by Roni Sarig
Jenny Toomey, Tsunami / Licorice:
They were the embodiment of it all: incredibly prolific, earnest, catchy, raw, nice, and hard working. They’d take other cool bands like Soul Asylum on the tour and help them make records. They were the next step of it all... they got a major label deal.
Where some American punk bands fell apart too soon and others remained part of the underground until the end, Hüsker Dü allowed their music to evolve as the members’ goals and priorities changed. While reviled by some hardcore loyalists as the first band to “sell out” to a major record company, Hüsker Dü remained true to themselves, for better or worse, the whole way. And while careerist ambitions threatened to tarnish their reputation in underground rock, Hüsker Dü stands today as one of the truly pivotal groups in punk rock’s transition from ‘80s underground to ‘90s mainstream. Though they paid the price for daring to cross over, bands from Soul Asylum to Nirvana to Green Day have them to thank for their paychecks.
Growing up in a small New York town near the Canadian border, Bob Mould had little contact with rock music beyond what he heard on the radio. He loved the Beatles and the Byrds until his teens, when he began to search out bands like the Ramones, Television, and the New York Dolls, which he read about in magazines from New York City. By 1978, when Mould went off to college in Minneapolis, British punk had exploded and Mould loved the Buzzcocks for blending his twin loves of punk rock and classic pop. Soon after arriving at school, Mould befriended Grant Hart and Greg Norton, a couple of local record store clerks who shared his tastes in music.
With Hart on drums, Norton on bass, and Mould on guitar, the three decided to form a band. Adopting the name Hüsker Dü from a children’s board game of the ‘50s (it’s Swedish for “do you remember?”), the trio came together in early 1979 and within a year had secured a place in a local punk scene that included future members of the Replacements and Soul Asylum (whose debut album Mould would produce in 1984).
Art Alexakis, Everclear:
Bob Mould’s guitar playing was very simple, open key-distorted but melodic. It was the first time I heard the Beatles meeting punk rock. And I started fucking around with distorted open tunings and that kind of melodicism.
Early on, the Hüskers’ reputation for short, fast songs and an intensely powerful live act made them Minneapolis’s punk ambassadors. Bands like the Dead Kennedys stayed with them when passing through town, and as they released a single on their own Reflex label, the Hüskers began to arrange tours to the West Coast. After meeting Black Flag at a gig in Chicago in late 1981, word of the band spread to the Minutemen, who called to see if Hüsker Dü wanted to put out a record on their New Alliance label. Without enough money to go into a studio, the band recorded a live show in Minneapolis that was released as their debut album, Land Speed Record. While the record’s furious pace conveyed the band’s energy, poor recording quality reduced much of it to a noisy racket.
King Coffey, Butthole Surfers:
Hüsker Dü tell me I wrote them their first out-of-state fan letter. I was so impressed by Land Speed Record – it was incredibly fast, with lots of energy behind it – I wrote them a letter. And they were so flattered somebody outside Minneapolis thought they were worthwhile, they wrote back and answered my stupid little fanzine questions I asked. Then when they came through Texas I roadied for them and got paid $5 a day.
After an uncharacteristically political single revealed a Minutemen influence, Hüsker Dü released its first studio (mini-)album, Everything Falls apart. More cohesive and better produced than the debut – though still fast and noisy – the record showcased the songwriting abilities of Mould and Hart, while their cover of Donovan’s Sunshine Superman unveiled the band’s long-suppressed pop sensibilities. On 1983’s Metal Circus EP – their first for SST – songs like Diane and It’s Not Funny anymore marked an increasingly melodic approach, a stretch beyond the standard hardcore sound.
Even given Hüsker Dü’s popularity within the hardcore scene, few fans expected a work as ambitious as 1984’s double album concept record, Zen Arcade. Bringing outside elements (piano, acoustic guitar, tape effects) into their music without sacrificing hardcore’s ferocity, Hüsker Dü took the hardcore form to its furthest limits. Tough and spacey, melancholic and celebratory, Zen Arcade connected hardcore to rock traditionalism, and opened the form up to countless new possibilities. Along with the equally successful, if less sprawling, follow-up New Day Rising, Hüsker Dü hit full stride – marrying pop and punk in a way that didn’t lessen the impact of either – and jumped to the head of the class in American punk rock.
