Everything Falls apart and more was a re-release of early Hüsker Dü
material. Also released about the same time was the CD Living End. A
live album from Hüsker Dü's 1987 tour.
This album is not how I originally remembered Husker Du's last
hurrah. The show forever etched on my brain -- right next to the 1984
firestorm at New York's Folk City ("Eight Miles High" is still ringing
in my ears) and the Irving Plaza gig two years later where the Huskers
literally blew the slamdancers out of the pit with a Coltrane-on-
feedback expedition through "Reoccurring Dreams" -- is the night at the
Ritz in the Spring of '87 when the band, fresh out of the studio with
_Warehouse: Songs and Stories_ hit the stage and played the entire
double album. In sequence, no less.
For the first twenty minutes or so, the audience stood slackjawed,
dazed by the torrent of brand new songs. By then, the Huskers were
pushing maximum-warp. Bob Mould's eyes rolled back in his head as he
sprayed the crowd with fuzz guitar shrapnel. Bassist Greg Norton was
airborne more often than not, looking (with that handlebar beauty of a
moustache) like Cardinal Richelieu on amphetamines as he alternated
between pogo-bouncing and Pete Townshend scissor-leg splits. One minute,
drummer Grant Hart was negotiating the tidal jazz-waltz surge of "She
Floated Away"; a couple breaths later, in "Actual Condition," he was
Tommy Ramone hammering away behind Eddie Cochran. Finally, as the band
turned into the hyper-mantra home stretch of "You Can Live at Home,"
voices, rhythm and feedback dissolved into a stage-wide wall of white
light/white heat.
There were encores -- all covers, including the Huskers' famous B-
side romp through "Love Is All Around", the _Mary Tyler Moore_ theme.
Which ended, appropriately, with the line "You're gonna make it after
all." Coming at a time when Husker Du were caught between their
liberation vision of post-punk & roll and the hardline of moshpit
purists who still swore by the speed-of-light gospel of 1982's _Land
Speed Record_, the all-Warehouse set was the ultimate declaration of
independence from the cretin hoppers -- a reaffirmation of punk as a
lifeforce, not just a tribal stomp. "Those who can't, slam," I wrote in
a review for the show for Melody Maker in England. "Those who can, do."
And the Huskers did it all over us, big time, that night.
Nine months later, Husker Du were history, undone by accelerated
internal pressures and irreconcilable differences. But in between, the
Huskers took one more glorious turn on the boards, tearing through the
East and Midwest -- including one last visit to the Ritz in New York --
with a strictly-hitsville set list and an incandescent live vibe that
even the breakup blues just around the corner could not dispel. "If I'd
only known what was coming," Bob Mould told me sometime after the band
dissolved, "I'd have just left after that and stopped." That tour, he
claimed, was one of the best that the band ever did.
This album is proof.
* * * * * *
By any measure, critical or commercial, Husker Du were at the top of
their game by the end of 1986. Formed in Minneapolis in late '78, the
band formally arrived on the still-deeply underground American punk
scene in 1981 with the one-two punch of "Statues"/"Amusement," released
on the trio's own Reflex label, and _Land Speed Record_, a classic
document of machine-gun stage etiquette issued under the Minutemen's New
Alliance imprint and recorded at a hometown show fo rthe princely sum of
$400. After that, Husker Du's recorded output snowballed, totalling six
albums (two of them, the epic _Zen Arcade and _Warehouse_, were doubles)
inside five years -- not to mention a cache of explosive singles and
EP's.
The rapid maturing of the group's songwriting and the vigorously
independent rock & roll spirit implicit in Husker Du's no-prisoners
three-piece roar were no less stunning. As the band's dominant writers,
Bob Mould and Grant Hart always prized melody and menace in equal
measures, yielding such early torpedoes as Mould's "In a Free Land," a
1982 single, and Hart's "It's Not Funny Anymore"from the 1983 mini-album
_Metal Circus_.. They were also not afraid to challenge the "fuck
society" party line of most hardcore punk lyrics, zooming in on personal
relationships and private emotional torment with an impassioned
directness that reached a dark apex on the Huskers' 1986 Warner Bros.
debut _Candy Apple Grey_. "It's and admission of humanity," Mould once
said to me of _Zen Arcade_. "You can't just scream and holler all your
life. You have to step back a minute, look at yourself and say 'Yeah, I
am fucked.' And try to change it."
Then, to paraphrase one of the band's own album titles, everything
falls apart -- beginning, on the eve of the Spring '97 U.S. _Warehouse_
tour, with the tragic suicide of the group's manager David Savoy. The
shows went on, but the novelty of the all_Warehouse set began to pale
for the band by the tour's end. "It became very walking-through-the-
motions," Grant Hart says now. "Once people realized that we were doing
the fourth song in a row from the album, it got so predictable. We could
have put on the most spirited presentation in the world. But by the end,
it wasn't working without the element of surprise."
