J Mascis

Growing up in Amherst, J was sort of the hometown hero. He was ten years ahead of me in high school, so no one really talked about him there, but after school hanging out with the older kids right as the “grunge” era was beginning to take off, his name and Dinosaur Jr often came up.

When I was 18, my first kind of “real” job was a small marketing agency in downtown Amherst. Lou and Murph had just left/been kicked out of Dinosaur, and Murph’s replacement (George Berz) was high school friends with a guy I worked with. George often stopped by the shop and J came along frequently as well.

When I’d hang out at Rao’s Coffee, the local coffee shop in Amherst, me and my friends would all be doing whatever troublemaking teenagers did back then, then one of us would look up and see J casually walking towards us to get coffee. We’d all go silent and as he’d walk by he sometimes gave a slight acknowledgement toward me. Just a simple “hey Lucas”.  That acknowledgement was enough to send my friends bonkers.

One other memory from that era isn’t even my own memory. I was hanging out with some friends who lived in some cheap apartments in Downtown Amherst (back when Amherst actually had cheap apartments), and one day one of them looked out the window and mentioned “you’ve got to see this, someone is moving out next door and everything they own is purple!”. That’s how we learned that J had been living one or two buildings down.

Back then, Dinosaur was still on an upward trajectory, but none of us (and probably not J either) realized how big and influential they would ultimately become.