“I always liked old-man clothes.”īefore Dinosaur Jr., the two boys were part of a hardcore group called Deep Wound, which had some local success before flaming out. “Old-man clothes,” Barlow says of his vintage sweaters. But while Barlow was less obviously a rock star, his shy-guy aesthetic would later gain purchase in indie circles: spectacles, normie hair, a gaze so earnest it could make you wince. “I can see Lou getting beat up in high school a lot,” he told Azerrad (whose account is not as flattering to all involved as the documentary is). “His anti-everything attitude - he wore it really well.” Mascis did not hold the same high opinion of his counterpart. “From the very beginning, he looked crazy and great,” Barlow says. The documentary’s wealth of archival footage shows a skinny young Mascis in oversize aviators, hippie beads, and tight T-shirts, a rejection of both Reagan’s conservatism and glam rock. Mascis had already decided to “drop out of society,” as he puts it, and he looked the part, mixing eggs into his dark shoulder-length hair to get a mangy texture. In Freakscene, Reichenheim fills out the before and after of this cataclysmic event, starting with a teenage Mascis in the early 1980s responding to a flyer Barlow had put up at a record store in western Massachusetts seeking a drummer who was into the Circle Jerks, Black Flag, and Minor Threat.īarlow was instantly smitten. in his famous history of indie rock, Our Band Could Be Your Life. was once the centerpiece of the group’s mythology as well as the narrative spine of Michael Azerrad’s chapter on Dinosaur Jr.
The story of Mascis kicking Barlow out of Dinosaur Jr. Boys, now middle-aged men, reunite and tour the world and make a lot of money. Aloof boy dumps other boy in the cruelest, most devastating manner possible. Boy falls in love with boy, who is too aloof to love him back. Their relationship is the subject of a new documentary, Freakscene, that had a one-night theatrical release earlier this summer before quietly slipping onto streaming services.įreakscene, directed by Mascis’s brother-in-law Philipp Reichenheim, is really a love story: Boy meets boy. guy - who in many ways is representative of a broader category of male - lies somewhere in the fraught dynamic among these three men. (Some girls, too!) The band itself is made up of three distinct types: Mascis, the visionary guitarist and front man, cool to the point of coldness, with a glazed stare, owlish frames, and sheets of feathery white hair Barlow the wallflower, playing bass from behind his own bushy curtain of hair as if trying to hide himself onstage and Murph the drummer, popular, hard-partying, bald as an egg.
crowd: plaid-shirt guys, hardcore guys, nerd guys. These concerts are also occasions to observe the rich pageantry of a Dinosaur Jr. After their heyday, the original lineup of J Mascis, Lou Barlow, and Murph reunited in the mid-aughts and began releasing a steady clip of albums that, if not quite as great as their seminal work, were still pretty good and extremely listenable, ensuring an equally steady cycle of age-appropriate tours for Gen X–ers and ancient millennials who may have outgrown the indie-rock scene but still liked to see a show every now and then. They came nowhere near that level of megastardom, but they were featured fairly regularly on MTV and were one of the brighter luminaries in the firmament of alternative bands that stretched over that era. At the height of their fame in the mid-’90s, they were billed as one of the next big things after Nirvana. While actual young people these days have adopted the giants of the 1990s, wearing vintage Nirvana and Red Hot Chili Peppers gear, “cool” dads prefer more esoteric fare: Mr. “I’m a cool mom” - the point being to signal that, though they are no longer young in years, they have at least retained some of their youthful spirit. The competition never breaks out into true warfare the participants merely eye each other warily and every so often tilt a jaw upward and mutter, “Nice shirt, man.” It’s like the male version of Amy Poehler’s character in Mean Girls - “I’m not a regular mom,” she says. At day-care drop-off and the playground, at birthday parties and piano recitals, guys with graying hair and sad paunches strut around in T-shirts emblazoned with the hip indie bands of yesteryear. All across gentrified Brooklyn rages what I like to call the Battle of the Dad Bands.
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