NEW YEAR YOUTUBE RABBITHOLE PLACEHOLDER POST

Barlow & Mould, Sebadoh, Bob Dylan, the Breeders

Trying hard to maintain this biweekly publishing pace you music lovers all deserve, finding myself falling behind just a bit in these times of holiday sloth followed immediately by post-holiday day-job catch-up scramble. What to do? Well, howzabout a good old-fashioned low-pressure YouTube roundup placeholder post? Just some vids that have crushed me lately? OK great, let’s do it now before these links inevitably start to break:

The key crusher here is the perhaps unlikely acoustic duo of Lou Barlow and Bob Mould (insert law firm joke here) playing Lou’s lovely angry uptight sorrowful song “Magnet’s Coil” live on a September, 1994 airing of MTV’s 120 Minutes television program. Bob was the guest host, promoting Sugar’s File Under: Easy Listening (release date September 6th, 1994), Lou was the guest guest, promoting Sebadoh’s Bakesale (release date August 23rd, 1994), and Bob’s accompanying 12-string on “Magnet’s Coil” is almost as beautiful as Lou’s always-beautiful vocals. Also included in this clip: their charmingly awkward “but no . . . but yeah! . . . but no” interview segment in which they praise Discharge (although not their disappointing first American tour), after which Lou tries to get into some good old fashioned tour-van trash-talk that Bob cordially tiptoes around. There’s more excerpts in this longer YouTube, including Bob’s solo introduction at the top of the episode, and the song that Bob sings and Lou accompanies, which I don’t recognize because I’ve listened to that Sugar album maybe 1.5 times at most, and it was literally 30 years ago.

These 120 Minutes vids immediately took me down a Bakesale rabbithole, first stop being this live performance of “Rebound” on the October 21st, 1994 airing of Late Night with Conan O’Brien where they kinda pull a “Radio Radio” at the end to give Jason Lowenstein the national TV exposure his unhinged (if not quite Gaffney-level unhinged) songwriting deserves, via a wild run-through of his “Crystal Gypsy” (a song that wasn’t officially released for another two years on their 1996 album Harmacy).

From there I came across this deep and hushed live solo acoustic set by Lou at Rough Trade Records’ former Haight Street location in San Francisco, which took place that year between Bakesale and Harmacy, on February 25th, 1995. Lou plays a couple songs each from those two albums, as well as “The Freed Pig” from Sebadoh III, one from Sebadoh vs. Helmet, two or three other songs I don’t know very well at all, and everything is so crystal-clear sombre (British spelling, even). And yes, he’s wearing a beanie of the Black Flag bars, and it’s not even cheesy because he was in Deep Wound and probably helped set up shows for Black Flag in Western Massachusetts. This set is broken up into individual videos, of which there are at least nine . . . I was gonna put “Skull” up because I’m somewhat obsessed with the lyrics of that song after learning it was written about a night spent smoking crack with Evan Dando at the Chateau Marmont in L.A. (according to Lou on Yasi Salek’s 24 Question Party People podcast), but went with another version of “Magnet’s Coil” instead.

And speaking of podcasts, Lou’s got one with his wife Adelle Barlow called RAW impressions, and here he is regaling her about the making of Bakesale. Good descriptions of the Sebadoh trio aesthetic and their dynamic as a “songwriter collective.” Now I’m thinking about how maybe Lou Barlow:Deep Wound::Richard Hell:Television, where in both cases you have a founding member and would-be bandleader playing punk rock who is rather quickly overtaken by a more dour and forceful bandleader playing classic rock. (I love all these bands, just riffin’ on some thoughts.) In any case, I think it’s impressive how Barlow returned to Dinosaur Jr. in 2005 and he and Mascis can seemingly put aside and/or outgrow all the tension described in “The Freed Pig” and just play powerful music. Lou is a powerful singer-songwriter, but he also constantly pushes the role of the bass guitar in a power trio setting. One can be both!

Couple non-Barlow bonus vids . . . first of all this shocking-to-me footage of Bob Dylan recording “The Man in Me.” Shocking-to-me because, regardless of The Big Lebowski (1998, d. Ethan Cohen & Joel Cohen, I did see and enjoy it once in the theaters), this song has long been one of my absolute favorite deeper Dylan cuts, just as I love New Morning as a low-key departure record from guitar-led folk/rock to piano-led soul/rock. And magically in 2025 here’s visual proof of Bob jamming it live in the studio, wearing shades, great beard-and-short-hair look, hitting those big “la la la”s, playing great lead piano, cueing live background vocalists and studio legends keeping it up behind him? You gotta be kidding!

And finally finally, I didn’t realize the Breeders’ Live in Big Sur concert film had been available on YouTube for 6 months already . . . “Divine Hammer” is just one of those glorious songs that I still haven’t gotten sick of, and the band clearly hasn’t either, judging from how this 2024 acoustic version may be the best version of this beautiful song they’ve recorded yet, and I’ve now used the word “beautiful” at least three separate times in this piece so it’s probably time for me to go. Which I will do, but only after adding how great it is to see the Last Splash line-up of the Breeders in this video too, the Deal twins of course hitting those hilliblly family harmonies, Josephine’s killer mellow fuzz bass of course, but also the great Jim Macpherson on drums. “It was great to play some music today.” — Kim Deal.

(Oh and one more bonus bonus vid, because it’s the best Aerosmith cover, Run-D.M.C. #2:)