We thought we were damn good when
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your emotional spectrum gets a little more involved," Mould
says, "a little wider, and it's not just screaming about how messed up the
government is and how you hate
your parents any more. It's..." "Playing
to a better medley," Joan says, cold-cocking him into stunned silence
with the malapropism. Finally, she asks the teen-mag question of which
is the calming influence, which is the wild one, and Bob cops to the
former, Greg admits to being in between, and Grant rolls his eyes. "We'll
be back with the eighty-five-year-old marathon winner and actor David
McCallum, okay?" Joan concludes. Okay, Joan.
A week later, Hüsker Dü is in Denver. All is not swell in the Mile-High City: A lack of advance sales has caused the promoter to move the gig from a beautifully restored downtown theater to Norman's Place, way the hell out in the suburb of Aurora. In fact, it looks like he's been keeping it a complete secret. The band goes to an in-store appearance at Wax Trax, a funky, comfortable record store in a collegiate-looking area. It looks like there are only six non-band, non-employee types in the whole store. Over the next hour, several more people drift in, but most don't recognize the band or know what they're doing behind the counter. The guys are taking it instride, though, chatting affably with the fans, signing album covers, posters and 12x12s, and surprising me with their encyclopedic knowledge of America's underground bands. Of course, they've played on bills with many of them. Bob Mould scores a stack of fanzines to read. "So how many songs have you guys released, anyway?" a fan asks, and Mould jots some figures down in a long string, going back to the top to pull out subtotals and comes up with an answer. One hundred thirty. More or less. "How many unreleased?" "Not many. We tend to use what we record right away. Maybe two or three songs. Hundreds on cassettes and in notebooks though." "Hey," the fan says, looking at the sheet of numbers. "I recognize that: card-counting." Mould's eyes light up. "Did you do any playing when you guys played Vegas?" And they're off into a conversation about that. It gets to be 4:30, and with soundcheck not until six, the question of finding something to eat looms large. The issue of food is complicated: Bob and Grant are strictly teetotaling vegetarians, a hard regime to hold to on the road. We wind up at a Greek Mexican place and head off to the gig via the hotel. Greg Norton, as navigator, knows where everything is everywhere in America. He has maps, for one thing, but he also has a hell of a lot in his head. I guess after six years of cross-country travel that's not too surprising. Tonight's gig is in a shopping center, close by a Gold's Gym and a Fuddrucker's. Norman's Place is a teen club serving no alcohol, and even at this early hour the parking-lot is swarming with rent-a-cops. In the dressing room we find music writer Gil Asakawa with an older man he introduces as George Beck, owner of the toy company that made Hüsker Dü. Gil has talked Beck into coming along to meet the band and give them a new copy of the game. Beck is friendly enough, although the sound coming through the closed door is frighteningly loud for him. "Where the Child Can Outwit the Adult!" it says on the Hüsker Dü box. According to New Times, the game has a scandal in its history: An overzealous ad agency inserted the subliminal message "GET |
IT!" in a Canadian Hüsker Dü
TV ad, and Beck and his company were denounced in Parliament.
The band is really happy to see Beck and they trade Hüsker Dü lore
for a while. "Hüsker Dü is a Norwegian television show similar to
Lawrence Welk, too, you know, and when we played Norway the government asked
us to stop using the name," Mould reveals. So did you? "Naw." Then the
four of them settle down for a game which, considering Mould's methodical
mind, I'm surprised that Greg Norton wins.
The show begins early, and although the sound leaves a bit to be desired, there is fire coming off the stage tonight. Playing for a small but devoted group of fans, suburban punk-by-numbers kids and curiosity-seekers, they let it rip. I wonder if the regulars here realize what kind of show they're getting tonight, how seeing the light at the end of the tour-tunnel is making the band cut loose. I also think about how difficult this band seemed for me at first. Metal Circus was a roar from one end to the other, but with a little bit of melodicism peeking out to let me know this wasn't your average hardcore band. Subsequent albums made that clearer until the magnificent single "Makes No Sense At All" proved that this band could write hit songs, or at least songs that were hits with me. But there has always bee an angularity to Hüsker Dü— particularly Mould's numbers, which seem to have very irregular meters (but only seem to) and emotionally opaque lyrics that make surrendering to the music just a little more work than it is with most bands. The hooks only sink in after three or four listenings. After that, the floodgates open and I remember how I had the same trouble with the early Who. True, Grant's not the flashy drummer Keith Moon was, but Greg's bass fills in more rhythmically than Entwistle's. The Mould/Townshend comparison works (and I'm not talking about their noses, either), except that Bob doesn't leap around. Where the Hüskers have it over the Who is that they have two prolific songwriters and a third who's getting back into it. When I ask Grant about the differences between his songs and Bob's, he says, "The fact that we're two different people might have something to do with it. I mean, Bob and I aren't each half of Paul Westerberg." "We started in the same place," Bob elaborates, "and developed differently, separated quite a bit, and I think now are getting more the same." The next morning we prepare to leave for Kansas City. Warners publicist Les Schwartz has rented a car and the band have a van. Yeah, van; no Silver Eagle tour bus for these guys. The tour is almost over: Only Kansas City and a gig the next night in Decorah, Iowa remain. It hasn't been an easy one so far. The band had been off the road for a while and was enjoying it after virtually living in the van for five years. It was hard getting back, if even for six weeks. Two weeks before the tour was to start, their manager, David Savoy, killed himself, plunging the band's affairs into Bob Mould's competent but overworked hands for the first time since Savoy had taken over in August '85. The band elected to hold off finding new management until after the tour, so Bob's toting an extra briefcase and making more phone calls every day. Continued >> |
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