Lou Barlow keeps spirit alive returning to band that kicked him out (Part 2 of 2 of Indie Ethos exclusive)

Before labels like “alternative,” “emo,” “lo-fi” and “grunge” became easy go-to words for lazy rock writers, somewhere in the northeast of the United States, a trio of teenagers began making indescribable music they liked. It was 1984, and these were the top 10 singles of the year:

1. “When Doves Cry”…..Prince
2. “What’s Love Got To Do With It”…..Tina Turner
3. “Jump”…..Van Halen
4. “Karma Chameleon”…..Culture Club
5. “Like A Virgin”…..Madonna
6.”Hello”…..Lionel Richie
7. “Owner Of A Lonely Heart”…..Yes
8. “Against All Odds (Take A Look At Me Now)”…..Phil Collins
9. “Footloose”…..Kenny Loggins
10. “Ghostbusters”…..Ray Parker, Jr.
(check out the bottom 90 here)

Was a revolution in popular music ever due (like today’s pop music scene). It was among these hits that Lou Barlow, J Mascis and Emmett Jefferson “Murph” Murphy III created a little band called Dinosaur Jr. while attending college in Amherst, Massachusetts. After an odd debut album in 1985 that went nowhere and may have just been ahead of its time with its mix of shoegaze, goth, hardcore, country, folk and classic rock, soon enough Dinosaur Jr. would become an iconic group of the nineties-era alternative rock scene.

Nowadays, Dinosaur Jr. is one of a handful of bands referred to as touchstones of an era that also produced Nirvana, Pearl Jam and the Pixies. Dinosaur has found a resurgence recently, as the original line-up has not only returned (that was already two new albums ago) but has maintained itself for an up-coming third album, so despite Barlow’s strong language below (pardon the “F” bombs and read the entire Q&A before drawing conclusions, cyber people), he and his mates have certainly found a way to maintain a creative spark among any so-called artistic differences. It must also be a good thing that Barlow stays busy with his own solo music, other collaborations, including a resurrected Sebadoh, the band Barlow created practically alongside his gig in Dinosaur Jr. Now, it too will record a new album (read the scoop at Backstagerider.com).

If you read Part 1 of this interview with Dinosaur Jr.’s bassist/part-time vocalist Barlow (Sebadoh’s Lou Barlow talks beginning with ‘Weed Forestin’ [soon to be reissued on LP]: an Indie Ethos Exclusive [Part 1 of 2]), you will have noticed I have already touched on the relevance of the band during the popular years of alternative rock, as well as the slightly lesser known Sebadoh. Barlow was with Dinosaur Jr. for its first three, and arguably most acclaimed, albums. He was then kicked out, the circumstances of which, Barlow is refreshingly candid about in the Q&A below. Likewise, Barlow also offers his feelings about working with Eric Gaffney, the other half of the original Sebadoh, the band Barlow started after Dinosaur Jr. Finally, Barlow shares his regret of having Sub Pop reissue Sebadoh’s  Bakesale on vinyl (Support the Independent Ethos, purchase on Amazon … you’ll also be supporting Barlow and Sub Pop). Why would he regret having reissued the record often referred to as the definitive Sebadoh record? Read on…

Part 1 of this interview ended with Barlow, noting “the power of Dinosaur Jr.,” which takes us right into part 2…

Hans Morgenstern: You guys are getting along good right now, right?

Lou Barlow: I don’t know… whatever. (laughter)

I heard you were “kicked out of the band” when they signed to a major label. Can you explain what happened there?

That’s not why I was kicked out. J was just like, ‘I’m sick of this. I can’t deal with this anymore.’

What’s “this”?

Just me hating him. Me just making him feel weird (laughs), so he kicked me out of the band, and they put out a single on Sub Pop and they signed to a major label.

You guys got back together in 2005. Did you ever think, 10 years ago, that the original Dinosaur would ever get back together, tour and record new material?

No, but when it happened I thought it was a good time. It made sense to me when it happened, but I certainly didn’t think that … maybe two years before, that I would have been like, ‘No, never!’ But I would go to J’s solo shows, and we did a show together at a benefit, and we sort of reunited our hardcore band for one song at a show, and I thought, maybe J’s kinda open and into things, and he can deal with this.

You even recorded together.

Yeah, we’ve done two records together.

Is a third record coming?

Yep! J, he’s totally on fire. He’s writing new songs.

But you also wrote Dinosaur Jr. songs, right?

Yeah. On the second record, I did two songs on that record. On the reunion records, I did two songs on each record.

But nothing on the first album [Dinosaur]?