The Huskers took a summer concert swing through England and Europe
with a revised set list, combining a condensed _Warehouse_ presentation
with older material and, for the occasional encore kick, a cover of the
Ramones' "Sheena Is A Punk Rocker." By September, Mould, Hart, and Greg
Norton had reconvened in Minneapolis for what was supposed to be the
third Warner Bros. studio album.
It was not a productive time. Tensions within the band were rising
and there was pressure on the Huskers from the record company to use an
outside producer. More critically, there wasn't much in the way of new
material to rehearse. Mould recalls having an embryonic version of
"Compositions For The Young And Old," which eventually surfaced on his
first solo album _Workbook_. He also had a fuzzbox hoedown, "Ain't No
Water In The Well," which he now concedes is just "okay". Hart had the
pop-punk driver "Now That You Know Me," which he later recorded for his
own solo album _Intolerance_. He also remembers rehearsing "She Can See
The Angels Coming," a power-hymn (as he calls it) that he'd written
partly in memory of David Savoy and which also ended up in solo form on
_Intolerance_.
"We were grabbing at straws in the end, to come up with
something," says Mould. So the band decided to take what ideas they had
and hammer them out on tour, which was the way the Huskers always used
to work.
"_Warehouse_ was the only record that we didn't really tour until
after we recorded it," explains Greg Norton, whose generally overlooked
writing for Husker Du gets some daylight on this album with the bullet-
rock _Warehouse_ outtake "Everytime," "From The Gut" (which he co-wrote
with Mould for _Everything Falls Apart_), and "New Day Rising" (a band
composition). "Every record before that, we'd write the songs, hit the
road, start playing them live and then eventually get into the studio
and record them." Which certainly explains the firewall live-in-the-
studio sound of hallmark Husker albums like 1985's _New Day Rising_ and
its speedy follow-up _Flip Your Wig_. "When _Flip Your Wig_ came out,"
Norton adds, "we were already playing songs from _Candy Apple Grey_."
"This time," Mould says, "we figured if we packed it up in the
truck and just went and played, the new stuff would take shape. And we
didn't want to do the same show we'd been doing on the _Warehouse_ tour.
So we decided to do a show with everything."
* * * * * *
_The Living End_ isn't quite everything. Some of the song-grenades
from the October '87 shows that, for one reason or another, didn't make
the cut here included: the obvious singles, "Could You Be The One?,"
Don't Want To Know If You Are Lonely," and "Makes No Sense At All"; a
full electric band arrangement of "Never Talking To You Again" from _Zen
Arcade_; a great version of Zen's "Pink Turns To Blue"; "Diane," Grant
Hart's serrated meditation on rape and murder from _Metal Circus_; and
"Flip Your Wig," which was the Huskers' alternate show opener. "It
depended on where our wig was," cracks Norton. "That is, if we felt like
just torching it from the beginning with 'New Day Rising' or, with 'Flip
Your Wig,' going from a slow simmer to a boil." Mould also mentions a
crazed stage recreation one night of the circular _Zen Arcade_ jam "Hare
Krsna" which "goes on for nine minutes and gets so improvisational at
one point that it doesn't sound like music anymore. Then on a dime, it
comes right back."
But the 77 minutes of music crammed on to this disc -- edited and
sequenced from mixing deck cassettes as a kind of dream-date-with-the-
Huskers by Lou Giordono, the band's soundman from 1984 to the bitter end
__ are still prime, primal Husker Du, an essential testament to the
band's mindfucking concert prowess even at a time when, offstage, they
were coming apart at the seams. "Once we hit the stage," says Norton,
"all that was put aside. We had some fun, played some good music and
watched people go apeshit."
"It was a very competitive time for the band," Hart claims. "Not
in direct animosity, but you can hear Bob and I trying to outdo each
other with each subsequent song. Not pulling anything out or holding
back on the other guy, but just putting a lot into it."
"For all the problems," Mould insists, "once you cross the
imaginary threshold and when you're lit up on stage, it all goes out the
window. A good show you shouldn't even remember. It should be a blur."
Appropriately, the Huskers hit the ground running here to the
starting gun of "New Day Rising," a ferocious reveille set in motion by
Hart's migraine drum-pulse, tailgated (as it was on the original album)
by the breathless pop melancholia of "The Girl Who Lives On Heaven
Hill." The mini-suite of songs from _Warehouse_ provides a locomotive
look at what those all-Warehouse shows were really like, in spite of
what the band may think of them now.
Mould's acidburn guitar break in "Standing In The Rain," in
particular, captures the Husker mindset in microcosm: equal parts
distortion-in-excelcis and pungent, skidding melodic shorthand.
