O: You guys have said some pretty terrible things about each other over the years, and Lou even sued J. How did you get past the insults?
JM: I guess it was just up to him to mellow out a bit. Lou's always expressed interest in a reunion, even when he's screaming at me. He realized he had to take some of the blame for the past.
LB: Well, J says it's because I mellowed out; I think it's because he mellowed out. [Laughs.] Because he was pretty much like a borderline sadist when I was in the band with him—he took great pleasure at other people's pain. [Laughs.] Now, he doesn't seem to be that way, and if he was that way, I would pick up on it. When I yelled at him a few years ago, it was because I thought he was saying extremely thoughtless and cruel things about people. When I began to see him after that, he just didn't have that edge, which then made me kind of mellow out. I don't really hold grudges with people—I mean, I have problems with people and things that I work through, but I've found that just about everything, every kind of breakup that I've had, always seems to come full circle, and I'm very open to that in my life. That's a big part of my life: reconciliation. So to see that kind of end with J, I was like, "Oh, okay." You know, I didn't quit the band. I wasn't driven away from the band. I would have stayed in that band for as long as they would have had me, regardless of how I felt mistreated. I would have stayed with the band for the music. So yeah, I definitely mellowed out, but it's because I was starting to get the idea that J had changed, and a lot of people had told me that. And as I actually began to see that myself, that's when my guard just totally dropped. I had a huge chip on my shoulder about what had happened to me in that band. And the way that J sort of phrases it now, like "Lou mellowing out," it's like, "Yeah, but this is like a—"
O: An action-reaction thing.
LB: This is an action-reaction thing. The thing about keeping the band together was not the issue between me and J, ever—we were always on the same page musically and kind of philosophically. The problem with keeping Dinosaur Jr. together was keeping Murph in the band, and my biggest job in that band was convincing Murph that we were great, and that's what I did all the time. Murph was the wild card. I wasn't. That came out later. I got a girlfriend and came out of my shell, to the horror of these people in a very controlled social situation, which was J's world, which was—whether J knew it or not—very much under his control. And when I came out of my shell, I then became something that couldn't be predicted. You couldn't predict what would come out of my mouth, and I took great pleasure in that. And the only real way of preserving that situation, the only way of J remaining in control of his world at that point, the world of that band, was to get me out of there. And that's what happened. And I'm sure it was very annoying to hear me come out of my shell, I don't doubt that. But we were all annoying. [Laughs.]
O: What did keeping Murph in the band entail?
LB: Talking constantly about it. Murph was a free spirit—he liked everything and anything. Murph was the guy that was driving 100 miles an hour down the back roads, drinking beers, scoping out parties, listening to Frank Zappa at top volume, and expounding on the virtues of jazz fusion. Where J and I were like, The Birthday Party, Neil Young. We were very open-minded, in our way, but there was a vision—J was writing these songs, and I intuitively and implicitly understood where he was going with his songs and what he wanted. Murph was the guy who was like, "What is this about? What's the big deal? Why are you guys telling me that I gotta play this way?" And that was a huge tension... It was really about keeping the band dynamic together and me and Murph solidifying as a rhythm section, and that was a lot of what I was involved with in the band. People kind of make this like, "J and Lou hate each other!" We weren't arguing. There were no fights between J and I. It came down to like two instances: One was me doing a bunch of really ill-advised feedback during a slow song, which J took as a personal affront and attacked me onstage, and then the second being the actual kicking me out of the band. And that was it. Between that time, there were no arguments between J and I—there was just no communication. We just didn't have that kind of chemistry. We had musical chemistry, but we had no personal chemistry. But I was hardly the only person on the planet that didn't have personal chemistry with J Mascis. [Laughs.]
M: The band was most important to Lou. Lou felt like the band was this real angel's egg or whatever. Whereas J was like—it was a lot of his stuff, so I think he could only be so objective. And me, I was just like, "Yeah, you know, whatever. We're just this sloppy punk-rock band. Who cares?" [Laughs.] But yeah, Lou was the most serious as far as like, "This band, man, this is like really important." He definitely was very idealistic about it, which was cool. J was, too, but Lou was definitely more so.
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