“They’re going to crack you up and then they’re going to crush your fucking skulls. And you’re going to love it.” – Keith Morris

Playing an album in its entirety as a live show has been equated to a “slam dunk contest” at best and at worst, “a cruel perversion of a concert’s real-time magic.” The basic question being raised from such a show is, “if you can just listen to the album at home…why go to the show? What’s different?”

In the case of Dinosaur Jr., sheer volume.

When Henry Rollins interviewed the band onstage before their set, he spent at least three questions asking about their decibel levels. We came out with some interesting insights: guitarist J. Mascis initially turned up the volume since he felt self-conscious about his ability to play guitar coming from the drums. Furthermore, the excruciating noise meant that bassist Lou Barlow and drummer Emmett Patrick Murphy (or simply Murph to fans) had to stand right next to each other during practices and even hold practice sessions on their own since they couldn’t hear each other or themselves. Saturday’s show didn’t sound quite like the eardrum bleeding affair of a few years ago, but since Mascis still played with three speaker stacks solely behind him, earplugs were still a necessity and they definitely delivered on Henry Rollins’ promise that their show would be “a sonic explosion in your face.”

It was a sonic explosion that began with two songs, “In a Jar” and “The Wagon” that don’t come from Bug, the album that they were to play in its entirety. It was a welcome surprise in a night that only yielded a few. The first surprise was that Barlow was the most dynamic of the trio. While Mascis was content to blow out our eardrums from a stationary position, Barlow still swung himself about the stage. Perhaps the biggest surprise was that upon reaching “Don’t”, Lou Barlow announced that he had blown his voice out singing the song on the first night of the tour and that it would be sung by a special guest. Who would it be? Rollins? Keith Morris? Ian MacKaye? In fact, the special guest wasn’t a famous name at all…it was someone named Jeremy from Arkansas. No one had heard of this Jeremy from Arkansas, but he did an outstanding Lou Barlow vocal impersonation and impressed a crowd who wasn’t expecting an unknown guest.

Yet, Bug is only nine songs and as such could not fill an entire evening. Thus, for the encore they threw their set list to chance, asking the audience to pick the songs. They ended up playing “Sludgefeast” and “Raisans”, which both prompted as many sing-a-longs as the album-as-a-set. Yes, it’s giving the audience exactly what they want, but even scripted shows can have a few surprises.