The Legendary Sebadoh

When Eric Gaffney and Lou Barlow, the highly dysfunctional creative partnership behind Sebadoh (bassist Jason Loewenstein had yet to come into his own as a songwriter), look back at their recently reissued third album there's one thing they wholeheartedly agree on.  It was a mess.  A mess in the most gloriously satisfying, let's-try-everything-and-see-how-much-we-get-away-with sense of the word, but still a frighteningly upfront sketch of a time that no Sebadoh member could imagine ever wanting to relive. 
 
"This is the sound when you are freaking out," says the soft spoken Lou Barlow, describing the heightened state of anxiety he was trying to convey through the album.  "It's the middle of the night, its hot as fuck in your apartment, you don't know whether you want to be with your girlfriend anymore, you lost your job, you gotta look for a job...  I wanted those feelings to be put directly onto the tape.""  When the album came out in 1991 he was still hurting from his brusque expulsion from the legendary Dinosaur Jr in 1989, and was gagging to prove that he was more than just "that guy who played bass in Dinosaur." 

Sebadoh III is imbued with that sense of urgency and the compulsive urge to prove yourself by going in at least five different musical directions at once.  The perfect backbone for Barlow's nervous intensity was Gaffney's fiendish appetite for "fucking with people" which was also, says Barlow, what made Sebadoh III so different from more well-adjusted contemporaries like Pavement.  Speaking of Gaffney's lyrical brilliance, Barlow says, "I found it legitimately poetic and disturbing.  When Eric would start messing around with words, you were like 'Oh my God, he's going to come through the speakers and fucking kill me.’”  It's the perfect description of the sheer trauma that is Gaffney's "As the World Dies the Eyes of God Grow Bigger" and a counterpoint to Barlow's own musical mission statement, where it's more about the emotions, than the warping thereof. 

"Being vulnerable was the whole fucking point," he says.  "I thought music was just ending up as this cacophony of posturing, and that's when it's important to say what you're thinking in a raw way, to become a resource for people who wanna hear that kinda shit.  That's the spirit behind [Sebadoh III]  Music is where you get all the shit out, were you're in the fucking trenches of your mind, raking up the muck."  Fortunately, there was far more than muck in the trenches of Barlow's mind, and the effortlessly pure "Kath", dedicated to Barlow's wife Kathleen Billus is possibly his most poignantly effective song ever.  "I wrote it and recorded it literally by her bedside while she was sleeping," he says.  "When I finished it I thought it was just undeniably beautiful, and I'm going to name it after Kath."  Simple as that. 

Not quite so simple is the extent to which Barlow’s muse was fueled by his (recently resolved) feud with Dinosaur mainman J Mascis.  The first track off Sebadoh III, “The Freed Pig", is the clearest example of Mascis-bashing on the album, yet by no means is it entirely hateful.  Says Barlow, “All those songs, [about J Mascis], I swear, are about me becoming responsible for how I felt about J.  It's not, 'this is the worst thing that's ever happened to me, how could you ruin my life?'  It's more, 'I'm freaking out, how can I talk myself down from this?' It's taking that urge to point that finger at someone and point it at yourself."  Regardless of how the Mascis issue influenced Sebadoh III, it's undeniable that Barlow’s time in Dinosaur shaped his idea that a band should be a “collective.”   "Nobody's going to be just the bass player who's thrashing out these songs while plotting his revenge," he says.