First: a most probably untrue story, or a legend as it were. Some two decades ago, my brother and his friends were parked by a country lane—we lived in the sticks outside Gettysburg—ingesting prodigious quantities of beer and valium and listening to Dinosaur Jr.’s “Freakscene” when my brother swears (and still swears) he saw, swoop above the treeline, a chihuahua with bat wings.
I like to think that “Freakscene” had a similarly profound, if somewhat less phantasmagoric, effect on scores of alt-rock fans. An insanely catchy slice of pop with metallic trimmings and a life-altering guitar solo, not to mention J Mascis’s nasal pothead drawl, it may not have caused most people to see batdogs, but it did cause them to see intimations of sonic bliss.
For those of you who don’t know the basic rudiments of the Dinosaur Jr. story, guitarist and vocalist J Mascis, bassist Lou Barlow, and drummer Emmett Jefferson Murphy III (Murph) got together in Amherst, Massachusetts to form Dinosaur, which ultimately had to add the Jr. to avoid legal troubles with a preexisting band. Nobody liked them—as J Mascis put it, “If you’re too loud and don’t have any fans, it’s a bad combination.”
