\u00a0<\/p>\n
H\u00fcSKER D\u00fc WERE A TRIO from Minneapolis. Guitarist Bob Mould and drummer Grant Hart sang and wrote the songs. Greg Norton played bass guitar and chipped in on vocals.<\/p>\n
A punk band, you would have to call them, as throughout the early and mid-1980s they toured and recorded primarily within the ecosystem of the American hardcore punk scene. At heart, though, they were always something else. They fit in, you could say, without quite fitting in.<\/p>\n
\u201cH\u00fcsker D\u00fc seemingly defined the punk ethos,\u201d wrote Terry Katzmann, one of the band\u2019s longtime friends once put it, \u201cwithout necessarily embracing or endorsing it.\u201d Perfectly put.<\/p>\n
The band could play louder and faster than anyone alive. When this got constraining, they\u2019d bring in 60s-style pop hooks, psychedelia, heavy metal. Often at once, which to me is the kernel of what made them great. They were never powerful or<\/em> something else. They were both, everything, all at the same time.<\/p>\n This blending of styles alienated many of the more orthodox fans within the punk scene. It also won the acclaim of many more, and it\u2019s by no means a stretch to consider H\u00fcsker D\u00fc one of the most influential acts ever to emerge from the American underground.<\/p>\n Before its 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 Zen Arcade<\/em>, first delivered to stores in July, 1984, by California-based SST records.<\/p>\n I remember the day I bought it. Newbury Comics \u2014 the one on Newbury Street \u2014 on a midweek afternoon, sunny and hot. I was eighteen years-old.<\/p>\n We knew there was an album coming coming out, but weren\u2019t sure when, exactly, it would hit the racks. In these pre-Internet times, news of such things was always unclear and came sporadically, delivered by college radio or gleaned through your network of friends. Sometimes it was a paper flyer glued to a mailbox or tacked to a record shop bulletin board. Nobody was a bigger H\u00fcsker D\u00fc fan than I was, but this latest album, due in the stores at any moment \u2014 I didn\u2019t even know the title.<\/p>\n Suddenly there it was, on a rack up front. It was called Zen Arcade<\/em>, whatever the heck that meant. I picked it up and, hey, what\u2019s this, it\u2019s a double album! As a teenage punk rocker weaned on Black Flag and Minor Threat, with a rather one-dimensional appreciation for music, the very weight of the thing, together with the heady title and the washed-over, almost Impressionist cover art was intimidating. It seemed so arty and grown-up. It also made me curious. What was<\/em> this strange record?<\/p>\n What it was, and what it remains almost forty years later, is the greatest indie-rock album of all time \u2014 if not, in my extraordinarily biased opinion, the greatest rock album, period.<\/p>\n \u201cThe most important and relevant double album to be released since the Beatles\u2019 White Album,\u201d bragged SST\u2019s own press release. There was some confidence for you, to say the least, when you consider the world of underground music in 1984. This was not only an obscure band, but an entire musical domain that existed far below the mainstream waterline. Then as now, the idea of comparing a little-known indie band to the Beatles seemed at best pretentious and at worst totally absurd.<\/p>\n Was it?<\/p>\n Twenty-three songs is a lot of music, but this is one the rare two-record sets that isn\u2019t bogged down by its own overreaching or conceit. The scourge of most double LPs, back when there was such a thing, is they went on for too long \u2014 padded with live cuts, covers, and extras (heck even London Calling<\/em> has its throw-aways). There\u2019s no filler in Zen Arcade<\/em>. Each and every song, from the shortest (44 seconds) to the longest (14 minutes), belongs exactly in its place.<\/p>\n Yes, that includes \u201cThe Tooth Fairy and the Princess.\u201d The longest-named song on the record is probably the most easily dismissed. But it\u2019s a clever little tempest, littered with switchbacks and small melodic explosions.