Opposites attract, maybe, but I think a better way of putting it is that opposition is attractive. Miles Davis was always surrounding himself with fleet-fingered saxophonists, from Cannonball Adderley and John Coltrane in his earlier quintets to Wayne Shorter (in his "Second Great Quintet"), Gary Bartz, and Dave Liebman (in his later electric groups). Liebman's theory was that Davis recognized that the contrast between his own Spartan style and a saxophonist capable of playing every mathematically possible permutation of a D minor scale within one bar was appealing to audiences, and indeed, it was a formula Davis stuck with for the majority of his career.
Rock music has its productive yet fractious relationships as well. My personal favorite is Ray and Dave Davies of the Kinks. Unlike the Gallagher brothers of Oasis, who are mostly content to undermine each other's presence with words, the Davies' relationship is best illustrated by an incident during an interview at a restaurant: Dave stole one of his brother's french fries and Ray stabbed him in the chest with a fork.
Which brings us to Dinosaur Jr. The band melded the volume and fury of punk to a melodic and musically brilliant songwriting sensibility, creating a number of defining albums and becoming a huge influence, etc. The Reader's Digest version of their story: Leader J. Mascis was a socially stunted guitar virtuoso and gifted songwriter who made his bandmates' life a living hell, eventually driving the extremely talented and rhythm section of the band's "classic" lineup (bassist Lou Barlow and drummer Murph) away and continuing the band as essentially a solo project. (Barlow was and is kind of a weirdo, too, so the blame can't be laid solely on Mascis.) Their mutual antipathy forged a high-volume sound that was as much physical as musical: Their second album You're Living All Over Me (the title came from a Barlow/Mascis argument while on tour) was specifically engineered to sound like the whole thing was being overloaded by the sort of shitty '80s PA everybody seemed to be playing through at the time — that is to say, distorted and often on the verge of being totally indistinguishable. (See also: Hüsker Dü.) But Mascis's songs were beautifully constructed chunks of emotive noise: He deemed the aesthetic "ear-bleeding country."
The band's third album was Bug, and while it spawned the pseudo-hit single "Freak Scene," Mascis claims it's his least favorite of the band's work. I prefer it to You're Living All Over Me, though — it's a much more consistent record, a little more polished, and there's no Barlow sound-collage nonsense like "Poledo" to slow the flow.
Bug starts off with "Freak Scene," and it's a helluva opener. Mascis cloaks every Dinosaur Jr. song in a swath of guitars, and "Freak Scene" veers from generic classic-rock-style distortion, to a slightly louder brand of that same distortion, to jangly Byrds-style chords and finally some acoustic thrown in — and just that's by 1:15. Conventional wisdom on Mascis' skills as a guitarist is that the dude fucking rips, and here's my take: The dude fucking rips. Solidly rooted in Zeppelin-esque weedily-wah, but clearly enamored of sheer hardcore noise, he's able to reel off leads that both assault and assuage.
The album's second song "No Bones" is more of a showcase for Barlow's monstrous bass tone than Mascis, at least for the first part. Barlow's bass playing is idiosyncratic but supportive and inextricable from the band's sound, providing a nice bridge between Mascis's wall of noise and Murph's John Bonham-indebted stomp. Around 2:42 (after some conventional soloing) things get really weird. Mascis continues soloing over an acoustic guitar track, but both of those are backgrounded to another track of Mascis's guitar with a flange pedal (and a boatload of tape echo) applied to it. This section isn't exactly a "solo;" it just kind of sounds like Mascis is kicking the living shit out of his amp. It's a singular clusterfuck of guitar noise, creative and weirdly moving: I can listen to that solo section over and over again — it touches me in a way that conventional guitar playing just doesn't.
"They Always Come" bounces along on some powerful fills from Murph and a downright frenetic tambourine part — until Mascis's New-Wavey break at 2:00 gives way to a soaring bass part from Barlow and a down-tempo solo section with Mascis's vocals weaving in and out of what seems like eight to twelve different guitar tracks. "Yeah We Know" features some of the most crushing snare shots since "Like A Rolling Stone." Murph might have the misfortune to deeply resemble Matt Pinfield, but he's a bad man: an agile, deft drummer who more or less steals the show from Mascis on this track.
"Let It Ride" features some of Mascis's best vocal work. He's an eerily effortless singer and even when it's pretty clear he's straining somewhere around the top of his range, he still sounds like can't really be bothered to try any harder. There's a great breakdown at 2:34 that I like to imagine as Mötorhead attempting to write a Cure song, followed by yet another twelve J solos crammed into two tracks of guitar and then one of the most abrupt endings of any song, ever.
"Pond Song" has some delicate, lovely acoustic work and an annoyingly endearing vocal from Mascis — the Neil Young comparisons that dogged the band were not without basis. At 1:31, there's a really creative break that sort of sounds like J trying to make his guitar approximate a theremin with nothing but feedback. In fact, listening to it now, I would be 100% convinced that it was a theremin if I thought that Mascis knew how to play one and did so simply out of spite because Lou Barlow did too and wanted to play it on the record.
"Budge" is, but for the album closer "Don't," one of the last vestiges of pure punk energy on Bug. The verse surges along on a beat that Mascis might have decided to describe to Murph as "get out and push," though it mixes a healthy bit of twang-jangle that sounds vaguely indebted to REM. "Post" is another of Mascis' mashups: The verse is a sludgy sort of trudge with J's feedback squalls in the background, while the chorus features the closest thing to a Willie Nelson song that ever came out of a band whose first incarnation was called Deep Wound.
Then there's the clusterfuck of 'Don't.' Beyond being the only track that J deemed to allow Barlow to sing lead on on Bug, the tune is also just wildly out of step with anything else on the album, a painful creep through overloaded guitars tracks and forceful drums, but the cherry on top is the irony/dicktitude of Mascis forcing Barlow to sing "Why don't you like me?" over and over and over again until he coughed up blood (I'm not being sarcastic about that, it's in Our Band Could Be Your Life). It seems more like an act of vengeance when you consider that it's nothing but wah-pedal-feedback in one ear, and wanky, meandering solo in the other when the rest of Bug cruises along on such concise, well-written songs.
Still, the tune has some real force to it. (How could it not?) Someone (presumably Mascis) chose to augment Barlow's vocal entrance at :29 with a blast of distortion: The vocal track and guitar blow out at the same time, briefly giving the impression that Barlow's causing that horrendous noise just by himself. Barlow, for his part, does find an astounding number of ways to vary his delivery of that song's lone lyric. "Don't" briefly falls apart at around 3:27 — it's perhaps a testament to the band's slacker aesthetic that they chose to let their sloppiest song on the record deteriorate even more — and at 3:43, Mascis hits a feedback squall that's far and away the most heinous on the record, peaking a few seconds later at about 3:46.
Bug was really Dinosaur Jr.'s swan song before Mascis unleashed the incredible dick move of having Murph fire Barlow for him, which was somehow interpreted by Barlow as news that the band was breaking up entirely — he later found out what really happened and had something of a meltdown. By 1994, even Murph had left, and the band had come full circle: Mascis was now just like his classic rock idols, using a rotating cast of musicians to record and perform music rigorously controlled by him. Of course, since then, the band has reunited and is currently touring and recording under the classic lineup, still causing hearing loss wherever they go, but presumably minus the tension that drove the band to the heights of Bug. To paraphrase Mascis: "I dunno. Probably."