Feedback to the future.
Grunge pioneers Dinosaur Jr have reformed - and they've brought their famous friends. As Matt Dillon directs their new video, the band rock in all the right places, finds Johnny Sharp
Saturday March 17, 2007
The Guardian
No, she doesn't mean Mascis, but in his own gently extraordinary way, the indie rock veteran cuts an equally charismatic figure. His long hair now grey-white, and his slothular body clad in a pea-green T-shirt and black track suit, he looks like Pauline Fowler from EastEnders in fancy dress as Kevin The Teenager. He's the undoubted star of the show. Drummer Murph is now bald and looks like a mortgage advisor indulging in his weekend hobby. Bass player and indie demi-celeb Lou Barlow appears to have aged approximately three weeks since he was originally in the band.
Matt is highly accommodating at first, allowing the photographer to take shots as the band go through their paces in a cluttered basement, intended as a homage to their teenage rehearsal days. Then we overstep the mark. "Pushy motherfucker!" he spits, and stomps out. It's a fair cop - our man got in the way of a shot and now our hopes of interviewing Matt and J together look doomed. We're banished to the kitchen upstairs, on the proviso we don't disturb the owners of the house. Who those owners are is not clear, but suffice to say they're big music fans. Rows and rows of vinyl are stored, featuring artists from Stockhausen to the Shangri-Las, along with piles of demo tapes by such unheralded talents as Racists and Hairy Snail. Eventually we get Lou, J and Murph around a table and encourage them to wallow in a bit of nostalgia.
"We practised in the living room of my parents' house," recalls Lou. "Which I can't believe we ever had the balls to do. We would open the window and put stacks out there, in the middle of the town. I can't believe we never got arrested ..."
At this point we are distracted by the sudden presence of alternative rock royalty putting some food out for the dog. It turns out this house belongs to Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth. Have we stumbled into a house on the US equivalent of Stella Street?
"It's kind of like a family round here," admits Lou. "Even my mum knows Thurston. He runs his label out of the same building she works in. There's a good music scene here, and Kim and Thurston are the centre of it."
"Thurston's always playing," says J. "Almost every week he's playing with different people. And the same 20 people are there watching."
Ooh, you bitch! Perhaps this is the kind of withering comment that got J his reputation as something of a sneering misanthropist.
"J's an interesting guy," Thurston Moore will confide later. "There's a lot going on there. You have to read between the lines. Or between the pauses."
What we do manage to decipher in those silences is a man with a very dry sense of humour but one who maintains a certain professional distance from his bandmates. It's been suggested that Mascis and Barlow's infamous enmity was mainly healed by witnessing the Pixies' lucrative reformation tour in 2004 ...
"Oh hey, we're no Pixies man," says Lou, scowling. "We're better than that!" Well either way, Dinosaur Jr were certainly influential ...
"Yeah ..." says J, "(seven second pause)... to the Pixies ..."
Back on set, we are now graced by the presence of yet another band. The intro of the video features Lightbulb, the band formed by Thurston and Kim's 12-year-old daughter Coco with two of her friends. They're to be "paid" for their appearance with ice cream. Their scene proves to be the last of the day, and everyone retires to the family kitchen for takeaway pizza.
His work over for the day, Matt Dillon has forgiven our previous faux pas, and when he finds we're British, proceeds to quiz us about the "scene" over here. "Are Teenage Fanclub still around?" he asks. "I love those guys. Awesome. And My Bloody Valentine? Awesome." So does he keep in touch with new music? We hear he's a vinyl obsessive.
"Yeah, I listen to a lot of older music. Pre-1960s, jazz, black music, Brazilian music. But Dinosaur Jr are my era. I'm a little out of touch with new stuff."
It seems most actors have their own bands now. Was he ever tempted to pick up the mic himself? "Never! Never!" he grins. "I always remember Joe Strummer once said to me 'I'll stop making movies when Eddie Murphy stops making records'! So I took the hint."
So how did he come to direct the video?
"I saw Dinosaur play in New York, and he said 'we wanna do a video, are you interested in directing?' So I said 'yeah'. I said to him 'what's the song about?' He said 'uuuh ... chicks'. And I said 'OK, so what do you want in the video?' and he says 'Uuuh ... models?' But I think the whole rock video thing is overdone. I wanted to show they still have that raw edge playing as a band."
It turns out Matt and J have been friends ever since Matt, a Dinosaur Jr fan, came to a show in 1990. "We see each other now and then - we've been skiing a couple of times, been to a couple of fashion shows."
Apparently J is also a keen skydiver. Which somehow seems about as likely as seeing Bernard Manning out windsurfing. "J's kinda misunderstood," says Matt. "He's a really great guy. People get a little intimidated 'cos he speaks slow, but that's just the way he is, you know?" And with that, he heads off to rejoin this unlikely meeting of minds. We depart with the peculiar image of Thurston Moore, Matt Dillon and J Mascis sharing a large pepperoni pizza imprinted forever on our consciousness.
Mascis Vs Barlow - the truth
Dinosaur Jr went their separate ways in 1989. Mascis wanted to fire Lou, so he told drummer Patrick "Murph" Murphy to call Lou and tell him the band was splitting up. Lou later read the band had hired a new bass player for a tour of Australia. Lou's side project, Sebadoh, became his main concern. He started writing songs about Mascis and yelling abuse at him in the street.
So, J, which of Lou's songs about you do you like best?
J Mascis: "Uuuh ... (smirks and looks at his feet) ... I couldn't possibly choose just one."
Lou Barlow: "But pretty much every Sebadoh song I wrote got interpreted that way. I did actually move on!"
At one point Lou described J as "a borderline sadist".
JM: "Hmmm," (shrugs, still smirking guiltily).
Do you have any regrets J?
JM: (12 second pause) Yeah ... it could have been handled better, but no one was speaking at that point, so we spent a lot of time going through Murph.
LB: I thought that was so bad the way they kicked me out of the band. But then later on when I had to kick people out of bands I ended up fucking people over in a similar way, even after vowing never to do that.
So are you friends these days or just business partners?
LB: (pause) "I'd consider anyone I worked with to be a friend." J Mascis says nothing.
· Dinosaur Jr's Beyond is out April 30
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007
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