Our Band Could Be Your Life

by Michael Azerrad

  The band was changing and improving drastically with each new release, and anyone who saw a Hüsker Dü show was seldom disappointed. While Norton took care of the heroic leaps and lunges, Hart would flail wildly with his hair in his face, a cartoonish parody of a rock drummer. Mould mostly stayed anchored to the mike, occasionally lurching about the stage as if the trusty Flying V guitar dangling around his knees was pulling him against his will.

  In concert the band inspired nothing short of awe. The sheets of sound were so dense and enveloping that it was mesmerizing; they played so fast that it seemed like time stood still. The crowd would become a swarming mass of energy—people would run around in circles at the back of the room out of sheer ecstasy, bouncing up and down or slamming around the room like errant subatomic particles, completely caught up in the swirl of the music. Hüsker Dü tapped into levels of visceral and psychic power that few bands have before or since, and the effect was extraordinary.

  The band did make a motley crew. The strapping, mustachioed Norton was a far cry from the chubby Hart, with his lank, stoner-length hair and hippie necklaces; the burly Mould, as Steve Albini put it in a Matter profile, looked like “a St. Paul gas station attendant after a hard day’s work.” “The sum of the parts was a pretty bizarre mix,” agrees Mould. “That’s sort of an off-putting thing—when you see that for the first time, you think, ‘What’s this shit?’ ”

  With his long hair and barefooted stage attire, the eccentric Hart got tagged as the hippie of the band. He protests that the long hair was only to make his face look a little slimmer and that he played barefooted simply so he could work the bass drum pedal faster, but the wide-eyed sincerity of his songs was far more San Francisco ’67 than New York ’77. Mould, on the other hand, generally wrote more incisively bitter songs. His melodies did not go down as easily, and his voice ranged from an apoplectic scream to a cutting, sardonic sneer like some sort of punk rock W. C. Fields.

  Mould and Hart had differing natures, to put it mildly. In a jokey teenzine-style survey in Matter, Hart said his favorite voice was “smoking pot”; his perfect afternoon would be spent “hanging around somewhere where there’s flowers and birds and stuff.” Mould’s favorite color: “Gray.” His favorite food: “Beef.”

  They professed to have no leader, but gradually Mould came to the fore, partly because he played guitar and wrote and sang most of the songs, but mostly because of his gruff, uncompromising nature. “It always seemed like Bob’s way or the highway,” says Hart. “He was a guy who could stink up an entire room with his bad vibes.”

  Despite the friction, Hart and Mould did their best to accommodate each other so the one thing they agreed on—the band—could continue to exist. Their logo (and every hardcore band had a logo) was a circle enclosing three parallel lines with another line going through them perpendicularly. “The circle is the band,” Mould explained, “the three lines across are the members, and the intersection is the common train of thought.”

  A 1983 HÜSKER PORTRAIT: HART’S AND MOULD’S DIFFERING NATURES ARE ON VIVID DISPLAY.

  GAIL BUTENSKY

  “There was definitely an intense dynamic between the three of them,” says the Butthole Surfers’ King Coffey, who wrote the band’s first out-of-state fan letter and briefly roadied for Hüsker Dü on an early Eighties tour of Texas. “There didn’t seem to be much humor involved with how they approached their music. But as guys, they were cool, they’d hang out. They just took what they were doing very seriously.”

  Although whoever wrote a song sang it, songwriting credits didn’t appear until the band’s fourth record. And once Hart began to get some songs on the band’s records, an increasingly tense rivalry began to erupt. “I think Grant may have been threatened by the fact that Bob was writing so many songs,” says Norton. “And maybe Bob was threatened by the fact that Grant was writing so many songs. And so they both were writing a shitload of songs.”

  Although Mould was much more prolific, the band’s albums gradually contained more Hart compositions. “I was learning to have the confidence to not be intimidated,” Hart explains. Nonetheless, it wasn’t until the band’s final album that at least one of the prime spots on an LP—the first and last tracks of each side—was occupied by a Grant Hart song.

