{"id":7315,"date":"2025-12-10T14:17:39","date_gmt":"2025-12-10T14:17:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/j-mascis-my-life-in-music-145343\/"},"modified":"2025-12-10T14:17:39","modified_gmt":"2025-12-10T14:17:39","slug":"j-mascis-my-life-in-music-145343","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/j-mascis-my-life-in-music-145343\/","title":{"rendered":"J Mascis \u2013 My Life In Music"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Dinosaur Jr mainman shares his formative freak-outs: \u201cNick Cave was my fashion icon in college\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The Dinosaur Jr mainman shares his formative freak-outs: \u201cNick Cave was my fashion icon in college\u201d<\/p>\n

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THE ROLLING STONES<\/strong><\/p>\n

Exile On Main Street<\/strong><\/p>\n

ROLLING STONES RECORDS, 1972<\/em><\/p>\n

I remember my mom giving me money to go grocery shopping and I stopped at the record store first and bought <Exile\u2026> \u2013 took that off the top and then spent the rest of the money on food. And, yeah, I still listen to it. There\u2019s so many songs on it that you\u2019re always discovering a different song. I like that it\u2019s kinda murky-sounding, there\u2019s something magical about it. I didn\u2019t really know anything about [the legend of its making] as a kid. It was just the record itself, the sound. They seemed to be taking off, from surviving the \u201960s and then suddenly jumping into something that I really liked. Their guitar-playing inspired me, Mick Taylor and Keith Richards together.<\/p>\n

THE STOOGES<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Stooges<\/strong><\/p>\n

ELEKTRA, 1969<\/em><\/p>\n

When I was maybe 11 or 12, I got the Rolling Stone Record Guide, and I would try to collect all the albums that had five stars. I definitely discovered a lot of stuff through that, like The Velvet Underground. I dunno if The Stooges got five stars, but somehow I got onto their first album. Something about it really spoke to me, especially the guitar sound. That inspired me, as a direction, to try to emulate it. I played with Ron Asheton a lot, and it was cool to learn how to play The Stooges\u2019 songs the right way. I see people play \u2019em the wrong way and it just doesn\u2019t sound right. There\u2019s a lot of subtlety that people bulldoze over, usually.<\/p>\n

EATER<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Album<\/strong><\/p>\n

THE LABEL, 1977<\/em><\/p>\n

The record store that sold punk and new wave stuff, the owner would go to England and buy cut-outs, so there\u2019d be 50 copies of the Eater album when I was getting into punk. I would just buy anything that was punk and I somehow really latched on to that. I\u2019d heard that the drummer was 14, and I was 14 or 15 when I heard it, so I related to that immediately. I also liked the fact they would speed up covers, which became a big thing in punk. They did \u201cI\u2019m Eighteen\u201d by Alice Cooper, but made it \u201cFifteen\u201d and sped it up a lot. I thought that was cool. I just liked the sound of it \u2013 it was like the music punk Velvet Underground fans would make, who are young.<\/p>\n

THE BIRTHDAY PARTY<\/strong><\/p>\n

Junkyard<\/strong><\/p>\n

4AD, 1982<\/em><\/p>\n

The Birthday Party was a big band for me, coming out of hardcore. It seemed like the hardcore scene had kinda died, and we\u2019re all looking for some new kind of music that has the same energy. That\u2019s where The Birthday Party came in, and Junkyard was the album that I had. I remember my roommate at college really hated it, which I thought was good. He liked The Doors and he would go mental when I played The Birthday Party. So of course that appealed to me \u2013 any music that I liked that would annoy other people, I would play more. I was really into [Nick Cave] back then. I even would try to copy his dress sense and hair and stuff. He was like my fashion icon in college.<\/p>\n

WIPERS<\/strong><\/p>\n

Over The Edge<\/strong><\/p>\n

TRAP, 1983<\/em><\/p>\n

I decided that I was going to switch [from drums] to guitar to form a band, because I didn\u2019t like any guitar players around. The sound I heard for guitar, nobody around my town was playing like that, so I decided I had to try it. Gerard Cosloy, who runs Matador, went to school with me \u2013 he was the manager of my hardcore band at the time, Deep Wound. And he told me about The Wipers. I hadn\u2019t heard of it until I was in college and started playing guitar, and that soon became one of my main things I was trying to copy when I was learning guitar, so it was a big influence on my guitar playing. Not that I could<\/em> copy it, but I tried.<\/p>\n

TASTE<\/strong><\/p>\n

On The Boards<\/strong><\/p>\n

POLYDOR, 1970<\/em><\/p>\n

I got into that way later, probably around [Dinosaur Jr\u2019s 1994 album] <Without A Sound>. My bass player at the time Mike Johnson turned me on to Taste and Rory Gallagher, and that album I thought was really amazing. It really spoke to me and re-inspired me. He [Gallagher] just played differently than other people. His leads went weird places, so it caught my ear because it didn\u2019t sound like something I would play, or anyone would play. Where he was going on the guitar was cool \u2013 it was just different-sounding and very intense and immediate. There\u2019s some great songs on the first Taste album, but the second one is good all the way through.<\/p>\n

GUIDED BY VOICES<\/strong><\/p>\n

Bee Thousand<\/strong><\/p>\n

SCAT, 1994<\/em><\/p>\n

That was something my brother actually turned me on to. He had seen Guided By Voices and I was feeling very kinda jaded on the whole music scene at the time. Knowing that this band\u2019s older than me and they seem more enthusiastic and the whole album is so awesome, it definitely gave me a kick. Even when they\u2019re in the basement, it was as if they were in a big studio. Everything about it, they were really going for it. We just played with them in Dayton \u2013 they did a 40th anniversary or something. That was pretty cool, to play with them in their hometown. They\u2019ve always had a lot of friends hanging around, so it was cool seeing all their drinking buddies, the local crew.<\/p>\n

RON WOOD<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve Got My Own Album To Do<\/strong><\/p>\n

WARNER MUSIC, 1974<\/em><\/p>\n

It\u2019s always been a favourite of mine. I had all these Stones albums, and I was looking for more Stones, anything, and I found out about this Ron Wood album. Mick and Keith are on there, and it\u2019s great to hear Ron and Keith singing together \u2013 I wish they would do that more often. When I was on Warners, my A&R man asked me if I wanted to re-release anything. I said, \u201cOh yeah, it\u2019d be cool if you guys would put out the Ron Wood album on CD.\u201d And when they did, they sent it to Jay Farrar, who ended up covering one of the songs on the first Son Volt album. At one point, I got to tell Ron Wood that, so that was exciting.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

The post J Mascis \u2013 My Life In Music<\/a> appeared first on UNCUT<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The Dinosaur Jr mainman shares his formative freak-outs: \u201cNick Cave was my fashion icon in college\u201d The Dinosaur Jr mainman shares his formative freak-outs: \u201cNick Cave was my fashion icon…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4744,35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7315","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dinosaur-jr","category-interviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7315","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7315"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7315\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}