by Bob Mould
One day in late 1978, I stopped by Cheapo Records in St. Paul. A PA set up on the street outside was blaring stuff like X-Ray Spex and Pere Ubu. I was like, wow, this is cool, and I started talking to the guy behind the counter. He was a pudgy, hippie-ish guy, barefoot. He might have been wearing something tie-dyed. And I’m thinking, Who is this frumpy guy? Not being a Greek god myself, I wasn’t making a judgment—it was more like a feeling of solidarity. He told me his name was Grant Hart, and we started talking about music. Somehow the conversation gets around to the subject of marijuana. He says, “I got some Thai stick.” So he closes up the store for a bit, and we go down to the basement and get stoned. I can’t remember if it was that day or a subsequent meeting, but I eventually mentioned to him that I played guitar. He looks at me and says, “Sure you do,” challenging me.
“I play guitar,” I say again.
“What kind of stuff?”
“You know, like this kind of music that we’re listening to. Good stuff.”
“I wanna see you play,” he says, challenging me again. “I’m gonna close the store right now and I wanna go see you play right now.”
So Grant closes the store, and we walk up to my dorm, just a couple of blocks away. We get to my room, I take out my guitar, plug in, and start playing, probably a bunch of Johnny Thunders riffs or something. And he’s like, “Yeah… we gotta play together… I play drums… we gotta play.”
And I say, “Well, cool, whatever.”
Then Grant says, “I know someone who’s got a bass. He works at another record store called Northern Lights down on University Avenue.”
I hadn’t even contemplated the notion of being in a band so soon upon arriving in Minnesota. The Twin Cities were gigantic compared to Malone, and I’d gone from having an entire floor of a house to myself to living in a multistory dormitory. On my dorm floor alone, there was my Japanese-American roommate, there were inner-city African-Americans, as well as privileged suburbanites. I was fresh from the sticks, learning to adjust to this melting pot while trying to create my own identity amid all the other activity at Macalester. A band would be great, but at that particular moment it wasn’t a top priority.
But I met Grant’s friend—his name was Greg Norton—and sure enough, he had a bass. I think he even had a strap for it too. Greg wasn’t the same type of outsider as Grant or me; he had the air of a connoisseur—a hep cat, a skiddly-bop-bo kind of deal. He was into Sun Ra, Ornette Coleman, outside stuff. I thought, What is this jazz bullshit? Greg was also a big fan of new-wave cult favorite Gary Wilson and his album You Think You Really Know Me. We all enjoyed that album, but I think it eventually had a big influence on Greg’s singing style.
Grant lived with his parents in the stockyards suburb of South St. Paul; his dad was a shop teacher, and his mom worked at a credit union. Greg’s parents were separated, and he lived with his mom in a small ’60S-style tract home in the nondescript middle-class suburb Mendota Heights. The house had a semifinished basement. That basement would soon prove to be key.
But I needed a push. Shortly after I arrived at Macalester, the Suicide Commandos broke up and I’d heard that Chris Osgood was giving guitar lessons. I thought the world of the Commandos and I wanted to hang out with Chris, so I figured I’d take a couple of guitar lessons from him. It didn’t matter that I already knew how to play. Chris says he still remembers seeing me step off the bus with that Flying V in front of the house—this big historic mansion where he lived on the top floor with his girlfriend. (I found out much later that his girlfriend would hide in the closet and read a book while I was getting lessons, so as to not disturb us.)
After the second lesson, Chris just looked at me and said it: “You know, you need to go start a band.”
CHAPTER 3
We weren’t a band yet. But the chemistry among the three of us was built around our love of music, and Grant, Greg, and I started going to shows together, hanging out, drinking and smoking weed, bonding, and generally just getting to know each other.
Personally, I felt more of a kinship with Grant. Both of us were the youngest in our family, and both of our families had tragically lost an elder son; Grant’s brother Tom had been killed in a car accident. We both viewed music from a melodic perspective, whereas Greg was more a fan of dissonance. Equally important, Grant and I were both attracted to other men. Grant and I never spent any time dwelling on the subject—and he wasn’t exclusively interested in men—but at the time I sensed that was his preference.
I may have been dealing with my own self-loathing, but there was never any doubt as to my homosexuality, no matter how much I repressed it at the time. I was coping with the confusion that began with puberty—discerning between love, sex, and friendship. The differences and overlaps were unclear to me then, and I am not sure if they are clear to me now. But as far as I was concerned, there was never a doubt as to the nature of the relationship between Grant and me. We could be friends, but we would never be in love, nor would we have sex.
