GroovyStylie!

Lou Barlow (Los Angeles, CA), Sarah Jaffe (Denton, TX) @ Plush

Sebadoh – Soul and Fire MP3

Sarah Jaffe – Clementine MP3

Dinosaur Jr. (Amherst, MA), Lou Barlow & The Missingmen (Los Angeles and San Pedro, CA), Violent Soho (Mansfield, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia) @ Marquee Theater

Some performers make their shows memorable by sheer force of personality. From the exuberance of Bruce Springsteen to the ambivalence of Bob Dylan they accentuate their stage presence. Dinosaur Jr. takes the exact opposite approach. If there were an antonym for the word “emote,” their presentation would serve as its dictionary definition. It might seem curious, then, that many of the people leaving the band’s November 3^rd, 2009 concert in Tempe, Arizona’s Marquee Theater were excitedly declaiming that it was one of the best shows they had ever seen. Somehow, in holding back Dinosaur Jr. managed to give their all.

Dinosaur Jr.

When the band first rose to prominence in the alternative rock scene of the late 1980s, they were frequently grouped together with other distortion-loving acts like the Jesus and Mary Chain, Sonic Youth, My Bloody Valentine and Nirvana. Critics tried to make sense of these artists’ seemingly counter-intuitive approach to melody, producing songs that would be the envy of the Brill Building were it not for the fact that they were submerged in torrents of noise.

Dinosaur Jr. were the hardest band to fathom of the entire set. Studiously avoiding irony in their songwriting and far more indebted to classic rock than those contemporaries, they nevertheless opted for a high-decibel presentation that made seeing their shows outright painful. This impulse to dress sincerity up in a winter storm’s worth of protective gear inspired all manner of analyses back in the heyday of alternative rock. Some inclined towards sociology, discerning generational wariness on the part of twenty-somethings tired of being told that their culture would never measure up to the Golden Age of the late 1960s. Others took a more psychological approach, describing the reluctance to permit beauty to be beautiful as passive-aggressive.

As compelling as such analyses might have seemed, however, they overlooked a crucial component of the noise rock experience. Just as people prefer to get gifts wrapped up in paper and bows, they seem to find concealed charms especially appealing. The mere fact that Dinosaur Jr. continues to draw enthusiastic crowds in its third decade of performing suggests that what might at first seem like hostility towards their audience is actually the best kind of tough love. Indeed, it could be argued that the band’s lack of stage presence and ear-bashing volume represent a deliberate attempt to bring scrutiny to the music at the expense of all else.

Dinosaur Jr.

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Musical reunions are hard to pull off. Although they promise a return to familiar pleasures, the vast majority fall well short of that goal. Instead of transporting you back to the comforts of home, the best they can do is to reconstruct it as a stage set, making the props on display stand in for the rest. It’s like watching your divorced parents play nice at your wedding, smiling together in family portraits as if the rancor between them had just been a bad dream. No matter how hard fans try to ignore what is missing, using the force of their nostalgia to flesh out details in their minds, the effect of this forced goodwill is still uncanny. You want to believe that the camaraderie is real, but the impulse to listen for false notes is hard to resist.

That’s why, as word first spread that the alternative rock band Dinosaur Jr.’s original line-up was reforming back in 2005, most of their fans were counting the days until it would end badly. Even in the best of times, it had never been an equal partnership. J Mascis not only wrote and sang most of the band’s songs, he also tightly scripted the parts played by bassist Lou Barlow and drummer Murph. Because Mascis continued to release material under the “Dinosaur Jr.” name for years after their departure, the mere idea of a reunion struck many people as strange. This wasn’t a case of a band like The Beatles, in which each member had a prominent role, getting back together. Indeed, if a band is like a marriage, Dinosaur Jr. had seemed like one doomed from the start.