<\/p>\n The album is best savored not as a CD \u2014 and for heaven\u2019s sake not as a download \u2014 but in the old, cardboard-and-vinyl package. That\u2019s a quintessentially record-snobbish thing to say, but unavoidable in this case, where each of the four sides is a distinct chapter with its own temperature and architecture.<\/p>\n Greg Norton, Grant Hart, and Bob Mould, circa 1984. Side one gets going without the slightest fuss, with the snap and kick of Bob Mould\u2019s \u201cSomething I Learned Today,\u201d eventually winding down with \u201cHare Krsna,\u201d a booming, tambourine-backed instrumental (mostly).<\/p>\n The first time I heard \u201cHare Krsna,\u201d sizzling over the stereo in a Boston area record shop not long after the album\u2019s release, I remember the young clerk furrowing his brow, looking up toward the speakers and saying, \u201cSomebody needs to write a dissertation about this song.\u201d I couldn\u2019t care less if they were plagiarizing a Bo Diddley riff; \u201cHare Krsna\u201d is a mesmerizing, three-and-a-half minute cyclone of melodic chaos that still gives me the chills. Listen to Mould hitting the strings at time 0:44.<\/a><\/p>\n Side one alone is unforgettable. And there are three more<\/em> to go. This is the ultimate workhorse album from the ultimate workhorse band, one so rich with sonic nooks and crannies that an in-depth listen leaves you not only battling tinnitus, but tired<\/em>. So many changes from fast to slow, hard to soft, love to hate, all in perfect working sequence. And each side-break is a perfectly placed respite. I can\u2019t think of a more brilliantly arranged<\/em> opus than Zen Arcade.<\/em> \u201cThe closest hardcore punk will ever get to an opera,\u201d wrote David Fricke of Rolling Stone.<\/em><\/p>\n Indeed, this is a proverbial concept album \u2014 a musical story, in the spirit of the Who\u2019s Tommy<\/em>, allegedly describing the journey and tribulations of a young man. He leaves home, maybe joins a cult, maybe joins the Army\u2026whatever. Alt-rock historians love reminding us about this, but you\u2019re free to ignore it. Any lyrical backstory is incidental to the record\u2019s impressiveness.<\/p>\n You\u2019ll find a gamut of effects: acoustic guitar, chairs being thrown, waves breaking, whispers and chants. There\u2019s even the breezy piano of \u201cMonday Will Never be the Same.\u201d (If Ken Burns ever directs a documentary about the history of alt-rock, the tinkling of \u201cMonday\u201d needs to be its backing theme.) Such eclectics are brave, maybe, for what was supposedly a punk album, but they never become maudlin or melodramatic. If you think today\u2019s co-opted rockers are clever with the tempo card, shifting from tough to tender, check out Grant Hart\u2019s \u201cNever Talking to You Again,\u201d a sing-along from side one done entirely in 12-string acoustic. \u201cHeartfelt\u201d is the word that jumps to mind, but it\u2019s not the syrupy strum you\u2019d hear nowadays. The song is biting and sharp \u2014 an attack<\/em>. Ditto for \u201cStanding By the Sea,\u201d with Hart\u2019s cathartic bellows set against bassist Greg Norton\u2019s eerie thrum and the soothe of a crashing surf.<\/p>\n Back in \u201984, the rock critic Robert Christgau chose Hart\u2019s \u201cTurn On the News,\u201d from side four, as his \u201csong of the year.\u201d Christgau said many flattering things about H\u00fcsker D\u00fc, but that one was the gimmie pick, like saying the Concorde is your favorite airplane. It\u2019s an easy song to like, but an even easier one to outgrow. If the album has a best song, it\u2019s probably Bob Mould\u2019s neo-pscychedelic \u201cChartered Trips,\u201d the fourth cut off side one. (\u201cTrips\u201d is almost<\/em> Mould\u2019s single greatest work, topped only by his spectacular rendition of the Byrds\u2019 \u201cEight Miles High,\u201d released as a single just prior to Zen Arcade<\/em>.)<\/p>\n Runner-up would be Hart\u2019s \u201cPink Turns to Blue,\u201d from side three. Officially the credits for this one list both Mould and Hart, but really this is Grant\u2019s piece. He took all the hook and melody of his earlier masterpiece, \u201cIt\u2019s Not Funny Anymore,\u201d and sandblasted it into a haunting anthem of love, drugs, and death. The song is simply gorgeous \u2014 and a little bit terrifying. Score it ahead of \u201cChartered Trips\u201d if you want. I\u2019m not going to argue.