He masterminded that record. It was amazing. Amazing songs. Fuckin’ amazing. But he really wanted me to sing. He didn’t really want to sing, so he sort of assigned songs for me. But I wasn’t really at the same spot, songwriting-wise. I was only starting to write songs, but he was amazing when he was 19 years old, freshman in college. He was on fire. He fuckin’ did all these amazing songs and said, ‘sing this,’ and I’m like, OK! (laughs). It was amazing. He was really into it, really inspired.

How has these past few years felt with the old guys in Dino? Is it more comfortable than it was back then?

Oh, yeah, definitely. But it’s the same (laughs). J’s not really into it. He’s not into anything really. He’s not into the way I play, he’s not into my songs, he’s not into Murph playing drums, but he deals with it, you know? (laughs) He’s like, ‘I guess other people like what’s going on here.’ He came to a point in his life where he understood that other people liked things that he didn’t really like, and then he would tolerate the things that other people liked that he didn’t really like (laughs), which is an amazing thing for someone to go like, ‘Hey, wait, I don’t like this but other people do, so I’ll guess I’ll do this because other people like it’ (laughter). He actually did that, which is, for him, an amazing, incredible leap.

How did the restart of Sebadoh come about?

We never really stopped playing, so I think there was a reissue of Bakesale, and Domino Records in England were like, ‘You’ve got to do this. We’ve got to reissue this record, we’ve got to reissue this record. We’ve got to.’ Then, finally, I’m like, OK, let’s do it. Let’s reissue the record. Then Sub Pop in the US wanted the record, but they didn’t want to release it. They wanted to do it digitally, then I had to tell them they had to do it physically. It was horrible, and of course it didn’t sell for them at all, and they lost a ton of money on it again (laughs). It’s kind of sort of tragic. It was awful. It was awful trying to convince Sub Pop to do a record that they would [lose money on]. I was like, come on, do this for me. I know you’re going to do a lot of money on it, so please do it, and they did it and then we toured. But we’ve been touring like every three or four years since we broke up, actually. We never broke up, actually, let’s put it that way. I think the interest in the band has never really been that great, so whatever. We do it when we can do it. Like when our schedules allow.

How would you describe Eric Gaffney’s role in the band? He was your first member of Sebadoh and co-wrote many songs on the first album. He even rejoined in a resurrected Sebadoh that toured in 2007 and 2008. Why is he no longer a member?

He doesn’t really like to play drums at all (laughs), which is really what I like him to do … to be inspired and play drums like he really likes it. We did a reunion tour like a few years ago, and he played drums, but he wouldn’t play the drums, you know? We would try to teach him songs that he didn’t know, and he wouldn’t learn them. It was kinda like being with J and Murph. They’re really just not into learning… They’re not into me. They’re not into my stuff, so it was hard to like really get Eric to play songs that he didn’t actually play, on the original recordings, so it’s very difficult. He wants to be the leader of a band and play guitar, which is awesome, which is great. I’d love to be in a band with Eric Gaffney, but I would need him to give as much effort as I give to him. I need something reciprocal from him, and he’s really not into that.

Is he doing anything right now?

Eric is awesome. He’s a great musician, and he writes really interesting songs, but he’s just not into collaborating, and that’s my thing. With Sebadoh it’s really about collaboration. It’s about people working together, and Eric’s not really into working together. … If I want Eric Gaffney to learn a bunch of Bakesale songs, and he won’t learn them, where am I at? What do we do with that? Like we would literally, on the tours that we did, we would say, ‘Eric, here’s a song,’ and we gave him like a few songs, like ‘Love is Stronger Than the Truth,’ from a record that he didn’t play on. ‘Here’s the song, I would like to play it, and people would like to hear it.’ He fuckin’ wouldn’t learn it (laughs). We’d be halfway through the tour, and he’d still be stumbling through the fuckin’ breaks. What do you do with that? What do you fuckin’ do with that? In the meantime, he’s showing us new songs, and we’re like, ‘Yeah, man, bring it on. Fuck yeah!’ We’re like fuckin’ into anything that he brings, but then you try to bring something that he doesn’t know, and he’s just like, ‘I don’t know…’”

Where does this rock star attitude come from?

I don’t know, man. Everyone I know is a fuckin’ rock star… but  not like Jason Loewenstein. Jason Loewenstein’s fuckin’ awesome. He’s into it. He does his best. The other people that I know like J and Eric and Murph, like those guys are like, ‘Hey, I’m not into this, so I’m not doin’ it.’ (laughs).

It’s going to be fun socializing with them on the cruise ship.

