Very few could have predicted that the original Dinosaur Jr, the contentious trio of guitarist J Mascis, bassist Lou Barlow, and drummer Emmett “Patrick” Murphy (aka Murph), would ever get back together. After creating some of the most important and influential music of the late ‘80s and, perhaps the defining college rock album in 1987’s You’re Living All Over Me, the original trio disbanded on most unfriendly terms, a product of poor communication, passive aggressive interaction, and the immaturity of youth.
Dinosaur Jr would continue in various incarnations helmed by Mascis, but the original trio never played together again. That was, until 2005 when, inexplicably, the original Dinosaur Jr reformed for a reunion tour that, also inexplicably, seemed to work. The band sounded as good as ever, and it seemed that the hands of time had healed old wounds. With the recently released Beyond, the first album of new material the original members have recorded together in 17 years, Dinosaur Jr seems to be back to stay.
Amplifier caught up with bassist Lou Barlow in Philadelphia at a stop on the reunion tour of his own post-Dinosaur Jr band, Sebadoh. Clad in blue jeans, black sport coat and a vintage Cinderella t-shirt, circa Night Songs, Barlow opens up about Dinosaur Jr’s famed history, its well-publicized breakup, and what was perhaps the unlikeliest of reunions.
Amplifier: I understand that the Dinosaur Jr reunion was conceived a couple years ago with a Deep Wound (Mascis and Barlow’s pre-Dinosaur Jr hardcore band) reunion of sorts.
Lou Barlow: I don’t know if it was conceived then, but I think maybe it made it seem like it could be more realistic. It made it a possibility. But there was no discussion about it. J and I just playing onstage together, I guess, was a step in that direction.
Amplifier: What was your initial feeling going into the Dinosaur Jr reunion? Was there trepidation? Did it seem natural when you got back on stage?
Barlow: It definitely felt natural. Murph came out to Los Angeles to practice with me before we started the tour and it immediately clicked. So I knew it was going to be okay, and I felt really good about it. I hadn’t really done anything quite like that in a long time, something that was that loud. The rhythms in those songs and the way that I play them are so much a part of my muscle memory that it’s pretty amazing to sort of go back and tap back into that.
Amplifier: How long was it into the tour that the idea came about to write some new material?
Barlow: Over a year. I think that any time that subject came up, we all, or at least I, scoffed at it, and I know J seemed to as well. I don’t know. It just didn’t seem possible.
Amplifier: You had to warm to the idea?
Barlow: Even the first session, I was pretty skeptical. I just didn’t know if J was really inspired to do it. I really just couldn’t figure out why he would want to do it, because it seemed like it was difficult for him.
Amplifier: Not the playing part, but the creating new music part?
Barlow: He can play all day, but creating music, it’s hard. J, he’s never been one, at least in my experience working with him…I don’t know, it just all seems to really take a lot out of him. So I was just wondering why he’d want to put himself through that.
Amplifier: Was it a collaborative process once you guys hit the studio?
Barlow: Not at first. J sort of had these instrumentals worked out. And he’s real specific about the drumming, so a lot of the time was just him teaching Murph how to play these drum parts. And Murph had to play exactly what J was playing. All drummers are real different, and they all have their quirks and certain things they can and can’t do, so it was a lot of just Murph learning how to do exactly what J wanted. But in the meantime, I just kind of picked up on the bass parts or picked up something to play on the bass, and J just doesn’t have any opinions about the bass for the most part, which is good.
Amplifier: Nice for you.
Barlow: Yeah, it’s nice for me. But when he doesn’t like things, you have to sort of adjust to it. The songs were simple, for the most part, at first, so it wasn’t that difficult. It was a little boring. … The window of working each day was probably from about 1 in the afternoon until 4, on a good day. A couple of hours a day. That was pretty much all J wanted to do. At first, it seemed weird to me, but then actually I got really into that whole schedule. I was staying out in Massachusetts with my family, and that’s where I’m from, so I was visiting my parents and all that stuff, so that relaxed schedule really started to appeal to me after a while. But at first it was a little frustrating.
Amplifier: Was it awkward to just have three hours a day in the studio?
