrugged, or possibly “buh,” a non-committal noise of his own invention that gave its own signal: that I am not exactly the first person to ask this question. For one thing, it has been an internet favorite for some time, marked by all the curious over-the-top exasperation that typifies anonymous online forums. (“It’s ‘grab it,’ you fucking idiot,” and so on).
But long before the internet, when a video was made for this song in 1988, J’s friend Jon Fetler had pondered exactly the same thing. If you ever see it, he is the freaky hick guy licking the knife, in what he refers to as an attempt to interject some “goofy/edgy menace” – a “pivotal performance totally overlooked by the Oscar Academy” that year. In a scene later deleted, perhaps with good reason, he put the head of a live school rabbit into his mouth, an operation that posed obvious logistical difficulties, and made it worth first asking: “Hey J, is it ‘rabbit’ or ‘grab it’?”
“I dunno,” responds J, “rabbit?”
Think about it for a second: Jon put a live rabbit in his mouth, and still J found it funny to keep him guessing about what he is actually singing.
Ultimately, what the episode stresses is something important about the way J prefers to think about his lyrics. “I write [the lyrics] because you have to sing something,” he is quoted as saying once,4 and he tells me, with similar disdain, that the words to his songs are always a late addition, coming after the song’s chords and even its melody. “I don’t do poetry,” he states bluntly – his wife, walking past, chuckles for some reason – and so outlines an esthetic that became familiar with the shoegazers a few years later, words present but lost within a squall of raging guitar noise.
It’s a blanket denial that applies equally to song titles, too. J tends to refer to his songs not by title, but by number, according to their place on the record; and the titles that do make it to the back cover are sometimes just “The” plus a noun borrowed from the lyrics (The Lung, as if to say, The Song about the Lung). Or completely unrelated. And, like most of our fabled guitar heroes, he doesn’t seem to place much of a premium on accurate spelling, in spite of the schools he went to. Kracked? Raisans?
All the same, I wonder whether to take what he says at face value. In a sense, after all, the complete denial of any involvement with poetry (or spelling) is a poetic position in itself, another kind of anti-stance that takes its cue from what Emily Dickinson and Amherst might embrace, and does precisely the opposite. And anyway, Little Fury Things clearly does have its own poetic pretensions – the sunlight and all that in the middle section for one thing, and then (if you buy the “grab, it” hearing of the lyrics) the unspecified “it,” always just out of reach, links up neatly with Lou’s screams in the introduction. “It was part of J’s vision of the tune,” says Lou, “‘You scream here’.”
So it is poetic, in a simple way: even if the mysterious object referred to is some kind of sweaty teen sex obsession (and what else would it be?), the making of a connection between all these “its” drags out the searchingness of that impressive opening for miles throughout the extent of the song – and becomes, to put it even more grandly, a common theme throughout J’s catalog of lyrics and titles (as two examples of about a million, Does It Float, Hand It Over).
But J clearly doesn’t have much time for any of this. In solidarity with nineties shoegazing once again, he prefers to revel in the general indecipherability of his lyrics. The notebooks that Maura Jasper attributes to him as a UMass freshman are gently denied; he shifts focus instead to the “first R.E.M. album,” where “no-one knows [precisely] what the lyrics are, so they make up their own meaning.” The implication is that he would like this attitude to be transferred to his own songs: if “rabbit” is more meaningful to you than “grab, it …,” then that’s just fine, whatever’s cool with him (to borrow another of his favorite phrases).
So who is it, where is it, what is it? These are not questions that will get much response. Whatever: you can feel free to bounce the lyrics round your own synaptic networks as much as you like, and J will still take pleasure in holding on to a secret – he never has to reveal what these words mean to him, or how they might be inflected by his own experiences, or what “it” is, if anything. He is also free to confound by singing it differently every time, and does so. If it’s laziness, it’s also guardedness. You do the meaning so that J doesn’t have to.
* * *
> The grab it/rabbit will remain part of this song’s unique aura. But it doesn’t matter much, because, with the chorus’s second repeat, you can barely hear the lyrics. It’s a well-known aspect of this scene’s songwriters that, having made something beautiful, they would deliberately mess it up, just as Chris Novoselic would find with Kurt Cobain’s Heart-Shaped Box.5 And this is just what happens here. J is no poet. As later, on Tarpit – another great song for an acoustic – he shoves your attention back away to where he is more comfortable: a brutal stomp on the fuzz switch and all the ghosts of holy hell come wailing back out of his noise machine.
Lee Ranaldo having wandered off upstairs again, we’re left with J’s voice alone in this final repeat, a more feeble presence than usual against the swirling vortex of the guitar tracks. Murph’s drum fills, in fact, are about all that remain distinct, as J’s voice and lyrics are lost inside the huge instrumental scream again, and the whole crowd, little furry things and all, disappears in a sheen of resonant feedback – down the plughole, down the rabbit-hole.