Our Band Could Be Your Life

by Michael Azerrad

  Hart and Mould hit it off, and Hart would often visit Mould’s dorm room, where they’d play records for hours. Hart sized up his new friend as “an upstater pretending to be a Manhattanite,” but Mould was an impressive guitarist. “He would pull a record out of the bag and put it on the turntable,” recalls Hart, “and by the second verse, be playing along with it.”

  One night in March ’79, Hart was hanging out with his pal Greg Norton and a keyboardist named Charlie Pine at Ron’s Randolph Inn, a little tavern where bands sometimes played. Pine walked up to the club’s owner, mentioned he had a band, and received a gig on the spot. Only one problem: Pine didn’t actually have a band. So he asked Hart to form one. Norton had a bass, so he was in, then Mould signed on, too.

  The quartet began intensive rehearsals in Norton’s mom’s basement in suburban Mendota Heights. “Bob was this dorky kid in a leather jacket with long hair and a Flying V like the Ramones,” Norton recalls, but he sure could whip up a big noise on his guitar. They quickly worked up a bunch of covers—everything from Fifties rocker (and fellow Minnesotan) Eddie Cochran to the Buzzcocks, trendy oldies like “Sea Cruise” and “I Fought the Law”—and plenty of Ramones.

  They had been jamming on Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer” when someone started babbling all the foreign phrases they could think of, parodying the song’s French verse. At one point someone hollered, “Hüsker Dü”—the name of a popular Sixties board game “where the child can outwit the adult.” (The phrase is Norwegian for “Do you remember?”) The name stuck.

  Hüsker Dü played their first gig on March 30, 1979. Then Pine got another gig a week later, a lucrative Spring Fest show at Macalester. Pine didn’t know that Hart, Mould, and Norton had secretly been practicing without him and had developed a couple of original tunes. They played them as the encore of the Spring Fest show, and when Pine tried to play along, Hart’s buddy “Balls” Mikutowski yanked the plug out of Pine’s keyboard, pointed at Pine, and gave him the finger, then pointed at the rest of the band and gave them a vigorous thumbs-up. With that benediction, Hüsker Dü was born.

  The band had lofty ambitions from the start; to them, a deal with punk-centric Sire Records seemed practically inevitable. “I think we kind of felt that what we were doing was good, that it was really good,” says Norton. “It was, ‘OK, we’re not from L.A. and we’re not from New York and we’re not from London,’ but we felt that we were good and we could play with the best of ’em.” But the problem was not that they weren’t from L.A., New York, or London—they weren’t even from Minneapolis. “We were St. Paul people, which was like East Germans,” Hart explains. “So we had to live that down.”

  At their first Minneapolis club show that summer, they were asked to stop playing because they were too loud. “We just sort of came out of nowhere, playing this real, real fast punk stuff, and people hated it,” said Mould. “We just kept playing faster and faster to get people to hate us more [laughs].”

  It was an awkward time to start a punk band in Minneapolis—the city’s leading punk outfit, the pioneering Suicide Commandos, had just broken up after their major label debut bombed; hipsters around town had soured on punk and began embracing new wavy bands like the Suburbs. “We just didn’t fit in,” said Mould. “People said, ‘We’ve seen it all, blah, blah, blah.’ We weren’t cool, because we were the only punk band around, and punk was going out [of style]. But we stuck to our guns.” The band did have a small but rabid following dubbed the Veggies, who never missed a show and turned even the smallest turnout into a slam-dance fest.

  And they had some help starting the band—Hart’s mother let him use the credit union’s photocopier to make flyers; Mould’s father got a van and drove it out to Minneapolis, caught a nap, and drove a cheap used car back to upstate New York; Norton’s mom let the band use the basement of her house as a rehearsal space and clubhouse.

  An enigmatic name like Hüsker Dü, they hoped, meant they wouldn’t be pigeonholed as a hardcore band. “It’s not like Social Red Youth Dynasty Brigade Distortion,” Mould explained. “When you see a name like that you can pretty much guess that the band has been listening to music for a year, and playing instruments for six months, been in a band for two months and they wrote all their lyrics the night of the show. That’s all well and good. I don’t have any qualms with that, but we don’t want to be lumped in with them.”

