"The underground community is more
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After we gas up, Bob takes Grant's place in the van and Grant jumps in with
Les and me. I take over the wheel and point the car east. The van overtakes
us and stays just barely visible ahead on the plains. Van driver Greg is
in a hurry.
Now in direct contrast with card-counting Bob Mould and straightforward, mechanically-inclined Greg Norton, Grantzberg Vernon Hart (sorry, man, I had to tell 'em) is not the most, shall we say, linear member of Hüsker Dü. It can be maddening, the way he never finishes sentences, his mind having rushed on to something else, leaving you to...But you can usually get his.... On the other hand, he tends to be very epigrammatic. He talks about playing the couch circuit in the band's early days and I say the sort of underground community that supported so many bands was wonderful. Says Grant: "The underground is more a series of tunnels than a hole." After four hours of rigorous conversation with Bob, Grant's playfulness and general good humor give me the clue to the other side of the band's appeal. At a Hüsker Dü gig in Austin, a Dutch fan approached me and asked, "Zo, are you a Bob Mould fan or a Grant Hart fan?" and then I spent the intervening weeks developing a theory that one was a more hard-rock writer and the other more of the pop guy. Grant dismisses it with a short, "That's a bunch of bullshit." (About half of the pop stuff I like is by Mould, and the other half by Hart.) On the other hand, he freely admits that the songs he writes on keys are differently structured from those he writes on guitar. But it's also clear that this end of the tour has left Grant pretty exhausted, so mostly we just trade general observations or drive along having conversations like this: Grant: "I've never been in the same mood twice." Ed: "That's an interesting thought. You really think that?" G: "Yeah." E: (stalling, trying to figure that one out) "That's good.i You're very lucky." G: "I've probably got six or seven categories of moods." E: (increasingly puzzled) "But you don't slide into them the same way or experience them the same way?" G: "I'm sure." Or Grant Hart tells a joke: "There was this guy who woke up one day and all he heard was drums. Everywhere he went, drums pounding, pounding in his head. And the doctor listened to his story and said, 'You got here just in time.' So the doctor pulls out a needle and gives the guy a shot, and the drums disappear. Then the bass solo starts..." We've lost the sun, and even though the moon's not up yet we can still see the horizon as we drive along. Reconnoitering at a rest-stop, we notice that we're not quite halfway across Kansas, and it's decided that the next stop will be someplace to eat. Grilled cheese again. Convinced that the van will catch up with us, we leave without talking to Bob and Greg. That turns out to be a big mistake. We set out with Grant at the wheel, revved up and doing around ninety. Suddenly the van comes up behind us, and Greg, mad that we left without him, |
passes us and disappears down the road.
So much for our navigator.
About three hours later we approach Kansas City
and realize that although we're headed to another Holiday Inn, we have no
idea where it is. Over the next two hours, the vision of the Holiday Inn we
passed on our way into the city dances in my head. We should have stopped
there just to use their computer to find out which one we were staying at
and get directions. But we didn't.
To keep from falling asleep, we've turned on the radio, which at 3:30 on a Friday morning in Kansas City, isn't much. But a song comes onthe oldies station: "Aquarius" by the 5th Dimension. "Awright!" Grant yells, and turns it all the way up. He starts pounding everything in sight, driving faster and faster. "I leaned to play drums to this song. My brother, who played drums and gave me my first set, said it'd be a good one to practice to; it had a couple of different beats in it. Finally we find the suburb we're supposed to be in. There's a Holiday Inn. We're ecstatic. It's the wrong Holiday Inn. We're pre-psychotic. The place we're supposed to be is two freeway exits back. All the way there, Grant is trying to figure out whether it would be more sadistic to leave a 6:30 or a 7:30 wakeup call for Greg Norton. The next day starts late. The hotel is a Holidome, with most of the rooms arranged around an indoor pool. Mould has decided there won't be time to visit William Burroughs. Instead he takes the modem out and starts doing business in his room. Grant takes the inflatable whale he bought in Denver and decides to donate it to the swimmers inthe pool. He gets up to the second floor and throws it in, to the delight of a bunch of kids. Throughout the day he checks in to see who's on the whale, and at one point there's a guy who must be seventy, all alone, riding it up and down the pool. Not much of a motel-vandalism story. Like I said, he's no Keith Moon. At four, the band shows up in my room. I ask why they still drive themselves around. "Well," Greg, who does most of the driving, says, "you like to drive." True enough, and there have been times when I've pushed myself to do a lot of it on a day, but I don't think a six-week tour.... "Driving ourselves on the road is something we've always done," he says. I guess it would be nice to have somebody that that's all they do, is drive." "It's aprt of our way of being independent from the situation as well," Bob adds. "You're not tied to the equipment, not tied to the crew, not tied to the interstate. Like yesterday, we can trail off and do something for an hour, or goof off in the afternoon. Other bands have to be on the bus at a certain time or else fly to the next gig and pay out of your wallet to do it. We're real hands-on as far as the booking and routing of our tours is concerned. This is the schedule we've picked." Then there's the queston of the lyrics. in the interviews I've read, the band downplays their importance, which is fine with me because I rarely listen to lyrics. But if they're not important, why are they there? "To have a title!" Grant states the obvious. "The lyrics are real important," Bob says. "But it's like, the two ground-breaking bands of the 80s people constantly refer to are us and R.E.M., and we've both got this problem. There are so many levels you can take this band on. You can say, 'They're a great live band, but I don't like their Continued >> |
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