I Just Read About That…

[ATTENDED: July 30, 2018] Heavy Blanket

About a day before this show, I looked up who Heavy Blanket were.  Imagine my surprise to read that they are a side project of J. Mascis.  So this makes four times I’ve seen Mascis live now (twice with Dino. Jr and once when he jammed with Pearl Jam in Boston).

Heavy Blanket put out an album 5 years ago ( I completely missed it) and the backstory of the band is pretty funny:

It was the summer of 1984, and a teenage j Mascis was bored. Sure, his band Deep Wound were still playing shows and melting faces.  [but] he wanted to start something new. He wanted to shed the pretentiousness and elitism that had risen around him  – to slow things down and turn the volume way, way up.

He remembered a couple kids from his early high school days – stoner kids he’d always admired for their “who gives a shit” attitude. Those kids, Johnny Pancake and Pete Cougar, had been kicked out of marching band for smoking weed out of a tuba. Way better musicians than the marching band deserved, they’d formed a duo that was all rhythm section – no vocals, no guitar, a sick, punchy brew of Band of Gypsies and Japanese hard psych (Johnny’s uncle was a US Marine stationed on Okinawa in 1973. From his frequent visits to Tokyo, he brought home a killer psych record collection. And a mean dose of the clap). These were the guys he needed. He rounded them up and it soon became obvious that the heavy rhythms they created were the perfect backdrop to young Mascis’ insane, fluid ability on the guitar. The trio came up with six blistering tracks, named themselves Heavy Blanket, and set a date to record.

But then, tragedy struck. Johnny hit his head and nearly drowned while swimming in an old stone quarry in southern Vermont. His recovery was… incomplete. He gave up playing altogether and became something of a recluse, retreating to the relative safety of his grandmother’s basement. Disheartened by Johnny incapacitation, Pete moved out to Ohio to work in his uncle’s second-hand furniture store. He later did a stint in federal prison for repeatedly passing low-denomination counterfeit bills at the local Stop’n’Shop. Mascis went on to form Dinosaur jr, and the rest is history. The boys lost touch, and those blistering tracks were lost to history.

Fast forward to the winter of 2011. While on his semi-annual ski retreat to Stowe, Mascis runs into an old friend. Johnny had emerged from his grandmother’s basement (having been forced to, once her demise stopped the flow of milk and sandwiches to his underground lair) and taken a job grooming the ski trails with a Snowcat. Convinced his long-ago accident was the handiwork of those schemers in Pearl Jam, Johnny begged j to reform the band. It was the only way to get back at them, he insisted. A quick search of Ohio prison records turned up Pete, living in a halfway house in Columbus. After securing the proper permissions from his parole officer, Pete boarded a Greyhound with the only recording of Heavy Blanket in existence – an old practice cassette. Building off those old tune structures, the boys – now men – have finally succeeded in fulfilling the promise of that long past summer.

Live, Heavy Blanket played 35 minutes of instrumental stoner blues metal.  Basically, J Mascis soloed for 32 minutes (given the pauses between songs) and the other guys plugged away at fuzzy bluesy bass and powerful drums.

Actually, that;s false, Johnny Pancake (or Pete Cougar) did do a drum solo–rather long and kind of impressive–for a good three or four minutes.  That’s pretty audacious for an opening act.  I actually think the drum solo helped to break up what would be a pretty monotonous 35 minutes if it was just five or six heavy blues jam (indistinguishable to my ear).

As would be expected, nobody spoke–except to say hi and goodbye.

And it was quite loud.

It was heavy, it was pretty fun, although honestly, if it weren’t for J. Mascis I wouldn’t have been as intrigued by it.  And even with J Mascis, it wasn’t all that riveting.

The lights were low, the stage was dark, you could barely see anyone.  The bassist’s poofy hair stood out–highlighted by the lights.  J’s silver hair was pretty obvious, but it would have been hard to confirm that it was he.

J’s soloing was solid of course, although it didn’t quite have his memorable sound–a very different kind of soloing than in Dino.  Just a chance to jam and jam a lot.