Kristin Hersh, Throwing Muses:
I was really unhappy at art school – RISD was full of these morose people dressed in black – and I was sleeping on a friend’s floor one night, really disillusioned, when he put on Zen Arcade. And it was just the most beautiful sound I’d ever heard, like the hardcore bands I grew up with but much prettier. They were stomping around, yelling and screaming, and still sounded like wind. I thought pop songs were evil, but they taught me that pop songs were okay. I don’t know if other people would call Hüsker Dü a pop band but I’m pretty sure they were.
Will Oldham, Palace:
New Day Rising was one of those records where I called the store every day for three weeks waiting for it to come out.
By 1985’s Flip Your Wig, their first record to emphasize vocal clarity over raging guitar walls, Hüsker Dü was crossing over the borders of hardcore. Rather than retrench and risk repeating themselves, they decided they had no choice but to move beyond SST and the punk underground. Late in the year, Hüsker Dü signed with Warner Bros., and 1986’s Candy Apple Gray became the first hardcore album recorded for a major label. Though not substantially different from Flip Your Wig, the record marked an end to hardcore’s first generation. By then, both Black Flag and the Minutemen were through, and for Hüsker Dü, priorities had changed.
Van Conner, Screaming Trees:
Right after New Day Rising and Flip Your Wig, whenever we’d tour, the local band of high school or college kids who opened up for us always sounded like Hüsker Dü, probably in the same way bands nowadays sound like Nirvana or Soundgarden.
For a younger generation of hardcore kids weaned on records like Zen Arcade, Candy Apple Gray was blasphemy; it seemed the band had alienated as many core fans as they gained from larger exposure. By 1987, though, Hüsker Dü were facing larger threats to its existence, including intensified alcohol and drug use, and a long-brewing power struggle between Mould and Hart. Their double album and final studio release, Warehouse: Songs & Stories, sounds weary and lifeless despite some strong material. The liner copy reads like a suicide note, making no attempt to hide the band’s sense of regret and despair: “Sometimes you feel real old, older than you are... The demands of life. Responsibilities, Responsibilities... You can’t go if you don’t know, and you can’t know if you don’t go...” Following the actual suicide of Hüsker Dü’s office manager, the band finally fell apart in early 1988.
Greg Norton left music to become a chef, and Grant Hart returned to SST as a solo artist before forming the band Nova Mob. Bob Mould also spent a few years as a solo artist (recording with former Pere Ubu members Tony Maimone and Anton Fier), then reverted back to the power-trio format (and indie status) with the band Sugar. More recently, he has resumed his solo career.
DISCOGRAPHY
Land Speed Record (New Alliance, 1981; SST, 1987); the super-fast live debut.
Everything Falls apart (Reflex, 1982; Rhino, 1993); released as a minialbum, the reissue Everything Fails apart and More includes singles, outtakes, and demos.
Metal Circus EP (SST, 1983); seven songs that showcase the band’s songwriting ability.
Zen Arcade (SST, 1984); the classic document of American hardcore punk in a two-record concept album.
New Day Rising (SST, 1985); everything great about Zen Arcade, but stripped down to one record.
Flip Your Wig (SST, 1985); a por
trait of a band aching for something bigger.
Candy Apple Gray (Warner Bros., 1986); the major label debut, with a predictably cleaner sound.
Warehouse: Songs and Stories (Warner Bros., 1987); the final studio album, two records of a great band grown stale.
The Living End (Warner Bros., 1994); a posthumous live album taken from the band’s final tour in 1987.
TRIBUTE: Various Artists, Dü Hüskers: The Twin Cities Replay Zen Arcade (Synapse, 1993); local Minneapolis/St. Paul groups including Walt Mink, the Blue Up, Balloon Guy, and Arcwelder remake the Hüskers’ classic record in its entirety.
