Grunge God Lives! J Mascis and the Fog Play L.A.; The Frogs Make You Feel a Little Dirty
Throughout the night Mascis sprinkles the set with his newest tracks ("Waistin," "Ground Me to You," "Back Before You Go"), forgoing More Light's piano for high-volume distortion and power-trio punch. The crowd nods their heads less frequently to the new tracks, wearing puzzled half-smiles. They're broke, they haven't bought the album, but now...now they just might. Dinosaur Jr. has always been music you can sink your teeth into, meaty bits of melody inspired by mid-70s cowboy rock and tempered by early 90s ennui. They were grunge before grunge, indie before indie. Mascis sings the anthems of 70s childhoods and 80s adolescence and single moms and keggers in the woods and boredom and heartbreak and endless evenings spent smoking bowls in the Dairy Mart parking lot. The crowd knows. The crowd remembers.
Mascis gets the heads flipping frantically with well-loved cuts like "The Wagon" and "Repulsion," and at the height of the frenzy the band tears into a cover of Iggy Pop's "TV Eye" with Watt taking over on vocals. A few of the boys in front are inspired to not only nod their heads but to bounce up and down as well, as if riding some pogo stick of glee and approval. And just when you thought it couldn't get any better the band lurches into a flawless, epic, surprisingly soulful version of Funkadelic's "Maggot Brain." Every song is impossibly loud. The bass presses into your gut. The drums pound a beat on your ribs and the ears fill with cotton.
When the Fog finally exits the stage I realize that the muscles in my cheeks are strained from smiling. I am happy because my youth was up there, playing its heart out. I am happy because rock 'n' roll is here to stay and I was beginning to wonder. I am happy because the boys are happy. I am happy because the off-key, inept band called Dinosaur that played in my high school boyfriend's brother's basement (and that sucked) are now the best thing I've heard in too long a time.
"We're like Patti Smith in '77, minus the tits," snapped Dennis Flemion. His wig, a shoulder-length black bob, did look kind of like Patti's hair. Although she never performed with a 6-foot, 5-inch man wearing green sequined wings and chaps who gives the impression of standing on a remote mountaintop even when he's three feet in front of you. That would be Jimmy.
The Dennis and Jimmy show brought its act to Maxwell's, to a surprisingly small crowd of fans who mostly looked like they had just been born when the Frogs started performing back in 1980. Hipper fratboys and their female cohorts, with the boys better behaved than the girls, who were talking loud and giggling and bumping into and even spilling beer on us, giving rise to visions of strangulation and heads slamming against walls. But who has time for violence, really, when Dennis is doing a dead-on Dylan imitation and Jimmy is singing the classic "Where's Jerry Lewis?" about all the "young and lovely" handicapped kids? Chorus: "I love you, crippled boy."
What is it about the Frogs, anyway, that led them to play with Pearl Jam and Billy Corgan? That attracted Sebastian Bach and led my then-boyfriend and me to drive from central New Jersey to Philadelphia to see them?or, perhaps, another band called the Frogs?play at a Borders? (We got lost in Germantown and missed the whole show.) It's something to do with Dennis' angelic harmonies and countermelodies, no doubt, or Jimmy's nuanced, perfectly timed delivery of lines like "I've got a suitcase full of drugs/I can turn you on...out of the mist/I kissed your lovely drug-filled lips." Maybe it's the frantic rave-up sound of "I Only Play 4 Money": "I don't do interviews/I won't sign autographs... I don't give a fuck about the fans."
What I'm trying to say is that there's a real, crafted musicality behind the lyrics the Frogs are known for. When Jimmy sings "everyone's making a big deal out of the fact that I raped someone/what's the crime/I had fun/?after all she was a nun," the lyrics themselves aren't all that funny. I mean, they're pretty funny. But when you hear them sung with perfect, Jewel-like Sincere Rock Star delivery, they're laugh-out-loud funny. When the Frogs do "Homos" and end up chanting the title again and again as fast as they can, the word turns into nonsense and you end up laughing partly at the idea that these two syllables are supposed to be so dangerous.
Tuesday night they did a fair amount of material from the notorious Racially Yours album, now finally available on Four Alarm. In that same spirit, the very first words Dennis sang, standing behind the drumset in black-and-sheer-striped pajamas and a black boa, were, "I'm a Negro/I'm on fire/and I don't know/just why/they've done this to me." Then there's "Now You Know You're Black," another excellent song that is about being racially harassed but from an ambiguous point of view. In fact, a lot of what is so disturbing?and intriguing?about the Frogs is not their taboo words and scenarios but the ambiguity, the neutrality even, with which they approach it all. Do they care that white people aren't supposed to write songs purporting to be from a black person's point of view, or not? Are they trying to rile people up or do they just not give a shit?
Gay or not gay, Dennis rivals Danny Fields in the rock 'n' roll Queen Bitch department (sample comment to Jimmy after the latter's volume is jacked up: "Do you have enough balls on your amp for your ego now?"). Yes, they're mean, that much is clear, as they let a puffy, glazed-eyes Evan Dando up onstage to sing along (as best he can), forcing him to start one song over and over, slowing it down more and more until he could keep up. This is after Dennis called him a rock 'n' roll suicide. What does it mean that they foisted this on the audience? Entertaining, for sure, in that train-wreck way, the Frogs were an outrageous good time. But afterward I felt a little dirty.
Eva S. Neuberg