Musician Tour Diary, Aug 1987

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"We're Hüsker Dü, not Bob Mould or
Grant Hart and two unlisted sidemen."
was going on— through our common interest in music. We ended up writing what we thought were real catchy songs, but they were real abrasive and real fast. Faster than bands had ever thought of playing before. In hindsight, you can go back and look at some of the early stuff the Beatles did and you can see how fast they played when all the yid was drink and take speed. Not that we patterned ourselves after the early Beatles, but.... Were influenced by a lot of things. I was listening to a lot of punk rock and a lot of, not so much free jazz, but weird fringe music. Grant came from much more of a pop background, and Greg was from a more jazzy end. We just did what we did. It was pretty natural. We didn't sit down and have a world domination plan. We thought we were awfully damn good when we started out. People hated our guts."

Careful Bob, they kill everything here.

      The early Hüsker Dü not only played an unpopular kind of music— although the Twin Cities was a more receptive place for punk than many— but they were from St. Paul, which enjoys the same sort of "second city" status that Brooklyn does to Manhattan, or Oakland to San Francisco: Nothing cool can come from a place like that. So they took what gigs they could get. "We've done our share of 3.2 bars (pouring low-alcohol beer for eighteen- to twenty-one-year-olds) and old folks' honky-tonk polka clubs and other wacky gigs," Mould recalls, "but we did demo tapes before we played out, 4-track stuff that we thought was the greatest stuff in the world. After we'd been together a year, a year and a half, we decided to put out a single. We did three songs at Blackberry Way with Steve Fjelstad in August 1980. We had people documenting live shows for us even back then, and we took 'Statues,' which was a studio song, and 'Amusement,' a live track, got a loan, and put that out as a single. We pressed up 2500 of them, printed the sleeves ourselves, stuffed them all into plastic bags and sat there and looked at them for a couple of months.
      "In March of '81 we decided to go down to Chicago, just for the hell of it, to level the entire 		city. We met the SST people there at one of the hell gigs, the one with the blue paint. Oh, that gig.... We got psychotic one night when we played this club, bouncing off the walls, picking up hammers between songs and smashing everything in sight. There were two lights in the whole place and we had them focused on the mike stands so all people could see was these silhouettes and these bright lights staring them in the face. And at the end of the set, we just went nuts. There were no dressing rooms, just a storage closet behind the stage, and one of us went back there and found this big thing of blue latex paint. I was out of my fuckin' mind, so I just picked it up and pitched it over the drum kit and it landed on the floor. The top flew off and blue paint went all over the place. This girl, who was the club-owner's roommate, dressed head to toe in leather, decided she was going to scoop up the paint with what was left of Grant's cymbals and pour it over his drum kit. She had a cymbal-full of blue paint, and just as she got to the kit, Grant came out, picked her up, power-slammed her into the blue paint so she was covered, her whole backside, and people decided they were going to pick her up by her elbows and bounce her off the walls, leaving these blue buttprints all around the club. Needless to say, we didn't get paid, although I think we sold some records. This was before what I consider hardcore was even hardcore. We pretty much...it was the Who."
      Well, now. Imagine that.
      In May, as soon as school let out, the band rented a van andspent the next three and a half months on the West Coast, where "we did a lot of gigs for twelve bucks, twenty bucks. If we could play a gig for twenty bucks and have a place to stay, we'd do that. A lot of generic beer, a lot of sandwiches, a lot of days without eating. But we discovered that, lo and behold, there were other bands doing somewhat the same thing we were doing." And the rest, as they say, is discography; first Land Speed Record came out on New Aliance, then the first SST record, the Metal Circus EP. Suddenly the trio from (ugh) St. Paul was one of America's leading avant-garde bands. From there, they set up the cycle of tour, record, tour, record, tour some more and record some more, that they only broke with the six-month hiatus that led up to Warehouses: Songs And Stories. Even— or maybe especially—America's leading avant-garde bands stand a good chance of turning into crispy critters if they don't watch it.

      You leave the hills behind in Colorado. It's amazing how you can start the day with snow-capped peaks looming overhead and within a matter of a couple of hours the whole countryside flattens out and becomes, well, Kansas. The aggravation of the road is taking its toll on the homesick Hüskers. When we cross into the Central time zone they let out a big sigh of relief— almost home. Bob quotes his lyric from "Celebrated Summer": Somewhere in April time they add another hour."
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