Feel the Pain by Dinosaur Jr.

1994 was a great year to be in a loud, alternative rock band, but it wasn’t that great a year for Dinosaur Jr. The band’s grisly volume, fractured sense of melody and contrarian spirit made them an underground legend in the '80s: They’d regularly play hardcore punk shows where audiences demanded short, speedy songs; instead frontman J Mascis would take off on epic guitar solos.

Our eardrums can vouch that they were also one of the loudest bands on the planet. But by the '90s, when alternative rock was finally starting to sell, Dinosaur Jr. was splintering: Bassist Lou Barlow was the first to go, forming Sebadoh after a bad-tempered fallout with Mascis. Drummer Murph left soon after, leaving Dino Jr. practically as Mascis’ solo project (On “Feel the Pain” he plays everything but bass).

Fans didn’t all embrace the new direction, so Mascis didn’t get to join the post-punk goldrush. Yet time has been good to “Feel the Pain,” whose emotive vocal and soft/loud shifts make it one of the definitive Dino Jr. tracks.

J Mascis visited the Harmonix office in late 2007, and played “Blitzkrieg Bop” on Expert drums. He scored 97%.

This song has frequent slow-to-fast shifts and the slow parts are all easy, but don’t get too comfortable. On drums you can practically sleep through the slow part, but you’ll need to wake up fast—The sped-up sections have lots of snare and tom fills that could fail you if you miss more than one.

The guitar solo is medium-difficult, with a lot of power chords and relatively few hammer-ons. And speaking of power chords, this is one of the few songs that makes you play them on bass; and you have to do lots of runs up the neck between those.

After years of estrangement, the original trio of Mascis, Barlow and Murph reunited in 2005 and are still going strong.