Digging Up Bones
Digging Up Bones
Maximum Guitar, July 1997

There's no sign of life as I stomp through the snow towards the front door of"Bob's Place." Peering through the house's frontwindow, I spy a goldtop Gibson Les Paul, a Martin D-21 acousticand a Fender Super Champ, along with piles of vinyl albums,scattered Remo drum heads and other musician-related ephemera. This is obviously the right place, but J Mascis, the mellow indie-rock slacker guitar hero and mastermind of Dinosaur Jr is nowhere to be found. Knocking on the door, I am startled by vicious barking and the sight of a stocky bulldog making its way towards me. Suddenly, the bulldog bounds through a doggie door and jumps at my legs. I scream in anticipation of being eaten alive, but instead of sinking his sharp teeth into my calves, the dog starts licking my boots. At that moment, a dark Bronco pulls up the driveway and a familiar looking figure hops out of the car. "Welcome to Bob's Place," says Mascis as he walks towards the house. "I see you've a already acquainted your-self with Bob." Mascis unlocks the door, and we all go inside. "Sorry, I'm late." he apologizes. "The electricity and phone have gone out, and I had to go into town to make some calls."

Bob's Place is Mascis' idyllic bachelor pad, nestled deep in the woods outside Amherst, Massachusetts. Mascis recorded most of Dinosaur Jr's new Reprise album, Hand It Over, in the basement of this house, where he also keeps his sizable collection of guitars, amps and pedals. One tiny room houses a 24-track recorder, a wall-to-wall mixing console, a Tascam DA- 88 digital multitrack and a couple racks of compressors, reverbs and other outboard gear, and the rest of the house is filled with sundry musical instruments. Upstairs, a pair of vintage keyboards, a Mellotron and a Memory moog rest next toan upright piano, and Kraftwerk's Computer World album is lying on the piano bench. Is Mascis contemplating cashing in on the burgeoning techno craze?

"Nah," he assures me. "I used the Mellotron to make the flute sounds on 'Alone,' and I got the Moog because I think they're cool." One listen to Hand It Over shows that Mascis still enjoys wreaking havoc with a guitar and a cranked-up amp. The songs "I Don't Think," "Nothin's Goin On" and"Loaded" burn with Mascis' characteristic crunch rhythms and caterwauling leads.

What is the secret behind those meltdown tones? "I used a tweed Fender Deluxeamp a lot," he explains. "It's a '56 with three inputs instead of four like on the later models. I was looking a long time for one, and I tried out a bunch but they never sounded how I thought they should. This one is pretty cool. I don't use the Deluxe much for leads, though. That's mainly a Fender 3x10B bandmaster, a tweed Twin or my purple plexi '68 Marshall 100-watt Superbass head."

On "I Don'tThink," perhaps the album's most potent track, Mascis ran a'59 Gibson Les Paul Junior through a Fender Super Champ "a backstage metal amp" for the rhythm part and plugged a '61Gibson Les Paul/SG Junior into the Bandmaster for the solo.

"The Meatball is on almost every song, " he adds. "It's a crazy distortion box that's made by this company called Lovetone in England. Kevin Shields (of My Bloody Valentine) turned me on to them. I use it for everything from slight overdrive to fullfuzz." Mascis explains that he started amassing his gear collection, which consists of more than 30 guitars, a virtual Hadrian's wall of amps and several dozen pedals, so he could create a lot of different sounds on his records. However, he's not fond of new guitars because, he says, "Everything new I've tried doesn't cut it, even the reissues. I don't know why they never go all the way with the reissues.

Before we venture into the basement for a guided tour, Mascis mentions that he has recently added to his guitar family: "This has been a big guitar week for me. I dropped a lot of money. Daddy's Junky Music opened a new store in Boston for all their vintage stuff, and I've just bought two guitars from them, a blue Fender Jaguar with a blue headstock and a Gibson ES- 330. " As we walk down the stairs, we are joined by Bob, who is panting only slightly louder than I am as we prepare for the gear orgy that is about to ensue.


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