HUSKER DU

(from a Salon.com article by By Patrick Smith, June 28, 2004 - reprinted without permission)


...just as punk rock appeared doomed to a legacy of broken guitar strings and blown-out amps -- but not so entirely that a band with the right ideas couldn't make gold from the pile -- along came three weird guys from Minnesota.  Led by guitarist/vocalist Bob Mould and drummer/vocalist Grant Hart, ably assisted by bassist Greg Norton, Hüsker Dü took the volume and do-it-yourself credo of their contemporaries, swirled in a generous measure of melodic hooks and '60s-era psychedelia, and pushed the boundaries of punk into unprecedented territory.

Not that Mould, Hart or Norton acknowledged such confines to begin with, never exactly pleased with their classification as a punk outfit. For one thing, they just didn't look the part: These were big, sweaty, chain-smoking men who obviously hadn't shaved or showered in a while. Norton, trimmest and most dapper of the threesome, wore a handlebar mustache. Wrote Terry Katzman, the Hüskers' first sound engineer and
friend still, "Hüsker Dü seemingly defined the punk ethos... without necessarily embracing or endorsing it."

Sure, they'd been at it since '79, and the band's first LP had been a sweat-bucket thrash fest called "Land Speed Record," but even at breakneck velocity there was something ineffably refined and just, well, different about Hüsker Dü. If pressed to explain, one might break out 1982's "Everything Falls Apart." Amid Side 1's hypsersonic avalanche is planted a cover of Donovan's 1966 hit "Sunshine Superman." Trite, perhaps, on the face of it, until you hear how tellingly and astonishingly un-ironic is the remake, without so much as a note's worth of smirk or parody.

While the blending of power/pop extremes was nothing the Velvet Underground, or even the Beatles, hadn't done years earlier, the Hüskers pulled it off in a way that transcended gimmickry, and did so on such terrain –- the American hardcore punk scene –- where nobody saw it coming or even believed it possible. Mould and Hart would, in a way, finish the job Reed and the others tinkered with one-dimensionally almost two
decades earlier, compounding their kindergarten melodies with equally hefty injections of hippie love and heavy-metal thunder.


Before their stormy demise in late 1987, the band would release six full-length albums, two EPs, and a catalog of singles and extras. But the pinnacle of all that output was a double LP called "Zen Arcade," first delivered to stores in July 1984, by California-based SST Records. "The most important and relevant double album to be released since the Beatles' 'White Album,'" bragged SST's press release. Such lofty hyperbole would be preposterous, until you consider the full context -- or lack thereof -- of the underground in 1984. Eleven years later, Spin magazine would award "Zen Arcade" the No. 4 spot on its ranking of the hundred best-ever
"alternative" records. Rolling Stone, in its laughably manic list of the best of the '80s, gave it lip service at No. 33. Not the choicest of praise, until you remember that not only this band, but their entire musical domain, lived and died far below the mainstream waterline.


Hüsker Dü could make you cry, but just for good measure they would rupture your eardrums in the process. Depressive? Angry? Delirious with angst? Conventional gauges of intensity are, at last, irrelevant. Hüsker Dü were all of those things, but they didn't brood. "In time I came to think of Hüsker music as the shadowy underside of REM's child-eye vision of love and loss," says Terri Sutton in the liner notes to "Dü Hüskers," a 1993 tribute disc to "Zen Arcade," on which 23 Minneapolis bands replay the entire album, start-to-finish
(one of two full-length tributes paid to the Dü, by the way). "Their games of hide and seek took place not in some lilac-scented Eden, but under the opaque ice of six-month Minnesotan winter."

(Zen Arcade) is the album Nirvana and Pearl Jam only wish they could have made: intelligent, clamorous, and hashing out more torment and passion in four sides than all the grungers and headbangers since -- all without a hint of heavy-metal pretension. It's amazing to think anyone could concoct a 14-minute bombast of guitar leads and layered feedback -- "Reocurring Dreams," Side 4 -- and have it not come out self-consciously. And when the 40-second whine at the end of "Dreams" is at last pinched off, the album trembling to a
close in a congealed, numbing squeal, the silence that follows is palpable, painful and disconcerting. Not until
you've stopped to catch your breath is it apparent that your notions of punk are forever changed.


"Zen Arcade" was not the only Hüsker jewel, though its scope and expanse hold it forever above the others. Six months after "Zen" sold more than 20,000 copies –- an unbelievable number for a record with no corporate endorsement –- came "New Day Rising," which woke the country from its winter freeze in
January 1985. Along with "Metal Circus," a seven-song EP precursor to "Zen," these three records represent, possibly, the most potent 1-2-3 punch in the annals of indie music.

Warner Bros. would sign the band for its last two projects, a move that had critics either nodding proudly -- "I told you so" -- or sucking their teeth nervously. Major label signings are commonplace today, even for upstart acts piped to the masses via the feeding tubes of MTV, but in the 1980s underground it was not only rare but controversial. Fans waited anxiously to see if the new contract would nurture Hüsker Dü's enduring genius, or seal its fate as the first alt-rock dinosaur band. As it happened, Hüsker Dü never sold its soul to the cigar chompers at Warner Bros., but nonetheless its final two albums were enormously anticlimactic.



Essential Listening:

Land Speed Record
Everything Falls Apart
Metal Circus
Eight Miles High/Makes No Sense At All
Zen Arcade
New Day Rising
Flip Your Wig
Candy Apple Grey
Warehouse: Songs and Stories
The Living End

Husker Du Allmusic
Husker Du Allmusic Discography
Husker Du Wiki
The Husker Du Database
Bob Mould's Site
Grant Hart's Site