<\/p>\n September, 1984, in the dressing room at the Channel. \u00a0 \u201cPink Turns to Blue\u201d follows \u201cOne Step at a Time,\u201d a brief piano time-out that, as much as anything else, allows the listener to catch his or her breath. The pregnant pause between the last note of \u201cOne Step\u201d and the opening chord of \u201cPink\u201d is like those one or two seconds between a lightning bolt and a thunderclap, and is one of the record\u2019s strongest moments. It reminds me of the similarly unforgettable transition into \u201cSweet Jane\u201d on the Velvet Underground\u2019s Loaded<\/em> album.<\/p>\n Before going further, I\u2019m aware how this favorite songs thing can turn tedious pretty quickly. Grant Hart himself once offered a disclaimer: \u201cPeople will always embrace different songs for different reasons,\u201d he told me. \u201cA song that might seem terrible filler, serving only to move the story along, will be someone\u2019s favorite on the album. Bob and I were both responsible for those kind of songs.\u201d Of my beloved \u201cHare Krsna\u201d Grant claims that he was merely \u201cfurthering the story without adding much musically.\u201d Hart felt similarly about some of Mould\u2019s thrashier and more \u201chardcore\u201d material.<\/p>\n To his point, not all of the album is easy to like and, depending on your ear and level of patience, the value of certain songs might not reveal itself for some time. For me it was twenty years before the first four songs from side two (Mould at his most furious) finally clicked. They\u2019d always been so noisy and formless. Suddenly they weren\u2019t. This was partly a context thing, maybe: the album, like wine, getting better not despite its age, but because<\/em> of it. It took the overall shittiness of music in the 21st century to underscore the greatness of cuts like \u201cPride\u201d and \u201cThe Biggest Lie\u201d \u2014 mere footnotes in 1984. They\u2019re awesome songs, at once explosive and subtle, but buried amidst so many other and perhaps better choices, that even the band\u2019s most devoted fans tend to skip them over.<\/p>\n Similarly it was decades before I learned to appreciate \u201cBroken Home, Broken Heart,\u201d the second song on the album, for the gem that it is, tucked anonymously between \u201cSomething I Learned Today\u201d and Hart\u2019s \u201cNever Talking to You Again,\u201d with Norton\u2019s bass stealing the show. And that a supposed punk rock album could jump from the fury of \u201cBroken Home\u201d to the acoustic beauty of \u201cNever Talking\u201d, without so much as a flinch, was a watershed in American music.<\/p>\n Though not entirely a surprise. Even at breakneck velocity there always was something ineffably refined and just, well, different<\/em> about H\u00fcsker D\u00fc. If pressed to explain, one might break out 1982\u2019s Everything Falls Apart<\/em> EP. Amidst side one\u2019s hypsersonic avalanche is Hart\u2019s cover of Donovan\u2019s 1966 hit, \u201cSunshine Superman.\u201d Playful, perhaps, on the face of it, until you hear how un<\/em>-ironic the remake is, without a note\u2019s worth of smirk or parody. This wasn\u2019t a joke. <\/p>\n Later, on his solo tours, Bob Mould would often play acoustic versions of some of the hardest and fastest H\u00fcsker D\u00fc songs \u2014 cuts like \u201cIn a Free Land\u201d or \u201cCelebrated Summer\u201d \u2014 and the results were startlingly pretty. That\u2019s just not going to work if you\u2019re Black Flag, the Dead Kennedys or Bad Brains. Or Nirvana. Run even the noisiest H\u00fcsker song through a centrifuge and something elegant reveals itself.<\/p>\n Concert flyer, Boston, 1984. \u00a0 Author\u2019s Collection.