One of the reasons I enjoy doing this series is that I'm fascinated with all the different unpredictable ways a song can work its way into popular consciousness without being released as a single. A pretty interesting example of that happened last week, when a 25-year-old Dinosaur Jr. deep cut, "Over Your Shoulder," got 8 million YouTube views in Japan and hit #18 on their singles chart. I joked that this seemingly classic 'big in Japan' rock scenario would hopefully culminate in the band recording a live album at Budokan like Cheap Trick. But by Monday there was an explanation for it all: the song was regularly featured in a segment of a popular '90s TV show called Gachinko! and YouTube's algorithms had begun recommending pirated episodes to people.

Dinosaur Jr. deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. Severed Lips
2. Forget The Swan
3. The Lung
4. In A Jar
5. Tarpit
6. No Bones
7. Budge
8. Blowing It
9. I Live For That Look
10. Drawerings
11. Goin' Home
12. Yeah Right
13. Over Your Shoulder
14. Even You
15. Can't We Move This
16. Never Bought It
17. Loaded
18. Back To Your Heart
19. I Want You To Know
20. Pierce The Morning Rain
21. Knocked Around

Tracks 1 and 2 from Dinosaur (1985)
Tracks 3, 4 and 5 from You're Living All Over Me (1987)
Tracks 6 and 7 from Bug (1988)
Tracks 8 and 9 from Green Mind (1991)
Tracks 10 and 11 from Where You Been (1993)
Tracks 12, 13 and 14 from Without A Sound (1994)
Tracks 15, 16 and 17 from Hand It Over (1997)
Track 18 from Beyond (2007)
Track 19 from Farm (2009)
Track 20 from I Bet On Sky (2012)
Track 21 from Give A Glimpse Of What Yer Not (2016)

Dinosaur Jr.'s catalog can be neatly divided into 3 eras that took place in different decades. In the '80s, J Mascis, Lou Barlow and Murph recorded the band's first 3 albums and became one of the most beloved SST bands of the burgeoning rock underground. Then J kicked Lou out of the band, signed to a major label and released 4 albums with varying levels of mainstream success in the '90s, got dropped from the label and, for the time being, retired the Dinosaur Jr. name. And then, in the new millennium, the original trio reunited and have recorded 4 more albums.

"Feel The Pain" was the band's biggest hit around the same time that me and my friends were watching Dinosaur Jr. play "Freak Scene" and "The Wagon" on frequent screenings of a dubbed VHS of 1991: The Year Punk Broke. But You're Living All Over Me was my first Dinosaur album and it remains rightfully seen by many as their masterpiece. I remember gaining a new appreciation for the album a few years ago when I read Nick Attfield's 33 1/3 book on it, which pointed out how many of the song structures were kind of unusual and linear compared to the more traditional verse/chorus songs J Mascis tended to write later. Like, I hadn't thought about how "The Lung" is this whole parade of different riffs and solos with one simple chorus repeated 4 times in the middle of the song. Maybe because it's such a catchy chorus that it still feels like a pop song on some level.

Lou Barlow's role in Dinosaur Jr. is interesting because it's rare that the 'secondary songwriter who sings one or two songs per album' in a band goes on to such a prolific career fronting other bands. I'm not the biggest Sebadoh fan but they have their moments and it's interesting to hear Mascis and Barlow's songs alongside each other since they both have such distinct musical identities now. It's funny to think that Dinosaur Jr.'s first album opens with a song primarily sung by Lou Barlow, "Forget The Swan" (although J sings lead on the bridge). It's kind of like Little Feat's first album opening with a Bill Payne song instead of a Lowell George song. The 2005 Merge reissue of Dinosaur opens with the b-side "Bulbs of Passion," at the band's request, however.

Throughout the '90s, Mascis and Barlow seemed like alt-rock's biggest feud between former bandmates, they both rose to greater fame apart than they'd had together, and it seemed so contentious that they'd never reconcile. So I regard the band's revival since 2005 as one of the more genuinely heartwarming reunions in rock history. Where a lot of bands get back together and do one or two perfunctory new albums but mostly tour the old songs, Dinosaur Jr. have genuinely added to their legacy with 4 albums that have all ranged from very good to great (I think I Bet On Sky is my favorite but Farm was better than I remembered when I revisited it this week). And even though Barlow has made dozens of albums now as a frontman or solo artist, he still writes a couple songs for each new Dinosaur album that really seem to take advantage of the band's sound, "Back To Your Heart" might be my favorite song he's ever written. And I think it's pretty cool that Lou and Murph have learned and played a number of songs from the '90s records that they didn't play on.

While there is something distinct and great about the classic Dinosaur Jr. lineup, however, I don't want to diminish the '90s albums, which contain a large share of the band's best songs. Murph stayed in the band a few years longer than Barlow did, playing on Where You Been and 3 songs on Green Mind, but J Mascis started to turn Dinosaur Jr. into a one man band in the '90s. And while Murph is a great drummer responsible for some really memorable performances (the hi-hat on "Tarpit" being one of my favorites), I have a particular affection for J Mascis's drumming. He's of course one of the most revered guitarists of his generation, but he was a drummer first, playing drums in Barlow's pre-Dinosaur hardcore band Deep Wound, and I just really love how he plays on those '90s records. I never really gave a second thought to "Over Your Shoulder" before this week but it really is a great song, a suitable recipient of the weird viral fame it's ended up with. And I really like Thalia Zedek's occasional backing vocals on Without A Sound, particularly on "Yeah Right."

Back when buying CDs was the only way to hear most albums, I think it was more common to kind of buy an artist's records in a weird order based on whatever was available in the stores you went to. So I made the odd choice to get J Mascis's first solo album, the live acoustic record Martin + Me, pretty early in my fandom of the band. And that means I primarily associate a lot of songs from Green Mind and Where You Been with those solo versions, including "Blowing It," "Drawerings," and "Goin' Home."

Hand It Over was the first new Dinosaur Jr. album that came out after I got into the band and I really fell in love with it and still listen to it often to this day. I always felt like a weirdo for thinking Hand It Over is the band's second best album after You're Living, so I felt pretty vindicated to see that J Mascis agreed with me when he ranked the band's albums for Noisey. There are so many good songs on that record, I agonized about not having enough room for "Mick" or "Sure Not Over You" too, Kevin Shields and Belinda Butcher helped make the album and brought a little MBV texture to it.

But the wave that brought SST bands like Dinosaur and Sonic Youth and the Meat Puppets to their commercial peaks around 1994 had subsided by 1997, and Hand It Over sold less than the band's other major label records. Their ill-fated promotional tour including performing "Never Bought It" with some of J's most abrasive distortion pedals in an infamous appearance on The Jenny Jones Show. By the end of the year, they'd been dropped from their label and even though the band was essentially J Mascis at that point, he decided to 'break up' Dinosaur Jr. The two albums he made as J Mascis + The Fog were essentially Dinosaur albums, with J playing almost everything (and '90s Dinosaur drummer George Berz in the touring lineup). It's a shame that both of those records are missing from streaming services today, More Light was really awesome. And the show I saw in support of that record with Mike Watt on bass (where I interviewed Watt before the show) was probably the loudest show I've ever seen, louder even than the reunited Dinosaur a few years later.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 14, 2019 at 10:33 AM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.