It was about an hour after dusk in the early summer of 1991, and I was sitting on a log in the half woods near my parents’ house with a guy I’d met in the front row at a Dinosaur Jr show. I had the names of my favorite bands scrawled in pen on the toe caps of my Converse high-tops (“Fugazi” on the left, “Dinosaur” on the right), and I studied them intently, trying to keep my teenage awkwardness under control. Two dorks alone in the dark, we avoided the obvious question by engaging in deep conversation: Was Dinosaur Jr better with or without Lou Barlow?
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Dinosaur Jr’s first three full-lengths, Dinosaur (Homestead, 1985), You’re Living All Over Me (SST, 1987), and Bug (SST, 1988), have only been out of print for five years or so and have never been too hard to find on eBay. Nonetheless, on March 22 Merge Records reissued all of them. They’re the only albums with the band’s original lineup: guitarist and front man Mascis, one-named drummer Murph, and bassist Barlow, who quit (or was fired) in 1989. (The “Jr” got tacked on after the first disc, when the Dinosaurs, a Bay Area band full of Summer of Love vets, threatened to sue.) Barlow subsequently dedicated himself to the tape-hiss horn of plenty Sebadoh, which he’d started as a side project a couple years before, and Mascis and Murph soldiered on with a rotating cast of bassists. In 1990 Dinosaur signed with Sire, and the following year they issued the flawless Green Mind.
The band was rumored to have become a Mascis dictatorship–an impression confirmed in the reissues’ liner notes–and by the mid-90s Murph was gone too. Until Sire dropped Dinosaur in 1997, Mascis and a lineup of scabs rewarded a devoted fan base with consistently diminishing returns. Then Mascis became the Fog, a studio project that only turned into a proper band to tour. He receded into the distance, dwindling to a speck on the horizon–if you’d been able to make him out, you’d still have seen his long hair, his guitar, and his flying flannel, but he’d lost his spot on the main stage to other dudes, dudes with turntables, who were our new heroes.
Considering how much indie rock has changed since then, do these three Dinosaur reissues belong anywhere now? They certainly seem irrelevant in the harsh light of the current post-post-post-punk world, with its skinny ties and dance-floor humpa-humpa and leg warmers and ironic beards–and I mean that as a sincere compliment. The snapshots scattered in the CDs’ beefed-up liner notes reveal three greasy-looking dudes who wouldn’t have made it past the door at a loft party in Brooklyn–they’ve got teenage trauma in their eyes and look like they’ve probably never seen a tit in real life. On the back cover of Dinosaur, Barlow seems like he’s on maybe week five of puberty, wearing a Christmas-gift sweater and the same haircut my aunt Pat had in 1982. Mascis is decked out in a velvet dinner jacket and gothy medallion, and his scraggly hair looks like he slept on it wet. Of the three, Murph’s the only one who’s half handsome, despite the giant zits.