BAD BRAINS
Ian MacKaye, Minor Threat / Fugazi:
Like most of the truly inspirational bands who really made a difference – the ones that took the machetes out and chopped their way through the jungle – you can’t contain the Bad Brains, you can’t fucking put a leash on them. They’re never going to appeal to the mainstream because they’re groundbreakers. But the Bad Brains have had more effect on music than most people could hope to realize. A lot of the popular bands of the past ten years, white maybe they haven’t been directly inspired by the Bad Brains, they’ve certainly been inspired by bands who’ve been inspired by the Bad Brains.
Four African-American kids from the Washington, D.C. suburbs, Bad Brains were destined to be hardcore’s great anomaly. But, as true outsiders – racially, musically, religiously – in a subculture that cultivated “outsiderness,” Bad Brains were perhaps the purest manifestation of hardcore ideology. And in the end, their impact would be as great (if not greater) than any of their hardcore peers. From Living Colour’s so-called “black rock” music, to the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ punk-funk, to Seattle’s metallic grunge, Bad Brains’ long shadow has reached across regions, styles, and decades of American punk-based music.
The members of Bad Brains had all been born in D.C.’s mostly black inner city, but moved with their parents to the Maryland suburbs around 1970, when gentrification pushed middle-income families out to make room for high-rent renovations. Singer Paul Hudson (known as H.R.) and his drummer brother Earl met guitarist Gary Wayne Miller (called Dr. Know, or Doc) and bassist Darryl Jennifer in high school, where they formed the jazz fusion band Mind Power. While the untrained foursome developed their jazz chops by copying Al DiMeola and Chick Corea records, each also played in more mainstream funk bands.
When the band started hearing the punk music coming out of England in 1977, they identified with its sense of marginalization and rebellion, and thought they could apply that spirit to their own music. As Mind Power moved toward a punk sound, the band renamed itself Bad Brains to connote awareness (like the original name), blackness (“bad” as slang for good), and punk rock (as in the earlier Ramones song “Bad Brain”).
Michael Franti, Spearhead:
They had a large impact on the scene because they weren’t only playing punk but were carrying within their music reggae and the spirit of Rastafari. For me to see bands out there who weren’t just R&B singers, but who still came from a very African perspective, was crucial. They showed me, as a black artist, you didn’t have to do what the mainstream of black music was doing.
Right away the band gravitated to groups like the Clash and the Specials who saw a kinship between punk and reggae, and the influence was reflected in the way Bad Brains would shift between lightning-fast punk songs and laid-back reggae grooves. From the punk-reggae connection, Bad Brains came into contact with Rastafarianism, the religion of many Jamaican musicians, and adopted it as their own faith. Not only did the group introduce local punk audiences to reggae, but by advancing Rastafarianism’s asceticism they would influence the D.C. scene’s later embrace of clean living, straight edge punk.
Punk’s reputation for high-energy shows made D.C. clubs unwilling to book bands like Bad Brains. Instead, the group played wherever it could organize a gig, including its own basement and a brownstone co-op in D.C.’s Adams Morgan neighborhood called Madame’s Organ. Attended by a motley crew of friends, hippies, and teenagers – including future Black Flag singer Henry Rollins and Minor Threat leader Ian MacKaye – these shows earned Bad Brains a reputation as the fastest, most exciting punk band in D.C. But still frustrated with local clubs’ unwillingness to book them (as they detail in the song Banned in D.C.), the group moved to New York in 1980.
Kate Schellenbach, Luscious Jackson:
Bad Brains was one of the bands that I – along with other kids my age like Jill and Gabby [of Luscious Jackson] and the Beastie Boys – would see every time they played. Not only was seeing them very exciting, it was also this social event. I met a lot of my good friends there... When I was in the Beastie Boys, their songs were some of our favorites to try and figure out. They were very accomplished musicians, so they inspired us to step up on our musicianship.
Adam Yauch, Beastie Boys:
The Bad Brains influenced me more than any other band in the world.