  But they immediately got lumped in with the hardcore bands anyway.

  Luckily they were able to put hardcore to work for them, playing the northern Midwest hardcore circuit—Madison, Milwaukee, and Chicago, mostly. Local hardcore kids would go to Hüsker Dü’s shows and put up the band that night; when their bands played Minneapolis, Hüsker Dü would reciprocate. Shunned by the arty hipsters, Hüsker Dü had found a community that would support them. “You’re in this very meager thing and you learn lessons and you take them home with you,” says Mould, “and then when the Effigies or the Meat Puppets or the Minutemen come through, we give up our floor, we give up our food. You give. You give back.”

  And then they won some key out-of-town fans. In March ’80 they arranged to play a Chicago show the same night as Black Flag was playing, billing it as a Black Flag afterparty. Sure enough, Greg Ginn, Chuck Dukowski, Dez Cadena, and Spot showed up at the tiny club and were blown away by Hüsker Dü. “We were on fire,” says Mould. “We were way too jacked up on everything, amphetamines in particular. I just remember bouncing from wall to wall to wall, just throwing myself off the walls. And I had this hammer and I was smashing stuff. We were just going nuts.”

  “We were on a mission,” Hart explains, “to impress the hell out of Black Flag.”

  By the end of the set, Hart had knocked over his kit, drums and cymbals spread over the floor. The band retreated to a utility closet, where they found a paint bucket that Mould heaved out onto the floor, splattering blue paint everywhere. A woman who worked for the club got angry at this and began scooping up the paint with a cymbal and flinging it onto Hart’s drums. “Not a smart move,” says Mould. “So he went flying out there, and he grabbed her and threw her down in the paint and then picked her up and started bouncing her off the wall. She was leaving these blue butt prints.’ ”

  The Black Flag guys looked on in astonishment. “They were sort of scared to come back, but they were just like, ‘Uh… What are you guys?’ ” says Mould. “We’re like, ‘We’re Hüsker Dü, who the hell are you?’ ”

  Despite the warm reception from the reigning kings of American punk rock, when they recorded their first single in November ’80, Hüsker Dü’s morale was low. “We were really confused,” Mould says. “We were getting shit from all sides.” Maybe that’s why they chose two of their slowest songs. Hart’s dirgey “Statues,” with its trancey bass line, skeletal guitar, and buried, yowling vocal, sounded a whole lot like Mould’s favorites, Public Image, Ltd.; so did Mould’s “Amusement,” for that matter. The single aimed for the robotic, alienated pose considered sophisticated at the time, and fell flat because of it.

  A new independent label in town called Twin/Tone had expressed interest in the band, then pulled out, reportedly because one of the co-owners quite understandably felt the single sounded too much like Public Image, Ltd. To make matters worse, Mould, Hart, and Norton were already indignant that Twin/Tone had signed the Replacements, a young, loud, and snotty Minneapolis band who had played only one or two gigs, while Hüsker Dü already had a modest regional following.

  “I don’t know if it was resentment,” says Mould, “but it sure can be a motivator to make you realize that, well, some people get it handed to them and some of us gotta work. I don’t think it was ever resenting, it was more like, ‘Well, that’s one way to do it.’ So we just thought, well, ‘We’ll just make our own label and make our own scene.’ ”

  So they added $2,000 to an existing loan at Hart’s mom’s credit union and founded Reflex Records (so named because it was a reflex against Twin/Tone) so they could release t
wo thousand copies of the “Statues”/“Amusement” single in January ’81.

  Derivative as it was, the single won praise in New York Rocker, Boston’s Take It, and Minneapolis’s City Pages, then got picked up by Systematic Distribution, which dealt with the West Coast and got the single written up in fanzines all around the country.

  They made their first trip out of the region in June ’81, touring for seven weeks in Canada and on the West Coast on the “Children’s Crusade ’81” tour. First stop was Calgary, then a rollicking oil boomtown. “It was the Wild West,” recalls Mould. “A lot of cowboys, a lot of Indians. Not many punks.” They played four sets a night for six nights at the roughneck Calgarian Hotel. “You’d walk in and do sound check, and there’d be a couple Native Americans shooting pool,” says Mould. “And maybe an hour later some cowboys walk in, they pick up some pool cues and start laying into each other. Come eight o’clock when the two guys in town with mohawks walk in, guess what happens—they stop hitting each other and start on the punks.”

