O: As a musician, how artistically rewarding is it for you to relive the past?
JM: It's pretty fun, just 'cause we play really well. I think people are psyched 'cause it doesn't seem, from people I've talked to, like a nostalgic thing—we play really hard and have a lot of force behind it. I guess we're just a good live band, so it sounds good. I don't know, 'cause maybe there's so many crappy bands now that it makes us seem even better or something.
LB: It's a gift that I get to go back, 'cause Dinosaur taught me so much about writing songs and musical dynamics, and so much of what I did was a reaction to Dinosaur. And what's kind of interesting, too, is that I'm doing this Dinosaur thing and I'm playing the way that I used to play, which is getting back to the genesis of my strumming style—the way that I played bass, and then the way that I began to write my own songs on ukulele and four-string guitars, when I first started writing for Sebadoh. It gets me back to that, which is where I went after I finished my solo record.
What I realized was that, since probably like '92, I had made a conscious switch to writing on a six-string guitar with normal tuning, and I started writing songs that way 'cause I had written so many songs on four-string guitars with alternate tunings that I thought I went far enough in that direction. So I started to embrace the more standard tuning and see what I could do with that, which led me through the '90s, like the Sebadoh pop years or whatever—Bakesale and Harmacy—into Folk Implosion. After I finished my solo record, I was like, "I really am ready now to return to my roots, I'm going to rediscover this style, I'm gonna start playing ukulele again and start getting back into that."
And just as I was starting to do that, then this Dinosaur reunion thing came up—it's like I was able to totally be transported back to that time. It was really cool. And then on top of that, right at the same time, I'd actually reconnected with Eric Gaffney from the original Sebadoh, and we're now piecing together a reissue of Sebadoh III, which was like the big, crazy, weird Sebadoh record that everybody liked. So I'm going back and listening to all the old tapes of that, which are all the songs that I wrote just after I was kicked out of Dinosaur. So it's really unique. For all of the bad blood that has passed between me and my ex-bandmates and all that shit, it's all come back around: I'm talking with Eric Gaffney and we're doing this reissue together, and I'm fucking playing with J again and hanging out with him and Murph. It's really cool.
O: Do you think the original trio will record new music together?
JM: We don't have any plans except the summer tour—see if we make it through that. I've been recording stuff on my own, but we didn't have any plans to record or anything. We're just thinking about the tour. I guess none of us really have a very forward-thinking attitude. I just don't know what that would be like, or if there's a point to it, or anything to record. Does anybody really want to hear the new Stooges album? They just want to go see 'em and hear 'em play their old stuff.
M: I don't know. This summer's gonna be so long, I don't think we've talked about it. We have some offers to do some stuff maybe later, and we'll see. I know Lou wants to get back to do some Sebadoh stuff, J has some side projects he's gonna work on, I have a couple things brewing. But we'll see. I think we're gonna be so burnt out after this summer, we can't really think beyond it.
LB: I really have no idea. We've only played 10 shows. I don't know how I would write songs like that now. I don't know why people are even really concerned about that. We've talked about that as a band: It's like, "Why are people talking about this? Why are people asking us if we're gonna do a new record, when if we did do a new record, they would get the fucking promo and go, like, ‘Yeah, I don't know—maybe this wasn't such a good idea?'" [Laughs.] Like, you'd get the record for free, or you'd fucking download it, and then we'd be out touring our new album while people yelled for the old songs, while they went to the bathroom when we played the new ones.
O: But you said that one of the things that made you think this reunion could work was seeing Mission Of Burma, and people have responded well to their new record.
LB: I listened to it once, and I said, "Yeah, okay, it sounds like the old stuff," but I didn't listen to it. I don't know. I consider myself to be a pretty good gauge as to the audience that I play to, and I have the attention span of less than a 13-year-old. Like 13-, 14-year-old kids, or 15-year-old kids, they can actually make it through whole records. I can't. I can listen to, like, one song of something—I'm extremely fickle, and I have no sense of nostalgia about anything. I don't give a shit. I'm never like, "Oh great, I'm so glad Iggy Pop has remixed Raw Power." [Laughs.] You put it on for one second, it's like, "I don't care. Who gives a shit? So it sounds better—who fucking cares?" I think maybe J is the same way.
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