No, no, no. They’re awesome. They’re awesome people. I’m just sayin’ on a creative level … In my opinion, if you’re a musician, you fuckin’ play music, and if someone says you play a song, you fuckin’ learn the song, and you play it. No matter what your opinion was. If someone shows you a song, and you say, ‘I don’t think that song is very good,’ you don’t say that (laughs). You play it. You take it as a challenge. You say, OK, I’m going to try to add to this song in a way that might make it better or more interesting for myself. You don’t shut down and not give to it. You take it as a challenge. If you were given something that you don’t respond to, that’s a challenge to make it interesting for yourself. Not to make the fuckin’ person that handed a piece of your soul to you… every song that someone hands to you is a piece of their soul, and you make the fuckin’ best of that. You’re making a huge risk by handing something creative to someone else. If you were a friend, and also if you were a fuckin’ good person, you say, ‘OK, thank you, I will do my best.’ You don’t just say (in dumb voice): ‘I don’t know man, I’m not feeling it.’

Are you thinking about Eric when you are saying all this?

I’m thinking about J, I’m thinking about Eric… uhhhh (he sighs) it drives me fuckin’ nuts about some people.

What happened recently that has caused this to bubble up?

No, whatever, it’s happened my whole experience. Every record that I’ve ever made, except when I worked with Jason Loewenstein. He’s fuckin’ awesome. Jason Loewenstein, Bob [D’Amico], [Imaad] Wasif, the people that I worked with in the Folk Implosion, great. Although that’s different. Eric Gaffney, J Mascis, Murph, those, those guys are (dumb voice) ‘I don’t know man.’ (laughs) You’re, really? Really? (Cracks up).

It sounds like it’s going to be a long tour…

No, no, dude. It’s all good (laughs). I’m just explaining to you. This doesn’t bum me out to the point that I’m not going to do what I do. I’ve just discovered with musicians that I’ve worked with, you’ve got the guys that synch, you’ve got the guys that go, ‘I don’t know, man. I don’t like this. I don’t feel like playin’ it’ or you’ve got the guys that go, ‘Hey, I don’t like this. I don’t care. I’m going to fuckin’ play it coz I’m a fuckin’ musician’ (laughs). ‘I’m going to focus and do it, and I’m going to do my best, and if I don’t like it, I’m going to try to do something that I do like on it.’ There’s collaborators and there’s fuckin’ people that are not collaborators, and I’ve dealt with both and I deal with both, and I will continue to deal with both (laughs).

In the Freed Man [Sebadoh’s debut album, when Sebadoh was just Barlow and Gaffney], you can tell there is a clash going on there.

Yeah, cause he played his own songs, and I was trying to involve him. I desperately wanted to be in a band with him, and I was just trying to involve him in the process and think, naively, that I would gain his trust (laughs). I was trying to gain his trust basically. Just looking back at it, it was amazing I just spent so much time trying to gain his trust … and then make him a collaborator. But I think when people are not collaborators, they’re not collaborators, unfortunately. You can’t make someone collaborate (laughs). As he collaborated with me, I thought that then I could collaborate with him, and that’s not really the case. That’s a big lesson that I learned.

I then ask Barlow whether this conversation is going on too long for him since I only requested 15 minutes. Then, he reveals, indeed he can cope fine with artistic differences while continuing to work with Dinosaur Jr. A member of Dinosaur was at his home all along during the interview, watching the two children Barlow has with his longtime wife. “Murph, the drummer of Dinosaur Jr., is watching our kids right now,” Barlow says. “He’s awesome.”

Sebadoh performs in Miami on Wednesday, Jan. 18, with Jacuzzi Boys and Plains supporting. Doors open at 8 p.m. Tickets are $15 in advance, on sale here, or $20 at the door. All ages are welcome. After a long weekend at sea on the Weezer Cruise (Edit: You can now read a 4-part recap of the event here), Lou Barlow returns to the same venue as bassist with Dinosaur Jr. Yuck will support at that show, also all ages, on Monday, Jan. 23. Doors open at 8 p.m.  Tickets are $26 in advance, on sale here, or $30 at the door.

—Hans Morgenstern

(Copyright 2012 by Hans Morgenstern. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.)

