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While Hüsker Dü was on their last legs by the time I got to them, they were one of those bands that the people I looked to as cool kids liked. I never owned any album besides New Day Rising, but a week of listening to them demonstrates the retentive power of a half decade of hearing an album played at a party, or when a roommate falls a little too much in love with a band. If you can sing snippets 10, 20 years after the fact – and from the verses – you heard that album on heavy rotation at some point.
A Little History
Hüsker Dü hailed from St. Paul, Minnesota, during the boom years that saw them, The Replacements…and Prince gain national attention. (Yeah, yeah, Prince was on a different level.) They met at area record stores – first Grant Hart (drums/vox) and Greg Norton (bass/future restauranteur), and later Bob Mould (guitar/vox) – and they came up in the Minneapolis/St. Paul punk scene, with their personal emphasis on St. Paul. (A 2017 interview with a Minneapolis member-supported radio station, before Hart’s death at 56, is the best, if one-sided, origin story I found.) They showed off their hardcore roots on 1980’s Land Speed Record and that heightened aggression carried all the way up to their first full length album, 1983’s Everything Falls Apart. Like flowers in a field, however, some melodic inflections started coming through as early as the Metal Circus EP from the same year (hear the guitar on “First of the Last Calls”).
They swung for the fences almost immediately after that with the release of 1984’s double album, Zen Arcade. More musically eclectic than anything that came before (as measured by the distance between “Never Talking to You Again” and the explosive “I’ll Never Forget You”), it’s a loosely-held together concept album, a narrative about an anonymous protagonist leaving home from a barely-more accepting world. Before that album went out into the world, Mould spoke to the band’s ambition:
While Hüsker Dü was on their last legs by the time I got to them, they were one of those bands that the people I looked to as cool kids liked. I never owned any album besides New Day Rising, but a week of listening to them demonstrates the retentive power of a half decade of hearing an album played at a party, or when a roommate falls a little too much in love with a band. If you can sing snippets 10, 20 years after the fact – and from the verses – you heard that album on heavy rotation at some point.
A Little History
Hüsker Dü hailed from St. Paul, Minnesota, during the boom years that saw them, The Replacements…and Prince gain national attention. (Yeah, yeah, Prince was on a different level.) They met at area record stores – first Grant Hart (drums/vox) and Greg Norton (bass/future restauranteur), and later Bob Mould (guitar/vox) – and they came up in the Minneapolis/St. Paul punk scene, with their personal emphasis on St. Paul. (A 2017 interview with a Minneapolis member-supported radio station, before Hart’s death at 56, is the best, if one-sided, origin story I found.) They showed off their hardcore roots on 1980’s Land Speed Record and that heightened aggression carried all the way up to their first full length album, 1983’s Everything Falls Apart. Like flowers in a field, however, some melodic inflections started coming through as early as the Metal Circus EP from the same year (hear the guitar on “First of the Last Calls”).
They swung for the fences almost immediately after that with the release of 1984’s double album, Zen Arcade. More musically eclectic than anything that came before (as measured by the distance between “Never Talking to You Again” and the explosive “I’ll Never Forget You”), it’s a loosely-held together concept album, a narrative about an anonymous protagonist leaving home from a barely-more accepting world. Before that album went out into the world, Mould spoke to the band’s ambition:
“We're going to try to do something bigger than anything like rock & roll and the whole puny touring band idea. I don't know what it's going to be, we have to work that out, but it's going to go beyond the whole idea of 'punk rock' or whatever.”
Zen Arcade topped both the posts I found that ranked Hüsker Dü albums from least best to best (fans, both times). They’d signed to SST Records by then – the label started by Black Flag’s Greg Ginn (LA band), which shows how much notice their touring got them – where they put out one album after another that elevated the melodic components while holding onto more or less of the aggression. Both New Day Rising and Flip Your Wig came out in ’85, then Candy Apple Grey in ’86, and the whole intense period came to an end with Warehouse Songs and Stories and the implosion catalyzed by Hart’s heroin addiction. Their split was famously acrimonious, but most of what I’ve read – and this includes comments from Mould – generally agrees the animosity appeared worse than it was. Asked about what might have been had they stuck together, Hart offered this piece of wisdom:
“I think if we hadn’t majorly regressed – we were heading down some terrible pop territory by Warehouse’s completion. But thank God that we got out of there with our reputations. I’m happy for that. Reputation and the work of an artist is the thing that you cannot replace with anything, whatsoever.”
Fun Details
They started with a keyboardist named Charlie Pine, playing under the name Buddy and the Returnables. The three permanent members started writing originals songs and decided they hated what they sounded like with Pine enough to kick him out of the band during a performance.
A major label, Warner Bros., released both Candy Apple Grey and Warehouse. The band signed only after insisting they retain creative control. This still arguably fed the tensions between Mould and Hart, Hüsker Dü’s eternally dueling songwriters. Speaking to those major label years, Hart made some loose comments about producers whispering poison about Mould to Hart, and vice versa, and that causing tension, but Hart clearly resented an arrangement where he could only get 45% of the songs on the album while Mould kept the other 55%. There’s also the suicide of the band’s manager, David Savoy, before the tour to support Warehouse, after which Mould took over managerial duties. Hart claimed “full responsibility” for that, apparently (oof.)