I don’t remember explicitly telling Grant I had no interest in him, but I’m certain my behavior made it very clear. Establishing that boundary was important to me. Grant could be very persuasive: I’d seen him in action, and I wanted to draw the line as clearly and as early as possible. Neither of us expressed any of this verbally, but I felt there was no doubt as to the parameters of our relationship, so there was no need for deep discussion.
But we were all close, and of course, Grant, Greg, and I had these instruments. It made sense for the three of us to play music together. Enter Charlie Pine, a chatty fellow of medium build, medium-length hair, and medium personality. I think Charlie worked part-time at an investment firm. His aspiration was to be a broker, while the three of us had little to no financial hope. But Grant had a Farfisa organ and Charlie could play keyboards, so he was in.
Charlie got us our first gig at Ron’s Randolph Inn, a bar one mile from Macalester. We had to come up with two sets of music, so we learned all kinds of stuff, including the old rockabilly tune “Sea Cruise,” Pere Ubu’s “Non-Alignment Pact,” the Buzzcocks’ “Fast Cars,” and the ’60s surf standard “Wipe Out.”
Charlie was up there with these mirrored sunglasses, looking like Lou Reed on the cover of Live, but with a crack in one of the lenses. He starts to lay a rap on the crowd: “I’m Buddy, these are the Returnables. We’re Buddy and the Returnables.” And I’m thinking to myself, isn’t that nice—we’re returnable. We were Buddy and the Returnables, and Charlie was Buddy.
We’re all up there playing like pigs in shit, having a blast. And yet I’m thinking, are the other guys noticing how out of sync Charlie is with the rest of us? Turns out the answer to that question was yes. Sometime during the second set, a friend of the band named Balls Mikutowski yanked the cord out of Charlie’s organ, pointed at Charlie, and gave him the thumbs-down. He then pointed at the rest of us with the thumbs-up. We finished the evening as a trio, blazing through some original songs that likely included “Do the Bee,” “Uncle Ron,” and “Don’t Try to Call.”
The truth was, Grant, Greg, and I had been rehearsing without Charlie, writing songs in the basement of the Northern Lights record store. The songs were fast and quick, but lighthearted. Grant was a big surf music fan so the songs had that uplifted surf beat, and I’m throwing my Johnny Thunders–meets–Johnny Ramone style on it. I wasn’t really sure what Greg was doing, but I know he was plugged in.
Buddy and the Returnables were history, so the three of us had to come up with a new (and better) name for our little band. One afternoon, while joking around with fake foreign language lyrics for a Talking Heads song, someone posed the couplet: “Psycho killer, Hüsker Dü, fa fa fa fa fa…” Hüsker Dü was the name of a board game (“in which the child can outwit the adult”) that was advertised on TV nonstop when we were kids. And there you have it. The beauty of the name was that it shared very little with the typical punk monikers of the day. Most other bands were named [insert adjective] [inse
rt noun]. The name Hüsker Dü was an identifier, not a description. Despite the superficial inanity, the name had a certain timelessness, and that avoidance of conformity (now there’s a band name) served us well.
* * *
One morning in May 1979, we put all of our gear in a car and arrived at Jay’s Longhorn right before the lunch buffet. Besides being a punk rock club at night, the Longhorn was a steakhouse by day, replete with cattle-print carpet, longhorns mounted on the walls, and wagon wheel chandeliers. For lunch they served a businessman’s buffet so the fat cats who worked downtown could get their steak on. We sneaked in, set up all our gear, and started playing our set right as people started coming in to eat. Hartley Frank, the portly, sweaty man who booked the club, came rolling out of the back, squawking, “Whaaat the fuck is going on out here? Who the fuck are you?” We stopped and said, “We’re Hüsker Dü and we want to play your club.” Hartley offered us an opening spot for Curtiss A that weekend if we’d just stop playing. We stopped and accepted the gig. Then we started playing again.
That was the start of a tradition with us—if you want to win someone over, do something obnoxious and leave an impression. Provocation was very punk rock; we had nothing to lose by doing these things. And if we’d gotten eighty-sixed from the Longhorn, no big deal, we would have found our way back in again somehow.
That weekend, on May 13, 1979, we played our first real gig as Hüsker Dü. It was a dream come true for me—everyone played the Longhorn. That’s where I saw local bands like the Commandos, NNB, the Suburbs, and that was my punk rock. The Police, Blondie, all the big acts played there as well. This was to be.
The actual set went by in a flash. We tore through our entire repertoire in about thirty minutes to a warm but not overly enthusiastic response. Mission accomplished: the first show went without any major hitches. Hüsker Dü was now an actual band, and we’d played a show at the Longhorn.
