O: Did money have something to do with the reunion?
JM: Yeah, that helps the vibes of the band, too. On the tours where we hated each other, we had, like, five dollars a day or something, and our van breaking down. It was just miserable—times where we'd take it out on each other. Getting paid some decent money definitely helps the vibe of the band.
O: Did you feel strongly enough about getting together and playing these old songs that you would have done it regardless of the money or any other factors?
JM: Probably not.
LB: I would have done this reunion, if those guys were up for it, no matter how much money was involved. The deciding thing is not the money. To go out and play with those guys? That's just crazy—I would do that no matter what. I'd do that for a benefit. But as far as, like, setting aside the next year of my life, there's gotta be some money involved. [Laughs.] And my wife just had a baby—I am a provider. There is this great personal side of this reunion, which is really amazing, and I really want to pull that to the forefront and say, "This is really why I'm doing it, and this is a beautiful thing for me personally." But there's also the side which is just like, "Fuck, I need to make money."
O: At the end of the Dinosaur Jr. chapter in Michael Azerrad's book Our Band Could Be Your Life, there's a story about Lou confronting J after Nirvana broke, and basically saying that it could have happened to you guys. Are you bitter that you didn't receive the kind of recognition that a lot of alt-rock bands got in the '90s?
JM: No, I never thought that was true. 'Cause the minute I heard Nirvana, you could tell, "Oh, this guy sounds like what American radio sounds like—Bad Company or Cheap Trick or something. His voice really has got that commercial kind of style." But I knew we never had that. Our goal was to be on SST—we never even thought that kind of way. It's just after Nirvana, everybody started thinking like that, and the whole scene got really weird and kind of depressing for a while.
LB: I said that to him because I was really high. [Laughs.] I was on the streets of Northampton—I saw J, and I was into fucking razzing him. There was nothing behind that. I was making it up as I went along. But now that I'm actually back in the band, I'm realizing, "We could have never been fucking Nirvana. If I had stayed in the band, we could have done okay, but we would have never been Nirvana." If you listen to Nevermind next to Bug or You're Living All Over Me... I mean, I like Nirvana, but there's so much going on in Dinosaur Jr. records that is—Nirvana's like a simplification.
Nirvana were like power chords—that's blocky, kinda power-chord music with the occasional Sonic Youth-y flip-out in it. But the power of that band is Kurt Cobain's voice, which is just fucking caramel—a beautiful rock voice. But Dinosaur—if you're gonna compare a song off You're Living All Over Me, which is just this crash of chords and roaring bass—that's a wall of sound, like a really rich wall of sound that I don't really hear when I hear Nirvana. I mean, Nirvana, I hear a wall of sound, of course, and it's great, but it doesn't have the artistry that fucking J Mascis brought into it. His guitar playing really is extraordinary, and he really did incredible things with the way that he played his guitar and set up his effects and the way that he crafted that sound. There's a lot to that—you don't hear that when Black Francis plays, and you don't hear it when Kurt Cobain plays. And on top of that, you don't hear it when you hear Smashing Pumpkins. Dinosaur was like fucking blood and guts—I played my bass like Lemmy, and J played like some fucking '70s guitar hero, but who had really amazing influences: Birthday Party, Stooges, Venom, R.E.M. He was awesome. Nobody played liked him.
O: Earlier in Our Band Could Be Your Life, Lou accuses J of being homophobic, but J never defends himself. What was that about?
JM: [Laughs.] I have no idea. The first I ever heard of that was the book. I don't know, that was just weird. I guess we would just tease Lou, but we had no idea he was struggling with that or anything. He never mentioned that, so that was a surprise to me. [Laughs.]
LB: It just refers to one episode where—I don't know. J was really bothered how I sucked on everything. It's funny, 'cause I was going through these tapes for Sebadoh III, and there's actually a few songs that I wrote from that period that really touch on that. Going back to that now, and, like, sort of examining that, I'm kind of like... [Pauses.] I don't know how homophobic he really was. He was just a jerk. He was pretty much just phobic. It didn't matter. Like everything kind of bugged him. And at that age especially, like 19, 20, 21, it's pretty fucking normal for a group of guys who hang around together to spend a lot of time hypothesizing about who's gay. It's pretty common.
And then when I've had run-ins with people, like real fucking dudes, like dudes that are not indie-rock guys or whatever, like just regular fucking people, they are insanely homophobic. So for me to call someone like J homophobic back then, looking back on it now is pretty much like—I was just so consumed with theories as to why he was such an asshole that I was sort of grasping at shit. I'm a little embarrassed about how I tried to actually bring that into the equation. If some guy's gonna approach me with a tape recorder a couple years later and ask me to tell the whole story while buying me drinks, I'm definitely going to start scraping the bottom of the barrel with my theories. [Laughs.] And the homophobic theory is pretty much the bottom of the barrel. J seems pretty accepting of all kinds of things, and I think he probably was back then, even, in his way.
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