I have booked a cabin on ‘The Weezer Cruise’

It’s on. I just paid off the balance we owed for a cabin on the Weezer Cruise. Having once worked for a cruise line (wearing the monkey suit at the Port of Miami and all) and taken advantage of “taxes only cruises” including a trans-Atlantic one that cost me about $150, I had resigned myself to never do another cruise again. Well, here comes the Weezer Cruise, offering a line-up on a Carnival cruise ship that includes many an intriguing band from the early indie rock days of Generation X (led by Weezer, of course) to today’s kids (including Yuck, who seem to recall the early nineties lo-fi sound with astounding devotion). The complete line-up includes:

• Weezer
• Dinosaur Jr.
• J. Masics
• Sebadoh
• Lou Barlow (seems the original Dinosaur Jr. reunion is still going strong)
• Yuck
• Gene Ween and Dave Driewitz (a good part of Ween)
• The Antlers
• Wavves
• Free Energy
• Boom Bip
• Keepaway
• Ozma (whose keyboardist, Star Wick, will teach yoga on board, while guitarist Jose Galvez will host 80s karaoke in the eveings)
• The Nervous Wreckords
• The Knocks
• Sleeper Agent
• and Yacht Rock Revue (whoever that may be…)

It appears to be a much mellower, sensitive group of bands— with some strange wit thrown into the mix— than an earlier similar-themed cruise with another alt-pop nineties act, 311, headlining (I just learned a second cruise featuring 311  will happen in 2012). Among many other nautical music festivals designed by Sixthman, catching 311 on a cruise ship really did not make me blink. But when I received the email announcing the sale of space aboard the Weezer Cruise a couple weeks ago, the line-up dazzled these eyes.

I remember attending a Weezer concert, very vaguely, in 1996 at some large club in Fort Lauderdale that I think no longer exists. I thought their “Sweater Song” was annoying, and I had never heard the then new album Pinkerton. I think I had some free tickets, invited by an old friend I must have fallen out of touch with. The memory of the show faded into memory as something close to… meh. My devotions to nineties bands, stayed in the world of the slightly more “underground”: post-rock, Stereolab, Yo La Tengo, the Sea and Cake, Red House Painters, Spiritualized, Swans and such. Only many years after graduating college would I later come to appreciate that I was a fan of Radiohead and even Flaming Lips. Weezer, in the meantime, has remained a distant, hazy college memory that was just a part of the flavor of the era.

The moment I really felt convinced this cruise might be worth attending came when my eyes  gravitated to the fact that Dinosaur Jr. will be a great part of the schedule. Besides Dinosaur Jr., frontman/guitarist/J. Masics will play solo shows. Then there are shows by Sebadoh, the band Dinosaur Jr. bassist and singer Lou Barlow fronted on the side in the late eighties. Plus, he too will perform solo shows. Barlow would later dedicate himself to Sebadoh in the nineties after Dinosaur Jr. signed to a major label and he was kicked out of that band. I have such affection for Sebadoh that I consider the home-recorded Freed Weed some sort of odd masterpiece where the songs are as much about the lo-fi recording technique that preserved them as the writing. I met Barlow once at an in-store performance at the long-disappeared Blue Note Records in North Miami Beach, sometime in the early to mid-nineties, and told him how much I loved Freed Weed for that quality. He modestly suggested I check out Smog, but I still have a soft spot for some of the surprising and serendipitous gorgeousity of the noise hidden in the cracks of Freed Weed. Yes, for me this will be the great Dinosaur Jr. family tree show over a period of four days that will happen to unfold on a Carnival Cruise ship. My own subconscious could not have concocted a stranger dream (and I have experienced concerts of a Peter Gabriel-fronted Genesis— costumes and all— at a weakly-attended Miami Beach club and saw early Stereolab at a shopping mall in my dreams).

The bonuses are nothing to sneeze at. Yuck, who have been celebrated by a seeming nostalgia for the nineties-era indie sound of such artists like Pavement and Archers of Loaf, Superchunk and even Sonic Youth (in its nineties phase) will perform a couple of shows. Here is a new live video of probably my favorite track off their recent album (I get flashbacks of St. Johnny’s “Givin’ up” hearing this):

Then there is Waaves, who I first saw last year in Miami Beach when they opened for Phoenix (Phoenix pack arena-sized show into Fillmore theater). It will be great seeing them again on stage. The Antlers were another nice surprise to see in the line-up. That band is also a recently formed group of young musicians that began with bedroom recordings, influenced by nineties-era lo-fi noise pop by the likes of the Flaming Lips and My Bloody Valentine.

There will be many an interesting show for an indie rock lover on this “boat,” and that’s plenty to make up for my ambivalence towards Weezer. But despite said ambivalence, I have not given up on them just yet. All this renewed interest in Pinkerton of late has inspired me to finally invest in listening to that 1996 album seeing as the band is focused on reviving that album nowadays and playing it in its entirety during the ship-board shows along with the album’s B-sides. This all seems to weird… on a ship? Well, here is Weezer drummer Pat Wilson with details:

Cabins are still available and start at just over $500 for the 4-night cruise. If you are going, let me know.

—Hans Morgenstern

(Copyright 2011 by Hans Morgenstern. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.)