I want to thank Dave from A Sound Day. Dave will explain what is happening in the first paragraph. I’ve always wanted to do a post on Husker Du but didn’t know where to start. So Dave wrote this post and I wrote a post for him on The Replacements that he is posting today. The two bands are from the same music scene in Minneapolis and knew each other well.
“Not long after Athens and sometime before Seattle, the epicenter of the American underground rock scene was Minneapolis.” So wrote Magnet magazine. That time was the mid-to-late-’80s, and at the forefront of that was two angry bands – Husker Du and the Replacements. Both had huge cult followings and flirted with bigtime success but neither really broke through in a big way. But each influenced later bands and are widely respected. Now the odd thing is my friend Max and I have some similar musical tastes but each of us like one of those bands and are close to oblivious to the other. So he suggested we write a little for each other’s sites about “our” bands. For me, that was Husker Du.
I’m guessing there’s a good chance that you’ve heard of Husker Du. But a much more limited chance you’ve heard them or know their music. That’s understandable. At home in the U.S., they’ve never had a top 40 single nor a platinum album. But they paved the way for bands you might have heard of, like Nirvana, Soundgarden and the Foo Fighters.
First the name. Husker Du is actually Norwegian for “Do you remember?” and it was the name of a board game and also a European TV game show. Someone in the band knew of it and inserted it into one of their songs in progress as a kind of placeholder for lyrics and it ended up sticking as the band name. They added “umlauts” – those dots – over the “u”s in the name to make it seem more menacing.
They were a power trio, formed in 1979 by guitarist/singer Bob Mould , bassist Greg Norton and his mustache, and drummer/singer Grant Hart. With a similar origin to R.E.M., they formed by way of a mix of college students and record stores. R.E.M.’s college guys met Peter Buck in a record store; Husker Du had Bob Mould who was a college student who hung around a record store in the Twin cities where Grant Hart worked and Greg Norton (a friend of Hart’s at the time) hung around. Appropriately, Peter Buck was a fan of Husker Du’s and noted “I played with Husker Du several times and hung out with them.” When they started the band they were all 20 or younger.
Husker Du was initially loud, fast, angry, and rather anti-social. And did I mention very loud? “Fueled by testosterone, alcohol, boredom, anger at the government…” Mould would later say. Probably a lot of amphetamines or speed too, he might have added. Anyone who’s ever had the misfortu… err, “opportunity”… to be around fans of thrash metal or hardcore punk knows there is no shortage at all of bands who can turn the amps up to 11, shout nonsensical lyrics, and generally rage noisily like a late night thunderstorm. Ones that can do that while actually making music, songs that have melody and make sense, are much rarer. And that’s what Husker Du did. I think Max here once made a great point – he liked Howard Jones because you could strip away the production and layered synthesizers of his ’80s new wave and you’d still be left with real songs that had merit. So too Husker; many of their songs could be taken down to an acoustic guitar and singer and still hold their own as real songs. That was part of their appeal to me.
They played almost nightly in the early-’80s and soon got signed to the small, indie SST label owned by underground punkers Black Flag. They put out their first record in 1982. By 1984, they’d grown tired of conventional thrash music and according to Mould wanted to do something new that “is going to be beyond the whole idea of ‘punk rock’ or whatever.” The result was Zen Arcade, a record Rolling Stone declared “the closest hardcore will ever get to opera” and then New Day Rising and Flip Your Wig and its single “Makes no sense at All.” The album hit #1 on the influential CMJ record chart – sort of a college rock list in the States – and on the British indie charts and the single #2 on the Indie rock charts over there. But big-time success eluded them, even when they showed their sense of humor and did a cover of “Love is All Around”, parodying the opening of another Minneapolis landmark, the Mary Tyler Moore Show. What it did though was start a bidding war for their services among the major labels. They ended up signing with Warner Bros. in late ’85, the first real truly alt-rock band to do so, because Warner agreed to give them creative freedom and the ability to produce their own records. This played a part in R.E.M.’s decision to choose Warner a couple of years later also and probably changed the way many “underground” bands looked at the huge multi-nats thereafter. Some fans accused them of selling out, but the group felt they had hit a “ceiling” with SST; they couldn’t press enough records to meet demand nor promote their acts to get them radio play or prestige billing in concert. Even though they didn’t hit the mega-stardom levels some thought, it was a good move for Husker Du. Grant Hart had to get a loan at his mom’s credit union to pay for the first HD record. But, as Mould would point out Warner “always paid on time” and after signing with them “we all bought houses. Modest houses.”
