Hüsker Dü
Savage Young Dü
Numero Group
The Wire, December 2017
by Simon Reynolds
Your
memories may differ from mine, but as I recall, 1983 was when postpunk’s
energies started to dwindle and the movement splintered into various fruitless
and misguided directions. Suddenly it was slim pickings out there for the young
music fiend. One coping mechanism to circumvent the excitement-deficit involved
turning to the past: particularly, the gathering swarm of Sixties garage
compilations. Another resource was
hardcore punk imports from America. I
vividly recall making expeditions to London to scour Rough Trade, Vinyl
Solution, and shops on Camden High Street for volumes in the Mindrocker and Back to the Grave series, but also to scoop up LPs by Angry
Samoans, Negative Approach, Flipper, and more.
These two kinds of punk will always be linked in my mind as vitalizing
blasts of visceral release that helped sustain some of us through the doldrums
of the mid-Eighties.
Some of the
most galvanising imports gleaned on these trips were SST releases by Black
Flag, Descendents, Meat Puppets, Minutemen... and Hüsker Dü.
The blizzard-blend of open-tuned guitar and open-hearted melody on the Metal Circus EP blossomed into the
mature furore of Zen Arcade and Flip Your Wig. Dü, by this point, were
my favorite group. And for a mid-decade moment,
Minneapolis – more precisely, the Twin Cities, given that two of the Dü three came from St Paul – felt like
the soul-center of Eighties alternative rock, since it had also given the world
the wonderfully ragged and achingly tuneful band The Replacements. Minnesota mystique encouraged certain fledgling
music journalists (e.g. me) to overpraise local Hüsker-derivatives like Soul
Asylum, who were originally named Loud Fast Rules and made their vinyl debut on
the Barefoot and Pregnant comp released
on Hüsker Dü’s tiny label Reflex.
I think of
Hüsker Dü and Replacements as core bands of an era that could be called “Years
of Exile”. It’s a period bookended, at its 1983-84 start, by the re-election of
Reagan and Thatcher, and at its other end by grunge’s breakthrough, Bill
Clinton ending 14 years of Republican rule, and Tony Blair’s rise (which signaled
if it didn’t yet achieve Labour’s return from the wilderness and pulled down
the curtain on an interminable-seeming era of Conservative dominance). “Exile” captures
the feeling of absolute alienation from both mainstream politics and mainstream
pop culture (the former’s reflection) widespread among youth at that time. The mood is hard to reconstruct now but you
can get a sense of it from the emotional spectrum of alternative rock and indie.
Discernible in groups as diverse as The
Smiths and R.E.M., Mekons and Dinosaur Jr, the palette was grey and glum for
the most part: despondency, resignation,
blocked idealism, passive-aggressive withdrawal, futile flails of impotent
rage, and here and there just the faintest inkling of “hope against hope” (the
title of Band of Susans’s defining song). Hüsker Dü paved the way for grunge,
but they were also - via intermediary My Bloody Valentine – ancestors of
shoegaze, a genre whose dream-dazed sound and fey sighing vocals implicitly proposed
an anti-politics of reverie rather than revolution.
In addition
to the group’s widespread influence, the Dü-sound directly participated in the
alt-rock crossover of the Nineties, through Sugar, the far more successful
successor group formed by singer/guitarist Bob Mould (one of Dü’s two gifted writers, the other being singer/drummer
Grant Hart, who died two months ago). Back in the Eighties, though, it had seemed
utterly inconceivable that noise-pop of the Hüsker Dü type could ever penetrate
mass consciousness. Along with political discontent and personal-existential
issues, the imploded anger in Eighties alternative rock stemmed partly from frustration:
knowing you were making the crucial music of your time – the next step in the rock
dialectic – but would never reach the ears and eyes of the wider public. This
revolution would never be televised, even after Hüsker Dü – like some of their
peers – signed to major labels. A woefully awkward appearance on the Joan
Rivers show, finagled somehow by Warners, and findable on YouTube, demonstrates
how ill-equipped the band were to navigate a mainstream governed by image and
presentation. “We don’t want to be
stars,” Hart declared in their very first interview, for a 1980 edition of their
local alt-weekly Sweet Potato. As if they would ever have any choice in the
matter!
