Lou Barlow knows what it’s like to have skeletons in your closet. Like anyone, there have been moments in his past he’d prefer to forget but that always seem to linger on the periphery. The only difference now is that, instead of keeping his skeletons at a distance, he’s playing rock ‘n’ roll with them.
After being fired from Dinosaur Jr in 1989 by cofounder J Mascis, Barlow went on to form the lo-fi indie rock group Sebadoh with Eric Gaffney. The two were joined by Jason Loewenstein and worked together for four years before Gaffney left the band. Many years of silence followed.
Now, more than a decade later, Barlow has renewed his relationship with Mascis (Dinosaur Jr has a new album due in May) and also has embarked on a North American tour with Sebadoh’s original members, a tour which will visit Los Angeles tonight at the Troubadour and Spaceland on Saturday night.
“It’s an opportunity to have new experiences with someone and a situation, the hope being that the good times you’re having now will somehow dim the bad times that you had,” Barlow said.
The idea of a Sebadoh reunion tour, however, was not a possibility until Barlow and Gaffney began working together on the reissue of the band’s seminal 1991 release, “III.”
“Jason and I were actually thinking about doing another tour together, and we were wondering who we would get to play drums,” Barlow said, “but at the same time Eric and I had begun doing the reissue, the logical extension of that being that we decided to go on tour together.”
Though Sebadoh played with various drummers and released several albums up until 2000, their current tour is the first by the lineup Barlow refers to as “Sebadoh Classic” since 1993. But despite this great length of time, Barlow believes little has changed.
“It feels really similar when Eric starts playing with us again,” he said, pausing to consider his statement. “It kind of feels the same.”
In the early ’90s, when Gaffney was still in the lineup, Sebadoh’s live shows were notorious for their use of “showtapes,” cassette recordings Barlow would make before the band went on tour, most of which contained long segments of ranting and egotistical free-associating.
“I would take one tape that was really long, like 15 to 20 minutes, and each night I would end up playing three or four minutes of it, in between songs when we really needed it or when I thought it was funny,” he said.
But, despite their infamous history, Barlow believes the incorporation of showtapes is one element that’s better left in the past.
“It was just one of those deliciously self-indulgent little moments of time you can have in your early 20s on the first blush of a marijuana high,” Barlow said. “I thought they were really funny but, for Eric and Jason, it wasn’t always funny to have this obnoxious showtape blaring.”
The Sebadoh live experience will also differ from past tours because of the band’s changing audience, which Barlow believes to be getting younger.
“I’m actually expecting a fair amount of kids,” he said. “I think a lot of our older fans aren’t going (to the show) anyway because few of them seem to agree on what was good about us. But who knows?”
The younger age of Sebadoh’s audience may be a result of the attention Sebadoh’s “III” has received from the media, especially from indie Web sites such as Pitchfork Media and Cokemachineglow. Barlow, however, is not one to believe the hype.
“Everything gets good reviews,” he said. “It doesn’t mean really much in the end. I’m mostly happy because I always want the music to be around. If it has a reputation of standing the test of time, then maybe it really does.”
But even with the reissue of “III,” the positive critical response and another opportunity to tour, Barlow considers his renewed relationship the most important thing to come out of Sebadoh in a long time.
“Getting back together with Eric is, in our little world, pretty fucking monumental,” he said.