A dinosaur is coming to Cornwall

On Saturday, Nov. 14, Cornwall Town Hall will be the coolest place in the county. Lou Barlow, of the rock bands Dinosaur Jr., the Folk Implosion and Sebadoh, will be joined by Attawalpa’s Luis Felber and hauntingly raw singer-songwriter Amelia Jackie as they transform the official administrative building into a rockin’ music venue.

Lou Barlow rarely gets the credit he deserves. As bassist for 1980s pre-grunge indie sensation Dinosaur Jr., he influenced a whole generation of bass players. Barlow started his music career by playing guitar in a hardcore punk band called Deep Wound out of Central Massachusetts.

When Barlow and the band’s drummer, J Mascis, left to form their own band, Dinosaur, Mascis took over on guitar and asked Barlow to join him on bass. As this was long before widespread public access to the internet, there was no easy way to find out that there was already a band called Dinosaur. Like the Warlocks before them, who eventually changed their name to the Grateful Dead, Dinosaur needed its own identity. Their solution? Simply add a Jr.

Barlow took his hard-playing guitar method and transferred it to the electric bass. By playing chords and using a guitar pick instead of the standard bare fingers, he gave his bass a richer, fuller sound, allowing Mascis to play with his guitar and litany of pedals. Along with their drummer, Murph, the band was rising to uncharted levels of popularity.

This was all happening in the late 1980s, when MTV was starting to take over the airwaves and commanded an outsized influence on the music industry as a whole. Eventually, the pressures of the road and the band’s creative struggles led to a famously fractured relationship between Mascis and Barlow. In 1989, Barlow was kicked out of Dinosaur Jr.

Because Mascis didn’t like sharing the band’s creative direction, Barlow had already been writing his own material. On a four-track cassette recorder, he cobbled together songs in bedrooms and living rooms while still touring with Dinosaur Jr. Many of those songs were about the tensions between Barlow and Mascis and the way he had been treated in the later days of his tenure with the band.

Barlow teamed up with Northampton-based musicians Eric Gaffney and Jason Loewenstein to form Sebadoh. Together with bands like Pavement and Guided by Voices, Sebadoh was instrumental in pioneering the lo-fi sound that would eventually be inextricable from shoegaze and other forms of indie rock in the late 1990s and early 2000s. While Sebadoh’s albums rarely garnered the kind of popularity they deserved upon release, music critics and record collectors would eventually look back and lavish praise on the band for setting trends that the industry couldn’t see as they were happening.

Popular success finally came for Barlow with another project, the Folk Imposition. Formed with multi-instrumentalist John Davis, the band was heavily featured on the soundtrack to Harmony Korine and Larry Clark’s independent blockbuster “Kids.” The movie became a generational touchstone, due in no small part to its use of music.

Barlow, Mascis and Murph seemed to use the 1990s as a way to grow up and work out their creative demons. In 2005, Dinosaur Jr. reunited with a lot less baggage and a greater willingness to work together as a band. Since the reunion, the band has released several new albums and achieved egendary status, with a new generation of music fans obsessing over the ahead-of-its-time albums released 30 to 40 years ago.

At Cornwall Town Hall, Barlow will perform solo. The show offers a series of ticket tiers, from general admission to a post-show wine-and-cheese soirée.

Tickets are available at dice.fm.