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n With its blend of hippie love and hard rock thunder, Zen Arcade<\/em> would, in a way, finish the job that the Velvet Underground and even the Beatles had tinkered with earlier. But while the blending of power\/pop extremes was nothing new, the H\u00fcskers pulled it off in a way that was never gimmicky (not until their lazy cover of \u201cLove is All Around,\u201d the Mary Tyler Moore Show<\/em> theme, in 1986), and, most remarkably, did so on such terrain \u2013- the American hardcore punk scene \u2013- where nobody expected it or even believed it possible.<\/p>\n \u201cA strenuous refutation of hardcore orthodoxy,\u201d as Michael Azerrad puts it in his book, Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991.<\/em> \u201cZen Arcade<\/em> was the final word on the [punk rock] genre, a scorching of musical earth. The album wasn\u2019t only about H\u00fcsker D\u00fc coming of age \u2014 it was about an entire musical movement coming of age.\u201d<\/p>\n Zen Arcade<\/em> is the album Nirvana and its contemporaries only wish<\/em> 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: to think anyone could concoct a fourteen-minute bombast of guitar leads and layered distortion \u2014 \u201cReoccurring Dreams,\u201d side four \u2014 and have it not <\/em>come out self-indulgently.<\/p>\n All right, maybe it\u2019s a little self-indulgent. But listen carefully enough and you\u2019ll learn that \u201cDreams\u201d can be parsed into six or seven subsections, each of them breaking through to the next, right in the nick of time. The song is long,<\/em> but never wears out its welcome. It belongs there, in its entirety. An epic album deserves an epic close.<\/p>\n And when the 40-second whine at the end of \u201cDreams\u201d is at last pinched off, the album burning to a close in a congealed, numbing squeal, the silence that follows is palpable, as dramatic as any of record\u2019s loudest moments. Only then, as your senses regain their composure, is it apparent that your notions of punk rock are changed forever.<\/p>\n But not everybody, however \u2014 not even Grant Hart \u2014 has openly accepted such lavish praise. Chatting over email some years ago, Grant described Zen<\/em> to me as \u201cthe album that fans tend to wear on their sleeves.\u201d Did he mean people like me? Have I been too sentimentally fond of it for some reason?<\/p>\n \u201cThe impact of Zen Arcade<\/em> on the Zeitgeist is hilarious to me,\u201d Grant went on. \u201cHilarious in the almost alchemical-mechanical way it has been embraced by true music fans and hipster-flipsters alike. When somebody states that Zen<\/em> is their favorite LP, I get the notion to ask why<\/em>. As we move further from the time it was released, it seems I get more honest answers.\u201d<\/p>\n My honest answer is that I like it the best because it sounds<\/em> the best, and by the sum of its parts it is<\/em> the best. And for the record, Zen Arcade<\/em> is not<\/em> my \u201cfavorite\u201d Husker D\u00fc LP. New Day Rising<\/a><\/em> is my \u201cfavorite\u201d Husker D\u00fc LP. But that\u2019s getting personal. When you look at it objectively, Zen<\/em> is the better and more profound of the two.<\/p>\n Norton, Hart, Mould, circa 1983. H\u00fcsker D\u00fc were nothing if not prolific. A mere six months after Zen Arcade<\/em> came New Day Rising<\/em>, which woke the country from its winter freeze in January, 1985. These are two best albums of the 1980s, and they appeared within six months<\/em> of each other!<\/p>\n Eight month\u2019s after that<\/em> came \u201cFlip Your Wig,\u201d the band\u2019s last album before signing with a major label. Flip<\/em> suffers from terrible production but is nonetheless memorable, highlighted by Hart\u2019s pi\u00e8ce de r\u00e9sistance, \u201cKeep Hanging On.\u201d Prior to Zen,<\/em> meanwhile, was Metal Circus<\/em>, a brilliant seven-song EP from 1983. Together, these four records represent, easily, the most potent 1-2-3-4 punch in the annals of indie music. All released in the astonishing space of less than two years.<\/em> That\u2019s simply incredible.<\/p>\n In 1986 and 1987, having moved from SST to Warner Brothers, H\u00fcsker D\u00fc released two disappointing and anticlimactic albums,\u201dCandy Apple Gray\u201d and \u201cWarehouse: Songs and Stories.