Still, even if few fans had faith that the reunion would last, the fact that Barlow had managed to achieve considerable success with other projects, such as Sebadoh and The Folk Implosion, after parting ways with Mascis made it an exciting prospect. As an added bonus, several of the songs on Sebadoh’s breakthrough record III, including the scathing “The Freed Pig,” had clearly been fueled by Barlow’s rancor towards his former bandmate. If nothing else, the Dinosaur Jr. tour promised an opportunity to see how long a dysfunctional relationship could be sustained under the pressures of the road.

Longer than almost anyone thought, as it turned out. Not only have Dinosaur Jr. toured widely since their reunion tour was announced, they also released a critically lauded album Beyond in 2007 and then managed to put out another, Farm, in 2009 that was, if anything, even better received. Making this improbable longevity even more improbable  – after all, the original line-up only lasted a few years to begin with – is the fact that Barlow and Murph have made it clear that Mascis is still calling the shots. Clearly, something must have happened to make them willing to subordinate their wills to his.

Dinosaur Jr.

Although financial concerns surely played a role – band members can make more money playing under the “Dinosaur Jr.” banner than they can on their own – the music business is in such poor shape that it can hardly be called a case of selling out. On the contrary, the motivation for staying together seems to be the conviction that autonomy is less important solidarity. The same reasons to break up that existed in 1988 still exist today, to an extent. But dwelling on negatives doesn’t seem to be as high a priority.

If  Beyond or Farm were like most reunion or comeback records, this would be the perfect següe for a backhanded compliment. “Sure, the band may not be what it once was, but we’re happy enough to have them back together that nitpicking would be counter-productive.” The reason this critical approach doesn’t work with these reunion albums is that although Dinosaur Jr. may not have been what they once seemed to be in their early years, they definitely are now. That is to say, this is one of those extremely rare cases in which a band only became a functional musical marriage after the divorce.

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It’s almost impossible to imagine a Dinosaur Jr. fan disliking the sound of the reunion records. Everything that made their 1980s albums exciting is present, as well as the innovations that J Mascis introduced in the 1990s after Barlow and Murph had been shunted aside. But there is one crucial difference between the new material and the music on Your Living All Over Me and Bug: it doesn’t make the same detour through memory. Sure, a longtime Dinosaur Jr. fan can listen to the post-reunion albums in the grip of nostalgia for the band’s classic sound. But the flood of associations triggered by songs like “The Lung” and “Get Me” and “Freak Scene” will be missing.

Of course, this is a problem that all artists with lengthy careers face. Whether you’re Bob Dylan or Gang of Four, your recent records are structurally incapable of evoking the complex personal responses of ones that fans have been listening to for decades. It doesn’t matter how good they are, in the end, because what they lack has nothing to do with the music. This is why folks rush out to get the latest release by their favorite classic rock or punk artists only to be disappointed because they can’t purchase the texture of remembrance. It also explains the enormous pressure audiences exert on performers to reprise their old hits.

Predictably, then, Dinosaur Jr.’s set at the Marquee witnessed an ebb and flow of concertgoers’ investment as

Dinosaur Jr.

post-reunion songs gave way to the best-known material from their back catalogue. For older members of the audience, who had been listening to their records for years or perhaps even seen them live back in the late 1980s or early 1990s, this dynamic made sense. The odd part was that the teens and twenty-somethings that made up a sizable percentage of the crowd demonstrated the same response. Somehow they knew when to nod in stunned admiration for J Mascis’s guitar-playing, when to sing along and when to push their bodies into overdrive as an expression of bliss.

More impressively, many of them seemed to understand that they were caught up in a paradoxical experience. True lovers of the band periodically wish for the volume to be turned down, so that the songs’ melodicism can be fully appreciated. But they also want the volume turned up, so that brute force pulverizes all traces of delicacy. The brilliance of Dinosaur Jr. lies in those contradictory desires., which were fully mobilized at the Marquee.

–Charlie Bertsch <cbertsch@gmail.com>