Sebadoh The Freed Man by: Dan Grimsey Mon:06-Aug-07 Label: Homestead Year: 1989 WB rating 42 out of 100

Dinosaur Jnr fans are a crazy obsessive mob. So just to annoy them – and because pretty much the only piece of Dinosaur Jnr trivia I know is that J Mascis kicked Lou Barlow out of the band, and Lou has never forgiven him for that – I have always boasted that I took Lou’s side in the split. There’s no reason for that. I have no spiritual connection with Lou Barlow. I’m just being a smart arse.

Basically the goss is, that J wouldn’t let Lou put many of his songs on Dinosaur Jnr albums. So Lou just kept writing and writing more and more songs so that by 1989, when this album was originally released, he and his mate Eric Gaffney had a hell of a lot of songs. There are 52 songs on this album! 52 songs! Fortunately they average about one or two minutes each.

The Freed Man comes across then as two busking friends just messing around with songs and sounds, and ideas for songs, and songs half done, and songs crappily recorded. The most crappily recorded possibly being their punk-rock cover of the Beatles ‘Yellow Submarine’ although there are countless other contenders for most crappily recorded award. Such as the childishly repetitive ‘Land Of The Lords,’ with it’s chanting “walking in the land of the lords/ walking in the land of the lords” which pretty much repeats itself ab nauseum.

These amateur recordings are quite fun at first in their naivety. Quite similar in it’s I’ve-been-stuffing-around-making-some-songs-in-my-bedroom attitude of Beck’s Mellow Gold album. Except did I mention that there are 52 songs! Which is about 40 songs too many.

The Freed Man isn’t just about lots and lots of songs of badly recorded songs. It’s also about snippets of television shows such as Sesame Street and Winnie the Pooh, seemingly recorded by placing a tape recorder right in front of the television. It’s also about random sounds such as a minute or so of cats screeching. And it’s also about inane stoned slacker conversations popping up in the middle of songs. Inane stoned slacker conversations such as this:

“I think everyone should have their own band, and there should be this one big show where everyone in the world played.”

“Yeah, that’d be wicked!”

“That’d be the best!!”

“No, everybody from the United States. A whole lot of hardcore bands. It’d be like Woodstock.”

And that’s just the beginning. The Freed Man is full of such little random bits like this popping up all over the place.

Lou’s side in this partnership is to write short snappy simple pop songs that sometimes verge towards novelty. Such as ‘Soulmate’ which starts “my soulmate is a special girl/ a girl that’s just like me/ she’ll share tremendous oral sex/ and try everything she sees,” and continues in a very ‘I Got A Girl’ by Tripping Daisy mode, which it may very well have inspired. Such as ‘I Love Me’ which goes “I love me/ can’t you see / I love me / 1, 2, 3.” Or ‘Punch In The Nose’ where Lou can’t seem to make up his mind whether he is, or is not, looking for a punch in the nose. Or the very cute ‘Little Man.’

Sometimes the songs turn out kind of nice. Still crappily recorded, but nice. Such as the almost Shins-ish ‘Bolder’ which annoyingly finishes just at the moment when I was just getting into it. Which when the songs are about a minute long on average, happens quite often. They don’t even fade out, they just stop. Or they suddenly switch to more random sound-bites from television or movies. It appears that the reason Lou and Eric were able to write so much material is because they only wrote the first half of the song, and then, being the ADHD suffering slackers they were, couldn’t be bothered finishing the job. So there was probably good reason for J Mascis kicking Lou out of Dinosaur Jnr. He probably got sick of being played all these half finished, semi-retarded almost-novelty songs.

Eric provides a more bizarre dimension, with strange little random instrumentals as he tries to create a psychedelic sound out of his limited ingredients of an acoustic guitar with a distortion pad and what ever else is lying around. The instruments lying around do not include a drum kit.

They did manage however to dig up a drum machine, because suddenly out of nowhere pops ‘Lou Rap’ possibly the worst white boy rapping since Wham!’s similarly titled ‘Wham! Rap’ (this was recorded prior to Vanilla Ice you understand). It starts off with “my name is Lou/ and I’m here to say” which is not the most original beginning to a rap song ever. Certainly J could never be blamed for not wanting this on a Dinosaur Jnr album.

Now, the phrase ‘for fans only’ has always seemed a little odd to me. I mean, why would you buy an album at all if you weren’t a fan? Maybe ‘for obsessives only’ would be a better term. This album however certainly falls into that category. It’s for ‘obsessives’ who want to see how their favourite band began, right from the very beginning. The charm of this album is similar to the fun of being shown your girl/boyfriend’s finger paintings from when they were a kid. They’re cute, but only people who love the creator could ever do anymore than pretend to be interested in them.