Our Band Could Be Your Life

by Michael Azerrad

  Even in a genre founded on rage, Hüsker Dü was already known for being a particularly angry band. “People have misconstrued the pessimism and anger in our songs,” Mould protested. “We’re really the opposite of all that; we’re not callous, insensitive people. But we’re frustrated by the fact that most people seem to end up that way—hopeless, defeated. We’re afraid of ending up that way ourselves, and that fear comes out in our songs.”

  Released on April 1, 1982, on New Alliance, In a Free Land was the best expression of Hüsker Dü’s cyclonic intensity to date—“This band is one of the hottest, most awesome bands ever to walk a stage,” raved Maximumrocknroll. Plenty of bands played as fast and angry as they could while remaining within punk’s simple parameters; the Hüskers were now revealing elements of pop and psychedelia in their sound and standing out from the pack in the process.

  They were also beginning to disavow the preachy aspects of hardcore. “What we try to do in our music is pose questions, not answers,” said Mould shortly after In a Free Land came out. “We have our own answers, but they’re good for us and not necessarily good for everyone else.” They were also beginning to abandon the sound, but not the intensity, of hardcore. The heroic title track sounded as if Mould were singing to a classic Clash tune played at 78 RPM.

  After In a Free Land, the band arranged to tour all the way to Los Angeles and then record twelve songs in two days in June with Spot at Total Access Studios. Thanks to the pre-Thriller record industry slump, there was a recording studio glut in Los Angeles. For as little as $400, a band could get a studio all to itself for three days, just enough to record and mix an entire album if they had their parts down. To save time and therefore money, they rarely did a second pass at a song. “In our whole ouevre,” notes Hart, “there’s probably not five second takes.” The quality of the performances sometimes suffered, but they really didn’t have a choice. Like so many other underground bands, the rough-and-ready nature of Hüsker Dü’s recordings was originally a necessity, not an aesthetic. And then it became an aesthetic out of necessity.

  The resulting Everything Falls Apart EP was released on Reflex in January ’83. While Land Speed Record sold mainly on the West Coast (and in England, through a deal with their friend Jello Biafra’s label, Alternative Tentacles), thanks to endless touring and good press, Everything Falls Apart sold all over the country. The initial pressing of five thousand copies sold out in a few weeks; another five thousand were pressed that summer.

  Mould wrote or cowrote ten of the twelve songs on Everything Falls Apart; one of the few he didn’t write was a frantic cover of Donovan’s benignly druggy Sixties hit “Sunshine Superman.” Unlike virtually every hardcore band, Hüsker Dü proudly stuck up for classic rock. “You know the whole deal with tearing down the old to make room for the new?” Hart said. “Well, music isn’t city planning.”

  The title track is fairly catchy and melodic yet sacrifices remarkably little of the band’s signature rage. “Blah, Blah, Blah,” “Punch Drunk,” and “From the Gut” hark back to the high-velocity thrashing of Land Speed Record, but as the record wears on, more and more noticeable melodies begin emanating from deep within, like someone whistling in a steel mill. The band was gradually beginning to ditch their more thrashy material, alienating much of the hardcore segment of their audience. “We’d been talking about the set,” Norton recalled. “And someone said, ‘Do we really have to do this?’ And we all said, ‘Oh, I thought you wanted to do this.’ ‘No, I thought you wanted to do this….’ ”

  They were starting to get a sense of themselves, gaining the self-confidence to drop the social and artistic crutch of the hardcore scene, which had grown stiflingly doctrinaire. “What I remember hardcore as being is, like, any band that just got up there and is real aggressive instead of ‘We have to sound a certain way and this is, like, the formula for it,’ ” Mould said. “And the new bands are just locked in[to] the formula. Afraid to do anything else because they think it’s such a pure form. Which is just a bunch of shit. It’s just a bunch of rules, that’s why we don’t play along with that game anymore.”

  Minneapolis has got a lot of talent for such a relatively small city,” Terry Katzman, now the Twin Cities correspondent for Boston Rock, wrote in November ’82. “And someone is bound to take notice.”

