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Too Many Words About Dinosaur Jr.'s "Bug"

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."

Writing Garage Rock About Mental Health Isn't a Sexy Job, But Someone's Got to Do It (and At Least One of Those Someones Is Me)

It's weird to rock out about mental health. (Incidentally that comp ^ is designed to get you to do that, and it benefits the National Alliance on Mental Illness, so buy it.)

It's not that there's not precedent — there's "Nervous Breakdown," "Psycho" and about a million variations on that theme — it's just that it's not necessarily "fun," and garage rock is "supposed" to be fun. Arguments about whether or not people can or should discount whole bands or songs because they're not living up to some kind of arbitrary definition of "fun" aside, why is it complicated to write a song that explicitly discusses mental illness?

"Toss and turn all night / fidget through the day
Blacking out the blues / till everything turns gray"

Anxiety's not sexy. It lacks the gravitas of depression or the "exotic" qualities of your more severe personality disorders, and it's such a generalized term that celebrities have started "coming forward" about their "struggles with anxiety" the way they might have used to about, I don't know, sex addiction or kleptomania or what have you. (Honestly, if Kourtney Kardashian is living with anxiety, cool; I'm sorry, that sucks, Kourt. But I don't believe you.) Feeling agitated or upset about your life is just part of being a human; true and chronic anxiety is pervasive, amorphous and — at least in my experience — acutely, physically painful. But it's hard to drum up sympathy or even understanding when the reductive definition of your disease is "I'm worried."

"Closing up my chest / I'm hanging up a sign
This space is for rent / brother, can you spare a dime?"

Anxiety, like that Abilify commercial where depression is an anthropomorphic bathrobe, hangs over you and clouds your perception. For me, it meant (means) being 100% convinced at all times that something was (is) terrible, and if I didn't (don't) know what it was (is), I had better damn sure find out. More often than not, that meant inventing something, or many things. (This is a list of common cognitive distortions; disentangling myself from them is a daily process.) Articulating anxiety is difficult; for me it's a jumble of nervousness, irritation, anger, existential dread and a basic, ground-floor ennui or weltschmerz. Physically, when it's near the top end of the 1-10 scale, anxiety manifests as an actual pain in my chest, a shrinking, closing, cannot-catch-breath sensation, and, on the more whimsical side, near-constant fidgeting.

"I can't catch my breath / my mind is racing
I just need a rest / from this fucking thing
Please leave me alone /I didn't ask for this
There's a fuse blown / the wires spark and hiss"

It's an irritating and unfair double standard that we'll accept garage rock describing mental illness in amorphous and generic terms ("I'm crazy/psycho/having a nervous breakdown"), but there's some arbitrary tipping point where it stops being "fun" and starts being a drag. My line in the sand is honesty; I will bum you out with my songs if I have to, because the songs that mean the most to me are the ones that make me feel less alone — if I can help convince someone that what they're going through isn't their burden alone or that someone knows something about their fight, I want to do exactly that.

"I don't have time for regrets, I just have time to worry
I can't stay up all night crying over you, I've got some worrying to do"

"Klonopinoscopy" is sonically, as "fun" a song as any I've ever written. There's exactly one minor chord, there's a saxophone, and I've been referring to it as my "country" song. But it is also explicitly about the daily pain of having the brain that I have. Before I started being extremely open about it, people often expressed surprise when I talked about living with depression and anxiety because I'm a fairly jovial dude; to that end, my music is more or less the same balancing act that I've lived my whole life. Things are sad, and I'm worried about everything, but we should probably still go to that show. 

Unpopular Opinion: The Best Charles Mingus Album is "Blues and Roots"

Charles Mingus was, to drag out a reductive old cliche, a study in contrasts. He was a jazz musician as prone to volume as subtlety; a composer who favored his musicians' input as much as his own; a bassist who commandeered the spotlight as much as he supported it. His music careens through almost every sub-genre of jazz, but Mingus didn't adapt to whatever form he chose to work with — rather, he bent music to his own indomitable will, smashing barriers and tearing down walls.