  As the third man, Norton was in a position to decide a lot of controversies but instead elected to stay out of the fray. “I don’t think I was the swing vote, I think I was the neutral—I was Switzerland,” says Norton. “I didn’t want to jump into the middle of that because I looked at it like it was the punk Lennon and McCartney. Grant was the McCartney, the pop love songs, and Bob was the dark side, Lennon. I just said, ‘Great, keep it up, boys!’

  “Which kind of reminds me of watching Spinal Tap,” Norton jokes, “where the bass player is going, ‘Well, Nigel’s like fire and David’s like ice. That makes me tepid water.’ I guess that was my role. I was the lukewarm guy.”

  Perhaps because Hart, Mould, and Norton didn’t socialize much outside the band, they treated each other with deference on the road. “We were always a pretty clean band,” Hart reveals. “There was never puke or a bunch of spilled stuff in the van.” By late ’83 they had grown tired of sleeping on floors and made the big leap to staying in motels, albeit three to a room.

  But it’s not like they were living the easy life at home. By the end of ’83 Mould was giving guitar lessons and renting an unheated basement room for $70 a month. Hart, who had no fixed address, was on food stamps. “We were on the road so much,” Mould says, “we’d just have a box of possessions that we’d leave in somebody’s basement and take the sleeping bag and sleep there for a month under the stairs until you go on tour again.” When they got to Southern California, they’d sleep under the desks at SST along with everyone else. “We’d stay there while we were making the records,” says Mould, “and play basketball and drink and eat once a day, get a couple of bucks and buy a big package of cheese and some bread and that would be about it.”

  Whenever they played Vancouver, B.C., they’d stay at the infamous Abandoned House, a punk rock squat where guests would climb through a hole in the ceiling and sleep in the attic; for food, someone would go to the nearby Chinatown, steal a fifty-pound box of ribs, and everybody back at the house would eat them and throw the bones out the window.

  “Hopefully we were going to just make enough money from the gig to get some food, maybe some beer, be able to buy smokes, and have enough gas to make it to the next gig,” says Norton. “That’s all that was important to us.”

  “That was the difference between the SST stuff and a lot of the other bands—with SST, it was almost like, who can have it worse?” says Mould. “Not consciously that way, but in some weird way that was part of paying your dues. People getting into it now have no idea what work is really like.”

  By the mid-Eighties rumors had begun to circulate that someone in the band was gay. Most thought it must be Norton—after all, he had the handlebar mustache. “I have never encountered anybody in my life,” Hart says, “who was so patient with that kind of bullshit.” But both Hart and Mould had male lovers, although never, as was later commonly believed, were they ever involved with each other. “It would have been fuckin’ bullshit,” Hart says.

  According to Hart, both men took lovers on tour and their orientation was an open secret in the indie community. But most people who knew cared very little. Part of the reason it was never a big deal was that the band never emphasized sexuality—theirs or anyone else’s—in their music or their performance. “It was very workmanlike,” says their friend Julie Panebianco. “This is what we do—we come and we play and our sexuality has nothing to do with anything. And no one really did think it had anything to do with anything. It was just not an issue and consequently no one cared.”

  “It just served to be even one more thing that we were bad-ass about,” says Hart. “It was not ever any kind of a weakness, it was a superiority type of thing, like the Spartans of ancient da
ys or something.”

  Hüsker Dü spent the entire summer of ’83 preparing material for the next album, rehearsing in a former church in St. Paul where Hart lived, along with a bunch of young drifters, runaways, and musicians. Everyone at the church was enjoying the particularly pure LSD that was going around. “I tripped probably twenty-eight times [that summer],” Hart admitted. “It was the acid bender of my life.” Mould stuck with his usual speed and alcohol, although amphetamines eventually began to get the better of the band. “It was a way of life,” says Mould. “After about six months of doing it nonstop, you just sort of lose track of it. You start doing it and you don’t stop for years.”

