Reichenheim married her boyfriend, Chavez guitarist Matt Sweeney, later that year. Mascis went to the wedding and befriended her brother, inviting him to go on vacation in Alaska a week later. (Reichenheim’s brother, Phillip, made the excellent 2021 Dinosaur Jr. documentary, Freakscene.) Mascis was still living in Massachusetts, but he would often spend his weeks in New York before heading home for the weekend. They remained close friends—“part of this downtown scene,” Reichenheim says. And then, as 1997 began, both of their lives crumbled. Reichenheim’s first marriage splintered. For the first time, Sire told Mascis that Dinosaur Jr.’s new album, Hand It Over, needed a hit; that was the beginning of the end.
The ups-and-downs of a dozen years in Dinosaur Jr. and the ’90s at large had left their mark on Mascis. He’d often been Barlow’s very public target through the decade, from a Sebadoh EP named Asshole with an opening track titled “Pig (Coward)” to a hometown Sebadoh show where Barlow berated Mascis as his own mother looked on. “I was just kind of depressed, and I needed all the help I could get,” he remembers. His therapist suggested he visit Mother Meera, an Indian spiritual teacher who touches attendees’ temples during a silent service. It was helpful if not transformative.
The same person suggested he go see Mata Amritanandamayi, or Amma, another Indian spiritual teacher who has now hugged around 40 million people as part of her practice. He first tried to meet her in New York, but the event was too crowded for Mascis to engage. When he went again to see her in Boston, it clicked. Reichenheim came from a long line of ministers, and she wanted to become a nurse; Amma’s ideas of self-sacrifice appealed to her sensibility. For Mascis, the whole ceremony simply felt good—the hug, the meditation, the music.
Amma’s directive was simple but complicated: “Just be nice to people,” Mascis says, laughing and drumming on the kitchen table, a Carnelian bracelet tight around his left wrist. “I wasn’t the nicest kid, and I’ve never been overly nice. I can be an asshole, but I’m working on it. It’s a constant.”
With the band done in late 1997, Mascis booked solo tours around Amma’s appearances, and he and Reichenheim followed her across the United States and Europe. She recently watched Summer Tour, the Dead & Company documentary produced and directed by two Provincetown regulars, Sevigny and Mischa Richter. She was never a Deadhead, but she identified with the devotional intensity from discovering and then trailing Amma, how it had changed both of their lives.
“Practicing some sort of spirituality came naturally to me, but in New York, that got lost in the shuffle of working, of trying to make things work. And J had been working so hard, coming out of his whole career in the ’90s,” Reichenheim reckons. “We connected in that way—‘Hey, there’s something else out there to explore about the world, about yourself.’”