The Mingus Legend is embellished, incorrectly remembered, or completely made up — a good bit of that by the man himself. Some of the stories are hilarious, like Mingus cutting his band off mid-set to give chatty audience members "solo breaks" as they continued talking through the sudden silence, unaware they were being shamed for their inattention. Some of them are sad, like when he punched his trombonist/arranger Jimmy Knepper in the mouth, ruining the man's ability to play his horn through its entire range. Some are just bizarre, like his unsolicited counsel to Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh, recounted in Dennis McNally's biography of the ban: "The way to make a woman love you is to fuck her for an hour and not come."

The man's outsize personality led to outsize music, all of it infused with the perfect amount of tension between music visceral and intellectual poles. On my personal favorite of his albums, the nonet and self-consciously "traditional" recording, Blues & Roots, instruments swoop and dive around each other like affable drunks, congratulating and confronting; written parts are replaced by spur-of-the-moment inventions; and throughout it all, Mingus howls in the background, sometimes with instruction, but mostly just for the hell of it. Tom Dowd, the Atlantic Records recording engineer who worked on Blues and Roots as well as virtually every album ever, spoke to the difficulty of recording Mingus's bass: Often, after Dowd had gotten a good recorded sound from the instrument in one spot in the studio's live room, Mingus would get distracted, pick up the instrument and walk away from the mic, sometimes while playing, to instruct a member of the ensemble. This is an apt metaphor for the man's career — as soon as you'd gotten a fix on him, he'd already packed up and marched elsewhere, inspiring others while he waited for you to catch up. 

Mingus' approach to composing the songs that make up Blues & Roots' was a tried-and-true one for him: He wrote the parts for the group but didn't notate them (that task was usually left to the unfortunate Knepper). Then, he gathered the musicians around a piano or his bass and played them their individual parts until they'd internalized them loosely enough to embellish or alter according to their own whims. Mingus was after (and achieved) a kind of compositional spontaneity that would allow for structured music to be played in an unstructured way. (Which is a really stupid and reductive way of describing jazz as a whole. I'm aware.) Consequently, when compared to another famous nonet recording from ten years prior, Miles Davis's Birth of the Cool, Blues & Roots is worlds apart — where Cool is intellectual and exacting, Blues & Roots threatens to burst at the seams with its own freewheeling vitality.

Blues and Roots opens with "Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting," a hard-charging tune in 6/4 that features some of Mingus's most "churchy" composing — band members enter and exit over each other's soloing in a way that isn't mean-spirited or showy, but exuberant. At 1:59, Horace Parlan drops into a stuttering ostinato that Mingus grabs onto like a pit bull. The rest of the band creeps back in slowly until Mingus screams "WELLLL I KNOOOOOW," signaling a return to regular time for Booker Ervin's tenor solo. At 3:06, Mingus cuts the band off and starts clapping, leaving Ervin to carry on accompanied by handclaps and vocals from the group. (Depending on the quality of the recording you're listening to, you can actually hear one of the microphones distort a little from Mingus's shouts.) Eventually, the whole band is howling, making it readily apparent that this music was as fun to record as it is to hear. The band's very minor fluctuations in feel towards the end are fascinating — it sounds like they didn't know if Mingus was going to cue another repeat of the melody or cut them off,  so you can hear them pull back slightly, as if anticipating an end that Mingus decided to delay after all.

'Cryin' Blues' quickly veers into a stellar bass solo from Mingus, who goads and pushes the tempo around, diving in and out of phrases equally informed by the blues and bebop. Unlike fleeter players like Paul Chambers or Scott LaFaro, whose virtuosity was nimble and effortless-sounding, Mingus makes you feel the physicality of the upright bass, digging in and slurring notes or hammering one note by flicking his index finger rapidly back and forth across the string. There's real earthy grit to his sound — you can practically hear the wood grain of his bass on this recording. Horace Parlan's piano solo jerks the rest of the band into a brief high-step around 3:12 as Mingus howls about goin' home. After another repeat of the chorus, bari sax player Pepper Adams and Mingus briefly trade a theme that bears a passing resemblance to Thelonious Monk's "Blue Monk" before the band brings the tune to a glorious, crashing end.

