O: It must have been weird to have J in the crowd while you sang songs about him.
LB: He wouldn't know, though.
O: But you would know.
LB: I would know, but singing songs about people who are there—it's gotta be done. It's the only way to really write good songs. [Laughs.] You can cover everything in all the metaphor you want, but as far as directly communicating with people, that's pretty much what it's about. I wrote a lot of songs for him that were actually not hate songs—I thought that they were very well-researched, and I often implicated myself in the problem just as much. [Laughs.] But I never thought he would listen to them. I knew he wouldn't, as a matter of fact. Which actually gave me a lot of freedom.
O: The fact that J offered to let you use his amp goes against the perception that you two didn't talk for years.
LB: There's a lot made that we hated each other while the band was going on, and it wasn't really that—it's just that we didn't communicate. We had, like, zero chemistry as people. J's someone that, if you get him going and talking and feeling comfortable, he can be really articulate and easy to talk to. But you have to do the work. And when I was in the band with him—actually, from the first time that I met him—I held him in really high esteem, because I thought he was really talented and well-dressed and he was like the coolest guy I'd ever met.
So I was very intimidated by him, and for that reason, I could never just walk up to him and slap him on the back, like, "Hey, J, what's going on, man?" I would always approach him as if he had literally been beamed down from another planet. 'Cause I thought he possessed super powers—I really did, from very early on. He was an amazing drummer, amazing songwriter, he picked up the guitar and within a very short period, he wrote those first three Dinosaur records. And there's so much on there, lyrically and melodically—I was totally in awe of the guy, so it was very hard for me to just be mellow around him. I really kind of worshipped him. He has an older brother, so when you smell that kind of worship in somebody, you tend to want to abuse them, I think. I haven't had that experience, because I grew up with all sisters, but he had an older brother and had a lot of friends in high school, so I think once he sort of figured out I respected him too much, he just kind of abused me.
O: It seems as though that tension probably had a lot to with the energy of the initial Dinosaur records and concerts.
LB: People talk about that a lot, and I think that's just bullshit. Because I think the thing that actually makes things sound really good—there's also this thing called the love of music that actually makes you play that way. [Laughs.] I like how people think, "Yeah, man, it was because they all hated each other that it was so great." Because the record that stands out as our big crowning achievement, that's when we were more like a band. You're Living All Over Me, we were a band. We were so much of a band, and I felt so safe within that band, that I put my fucking tape collage at the end of the record. J said, "Yeah, do it, that's cool." And when we were doing our short tours around that time, there was a real sense of working together, and when we would go into the studio, we would be there with J while he was constructing these things. And we would be singing together in the studio, or cracking each other up. The reason that I played so hard with Dinosaur wasn't because I was thinking, "I wish this was J's face!" No, it had to do with having a pretty good idea of what we wanted to sound like, based on listening to tons of records and being really passionate about music, and passionate about forceful music, too. We were really into forceful music, but also completely in love with songs, and after coming out of something like hardcore, how else could you play and be true to yourself without just fucking wailing? But really, it's the love of music first and foremost that makes things sound great. The tension is what tore us apart and what made Bug not be quite as great as the record before it. Because if J and I had actually started to really work together, or I had felt safe to start writing songs with him, we could have become something else entirely. There are no could'ves here—I never go, "Gee, if only J and I..." I'm just saying that You're Living All Over Me was an instance where we were working together. J was masterminding it for sure, but he was benevolently masterminding it, and we were working together and it was pretty fun. And we were enjoying what we were creating together. So it's really hard for me to play into that kind of mythology about the tension and stuff.
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