Sebadoh - The Freed Men

I dont remember actually remembering getting into Dinosaur in the late eighties. I only just found out they added the Jr after the release of their third album. Their second and third albums, You`re Living All Over me and Bug, were received with a clamour bordering on fanatical religious ecstasy with some friends. That I do remember, but, apart from the number 11 on the dial Neil Young overdriven guitar solo`s, nothing else stuck in my head. What has caught my attention recently though was what Lou Barlow was up to, extra curricular, around that time.

Barlow had a fascination with recording and experimenting with sounds from an early age. His parents had bought him a tape recorder when he was young and he remembered fooling around with it with a little help from his extended family; "and my cousin showed me that if you half press the ffw and record buttons and yell into the mic, it`ll make this stretched out groaning sound. that cracked me up ! He`d yell `We`re gonna beat the crap out of Louieeeee` and would keep playing it at me." Later on Barlow began experimenting multi tracking himself on an acoustic and vocals. By the time he had got hold of a 4 track, it all sounded wonderful, especially through the smokescreen of weed that lay in the space between his ears and the speakers.

His soon to be conspirator in aural experimentation, Eric Gaffney, played drums in numerous bands, had edited his own `zine Withdrawal and was working as a radio DJ and pizza delivery driver. Gaffney had recorded a live cassette of his drums/gtr duo called The Gracefully Ageing Hippy Soloists and sold copies to local record stores. With the availability of affordable cassette to cassette recorders, a Cassette culture had formed. Given a leg up and a shot in the arm from the same energy and adreneline that had given birth to a hardcore music scene, it flourished. With tapes, cheaply produced fanzines and 7 inch singles being released on a regular basis some might say that home-taping was saving music, administering a compassionate coup de grace, as opposed to the murder rap the music industry lawyers insisted upon stickering albums with.

By now Barlow, suffering a crisis in confidence of a Dinosaur proportion, had been recording his own music using his 4 track and putting together tapes that lurched from quiet to loud and from punk to folk. These home doodle tapes soon found an outlet in the record store Cassette scene. Gaffney had come across Barlow`s music in this way, and things had clicked between them. In 1988 they were recording in this chaotic vein, bringing both solo and joint experiments together. Walkman recordings of supermarket ambience would be layered with other found and created sounds. Between them they wrote the songs, made the recordings, copied the tapes and designed the artwork. Their tapes and those of many other dreamers and schemers, experimentalists and boundary pushers sold in local record stores for a dollar a shot. These ideas would eventually form Sebadoh`s first cassette, and later, vinyl, release, as The Freed Man. Rising tensions in the Dinosaur trio had led Barlow to make recordings of his own for Gerard Cosloy. Cosloy produced a fanzine called Conflict and around 1988 had signed Barlow and drummer Eric Gaffney to his indie label, Homestead Cosloy had moved to New York and, at one time, had a roster of Sonic Youth, Big Black and Dinosaur, arguably the three most powerful bands in America at the time. Dinosaur toured with Sonic Youth and released their second album, You`re Living All Over Me, on the SST label, much to Cosloy`s dismay, who hoped Dinosaur would remain with his imprint. Lee Renaldo had sung backing vocals on the album and Kim Gordon had begun to get tapes from Barlow, featuring his 4 track demo experiments, including the song `Poledo`, which was included as the last track on this, Dinosaur`s second, album.

By the time Bug had been released and toured to the bone, that line up of Dinosaur Jr had fallen apart. The writing had been scrawled all over the wall as well as the cassette covers for a while. Barlow went on to form Sebadoh with Gaffney and shared lo-fi high fives with, amongst others, a Scientologist and an alcohol loving Roger Daltrey impersonator. The Freed Man was released at the start of that lo-fi movement, which peaked with the `Doh, Bek D. Campbell and Guided By Voices, in the mid nineties. It has just been re-released by Domino Recordings, along with extra noises, abstractions and, erm, noises. It hits my ears as a buzzy collection of stoned, intimately short moments. As a whole, the re-issue contains scraps of brilliance as well as scrappy flab. Its charm for me lies in its experimentalism, its wilful lack of spit and polish and in the sporadic snatches of vitality that are undoubetdly present. Those moments being the result of the ingredients thrown, however haphazardly, by Barlow and Gaffney, in the general direction of the pot.

Thanks to Fiona @ The Domino Recording Company. More here on Sebadoh

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"tactical guerilla facilitation within the (+/-)pop culture Dow Seng"