  At the time, it had been four years since the ill-fated Suicide Commandos had signed to a major label, and it would be a couple more before the majors took any notice of Minneapolis. “I think they’re probably scared of people who have a good idea of what they really want to do,” Mould theorized, “as opposed to people who are completely malleable jelly tofu bands who can say, ‘Make us big, we’ll do everything you want.’ ”

  But popularity was not something Hüsker Dü wanted to avoid. Shortly after Everything Falls Apart, an interviewer opined that Hüsker Dü would never have a hit record. “I don’t know,” said Mould. “I wouldn’t write it out of the question.” Hart added that the band had always had a “serious pop edge.” Mould even went so far as to claim that had they slowed down In a Free Land a tad, sent ten thousand promo copies to all the key stations in the big cities and college towns, and backed it up with a big publicity push, the band could have broken nationally. Although none of those things were possible, the band made no secret of grand ambitions.

  Not only did the band run their own label; they also did their own driving and equipment hauling. But for Hüsker Dü, DIY wasn’t an ethical decision or even a point of pride. It was a necessity. “We didn’t have anybody banging down our door, offering to do it all for us,” says Norton. “It just gets back to that do-it-yourself attitude like the Minutemen had and [Black] Flag had and the Meat Puppets had—we learned from [Mission of] Burma and D.O.A. and the Subhumans and Minor Threat.”

  “We just enjoy doing it that way,” Mould said. “When you start giving up parts of your independence, when you start hiring road people and publicists and let others do your booking, it gives off an impression, an illusion for people. We’re not that hard to find, we’re a fairly accessible band, we don’t hide from people.”

  In retrospect, Hart believes that taking on so many responsibilities may have hurt the band in the long run. “The DIY thing, I don’t know, it’s like we handicapped ourselves in a lot of situations to maintain that,” he says. “There were things that, by all rights, we should have been able to let go of and oversee.”

  In fact, Hüsker Dü’s popularity meant they couldn’t release their own records: the band’s releases now called for initial pressings of ten thousand, which they couldn’t afford. SST had the organizational wherewithal, the financial credit, and the enthusiasm for the larger pressings, and so Hüsker Dü became the label’s first non–West Coast artist.

  In December ’82 Hüsker Dü took off on a five-week tour that wound through the Midwest, Southwest, and on into California, where they intended to record and mix their next album with Spot—in one day. Making a whole album in one day was trying enough, but it became impossible when the power got cut off because the studio hadn’t paid the electric bill. “We were trying to jump power from other parts of the building,” Mould recalls. “Stuff like that freaks everybody out.” The album wound up being a seven-song EP.

  The new material was more fully realized and diverse than anything they’d previously done. It was still very fast and very loud, but the EP, titled Metal Circus, also got even more overtly melodic; compared to Land Speed Record, it was like Rodgers and Hammerstein. As Norton told the New Musical Express: “I don’t tend to walk down the street whistling hardcore.”

  Not only were Hart and Mould singing more tunefully, but Hart’s busy drumming, all singsong beats and light-speed snare rolls, rushed the music along more precisely than ever; Norton’s bass lines often carried much of the tune while Mould’s guitar swathed it all in a crackling blanket of electronic distortion.

  Although Metal Circus did have a song about nuclear annihilation (and what self-respecting u
nderground rock album of the time didn’t?), the lyrics became more personal, less political. “Politics will come and go, but we’re still people, that will never change and that’s just what we’re gonna sing about,” Mould said. “It’s a personal thing this time—how we’re fucked or you’re fucked or everybody’s fucked at one time or another.”

  The band rationalized their new introspective approach with high-minded statements like “The revolution begins at home” and “We’re into personal politics,” but Hart says it was just a way of justifying the change in direction. “Any time somebody has a new idea, they are rectifying that new idea with the entire body of their work,” he says. “It’s hard for somebody to say, ‘I did a 180 in my work.’ You usually try to put it on something.”