  They’d made solid connections with Vancouver bands like D.O.A. and the Subhumans and stayed there for a week, playing shows and hanging out. D.O.A. also hooked up Hüsker Dü with some Seattle punkers who were starting up a paper called The Rocket, which later became Seattle’s preeminent music paper. The band stayed in Seattle for a week or so and managed to score a few gigs on short notice. “It was easy at the time,” says Mould, “because you either played New Wave Monday at the disco or you just found the other kids hanging out on the strip in the U-District and said, ‘Hey, do you have a place we can stay? Is there punk rock here?’ And they say, ‘Oh yeah, the Fartz are playing at [the club] WREX, down [in the neighborhood] where the junkies shoot up, down on the water. Go down there!’ Then you just go down there and you just pick up a gig. And you play more gigs. That’s how it went.”

  The hardcore grapevine had already spread word of the Hüskers, but hardly anybody had heard their music. Remarkably, the band exceeded the hype. “Wow” went a review from the key Seattle zine Desperate Times. “I had heard that this was a great band, but of course that can never prepare one when a band is this great….[O]nly idiots would want to sit down during their sets…. They come on with such force and energy, energy that builds with each song, that I felt as though the bar would explode at any moment.” Word got around town fast, and a local promoter put them on the bill with the Dead Kennedys at the Showbox club before nine hundred people, by far the Hüskers’ biggest crowd to date.

  After the success in Seattle, it was down to Portland. About twelve people showed up. “Usually, what we would do was be as antagonistic as possible and try to clear the room at that point,” Norton says. “There wasn’t anybody there, we might as well see if we can piss everybody off and make ’em leave. You do what you have to do to entertain yourself.” The band made noise and feedback until everyone went away.

  Fortunately, the Dead Kennedys’ Jello Biafra had really enjoyed the Seattle show and invited them not just to stay at his house in San Francisco, but to open for the Dead Kennedys at the Mabuhay Gardens, where they played a tornadic twenty-minute set at the overpacked club. “It was really cool at first. The kids were having fun diving off the stage. Then they started thrashing into us,” said Mould. “It was so packed, the bouncers couldn’t get them out the back, so they had to drag them across the stage during our songs. We didn’t stop, and the tension just kept on building.”

  Biafra was a very helpful host, even forging rent receipts for the band so they could get food stamps, which was crucial since they’d long since run out of money. Next stop was Southern California, where Mike Watt was trying to line up some gigs for them, but it was the height of L.A.’s unofficial ban on hardcore shows, so Hart, Mould, and Norton went straight back to Minneapolis.

  They arrived to find that Minneapolis was a different place. While Hüsker Dü was away, the Replacements had created a stir. Not only was there competition for the Minneapolis punk crown, but the competition was now the pet project of their nemesis Twin/Tone. “That year they were proving themselves at all costs,” says Terry Katzman, then a local soundman and journalist. “They knew when they came back to Minneapolis that the Replacements were going and the ante had gone up.”

  The 7th Street Entry was the small ground floor annex to the recently opened First Avenue club, a place for developing local bands to play while big national acts played the big room upstairs. It was there that Hüsker Dü played an August 15 homecoming show to record what would become their first album.

  Engineer Terry Katzman was at sound check and thus was the first local to hear them after they got back. Katzman was stunned by what he heard. “I was about to have heart failure—I couldn’t believe how fast they were,” Katzman recalls. “They came back a different band.” Writing about the performance in the Twin Cities column of the zine Discords, Katzman exclaimed, “It’s hard to believe but the only Mpls hardcore band have gotten even faster during their stay away.”

  The band had plenty of slower material, but only the fast stuff got played on the Children’s Crusade tour. When they opened for another band, they usually had a short time to make their point, so they always came out with both guns blazing. And when they headlined, there was usually almost nobody there, so they’d retaliate and try to drive out the few adventurous souls who’d come to see them by playing even faster, louder, and noisier than ever.