\u201d I\u2019m unsure which of these two records annoys me more, but neither, really, has much place in this conversation. \u201cCandy Apple Grey\u201d does well at the start and finish \u2014 I\u2019ve always loved the gothic guitar squall of the opener, \u201cCrystal,\u201d as well as the closer, \u201cAll This I\u2019ve Done For You\u201d \u2014 but the rest is flyover country, including Bob Mould\u2019s abominable \u201cToo Far Down,\u201d which has to be the ugliest song he ever recorded.<\/p>\n With Warehouse<\/em>, it\u2019s as if they took Zen Arcade<\/em> placed it on a table in front of them and said, \u201cOkay how can we ruin this?\u201d Like Zen Arcade<\/em>, it\u2019s a double LP. Unlike Zen Arcade<\/em>, it\u2019s bloated with filler. I\u2019ll always love \u201cBack From Somewhere\u201d and \u201cShe\u2019s a Woman (and Now He Is a Man),\u201d but the plodding, uninspired likes of \u201cIce Cold Ice,\u201d \u201cYou\u2019re a Soldier,\u201d and too many others, anchor this one at the bottom of the H\u00fcsker canon.<\/p>\n Bob and Grant had their power struggles, but as a songwriting tandem their talents were wonderfully complementary \u2014 think Strummer and Jones, or McCartney and Lennon. This was much of what made the band so great. By the time \u201cWarehouse\u201d warbles to a close, clearly this synchronicity is unraveling. Hart, at least, holds his own on this record, while Mould\u2019s songs are overextended and lazy. Depressing as it was, you could say that H\u00fcsker D\u00fc broke up exactly when it needed to.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, unless I\u2019ve missed something, none of the big music magazines or websites gave Zen Arcade<\/em> so much as a mention on its 20th, 15th, 30th or 40th birthdays. Some years ago Spin<\/em> awarded it the number four spot on its ranking of the hundred best-ever \u201calternative\u201d records, and Rolling Stone<\/em>, in a manic best-of-the-80s list, once gave it lip service at number 33. But what since then? Instead we\u2019ve have bands like Green Day winning Grammys.<\/p>\n For that matter, do younger music fans have any sense of what the 1980s truly were like? This was the richest and most innovative period in the whole history of independent music, but rarely is it acknowledged as such. As popular culture has it, serious rock music skipped the 80s entirely. When pundits do take the decade seriously, we tend to see the same names over and over. It\u2019s both frustrating and unjustified that H\u00fcsker D\u00fc never developed the same posthumous cachet that others of their era did. Like the Replacements, for example, or Sonic Youth. H\u00fcsker D\u00fc could run circles around either of those two, but never became \u201ccool\u201d in quite the same way.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/askthepilot.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/07\/HuskerDuSSTPromo2-1024x728.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
Photo by Naomi Petersen.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/askthepilot.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/07\/Husker-Du-1985-Channel.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
Boston Rock magazine.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/askthepilot.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/07\/Husker-Flyer-Channel-1984.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"Norton,](\"http:\/\/www.askthepilot.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/05\/HuskerDuSSTPromo51.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n
Photo by Daniel Corrigan.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n![\"Husker](\"http:\/\/www.askthepilot.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/07\/Husker-Du-LP-Collage-.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/askthepilot.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/06\/Huskers86.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"Every](\"http:\/\/www.askthepilot.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/07\/every-everything-POSTER-final-1200x1800-682x1024.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n