Underneath all the corrosion, Mould, Hart and Norton, were popsters at
heart, hitting all the right car-radio G-spots. The bait was speed and
harmonic overload. But the payoff was always in the hook or the chorus,
whether it was the opening guitar riff of "Friend, You've Got To Fall"
(an inspired rewiring of the signature lick from the Yardbirds' "Over
Under Sideways Down") or the way in "Ice Cold Ice" that Hart sings the
chorus in high, aching echo-laden harmony to Mould's yelping vocal --
half-sneering bravado, half-naked fear.
"I always had the opinion that even if it was just two bars, if it
didn't move the song along in some way, I could live without it," says
Hart of his own writing. "Go for something else. Or just have nothing
there."
Mould, in turn, feels that if they had lived to see another year
or two, Husker Du might have gone into a deeper, darker musical space.
On _Candy Apple Grey_, his long acoustic agony-blues "Hardly Getting
Over It" had a grim, stripped-down momentum, with a simple melody and a
repetitive chorus "to keep it open," he says, "so the words do all the
work." But in the version here from the RPM Club in Toronto, there is a
greater, soaring payoff -- a transcendent open-ended throb that has few
equals even in the Huskers' own stage logs.
"There wasn't much stuff in the Husker Du repertoire that had much
room for dynamic interpretation," Mould notes, "but I suspect that is
the direction the band would have gone in if it had stayed together. The
rehearsals were becoming more improvisational, less structured."
At the same time, Husker Du had a mthhodical, modular approach to
performance. Songs of like mind and attack were grouped into what the
band termed "packs of three": "Standing In The Rain," "Back From
Somewhere" and "Ice Cold Ice" from _Warehouse_; the _New Day_ hat trick
of "Terms Of Psychic Warfare," Powerline" and "Books About UFO's"
(Mould: "These always went together"). The three-way collision here of
"From The Gut" and "Target" from _Everything Falls Apart_ with "It's Not
Funny Anymore" shoots by in under six minutes, but there is no mistaking
the packet's thematic lash against punk fundamentalism ("You don't like
the people who caught on late/If they're having fun") and the mob rule
psyche of the moshpit ("Act like you want to act/Be what you want to
be/Find out who you really are/And don't pay attention to me").
With hindsight, you can also trace in these songs and performances
a subtext of frustration and loss that was being played out in Husker
Du's offstage turmoil. the climactic tag-chorus in "Celebrated Summer" -
- before Mould goes into the final guitar sqwack -- speaks volumes about
scarred innocence and the weight of experience. "WHat's Goin' On" from
_Zen Arcade_ is a manic Grant Hart song about someone consumed by inner
chaos; you can certainly hear much of the Huskers' own combustible self-
absorption in the awesome brutality of this rendering, sung with
hysteric conviction by Greg Norton. from Toad's Place in New Haven. For
all of the talk about taking new ideas out on the road, of using this
tour as a mobile song lab, the Huskers only played two new songs on this
jaunt: "Now That You Know Me" and "Ain't No Water In The Well." They
found their succor and inspiration -- and all the appropriate emotional
parallels -- in their greatest hits.
"I don't know who said it, but it might apply here: 'Nostalgia is
the symptom of a dying culture,'" says Hart. "In the case of Husker Du,
we were pulling back. We were digging so much into the back catalogm not
meeting the quotas we set for ourselves.
"There was an amount of denial, of being able to focus so much
negative energy on what we were doing. And yet it's rather obvious from
the sound of these recordings that there was also a lot of positive
stuff between us."
"That's the weird thing," Mould agrees, "In spite of how everyone
was retreating to his own corner, it never affected the performances.
The music was so strong, everybody got caught up in it. It was easy to
say 'Fuck all this other shit' for an hour."
* * * * * *
The end came in January, 1988. Greg Norton likens it to "a little
bug flying along and then, all of a sudden, a semi comes out of nowhere.
Next thing you know, you're all over the windshield."
That was six years ago -- a lifetime in rock & roll and long
enough for the Huskers' mighty noise, ghettoized as fringe music even in
their prime, to become a defining, commercial force in the 90's. Just as
the Ramones, Patti Smith and the Buzzcocks begat the Huskers, so the
Huskers to no small degree begat the Grunge Generation. They are the
name to drop, under "seminal influence," in reviews and interviews,
which makes the release of these live tapes especially propitious. "It's
a little unnerving," concedes Mould. "I have this real strange feeling
that this record is going to be successful."
If so, it will be for at least four of the right reasons, as laid
out here in "Powerline": "It aggrevates and it pacifies...It captivates
and it hypnotizes/Hear the power in the lines." You may have heard it
before -- on the original records, on bootlegs, on other unforgettable
nights that (like mine) still ring in your ears. But one listen to _The
Living End_ and this will be the way you remember it from here on out.
-- David Fricke Rolling Stone