Savage Young Dü skips the Warners era, which
produced two superb albums, Candy Apple
Grey and Warehouse: Songs and Stories,
both essentially of a piece with the three preceding SST classics: Zen Arcade, New Day Rising, and Flip Your
Wig. But Numero’s box also steers
clear of the SST phase. Instead it’s focused forensically on the first four
years of Hüsker Dü’s existence, when they were still shaking off influences
(Ramones being the formative one, but Public Image Ltd surprisingly strong
circa their debut single “Statues”). Gathering demos, a practice session
captured during sound-check, live recordings, a couple of early singles and one
whole studio album, the box comes with an exhaustively detailed history and a wealth
of cool illustrations: photos catching bassist Greg Norton in mid-leap levitating
above the stage, flyers for scores of tour dates, biro-scrawled inlays of cassettes taped by
their live soundman.
Driven by a
dedicated work ethic that was stoked further by a diet of low-grade speed,
blessed with two fertile writing talents, Hüsker Dü wrote songs at a furious pace, then played
them live at unflagging full-tilt velocity. The result is a ton of material
that is indistinct stylistically (Hüsker Dü still some ways off achieving the “band-voice” detectable with any great
group within seconds of hearing them) and muddied further by the production
quality. Its loving restoration here only highlights its
rudimentary-documentary nature (Dü generally favored a one-take approach). To
be blunt, it does all rather merge into an undifferentiated blur of foaming
guitar, pummeling bass, and hectic, tripping-over-themselves drum patterns.
Amidst the
hoarse roar of songs like “Sore Eyes”, lyric shards leap out that illustrate
Mould and Grant’s emerging knack for mundane yet quirky specificities - “I woke
up in the middle of a wet dream”, “I read sex manuals in my room” – that make
the confessions of loneliness and insecurity sting with a harsh reality that
recalls prime Pete Shelley. Whether this vulnerability - radical in the context
of hardcore - has something to do with Mould and Hart being (like the Buzzcock vocalist)
gay and bi respectively is an intriguing if unanswerable question. Both Dü singer-songwriters grew up in households
with abusive and emotionally dominating fathers, and that must surely have
complicated their feelings about masculine character armour. Whatever the
biographical sources, it’s this characteristic Hüsker aura of wounded frailty that makes
you sure that “Diane” - Hart’s first great song, inspired by Twin Cities serial
killings – involves identification with the victim rather than the victimizer.
Whereas with other Eighties noise-core songs about girl-murder, you’re less
confident that the psycho-dynamic is altogether wholesome.
More than
personal experience or sexual politics, though, it was a growing infatuation
with Sixties music that enabled Hüsker Du to slip past the regimenting
strictures of hardcore (“loud fast rules” is meant to be a celebration, but it
could also read as a set of regulations). Their cover of Donovan’s “Sunshine
Superman” could have been a Dickies-like gesture (rampaging over a hippie dippy
golden oldie for shits ‘n’ giggles) in another band’s hands. But for Dü it points ahead to their blistering
revisions of “Ticket To Ride” and “Eight Miles High”.
The Byrds
above all seemed to have opened up Dü’s music, emotionally and harmonically. Gradually
the melodies start to soar rather than jabber percussively, ramalama-punk
style, like they do on the earliest songs such as “Truth Hurts”. Backing vocals
begin to appear. Mould’s guitar develops
a chiming style of jangle-riff that recalls nothing so much as Blue Öyster Cult’s own Byrds homage “Don’t
Fear The Reaper”. I thought I was hallucinating the resemblance but in the
booklet Mike Watt describes Dü ’s live album Land Speed Record (released on the Minutemen’s little label New
Alliance) as striking them on first hearing as “like really fast Blue Öyster Cult.” And hey, the umlaut
fetish clinches it, surely! Grant Hart himself talked about a “raga thing”
emerging from within the haze of overtones and partials generated by his manic
cymbal spray and Mould’s flayed V-neck. He also compared it to “free jazz”. But
there are only hints in the early material collected here of the raging
abstract majesty of “Reoccurring Dreams”, the 14 minute improvised instrumental
that closes Zen Arcade.
The hurtful
truth – and I’ve been delaying saying it, because I love the band and respect
the archival rationale – is that if the material in this box set was all Hüsker Dü had ever done, no one would be
making a box set of their work. The legend is based on what came next. The box that’s really needed would
start with the Metal Circus recording of “Real World” – as opposed to its gnarly
prototype on Savage – and finish with
the best tracks on Warehouse. Fans will find things to love here, I’m sure.
But Savage Young Dü won’t be making any converts.