Barlow: It did seem a little awkward at first. So we did the first sessions, where it was a few weeks, and then when we came back, we had another subsequent session and J had actually bagged a bunch of the stuff that we were working on, which I was really encouraged by. Once he started throwing songs away, I started to get really, like, ‘Oh wow, okay, he’s starting to employ an editorial process,’ which he never really did back in the day. It was just like he wrote songs and we recorded them and they were put on the records. For the first three records, it was pretty much everything we recorded made it onto the records. There weren’t outtakes and stuff like that. So when he started to really edit stuff, I started to feel like he was kind of getting involved in it.
Amplifier: One of the things that struck me about this whole thing was that, prior to 2005 and hearing about the reunion, for me it probably would have been one of the most unlikely of scenarios. So I guess I wondered, ‘Why?’ for you? Because you’ve got your own thing. You’re well known. You’re established, apart from Dinosaur Jr, obviously.
Barlow: Well, I think touring with Dinosaur is unique, because I have so little to do, and there are a lot of creature comforts that are taken care of on a Dinosaur tour. We have a bus that allows me to travel with my family, so my baby’s spent a good portion of her young life in the Dinosaur bus. So for me to spend a lot of time with my family and make money at the same time was great. Because when I’m doing something like Sebadoh or anything else, it’s so labor-intensive for me, from the time I wake up, and especially if I’m traveling with the family, it’s pretty intense. It just seems like a good job for me right now. And also, the money that I made…the Dinosaur management literally just picks everybody up by their ankles and shakes the money out of them, which is something that I would never do on my own.
Amplifier: There’s no getting ripped off.
Barlow: With Dinosaur Jr, there’s no getting ripped off. There’s no question that we were getting absolutely as much money as we possibly could, and since all of those decisions happened without me and I don’t really feel particularly responsible for them… For me, it’s made the Sebadoh tour possible, because it gave me enough money that I could front the thousands of dollars it takes to even get something as minimal as a Sebadoh tour off the ground. We had to buy backline. We had to rent this van. All that stuff just takes a lot of money, just to get it off the ground and, before Dinosaur, for whatever reason that was just money I didn’t have.
Amplifier: You can understand my question. I read Michael Azerrad’s book [Our Band Could Be Your Life]. And you think, ‘Wouldn’t this be too much of a trial?’ just given the history?
Barlow: Yeah, but everything changed.
Amplifier: Is the communication part different?
Barlow: Yeah it is different. It’s the same, but it’s different. I still don’t communicate in that band very well. And J still totally intimidates me. But he doesn’t scare me. He used to scare me. It was such a long time ago. I mean, 17 years ago? Back then, we didn’t really know what the plot was. The day that we got signed to SST Records, really our story was over. Anything that happened after that, there was just so much ambiguity about it, and we didn’t really know. It was just such a hard thing to know what to do or why we were doing it. And now, it’s just like we’ve all been around long enough to know that performing and being able to be on tour is just a gift. I think we all realize how incredibly lucky we are to have any kind of longevity at all, really. So when we came back into doing this reunion, that kind of realization had a way of just eliminating all of the gray areas that just seemed to pollute the band and, for me, really made the early Dinosaur experience really excruciating. All of that stuff is just gone, because I know that now all of us just know what we’re doing. And we know why we’re doing it. We’re doing it, on one hand to just keep the music alive, and we’re doing it, on the other hand, to keep ourselves alive and to keep our own thing going. So there’s a sense of purpose. I think that before, we were just too young or too blinded either by our own insecurities or anger or anything to really see what the plot was. And now it’s just very clear.
Amplifier: Regarding the whole communication aspect of it, I went through all the old materials and I thought 20 years is a long time. But then reading some of the new information, like the cryptic one-line emails that are interpreted by Brian [Schwartz, the band’s co-manager], I thought, man, this must be difficult still. I mean, am I reading into things?
Barlow: It’s not hard for me. All I really need from J is one line. Do you want to do this? No. And that was something that even back in the day was so difficult to get. And in person, it’s almost impossible to extract anything like that from him. So, yeah, email has been a miracle for that. And even just when we were negotiating fees or how we were going to split up the take of the touring, it was such a heavy issue, but I knew exactly where J stood in a second from one email. And that was it. It wasn’t this torturous thing. It wasn’t drawn out. It was just like, there you go, there’s the bottom line. Deal with it or don’t.