  Now approaching peak form, the band would jam for hours, brainstorming music and lyrics. It may have seemed like more Hüsker Dü bravado, but the band sensed the next album was going to be a milestone. “It was a coming-of-age work and we knew it when we were writing it,” says Mould. “It was like, this is going to change everything because it’s that good.”

  This was happening against the backdrop of an underground scene rebounding from an utter rejection of anything resembling conventional rock music and beginning to revisit the music everyone had actually listened to growing up. Besides, change was inevitable—bands were getting older and were getting better at playing their instruments and writing their songs. Hardcore’s limited chordal and rhythmic palette fostered a sameness of sound, and the punk ethos had made a virtue of this shortcoming. But Hüsker Dü knew more was possible.

  “Right now we’re at a stage where we have to think things through in a big way,” Mould had told Steve Albini in Matter shortly before the band recorded their next album. “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.”

  The stage was certainly set for Hüsker Dü to make some sort of grandiose move. By 1984 Minneapolis was pop music’s “it” city, thanks to the Midas touch of R&B production team Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis and a diminutive virtuoso named Prince, who was going supernova with his album and movie Purple Rain. And the city also boasted several critically lauded underground bands, including Soul Asylum, the Magnolias, and the Replacements. Minneapolis happily embraced the attention—it was novel for this white-bread, snowbound town to be considered hip, and for a city that had long strived to be cosmopolitan, something of a vindication. “The music scene is so good for Minnesota,” Mould exclaimed at the time. “It’s probably the biggest export the state’s ever had!”

  Mould and Hart were writing songs at a prodigious pace and had a plentiful supply of unreleased music. Consequently, their live sets skimped on the album they’d just released and instead concentrated on the one they were about to record. “We’re always progressing,” Mould said. “We’re not trying to show people where we were eight months ago. I would think that if people like the band and they have the records, that they would really be excited about hearing new stuff. If people want to hear us play a bunch of old hits, they pick the wrong band to follow.”

  Playing unrecorded material also had a practical advantage—because the songs were worked out on the road, they were in polished form once the band entered the studio, which also made them quick, and therefore economical, to record. “They knew what they wanted to do, knew how they wanted it to sound, and that was that,” says Spot. “In the studio, you worked. We didn’t have much time. We had ten hours to do a whole lot of stuff, and everybody was there and everybody did a whole lot of stuff in ten hours. They were very serious, very driven.”

  They were getting ready to tour their way to California for the recording of their double album, now titled Zen Arcade, when Mould saw Hart’s artwork for the new Man Sized Action album on Reflex. “Bob was going, ‘I can’t believe this—Grant did the artwork for this, and there’s not a single songwriter credit on the record. He didn’t credit the songs anywhere. I tell you, when we record Zen Arcade, we’re having individual songwriter credits,’ ” Norton recalls. It was a blow to the band’s precarious unity and the rivalry between Hart and Mould, which had been on a low simmer, went up a notch.

  “And I didn’t think anything of it,” Norton says. “Of course, Bob was and is a savvy businessman, and I didn’t realize that if I just rolled over on that one, I wouldn’t be making as much money as these guys were. Later on, I said, ‘Hey, wait a second!’ ”

  And so in October ’83, just as Metal Circus was hitting the stores, the band recorded twenty-five tracks—at least twenty-one of them first takes—with Spot in California at Total Access in a remarkable forty-five hours, then mixed it all in one marathon forty-hour session, bringing the whole thing in for $3,200.

  Zen Arcade was Hüsker Dü’s most strenuous refutation of hardcore orthodoxy. While most of the songs are loud and fast, even the most violent passages give way to overtly musical chord changes and melodies that no hidebound hardcore zealot would tolerate. Many tracks are just speedy, heavily distorted pop songs. A couple are piano solos, others just voice and acoustic guitar; “Hare Krsna” proudly borrowed from the Bo Diddley–fied 1965 Top 40 hit “I Want Candy,” and “Turn on the News” has nearly the same chord progression as the solo section of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Freebird.” The closing instrumental lasts fourteen unpunk minutes. The album’s variegated styles prompted a typical Hartism. “It’s geodesic shaped,” Hart said. “The idea is that everyone will have to get a new stereo.”

