Underneath my bed right now are several padded cases and a shoebox or two, all covered in dust so thick it’s sticky. Inside lay hundreds of tattered audio cassettes—the vinyl of my generation, technoculturally speaking. Scattered among them are five or six Dinosaur Jr albums, the very same ones I flipped a thousand times in junior high to drown out the rumble of the school bus and of my boundless adolescent wrath. Through swelter, slush and many fleeting, self-inflicted liberations, I continued to worship these tapes through high school and even college, while some of the best ones were never even really mine. They were “borrowed,” of course, from my older brother.

Yeah, I was one of those; I had an older brother whose tapes I uh, re-appropriated. I gratefully admit that he paved my way into the underground—with Pavement, of course. With Superchunk, Mudhoney and Dinosaur Jr. He was on guard in the mid/late ‘80s as Dinosaur’s now most celebrated LPs were first coming out, while I was probably still dragging my stuffed Wile E. Coyote doll to the TV room at 6am to watch Popeye. Inevitably, though, that nasty mandrake puberty sprouted through the fragile soil of my ‘tween years, and the venom of my peers fed into it like acid rain. Those indie rock albums rapidly became my bible, and I became their radical fundamentalist. Thunder-charged crushes, humiliations, loathing and despair plowed like tsunamis through every cracking voice, lanky arm, and spontaneous erection, and through it all, my one cherished lifeline was the foam-padded headphone-emitted force field of songs like “In a Jar”, “Freak Scene” and “The Lung.” The beauty of being an unpopular “freak” in those days laid entirely with the bands that shared your condition, all trembling defensively at the onset of a cultural hijacking yet each in its own categorical crevasse. Caught at the vanguard of this burgeoning in-between scene, Dinosaur Jr was too genuine, noisy and self-conscious for the mainstream, yet too whiny, slow and “wussy” for the headbangers.

It wasn’t until the no-no-‘90s rolled lackadaisically in that I personally managed to shove my way into the flannel-waisted mosh pits of The City; 1991, to be exact, with the indie renaissance already well underway, marked the occasion of my first real rock show that exploded in an ear-shattering hail of distortion, green and red stage lights, pot smoke, crowd surfing, shoulders and elbows—everything I’d always yearned for it to be. Crammed up against nearly a thousand fellow “losers” like layers of magnetic tape, the adolescent realization of feeling completely alone melted away for the first time; the wheel at the center of it all: Dinosaur Jr. That was the power of Barlow’s throbbing, wounded bass, Murph’s primal punctuation, and the whining, wailing axe of J Mascis. They skewered and crunched our doldrums at the willing expense of our eardrums.

What I didn’t realize, though, was that Barlow wasn’t on that stage in 1991. The band was touring on Green Mind, a great album by any standard, but also sadly the first one without Lou and with only a few tracks drummed by Murph. I recognized the enormous difference between 1988’s Bug and 1991’s Green Mind, but was too much of a slacker to bother with ‘zines or even album credits; I just chalked it up, cynically, to their leap to a major. Adding to the confusion was SST’s release the same year of the original trio’s singles/b-side collection Fossils, and beyond that, there was too much catching up to do, anyway. Superchunk’s No Pocky for Kitty, My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless, Pixies’ Trompe Le Monde, Slint’s Spiderland, Smashing Pumpkins’ Gish, L7’s Smell the Magic—every one of these albums is now considered a milestone classic—all of them came out in ‘91. It was also in September ‘91 that a catchy little number first crept its way onto the late-night broadcasts of MTV’s 120 Minutes, a real toe-tappin’ little ditty by the name of “Smells like Teen Spirit.”