Though Bad Brains first recorded as early as 1979, it wasn’t until 1982 that they finally released a cassette-only debut album on ROIR. The tape (with liner notes written by Yo La Tengo’s Ira Kaplan, then a music critic) mixed high-energy classics such as Big Take over and Sailin’ on with reggae tracks like Jah Calling for a sound that was as fast and ferocious as any hardcore album (if not more so), while maintaining tight structures and quick changes. As the band’s reputation grew, it stepped up a touring regime that brought them to California, where they headlined a show featuring the first-ever gig by Bad Brains fanatics, the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
Dave Grohl, Nirvana / Foo Fighters:
My goal has always been to be as powerful live as the Bad Brains. We’re not that close yet, but we’re getting there. [Allstar Daily Music News, 1/26/98]
Having garnered enough attention to warrant a full-scale LP, Bad Brains released Rock for Light in 1983. Though it contained some of the same songs as the ROIR cassette, the material was rerecorded by Ric Ocasek of the Cars. The album’s slicker sound did little to detract from the music’s power; it even added greater dynamism. Within a year, though, H.R.’s desire to pursue reggae exclusively led him to quit Bad Brains for a solo career, and the group entered a two-year period of inactivity.
After an H.R. solo album, Bad Brains re-formed in 1986 and released I against I on Black Flag’s SST label. Both a triumphant return and stylistic departure, the record was not explicitly hardcore and not at all reggae, but rather a seminal album in the development of the black rock style typified by Living Colour, the grunge sound of bands like Soundgarden, and the funk-inflected metal of later bands like Rage against the Machine. But after a lengthy 1987 tour yielded three live albums, H.R. quit the band again (along with Earl) to record a second solo album.
Chris Cornell, Soundgarden:
I against I was a record that everyone in the band poured over. Everyone in the Seattle scene, we’d sit around in rooms and listen, song to song, and talk about them.
Determined to continue Bad Brains without H.R. and Earl, Doc and Darryl briefly recruited members of Faith No More and the Cro-Mags to tour, though H.R. returned once again for 1989’s metal-oriented The Quickness. Disbanding once again, the group remained inactive until 1993, when they were signed by Epic, a major label that had been successful with Living Colour. Joined by a young H.R. sound-alike named Israel Joseph I, Doc and Darryl made Rise, a record that augmented their recent metal funk leanings with cheesy synths and dancehall beats. The album was unsuccessful both commercially and creatively, and Epic soon dropped the band.
A second chance at revival came in 1994, when Madonna’s Maverick label reunited H.R. and Earl with Doc and Darryl to record God of Love. Ric Ocasek was producing again, and the band was invited to join a Beastie Boys’ tour. Bad Brains seemed poised for another comeback. However, early into the tour H.R. showed signs of instability, due possibly to anxiety, drugs, or a more serious mental condition (or what Doc laments as H.R.’s “fear of the big time”). After dropping off an
d then rejoining the Beasties, the group embarked on their own tour.
While performing in Lawrence, Kansas, H.R. became agitated by an audience member he believed was heckling him and he smashed the heavy steel base of his microphone stand over the kid’s head. The victim sustained severe head injuries (but survived), while H.R. spent over a month in jail before being released. Not surprisingly, Bad Brains split up again, this time perhaps for good. Meanwhile, the musical style that Bad Brains invented now fills arenas.
DISCOGRAPHY
Bad Brains (ROIR 1982, 1996); the classic debut cassette that captures the band’s early sound, recently reissued on CD.
Rock for Light (PVC 1983, Caroline 1991); their first widely available album, featuring slicker production by Ric Ocasek.
I against I (SST, 1986); a strong comeback album of all new material, including some of their best songs.
Live (SST, 1988); a concert recording from the band’s 1987 tour.
Quickness (Caroline, 1989); the most consistently metallic of Bad Brains albums, but retaining hard funk elements.
The Youth Are Getting Restless (Caroline, 1990); a live recording from the 1987 tour.
Spirit Electricity (SST, 1991); yet another live album recorded in 1987.
Rise (Epic, 1993); featuring new singer Israel Joseph I and drummer Mackie, the band’s uneven and ill-considered major label debut.
God of Love (Maverick / Warner Bros., 1995); H.R.’s return (and perhaps the band’s swan song) is one step better than Rise, but a far cry from the ‘80s recordings.