  Mould in particular was growing well tired of the hardcore scene, beginning with its hypocritical embrace of anarchy, which had long since become an empty buzzword, while the anarchy symbol, a circled letter A emblazoned on countless black leather jackets, had become the peace symbol of the Eighties—an important concept drained of all meaning. “There’s an attitude, whether people like to say that or not, you know, ‘The first rule is no rules,’ ” Mould said. “That’s a bunch of shit, there are rules, there always have been.”

  “Basically, they were going, ‘Be different, be different. Be like us or we’ll kill you,’ ” Norton says of the hardcore crowd. “Everybody had the shaved head, and at that point that’s when we said, ‘Fuck this shit, man—we’re not doing this to be fashion icons, we’re not doing this to front anything, we’re doing this because the music is the most important thing. We’re doing this because we’re into what we’re doing, and at that point we quit shaving and quit cutting our hair and started wearing whatever the hell we felt like.”

  (A case in point was Norton’s signature handlebar mustache. He had forgotten to pack a razor on a 1982 tour, and as his mustache grew longer and longer, it started to get in his mouth when he played. Norton had groused about it to Black Flag’s Dez Cadena, who replied, “Man, if it’s getting in your mouth, you should just curl it up!” “So I thought, ‘Yeah, right!’ ” says Norton. “It was like, ‘Punk rocker with a handlebar mustache, OK!’ ”)

  The scene was flooded with poseurs and violent thugs who knew and cared little for the music’s original impulses. “You can’t tell the people who are into it from people who are coming in from [the dull Minneapolis suburb of] Edina with chains on their boots,” Mould said. “A year or two ago you could walk into a club and you’d know somebody and what kind of music they were into just by talking for ten seconds. Now you’ve got kids coming in from all over the place and they go out and punch people on the floor.” Even the music itself was getting stale. “There’s more to life than that same beat, over and over,” Mould said.

  The members of Hüsker Dü weren’t alone in their feelings—in his Matter column that same year, Steve Albini wrote, “Wanna be the big new teen in hardcore circles? Get some other dillheads together, call yourselves Antagonistic Decline or Vicious Tendencies or Unrepentant Youth or some such thing, copy every lick from the Dischord collection and write songs about military intervention, whether you know anything about it or not, and you’re guaranteed a good review in Maximumrocknroll.”

  “A lot of these bands are pretty idealistic, and that’s all well and good, for them. They think they can really do something,” Mould said. “But I’m not out rioting in the streets. I’m not throwing firebombs. I’m not spray-painting the Capitol. So why should I sing about it? It’s not right to lie to people like that.”

  So it was no accident that Metal Circus opened with “Real World,” a pointed tirade not just against hardcore orthodoxy but an outburst of middle American pragmatism—“You want to change the world / By breaking rules and laws / People don’t do things like that / in the real world at all,” Mould screams. “Reading the fanzines and stuff, you’ll see a lot of kids write in and sign their letters ‘anarchy and peace,’ ” Mould explained to Conflict publisher Gerard Cosloy. “I don’t think that many of them live what that means; I mean, they all live at home with their parents, they all value greatly their possessions, I’m sure.”

  Hart contributed two songs, including “Diane,” a chilling account of the rape and murder of a local waitress told from the killer’s point of view; the song was a fairly direct descendant of Fifties teen tragedy songs and folk murder ballads. While the lyrics to Hart’s “It’s Not Funny Anymore” also indicted the conformism of the hardcore scene, the fact that it was also a sweet, impassioned speed-pop gem sure to irritate the mohawk crowd meant even more.

  When Metal Circus came out in October ’83, various tracks—particularly the perversely sing-along “Diane”—got picked up by dozens of radio stations around the country, mostly college. College students largely shied away from hardcore, but Hüsker Dü’s more tuneful take was striking a chord.

  They’d done three West Coast tours and a couple of smaller Midwest jaunts before making it out to the East Coast for a two-week headlining tour in April ’83. They went east with a little trepidation, since it was unknown territory and they had no idea what the turnouts would be. But the Philadelphia show miraculously sold out, and so did Boston, and so did Washington. “The thing that we didn’t realize,” Norton says, “was college radio was playing the hell out of Hüsker Dü.”

