J Mascis picks the album he never gets tired of listening to
The entire vocabulary of alternative guitar playing can be indebted to J Mascis. Although he may not have been the most profile instrumentalist on the scene, his work with Dinosaur Jr provided a foundation for what alternative rock would sound like years later, creating sonic textures far more abrasive than what was heard on radio. While Mascis has crafted his spot in history, he maintains that he learned everything he knows from the world of classic rock.
Going through the back catalogue of the band, it’s easy to see how genres like punk rock played a massive role in the group’s development. From how Lou Barlow complemented Mascis on bass to the feral guitar sounds, the band felt like the perfect combination of pop smarts and the dense sonic sounds of everyone from The Clash to Joy Division.
While there was a firm emphasis on the near-psychedelic landscape of a record like You’re Living All Over Me, tracks like ‘In A Jar’ showed that the band still had a firm grip on melody, making songs that might be able to be played on the radio if they had been given a sweeter touch in the mixing stages.
Then again, Mascis wasn’t the first to make his guitar sound like it was about to squeal. Before the band started, Mascis loved what The Rolling Stones had been doing throughout the 1970s. As opposed to the British Invasion pinups that the band were known for in their early years, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards had turned themselves into a songwriting institution by the time they made their double album experience Exile on Main Street.
Taking the basis of blues, hard rock, and country music, the band put everything under one roof for the album, running the gamut of their strengths across singles like ‘Tumbling Dice’ and ‘Happy’. While Mascis was already in love with punk, this instilled the melodic side of his songwriting in the early years.
Buying the album with money that he was initially going to use for food, Mascis admired how many facets the album has, telling MusicRadar, “It’s so long. It’s great, but it’s not so great that you remember everything about every song. It’s murky, too. There’s a lot of stuff you can keep rediscovering. It’s somehow a good mixture.”
While the long runtime of the album can be a bit daunting, Mascis would go on to say that he never gets tired of listening to it whenever he puts it on, explaining, “Some albums, if they are too good, you just don’t want to listen to them. They’re in your head too much, and it’s just there. Something that Exile… got right is you can listen to it a lot.”
Even though Dinosaur Jr may not sound like The Rolling Stones by any stretch of the imagination, The Stones’ ability to keep things fresh on every track bled into their sound as well. Regardless of the usual guitar tones found on Mascis’s rig, his mission is to create the same atmosphere as Exile on Main Street, where fans can have a good time across every single song. Given the murky side of The Stones’ record, though, there’s a good chance that the rock titans were ahead of the curve on grunge without knowing it.
