One Day In June, 1991

Molly and I drove out past the city limits, headed nowhere in particular. We did that sometimes, it was a small town and there wasn’t much else to do. We were teenagers, and we often needed a good way to get lost. Unfamiliar backroads held a natural appeal.

Dinosaur Jr.’s Green Mind had been released a few weeks before and it was the album of the season. A cassette copy traveled with me everywhere I went. I’d been enticed into buying it by the video for “The Wagon”, a claymation colorfest of bug-eyed beasts careening through a surreal cityscape, moving in jittery time to a massed wall of guitar buzz, onwards and upwards into a starry night. Skyscrapers, strange creatures, rockets into space. Even though nothing in the video is realistic, it still somehow reflected back at me a fundamental feeling about the innate peculiarity of living on planet Earth.

That mess of sound and vision was an apt reflection of our psyches, the way it felt to be teenagers in a small town, always feeling trapped and nervous. Foggy, fraying at the edges, constantly buzzing. Snatches of lyrics made those feelings explicit. J Mascis sang about being too scared to leave the house, never having much to say, and he sang it in the blasé drawl of someone who felt that alienation keenly.

Oddly, despite the preponderance of ennui and lethargy, Green Mind somehow sounded to us very fresh, very lively, and, in its own peculiar way, welcoming. “Come on down, come on down” a chorus of multi-tracked voices beckoned over a skittering, buoyant rhythm, acoustic guitars ringing brightly, layered one on top of the other. That warm, open invitation is called “Puke & Cry”, which is what everyone’s gonna do, J Mascis assures us, once the party starts.

Spring was merging into summer and everything was green and vibrant. Molly wore a crimson skirt with black and white-striped leggings and Doc Martens. I wore a plain green t-shirt and gray pants. Molly’s younger sister once said to her “I’d never date a guy who wore gray pants.” I liked that my fashion sense could inspire that kind of distaste, since I’d never thought about having any kind of fashion sense at all before, except in the sense that I was pretty sure I wanted to be anti-fashionable. So, success! I guess.

Molly and I thrived on the tension and release that comes with the innocent teasing and button-pushing that comes naturally to teenagers. She’d make fun of me for the way I drove like an old man and I’d ridicule the way she spread ketchup all over her fries instead of leaving it off to the side like a normal person.

(What constitutes normal was always a hot topic, we each believed our backgrounds made us freaks. But as we were soon to discover, we were part of a whole damn generation that felt that way. Supposedly. Sometimes I think the idea of a generation, any generation, with all of the tropes and attributes that get applied to it, is a generalization that really only applies to a small subsection of that generation’s populace, many of whom are the very writers and commentators who are creating the impressions about that generation in the first place. Thus leaving huge swathes of people who aren’t represented by many, if any, of those attributes at all. Are those the normal people?)

We mostly talked about music. She introduced me to artists I’d either never heard of or had never previously thought about in a considered way, and she indulged my relentless blathering about what music is, how it works, the ways it shapes us and enhances everyday living. Molly sharpened my ideas in ways I never would have expected. We’d sing Madonna’s “Express Yourself” as a comic duet. It was joyous and cathartic in a way my normally broody pre-Molly self wouldn’t have recognized.

We loved each other fiercely, recklessly, with the kind of beyond-all-boundaries intensity that threatens to devour its participants. Moods could change like weather. From sweetness and ardor to suspicion and insecurity in the blink of a heavily mascaraed eyelash. J Mascis mirrored the moods perfectly, howling “How’d you pin that one on me? I hadn’t even done it yet!” over growling, queasy guitars - a sound like a thunderstorm of neuroses.

J Mascis wrote this music for us, pretty sure.

Right down to the way we moved. We hardly ever walked together, side-by-side, Molly and I. One of us was always moving briskly forward in a direct path while the other loped behind, slouched, unhurried. Then we’d trade places in our pacing, one of us slowing down and veering off the path while the other bounded forward, and then we’d switch again. It was like a dance, almost ballet, only clumsier, and with a lot more profanity.

That day when we drove out of town we found an abandoned church, and we got out to explore. It felt abandoned, anyway, no one was around and the parking area was covered in weeds. Pretty sure there was a cemetery nearby. Molly leaned against the brick wall of the church and lit a cigarette. “Why do you have to smoke?” I asked. It was a running line, one for which she always had a clever, obnoxious answer. Once, as we were driving down a main road in our little town I had asked her that question and she mockingly declared “Oh god - you’re right, what have I been thinking this whole time?!” then she crushed the half-full pack in her hands and tossed it out of the window of the moving car.

We talked about the future. Destinies called out and big cities beckoned. Green Mind reflected it back at us again, languidly; “Scary things across the water,” J Mascis standing at the edge of a lake looking at the intimidating bright lights on the other side. Somehow it all seemed so out of reach as to be pointless.

Our defense mechanism was a mixture of irony and pessimism. Tired minds clogged with muck remembering how everything sucks. (That’s from “Muck”. So much of Green Mind seems to take place around water. Probably a swamp.) “There never really is a good time,” (that’s from “Thumb”, my favorite because it steals its floating, near-inert sense of rhythm from The Rolling Stones’ “Sway”) but even in that state of stasis and brain fog we cultivated good times the way gardeners grow vegetables.

I had a decent job. School was an option. A network of family and friends was in place. Opportunity didn't necessarily abound, but it existed. I simply wasn't too adept at seeking it out, or following through. If you’d told me how privileged I was back then I’m sure I would’ve balked. Privilege? Bah. Look around at the feelings shared among my little group of friends and I, the sense of everyday ennui, the relentless confusion, the ever-clouded if not borderline-hopeless future. Our feelings about it all are surely justified, as well as being unique, novel, not the kind of thing that could be reduced to a diagram charting the shared traits of a whole hopeless generation. Likewise this music, these fuzzy, squalling guitars, booming drums and pitchy, whiny vocals, it’s all ours and ours alone and could not possibly sell to millions or be taken to the top of the charts, not by Dinosaur Jr, and not by any other band of misfits from somewhere like, say, the Pacific Northwest.

Amid all of this Molly and I had our moments. That day in June was one of them; the driving out of town and the green and the old church. Teasing, wandering, laughing, embracing. There was a sense of unraveling, of layers being peeled away.

If Green Mind had not existed, these moments would not be diminished, but they would have a different shape, they’d cast a different kind of shadow. As it is, those songs - “The Wagon”, “Thumb”, “Puke & Cry”, etc. - inhabit those moments in a way that feels as elemental as rain or sunshine. Equally, the music is inevitably imbued with the feelings at play during that time.

J Mascis is singing “Hey, I live for that look” and I can see Molly, dressed in black, bright red lipstick, standing with legs at a skewed and unnatural angle, eyes fiery and expectant. She’s a little bored and half-annoyed, frowning, ready for a cigarette, ready to leave this place.

I really do live for that look.

This is what music is.