  Surprisingly, the turnout for the first New York show was lackluster, although the band turned in a blazing performance, “a titanic show, one so fraught and locomotive even the band looked surprised,” wrote the Village Voice’s R.J. Smith. At the end of their set, Mould immediately threw down his guitar and pressed his fists to his temples in agony. “I usually have a good headache by the time we’re done playing,” Mould explained. “I scream myself to the point where my head is bursting.”

  The second-billed Replacements got paid only $100, less than the opener, “a pretty shitty punk band” (Norton’s words) called the Young and the Useless. Norton complained that the Replacements were getting the shaft, but to no avail. “The guy who booked the gig was like, ‘Yeah, well, your friends from Minneapolis are just lucky to be on this bill,’ ” says Norton. “ ‘They should pay me a hundred bucks.’ ” (The Young and the Useless later evolved into the Beastie Boys and continued to command at least $100 per show for the rest of their careers.)

  The tour had been pegged on an appearance at the punk-friendly Music for Dozens night at Folk City, the fabled Greenwich Village hole-in-the-wall where Bob Dylan often performed in the early Sixties. The band knew their initial splash in New York was crucial. “And when the Folk City show presented itself, it was tailor-made for our manipulations,” Hart says. “I think it was a good way for us to demonstrate that we were part of a greater thing—we were today’s manifestation of a type of freedom of thought that we had by no means originated.”

  So Hüsker Dü cannily covered the Byrds’ “Eight Miles High” in homage to the Vietnam era folk-rock scene. Except they tore the song up into a million screaming pieces. “We thought we were playing it just like the Byrds,” Mould said. “That’s been my personal problem for all these years: I always thought I was making pop records.”

  “Eight Miles High,” of course, is a preeminent classic of Sixties psychedelia. At the time there was a slew of American bands—the Three O’Clock, the Bangles, Rain Parade, et al.—who were copping superficial aspects of the Byrds and other trippy Sixties bands but weren’t actually psychedelic at all. This disgusted Hart, Mould, and Norton just as much as the conformity of the avowedly nonconformist hardcore scene did. So they took psychedelia’s most sacred cow and gave it a good thrashing.

  Quite simply, it’s one of the most powerful pieces of rock music ever recorded. The Hüsker Dü version takes the song’s original themes of disillusionment and foreboding and turns them into a death shriek for the collapse of the Sixties counterculture, something Mould had been ruing ever since his encounters with the Young Republicans back at Macalester.
Mould’s almost wordless vocals were a direct descendant of John Lennon’s primal scream approach, only ten times as horrific; cathartic, ultimately life-affirming, his bloodcurdling howls were as direct, honest, and arresting as an infant’s wail.

  Starting with Metal Circus and most powerfully evident with “Eight Miles High” (released as a single in May ’84), Hüsker Dü was doing something that virtually no punk band had done before: making music that could make you cry. Songs like “Diane” and “Everything Falls Apart” were powerfully moving, not just bilious statements of alienation, but music you could hang your heart on.

  Although the band toured frequently, it was for relatively short periods of time, usually two or three weeks at a clip—because of their Minneapolis base, it was easy to hit virtually any part of the country and come back in a couple of weeks. Spring through fall of ’84 marked the beginning of the band’s most extensive touring, hitting the Midwest, East, and Southwest in May and June, then going back and covering pretty much the same ground in September and October.

  The band had developed an unrelenting attack for their live shows, playing song after song in quick succession, a continuous wall of sound with no breaks—no sooner would the last shrieking notes of guitar feedback fade away than the band was hurtling off into a new song. (Quips Hart, “It gave everybody who was up in the air a chance to touch the ground again.”) Hart would just count off the first number, and the band would plow through an hour’s worth of material with barely a break, save a testy gripe from Mould about the stage divers, usually on the order of “Stay the fuck away from the microphone.”

  The effect was relentless and disorienting. “We play so fast and rattle so many songs off in a row, it doesn’t give people a chance to turn to their friend and say, ‘What do you think of it?’ ” said Mould. “People have to think about it in their own mind. They can’t listen to their friends and get that acceptance.”