The Weirdness Flows with Dinosaur Jr
Freakscene: The Story of Dinosaur Jr. confirms the band's legacy as one of the best American rock bands to ever do it
“We’re more like family than friends. A dysfunctional family.” It’s a line that comes from J Mascis, the legendary lead singer of Dinosaur Jr., towards the end of Freakscene: the Story of Dinosaur Jr., the new career-spanning documentary that just had a limited, one-night only release around the country, but to anyone who has ever had any remote interest in the group, it’s probably not a surprising one. Nothing about the band’s storied history has ever seemed easy or perhaps even enjoyable. Another memorable line comes towards the end of the band’s early run in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s when drummer Murph finally leaves the group. J tells him “if it’s not fun anymore, maybe you shouldn’t do this” and Murphy simply replies, “when was this ever fun?”
The story of Dinosaur Jr., has never really been hard to tell. From the ashes of hardcore band Deep Wound, J Mascis ditched the drums, picked up a guitar, asked Lou to keep playing bass (a move that shocked Barlow as he claims he always thought J hated him, even then), and found a drummer in Murph. The Western Massachusetts trio would then settle on the name Dinosaur and start to gain notoriety as one of the loudest bands around. After another band claimed they’d called themselves Dinosaur first, they stuck a “jr” on the end and kept on blasting out savagely loud tunes at aggressive volumes. After a trio of iconic indie staples, the band slowly turned into a solo project before being abandoned altogether only for the trio to reunite in the mid-aughts and pick up right where they left off. Now, their string of reunion albums not only is twice as long as their original output, but arguably is just as impressive as those seminal, early albums.
So, while the band’s story has already been that of legends, hearing (a bit) more from the members themselves feels special and the guests who contributed their tales are almost equally as exciting. We learn about their early tour with Sonic Youth around the time of You’re Living All Over Me and how it was the one and only time the band ever had fun on tour. The videos of these groups just hanging out in the late ‘80s is also a sight to behold. However, any mention of slightly good news is immediately thwarted by gnarly history. As the band found confidence in themselves, a tour bus disaster left them stranded in Idaho for a week when tensions came to a head and the band never fully recovered. It’s painful to hear Murph express how he knew they were a talented band, but how J and Lou couldn’t act mature enough to make it work.
It all leads up to a point where a video clip shows J and Lou get into a physical altercation on stage before Barlow is ultimately ejected from the group. Murph hangs on for a bit before ultimately delivering the quip about how it was never fun and J picks up the pieces long enough for the post-Nirvana wave to lift his newly-turned solo journey up and give him some MTV and late-night exposure through the rather large hit “Feel the Pain.” Of course he eventually folds, after a few more memorable musical guest TV appearances, and the band goes dark until Murph and Lou get the call (from J’s manager) to reunite in 2005.
Still, as I mentioned, none of this is new or told for the first time in the documentary. What the documentary does do, however, is show us a bit more of the intimate feelings between the band members. J never appears in clips with the others (aside from being together on tour or performing) and it’s the stories from Henry Rollins, Kim Gordon, Kevin Shields, Bob Mould, and Thurston Moore that really fill in the details. There is also an incredible moment when Frank Black of the Pixies mimics their colossal sound through some form of onomatopoeia that is just as fascinating as it is bizarre.
However, for me, the treat was being able to see the screening with J in attendance and having him participate in a Q & A after the film finished to give us even more dazed responses. He notes that there was a great deleted scene where Mark Lanegan talks about also wanting to kill Lou, he has no favorite new bands and didn’t discover any during the pandemic, and finally that when Nirvana finally made it to be the biggest band in the world, it was one time in life where he thought things actually made sense. It was a revealing moment where J expressed passion and seemed to actually be happy when recalling a moment of the past.
A fan also asked if J wasn’t making music what he would’ve ended up doing and after a brief pause he said “I could be the grouchy guy in a record store or maybe a therapist. You know, get paid to stare at people while they talk about things. Those are probably the only options.” He said it just as deadpan as every other remark and it really drove home the point that it’s always been about the music and nothing else. The band didn’t exist for them to have fun, become friends, and make it big. There wasn’t just the desire, but the need to play music as if that was the only option in the world. For them, it was and we’re lucky for it.
By the time the reunion seemed to be permanent, the band also finally seemed to acknowledge what Murph suggested back in the late ‘80s and they had matured enough to not only embrace their sound, but make it the best it could possibly be. As the documentary arrived at the band’s thirtieth anniversary shows which took place over a week at Bowery Ballroom in 2015, Lou says the band were at their peak and finally playing at a level they always knew they could achieve and seeing them celebrate this both in person (I was there!) and on screen felt epic and seeing clips from shows I attended cemented their legacy in my own heart, but also backed up Lou’s take that one day they’ll be remembered for their wall of sound the same way we remember The Ramones or Velvet Underground.
If anything, that’s the big takeaway from Freakscene. The band’s past is obviously vital and important, but it’s their legacy which has made them such icons all these years later and here, the argument is that Dinosaur are just as crucial to the indie rock scene as Sonic Youth, Pixies, or Pavement and we should treat them as such. From their hardcore roots to their pioneering shoegaze qualities, the imprint of the band can be seen and heard among countless other bands and not only did they all come up together to help invent the alternative music scene of the ‘90s, but Dinosaur Jr. has kept it alive all these years later. They redefined punk and what it meant to be a loud band and influenced countless others along the way. From the heavy, thrash punk of their ‘80s hey-day to their more Crazy Horse influenced anthems of today, it’s no question in my mind that they’re one of the best American rock bands to ever do it, period.
“Well if it’s not fun, why should I do it? That never occurred to us that it’s supposed to be fun. It’s just, music was really important and we wanted to do it.” It was always about the music. More than friendship, feelings, getting famous, or making money along the way, music was what bound them together. Over the years, Lou started other bands, J clearly recruited others to try and take the place of his bandmates, but none of it mattered when it came to them finally getting it. As Murph said, “We’re a good band. Why don’t you get with it? Why don’t you step up to the plate and make this shit happen?” Not only did they step up to the plate to make shit happen, they now seem unstoppable and a true force in the history of American rock music and one of the most reliably great and brilliantly consistent bands of all time. Even if they can’t be friends, their music feels like a stable thing for so many of us and even acts like that placeholder. When we need music, or a friend, it’s still (and always) them.