Their first WB album was Candy Apple Grey, which had the single “Don’t Want to Know If You’re Lonely”. It got good reviews and sold better than the predecessors (which were rumored to have sold in the neighborhood of 5000 copies in the U.S., in some cases) . It got them more notice on college stations and even occasionally on MTV. But to me, their crowning achievement was Warehouse : Stories and Songs, which came out in 1987. It was a sprawling 20-song double LP (but single CD), and like their others self-produced and recorded in Minnesota.
It was a continuing evolution for them. As Allmusic put it, in their review which gave it a perfect 5-stars, it was “cleaner and more produced” than anything they’d done before but “they never sound like they are selling out.” It was also the one that the alt-rock station that I listened to much of the time in the late-’80s, CFNY Toronto, latched onto. It blew me away. There was a lot of mainstream “heavy metal” around, or its imitation, at the time from Motley Crue to Bon Jovi, but nothing on air sounded like these short, high-powered, angst-filled rockers that would leave the guitars and amps of a Def Leppard or Posion shaking in their boots. But they were strangely likable too. Clearly, they’d heard a Beatles or Byrds or Fleetwood Mac record in their time and they carried over a bit of that melodic craftmanship.
Eleven of the 20 were written by Bob Mould, and the other nine, Grant Hart. Which points to an underlying issue – the band was breaking up by then, mostly due to personality problems. Norton had just gotten married and the band’s manager commit suicide. But Mould and Hart had grown to despise each other. They were competitive and jealous (each wanted more of the writing credits than the other) of one another. Both were gay, which was unusual in that style of music but would be no issue except it was also widely rumored, but never confirmed, that they had been a couple who’d broken up by Warehouse. Mould has said “I’ve never talked about Grant’s situation and I never will. I think that’s personal.” More widely confirmed is that they were going in different directions in lifestyle. Mould was quitting drugs and had all but given up drinking, meanwhile, Hart was battling heroin addiction with limited success and refusing to go to the rehab his bandmates wanted him to attend. This made him less than reliable as a player in gigs. In the end, the band cut short their tour for this album and officially broke up in early-’88.
But they left us with this opus. Agreed, a bit overblown (Mould has said since it should have been a single LP instead) with some fantastic, angsty rock tunes like “Bed of Nails”, “She Floated Away”, a Grant Hart tune allmusic calls a “sea shanty” that always appealed to me and the very-near hit “Could You Be the One?”. That two-and-a-half-minute bit of Flying V guitar angst and nervousness over a relationship’s direction jumped out of the speakers at me and got a good amount of play on both MTV and Canada’s Much Music, as well as influencing later videos by their use of colored screens and so forth.
The album only barely hit the British top 100 and peaked at #117 on Billboard at home but remains one of the best ’80s guitar-rock albums and one that caught some other musicians’ ears. Kurt Cobain listed them as one of his favorite bands and his one-time bandmate, Dave Grohl? Well, he says “I was a huge Husker Du fan and obviously Bob Mould’s music has influenced the way I write music and play guitar. A lot of what I do comes from Bob.”
Bob Mould has been the one who has carried on and had success in music post-Husker. He briefly had the underrated power pop band Sugar (hmm, another topic for Power Pop blog, Max?) and has put out numerous solo albums ranging from acoustic guitar balladry to electronica to raging neo-punk. Definitely, a career worth looking into now and again. Greg Norton quit to become a restauranteur and chef, while Hart played in some indie bands and segued into visual arts quite a bit before sadly passing away of cancer and hepatitis in 2017.
Thanks, Max for letting me drone on and talk a bit about an American band I think deserves more attention than they got.
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