"Moanin" is the centerpiece of the album and a perfect distillation of everything that makes Mingus's music great. Short, catchy phrases are introduced and layered, building in dynamics and briefly detouring into a "B" theme until the whole ensemble reaches critical mass and slams to a halt with a powerful unison line. You can hear the musicians alter their parts as other members enter in turn, simplifying their own individual parts to free the ensemble sound of clutter; demonstrating the spontaneous telepathy that Mingus' groups were known for. Jackie McLean's signature "just a hair sharp" tone is fully on display during his solo at 2:22, and Mingus repeats the same descending bass lick repeatedly for ear-tickling repetition. It's worthwhile to listen to the section starting at 4:41 a few times in headphones to really understand the genius of Mingus' leadership: You can hear him snapping his fingers to indicate the upcoming section's tempo as drummer Danny Richmond sets up a time change on his kick drum and snare. It's unclear whether or not this change was made up on the fly, but the way the band lurches into the break-neck 6/8 meter after a brief press-roll from Richmond makes it clear they're used to this sort of thing. Richmond hits another tight roll at 5:31 and the band returns to the original 4/4 for the last statement of melody. Whew.

"Tensions" starts with a short but spry bass solo from Mingus that showcases one of his signature moves at :12 — not content to just bend the bass's G string to distort the pitch, Mingus just yanks the whole string horizontally off the side of the instrument's neck, producing a strangled tone that he still manages to keep in tune. "Tensions" is also notable for the brutally fast double-tonguing by the horns — the melody calls for exponentially faster trills as the timbre thickens and builds before Mingus's extended bass solo. Listen for his deft octave skipping lines at 1:41 and 1:52, and the long glissandi and harmonics at 2:18.  The tune comes out just as frenetic as it came in: McLean skitters around in the ether above the rest of the band, and at 5:58, it sounds like Parlan just slams his elbow onto the piano, which, you know, same.

"My Jelly Roll Soul" Mingus' tribute to New Orleans composer Jelly Roll Morton — he stiffly slaps and pops his upright's strings as some of the first New Orleans bassists did for some of the sections. Richmond alternates between a relaxed swing over the melody and an infectious parade-march beat during the first part of Knepper's trombone solo before he and Mingus relax into a more contemporary feel, though everybody's solos are pure Big Easy. The tune takes on another odd rhythmic twist halfway through Parlan's solo, and Mingus and Richmond navigate these seemingly spur-of-the-moment changes with such ease, it seems like they're sharing a brain. They close the solo section by passing the melody back and forth between the two of them, and despite the start-and-stop quality of the section, the relaxed swing never feels interrupted and Richmond sounds like he's playing melodies with his trap set.

"E's Flat Ah's Flat Too," another of Mingus' oft-recorded tunes, is a fantastic closer, featuring a singing bass intro from Mingus and another rattling, layered melody section. Ringer pianist Mal Waldron comes out swinging (pun fully intended) for the opening solo, and the rest of the solos are concise and punchy — exactly what you want in an album closer. Mingus resumes his opening line at points throughout the solos, always keeping an eye on cohesion in the midst of the ensemble's relative anarchy. Richmond provides a brief break before the cacophonous melody returns and the band rolls on like a freight train threatening to run off the tracks.

Mingus's life was marked by tragedy as much as it was righteous anger and joy. His career was hampered by financial problems, mismanagement, and all too frequently his own personality. Then, of course, came the cruel irony of Mingus's final years — he was crippled by Lou Gherig's Disease and increasingly unable to play or even notate the music he heard in his head. The last years of his life were marked by the singularly sad image of the great man hunched in a wheelchair, singing bits of compositions into a tape recorder out of the desperation to get some of it, any of it, out of his head and into the world before he passed. But this is not how Mingus deserves to be remembered. Instead, put on a record like Blues and Roots and feel the man's exuberance, creativity, and most importantly, his pure joy at being alive and sharing this wonderful music with us.