Once you know that history, it’s weird to hear Mould identify himself as the calming influence in the band during Hüsker Dü’s appearance on the Joan Rivers Show. Also, it’s weird seeing Hüsker Dü on the Joan Rivers’ Show.
The name Husker Du came while trying to shout out the foreign phrases they couldn’t remember in the Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer.” Someone recalled a 1970’s board game called “Husker Du,” which means “do you remember” in Danish and Norwegian, and that stuck.
SST pressed only 5,000 copies of Zen Arcade and it sold out mid-tour. That issue with growing too fast followed them all the way until they signed to Warner. And, candidly, I still can’t believe a major label signed a band like Husker Du around the height of the hair-metal era.
On a personal note, I convinced myself sometime last week that Hart had a lisp, and it really impressed me that they handed vocal duties to him on (great) songs like “Sorry Somehow” and “You’re a Solider.” Listening again, I might have played a trick on my brain, but you be the judge…
Last note here, and it’s because I feel like Grant Hart hogs too much of the above (here's more). Bob Mould released an album in 2019 called Sunshine Rock. It sounds like a compelling project, grounded in positivity and, to some extent coping with loss, but their falling out and Hart’s fairly recent death of course came up. And I just loved this exchange:
“Rolling Stone: Were you able to make amends with him toward the end?
Mould: Yeah. [Pauses] How to answer that?”
Last Words After a Week of ‘Em
With apologies to anyone who had the time to fully digest Zen Arcade, I locate Husker Du’s salad days over the two-year span that produced New Day Rising, Flip Your Wig, and Candy Apple Grey. (For what it’s worth, Flip Your Wig is Mould’s favorite.) Wherever you classify them - “college rock” seems favorite, and that phrase was all over at the time – they’d landed on (as I see it) a formula of punk rhythms with melodic overlays (and plenty of melodic bass to boot). They could still punch the tempo through the roof – e.g., perma-classics like “Divide and Conquer” (Flip) and “Celebrated Summer” (New Day; both cherished favorites) – but they’d also mastered the subtle arts of variety by then – e.g., the sparkling, affectionately comic “Books About UFOs” (New Day) and the near-ballad, “Green Eyes” (Flip). They expanded their repertoire even further on Candy Apple Grey, plumbing the depths (“Hardly Getting Over It”) before hitting the bottom of the Marianas Trench and digging on “Too Far Down.” (I have never suffered from anything I recognized as depression (who hasn’t been told otherwise?), but the latter feels like one of the better, and a remarkably early, description of how I understand it.)
They started slipping some very straight pop arrangements into their songs through their middle years – e.g., “Makes No Sense at All” (Flip) and “Sorry Somehow” is an absolute gem – but it all reached a complicated pitch on Warehouse with tracks like “Turn It Around,” “Could You Be the One” (which you can see live on the Joan Rivers clip, if with a bunch of Vaseline smeared on the damn screen), and even “Actual Condition.” I’d lump “Standing in the Rain” and “She Floated Away” under the same “pop” label, but my ear takes a band like Hüsker Dü as a point of reference point.
My favorite album is still New Day Rising, but it’s possible that anyone’s favorite Hüsker Dü album is simply the one they’ve heard the most. I’ve been listening to that album at least once a year for 20 years or so, and I hear something I missed before every time – just like I didn’t hear echoes of Sonic Youth in the cacophony of “What’s Going On” (Zen Arcade) until this week. If you can get past the speed, volume, and break through the wall-of-sound effect to pick up on who’s doing what in the inter-play – and that’s within a trio - Hüsker Dü holds up very well over repeated listening. So, thanks to all those cool kids who turned me on to them.
The Rest of the Playlist
I expanded this week’s playlist to 40 songs to make room for Hüsker Dü and I still gave them over half (23) of it. Before touching on the random stuff, I added a healthy dose of The Beths, an
It’s a grab-bag after that, with a mix of new stuff by Black Belt Eagle Scout (“I Said I Wouldn’t Write this Song,” and could she be cooler?), Ezra Furman (“Evening Prayer aka Justice,” who has an alluring raspiness about him), and Lana Del Ray’s synth-tastic, too-knowing pop (“Happiness Is a Butterfly”)…and there’s more, but whoops!
I don’t even remember how I found “Love Me” by The Phantom, but that guided me to The Roots of the Cramps, and that’s where I found old garage classics like Three Aces & the Jesters' “Booze Party,” Link Wray's “Fatback,” Flower Children's (tasteful) “Miniskirt Blues,” Larry Phillipson's “Bitter Feelings” and Bostweed's “Faster Pussycat Kill Kill.” To close on one final personal note, garage was what carried me after grunge bored me (and the Treepeople broke up), so that sound is pretty damn automatic for me.
Right. All for this one. Till next week. Warning: it’s gonna be a weird one.
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