Dinosaur's "In a Jar"

in which I compare the bassline--positively--to a colonoscopy (colonoscopies are miraculous-- they save lives!)

I’ve been revisiting some of the songs that nourished me and rocked me in my late adolescence and I’ve been thinking that “In a Jar” by Dinosaur Jr. is one of the greatest things that came out of the 20^th Century.

I was a Dinosaur fan from way back, before they had to add the “Jr.” to their name for legal reasons. I was obsessed with their album “You’re Living All Over Me”. I would sit on the floor in front of the stereo turntable with my head between the speakers and listen to the album over and over again, being saturated with its heaviness and beauty.

One night in the late 1980s, I —along with various Blake Babies and Lemonheads (as well as Beat Happening, who were staying at our place in Boston)—journeyed on the T’s orange line into Jamaica Plain to find Greenstreet Station in order to experience Dinosaur live in the small club of the same name. As I remember it, there were only about 12 people in the audience, including us.

J and Lou and Murph (Dinosaur) were worship-worthy that night--pure power—and blew our minds. J’s guitar playing was inspirational (he’s on my list of top-five favorite lead players of all time) and the combination of songs and sounds (there were a lot of pedals) and volume such a mind-opener.

On the recording, “In a Jar” starts off with a taut but swinging, almost skipping, drum fill, a theme that will recur throughout the song, sometimes slightly altered so that there are no breaks between the snare hits so it’s a straighter roll. The fills serve as kicks in the song’s butt, keeping it going (not that it needs any help); keeping the ball in the air when the song is taking its series of intermittent breaths between vocal and guitar and bass phrases. It’s uncanny, those fills. They keep coming.

The three guys in the band are so tight with each other, so tuned in by instinct, but also so loose in their casual attack of the music. It doesn’t matter if they hate each other. This blend is perfection.

Another thing among many that are so interesting about this song is how quiet the guitars are at first; the superior bass performance is featured in the mix like a main instrument. And it should be because it is fascinating: Semi-distorted, played hard but fluid, melodically winding and tearing its way through the body of the song’s parts, the bass is ragged yet somehow so precise, like a colonoscopy scraping polyps out of a tortuous colon. Here and there Lou plays more than one note at a time to create thick chordal vibes in certain key areas. Lou and Murph are enmeshed, but not too; each also seems solipsistically focused on forging his own world his own way.

It’s punk and it’s sophisticated, and it’s jazzy, almost Vegas-y. I want to snap my fingers and wiggle my butt. But I also want to bang my head! And also sob, and praise all the gods in heaven and salute all the aliens in space. That’s part of what I loved about the whole album “You’re Living All Over Me”—the combination of things: solidity and flight, scuzz and glitter, the material and the ethereal.

Like I said, the guitars are low in the mix at first. This restraint and foresight (or maybe it was just an excellent accident) is admirable because when the guitars do eventually start to build and pile on, the ultimate effect is extra potent and climactic.

The guitars get a bit louder in the first, instrumental bridge and come up to almost the same level as the bass (or maybe that is my imagination, or some trick in the mixing, or J is playing higher up on the neck here, making it ring with more resonance). Then in the second bridge (the one with vocals) a still louder, and heavier, guitar comes in, chunky and satisfying, and then the guitar solo soars in over and above all the other guitars like a hawk, and then morphs into a fighter jet, which becomes a kamikaze, spiraling down for a second or two before changing its mind and not crashing and exploding.

The way J combined abandon and control in his playing was like musical illustration of my own existential struggle to walk the line between too much and not enough.

When J’s voice breaks in the middle of the word “can’t” (“…just ca-a-a-n’t stop”) right before that section before the guitar solo, I find this, too, so relatable, because it telegraphs the vulnerability and doubt within the song’s structural strength and mastery.

(Maybe I am reading way too much into every little atom of this song’s minutiae, but the important thing is that the music moved me personally, and that is what I think music is there to do; to help people feel less alone in the world.)

Another notable vocal moment: in the last chorus J adds an “s” to the word “all” to make the line “All’s I could do was lick your hand” and this further endears me to him, to Dinosaur, and to the song, and to where I came from, because I think this might be a regional colloquialism? Or an east coast one? ( I am from Massachusetts, and J (and Dinosaur Jr) is from Massachusetts.) Anyway that expression (“All’s I…”) always seemed like a local thing to me, growing up: ‘I’m broke. All’s I got is a five.’

As for the meaning of the lyrics, I can’t be sure, but the words seemed to recognize me. I felt like a small, insignificant creature, like a bug that bites people, annoys them, poisons them, or like an ugly reptile or frog, or submissive and docile like a pet (“please come pat me on the head”), unable to express myself, interesting only to the damaged. The dysfunction of the relationship in the song really rang true to me. It was what I lived.