J Mascis and Mike Watt Cover Each Other’s Bands on New Split

There’s a new split 7″ from J Mascis and Mike Watt. Two musicians who shared a label when American underground rock was still an actual underground, not a nostalgic brand. Watt throws himself into a ramshackle take on Dinosaur Jr.’s “The Little Baby,” the throwaway track from 1991’s Whatever’s Cool With Me EP. George Hurley, his old Minutemen bandmate, plays drums and shouts along. It sounds like a room full of people remembering why they started doing this in the first place.

Mascis, for his side, doesn’t touch the Minutemen catalog. He reaches instead for “Formal Introduction,” a song Watt wrote for fIREHOSE, the trio he formed after D. Boon’s death. Mascis slows the song down and wraps it in the kind of fuzzed-out guitar sprawl that’s been his signature for decades. There’s a strange history to that track: in 1996, Watt and Kira Roessler, as Dos, stripped it to an instrumental bass duet. Mascis puts the words back in, barely, and lets the riffs carry the weight.

Neither cover is going to replace the original. That seems to be the point. The split is the third in a series from Austin’s Red Parakeet Records, which previously paired Watt with Papa M and Tim Kerr. Each installment works like a conversation between people who’ve never been interested in doing what’s expected. This one adds a small, sharp chapter to that record.