Dinosaur Junior

(Father to a fast-moving toddler/ adoptive New Englander/ Ché fan at large Paul Kaufman currently makes it out of the house at night a couple of times a year, so they better count. This one did.)

In the future, I’ll have to contain the instinct to rile when I see current concert calendars loaded with bands you could have seen in the mid-’70s: Pat Benatar, America, Kansas, James Taylor. Sure, most of this stuff is hurl-worthy, but I can’t pretend that nostalgia is of no interest to me.

What were the last three shows I’ve seen? Sonic Youth, Pavement, and now, Dinosaur Jr. True, the first of these is a band still actively exploring new territory, but the others weren’t. The Pavement show was one-off reunion of my favorite band of the ’90s, playing their classics. This Dinosaur Jr. show was an even more specific revisit to a place and time: late-’80s Boston. “Playing the album ‘Bug’ (1988) in its entirety!” read the announcement. I bought a ticket the moment I saw the ad.

The show was at The Paradise Club in the student-centric Allston neighborhood, a few blocks and 22 years from the first time I had seen them. Back then, Dinosaur Jr. was the “it” band among the many Boston college radio stations, and they had joined the übercool SST indie label, but I was lucky to catch them at a small place (“Bunratty’s,” now defunct, still notorious.

(Jack Gamboa continues his Che-infused memoir of his mid-’80s band.)

It was the very first day of school after summer break. I was walking to my Propaganda Films of the Third Reich lecture. (I had already taken Bram Dijkstra’s “Devils, Vampires and Other Horrible Creatures of 19th Century Literature.”) Suddenly on the path to the quad I saw my best childhood friend Steve. I had not seen him in months!

He was a guitarist, so we were talking about the local band scene, I was telling him about the rockabilly outfit the Wild Desires. I “BongoChild” drummed for Dave “LadiesLove” Ellison on Magnatone Typhoon and bass legend Andy “ThunderTrain” Seidlinger on lownotes. A bad-ass situation too perfect to last. We had broken up a few months before. Andy had also been playing my borrowed drums for a pair of punks who called themselves Leather Geek, but he transferred to UCLA to study Structural Engineering. I told Steve: “I would love to meet up with Leather Geek! I never saw them play, but I hear that they threw legendary parties. Rumor has it that Jory is an excellent guitarist, and Eric did a poetry reading of ‘Walk This Way’ by Aerosmith!” Steve was laughing and digging that. So we were gossiping about musicians and stuff like that. We turned a corner and entered an open lawn area (I think it was called ‘the Quad’ in those days) …

Seen any good shows lately? Dinosaur Jr.

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