  Zen Arcade is a concept album—and a double album at that—the very epitome of dinosaur rock excess, and yet the loose story line could have been about any of thousands of hardcore kids: A young man runs away from his feuding parents and worthless friends, wanders the streets of a big city trying to figure himself out, is tempted to join a cult, hooks up with a girl, who soon OD’s. Eventually, after plenty of harsh introspection, he comes back home but returns withdrawn, enveloped in a protective emotional shell. “I’m not the son you wanted,” the character sings, “but what could you expect / I’ve made my world of happiness to combat your neglect.” As the zine Hard Times put it, the story encapsulates “the wreckage of our era: betrayal, alienation, pain, egotism, emotional suffocation, and isolation.”

  Unfortunately, the story ends with the lamest of narrative cop-outs—it was only a nightmare. The finale, the fourteen-minute instrumental epic “Reoccurring Dreams,” might be a summation of the rest of the protagonist’s life—like all lives, it’s a tumultuous improvisation, full of exhilarating highs and static lows. Hart compares the minute of high-pitched feedback that closes the track to the sound of a flatlining EKG.

  The theme shouldn’t have come as any surprise—in their song lyrics and interviews, the band had been discussing personal evolution and self-discovery for over a year. Zen Arcade both described that change and embodied it by experimenting so boldly—and succeeded spectacularly. The story obviously reflected the band’s own self-discovery, but it may also have been somewhat autobiographical on Mould’s part—as an angry kid stuck in an unhappy family situation and trying to figure out his sexuality (“His parents, they can’t understand why their son he turned out wrong,” he sings in “Whatever”), all in a claustrophobically small, conservative town, he must have had his own fantasies of running away to the big city. Unlike the character in Zen Arcade, though, Mould actually did it.

  Up until Zen Arcade their best seller had been Land Speed Record, which had sold over ten thousand copies. The band had warned SST that the new record was going to be big. “It was so much better than anything else that was out there at the time,” says Mould. “We just knew it was going to sell more than three thousand.”

  SST erred on the side of caution and in July ’84 did an initial pressing of somewhere between thirty-five hundred and five thousand copies, which sold out just a couple of weeks into the band’s tour to promote the album. The album was often out of stock for months afte
rward, considerably denting sales and frustrating the band. “That was sort of the beginning of us knowing that things were a little askew,” says Mould, “when we’re out promoting the record and doing in-stores, and the best we could do was make special flyers to give to people because we had sold all thirty-five hundred copies that got pressed.”

  Joe Carducci says SST realized they had a big seller on their hands, but they had to be particularly cautious about financial expenditures because Black Flag had a slew of albums coming out that year and the Minutemen had decided to make their next one a double as well (in fact, Zen Arcade was held up so SST could release Double Nickels on the Dime on the same day). So even though SST had some cash by that point, the label’s resources were already stretched. Besides, pressings of more than five thousand copies were mysterious territory for SST. No one could be sure how many records Hüsker Dü would sell, and if SST printed up too many copies, they’d eat the cost.

  But those who managed to get the record, loved it. Zen Arcade wound up on countless year-end best-of lists—the L.A. Times’, the Boston Phoenix’s, and the influential Village Voice poll; the L.A. Herald’s Mikal Gilmore went so far as to place Zen Arcade in a league with the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street, the Clash’s London Calling, and Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited. “All of a sudden,” says Mould, “we went from being this band that was making our own posters for the in-stores in Columbus because they couldn’t sell the record, to sitting up there with that. All of a sudden you get a little self-conscious because you realize that everybody’s looking at you. And it’s not this innocent and pure secret anymore. It’s now ‘critically acclaimed’ and ‘trendsetting’ and ‘attention-grabbing.’