  Besides, they’d been playing constantly for months and had become far better musicians. “And there was a point there where we were like, ‘Let’s see how fast we can play it,’ ” says Norton. “I guess we were just trying to blow people away.” Along the way they’d witnessed speedy bands like D.O.A., the Fartz, and the Dead Kennedys and realized that playing fast was the cool thing to do. As a result, “the fast stuff got meteoric,” says Hart, “and the slower stuff became less important.” They were also taking plenty of cheap trucker’s speed, but Norton insists amphetamines weren’t responsible for the breakneck tempos—they took speed mostly as an appetite suppressant because they had no money for food.

  Even Mould admitted the resulting record was “speed for speed’s sake.” Recorded for $350, the pointedly titled Land Speed Record almost completely dispensed with structure, sounding less like guitar, bass, drums, and vocals than a sustained explosion, an almost formless mass that owed much to the squalling, teeming free jazz Hart, Mould, and Norton were listening to at the time. “It sounds just like when you go to a gig and your ears are blown off,” explained Mould.

  Seventeen songs in twenty-six minutes, Land Speed Record is a fiery admixture of adrenaline and bile, a 200-proof distillation of rage; if you listen closely, you can almost hear the sound of blood boiling. Any melody was obliterated in the cacophony, and except for occasional phrases like “It’s all lies anyway,” the lyrics were incomprehensible; titles like “All Tensed Up,” “Guns at My School,” “Let’s Go Die,” and “Don’t Have a Life” tell the story. Land Speed Record, Mould once noted, is “like the bad part of the acid.”

  But a style was forming. Oddly enough, the key was their takeoff on the Gilligan’s Island theme. If you could find the tune, regrettably familiar to just about anybody on the planet, buried in the band’s dense attack, you could start to pick up the structures and melodies deeply inscribed in the originals, too.

  Yet the band felt compelled to be as noisy as possible. “We could sound slick and have no feedback and be pleasant,” Mould explained at the time, “but our lyric matter is not; therefore, why should we sound like the dB’s? We are not singing about JoAnne and Shirley and Sally, we’re singing about starving people, military-industrial complexes, and messed-up city transit.” And indeed, the cover of Land Speed Record is a photo of the coffins of the first eight soldiers killed in Vietnam; like many punks, the members of Hüsker Dü actually agreed with Sixties counterculture values but despised the hippies for selling out those values. “We’re doing the same thing that the peace movement did in the
Sixties,” Mould said, “but the way they did it didn’t work. They sat in the park and sang with acoustic guitars. We take electric guitars and blast the shit out of them over and over again until the message sinks in. We’re saying the same thing they did, that you’re not going to screw us around, you’re not sending me to war to fight for Dow Chemical, or some outrageous reason. We’re not going to be passive. We’ll fight back our own way.”

  The Hüskers had gotten cast as a hardcore band when what they were really doing was playing folk rock played at light speed, encased in an almost palpable cloak of swarming electronic distortion, car accident drumming, and extreme volume. “We were really surprised when we found out there were other bands doing something similar, with the speed and everything,” Mould told Matter writer Steve Albini in 1983. “We just do what each song requires, we don’t try to play slow or fast or anything.” But Mould was just being canny—despite their un-hardcore name, the band looked like hardcore, sounded like hardcore, and smelled like hardcore. They just knew the pitfalls of being pigeonholed.

  By 1982 Norton was working as a waiter, Mould was still at Macalester, and Hart was unemployed, dependent on the kindness of friends and family. When they realized they didn’t have the money to put out Land Speed Record themselves, Hüsker Dü called Joe Carducci at SST. Carducci said they were interested, but they’d have to wait until SST had enough money to put it out. Carducci then tipped off Mike Watt that Hüsker Dü was looking for a label, and Watt offered to release the record on New Alliance. They sent him the tape, and the album sold out its initial pressing of a thousand copies in days.

  That February, while they recorded the In a Free Land three-song EP in Minneapolis, Hart and Norton got a poisonous taste of Mould’s formidable dark side. “Bob was such a bastard at that time,” Hart recalled. “Literally the meanest person that I have ever met. You know, the silent psychic intimidation routine, where somebody just fumes for, like, four days? Bob can fume like nobody I know. He’s intimidating you without saying a word.”