Amplifier: So for you, it was either, do I want to do it or don’t I?
Barlow: Yeah, exactly. See, the other thing about J and the Dinosaur experience, is that so many of the people that J knows and the people that he works with, I really like. I really like them. And J’s wife is just really, this really wonderful person. Really warm and caring. And they live in this wonderful house in Amherst. My wife gets along with his wife really well. And pretty much all of his friends are really sensitive people who are really kind. And although J himself is a little tough, I also find him really funny, conversationally. Hanging out with him, it’s not like there’s this horrible silence that’s over everything. Because what’s really funny are just the little things, the little things that occur day to day. And also through this experience too, J actually, he does what he needs to do. He really is, for lack of a better term and I wish I had one, but he is a team player in the end. He’s not as isolated as I would have imagined that he was, or that he was in the past. He’s pretty present, and things do get done and they get done well and he does it his way, and there’s a consistency within that that I do now really appreciate. So being a part of it just makes everything that I’m dividing my time between… it just makes it another interesting thing that I’m dividing my time with. And it’s another thing that has a way of fortifying all the other parts of all the other stuff that I want to do. I’ve been more prolific writing for myself. I was more prolific writing for Dinosaur. I approached this whole Sebadoh thing with even more of an open mind than I would have otherwise. So for all of those, the way you described them, like the sort of things that seem excruciated, it’s just not.
Amplifier: The history doesn’t cloud the current experience.
Barlow: Exactly. It really doesn’t. I think there’s a lot of reasons for that, and a lot of it just has to do with getting older. I mean, I have a child, and I’m throwing a child into this mix as well. When we come downstairs from working on something in the studio and my baby’s running around, it’s like, ‘Okay, great!’
Amplifier: Was the Sebadoh reunion, for you, an opportunity to say, This was yours, and I’m taking back what was mine?
Barlow: Maybe. But if I look back on the history of Dinosaur, that book really, it was so stark, the language, just the interviews and the space I was given in that book to just vent this poison. My feeling after reading it was just I felt really sad. It’s sad that this all ended that way. And that’s the other thing. When I was given the opportunity to come back to Dinosaur, I took that as an opportunity to just change the end of the story. For me, it was like a failure of communication, a failure of the music to really become the most important thing. It was just kind of a failure in the end. Even though I was very proud of what I did with the band and it gave me life beyond that, I always kind of looked back on it as being a failure, and that book really brought that into sharp relief for me. So when I was given the opportunity to go back and do it again, it was just a way to change it and make it into something positive.
Amplifier: So there’s a second chapter for some of those bands in that book. And I wondered, is that the Beyond?
Barlow: It could be. J came up with that title. People were throwing a lot of titles around and he didn’t really have anything to say about it, and then he’d just email me, like ‘Beyond.’ ‘What about Beyond for a title?’ And I’m like, ‘Fantastic. Good job. That’s a great title.’ I was psyched, and psyched too because it just sounds weirdly hopeful for him to say that. And I’m here. I’m here for that. I’m happy to be a part of J’s thing. He and I both have just never stopped. We’ve just been doing what we do the entire time. The perception is that there’s been these huge dips in activity or even dips in the quality of the material, and I don’t think there really has been. Even with him, as I’ve gone back and looked at his stuff, he’s been remarkably consistent with what he’s done and remarkably true to his thing, and I know that I’ve done that with myself, so it’s a cool way that our paths can intersect again. Working with him again empowers me to continue to do something crazy like a Sebadoh reunion and it also just gives me grist. Grist for the mill, for everything. And then just continuing the Dinosaur Jr legacy, whether I continue to play bass with it or not, I’m just happy to keep his thing rolling. I’m happy to be part of it.
Amplifier: If the Dinosaur thing ended after the few dates in May, would that be satisfying for you?
Barlow: Yeah, it’s already satisfying. This is all sort of reaching into uncharted territory, or even unimagined territory.
Amplifier: For you, it’s been rewritten? It feels resolved?
Barlow: Yeah, definitely. Definitely.
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Interview by Frank Valish
Photo: Brantley Gutierrez
DINOSAUR JR's BEYOND is out now on Fat Possum Records.
http://www.dinosaurjr.com
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