In the beginning, our shows had the up-surf and elemental punk rock feel: simple, stupid lyrics that rhymed and maybe didn’t mean a lot, but were funny and punk. Then, as the months went on, another side to the band’s sound emerged, a slower, darker droning feel. A lot of that was my doing, and one huge inspiration was Joy Division’s album Unknown Pleasures. You come across only a handful of records in a lifetime that have that immediate impact, where you never forget the sound. It gets embedded in your cellular structure, and it seeps into the work you create. Joy Division’s music was sad and poetic, and I felt we needed to add those elements to the mix. I also played chiming guitar parts that were influenced by early Cure, and a warped and warbling sound inspired by Keith Levene of Public Image Ltd (PiL).
Another band that inspired us was Pere Ubu. The three of us went to see them play twice in one evening at the Walker Art Center in 1979. We sat in the front row for both shows, and after the second, we walked onstage and chatted with the band. We didn’t want to sound like Pere Ubu, but they showed us how a band could have a unique sound and an unusual, less than glamorous look, and still succeed in every way that was important to us.
Tim Carr was a major influence on the Minneapolis scene; he organized shows with many of the happening acts from America and Europe (and later went on to become a big-time A&R guy at major labels). Tim booked the Monochrome Set, Devo, Cabaret Voltaire, Judy Nylon, the Fleshtones, and many other legendary, very influential bands for the M-80 Festival, at the University of Minnesota Field House on September 22–23, 1979. It was a rickety venue, but with all the assembled talent and the excitement that surrounded each band’s performance, it felt like something historic was happening. In my mind, it was equal to Woodstock or Altamont or the Beatles at Shea Stadium. There was a great scene building in the Twin Cities, and Tim Carr was a big part of it.
For me, so was trucker speed. By now I had acquired a smoking habit, but this drug was a revelation of sorts. With trucker speed I was able to drink more than normal. It also made me feel invincible. The stockyards in South St. Paul were a good place to find the ephedrine pills, since there were so many truckers around. Smoking and speed changed the way I looked. When I arrived in St. Paul, I was still carrying baby fat and weighed 210 pounds; by the end of the school year, I had lost 45 pounds. I appeared thin and severe; my cheekbones were pronounced, and my body snapped around like a disconnected live wire. This would be the first of many times my weight and appearance would go through drastic changes.
The band was playing, and I was living this scene, but I was still in college. At the end of my first year at Macalester, June 1979, I could either go back home or stay in St. Paul. I had no interest in returning to Malone, especially after hearing a horrific story about something that happened there. There was this friend of mine, a quiet kid with blond hair and glasses who was a year ahead of me in high school. He had allegedly made an unwanted sexual advance toward another young man, and sometime later he was found in the woods, hung up like a deer. After that, I wanted nothing more to do with Malone.
Besides, the weekly phone calls with my family were difficult enough, especially the ones where my father threatened to sever my financial support or escalate his violence toward my mother. It was a constant offer/reward/punishment cycle, and now that I was 1,200 miles away, I never wanted to return. Grant suggested I stay with him at his parents’ house for the summer—that way, we’d be able to continue with the band. I accepted.
Living with the Harts was what most people would think of as normal. I joined the family for most dinners, which were eaten at the kitchen table—unlike with my family, who ate in the living room off of TV trays. I offered to pay a monthly amount to help cover the day-to-day living costs, but they wouldn’t hear of it. Grant’s room was in the attic, actually two small adjoining rooms not dissimilar to the one in which I spent my high school years back home. There was a stereo, a bong, and enough space for two sleeping areas. There was only one bathroom in the whole house, and it was downstairs on the main level, attached to Grant’s parents’ bedroom, which could make things awkward.
I occupied myself with mindless temp jobs, mostly in offices: filing insurance claims, doing microfilm work for medical firms, soliciting subscriptions to the local daily paper. The trucker speed was suppressing my appetite, so I rarely ate full meals. Another unhealthy side effect of taking the pills was that it softened my upper palate, which made eating solid foods next to impossible. So after work, I’d usually head to McDonald’s for a thirty-nine-cent hamburger because they didn’t hurt like potato chips did. Once I realized that the steamed White Castle burgers were even softer, I switched to those.
It’s hard to forget my Quality Park Products job from that summer—or what I did there. The office was located in a light industrial park on Highway 280. I got a weeklong temp job working eight hours a day, filling in for a vacationing employee. My role was simple: invoices came in and I would time-stamp each one, separate the carbon copy, and place them facedown in two separate piles. I was hopped up on pills, and on the first day, I was done with my work by lunchtime. I asked the supervisor if there was anything else to do. There wasn’t, and even better, I could go home early with full pay. I picked up the pace a little more on Tuesday, and so on throughout the week. By Friday afternoon, I really felt great about myself. Forty hours’ pay for twenty hours’ work.
When I came in the following Monday to pick up my paycheck, the supervisor asked me if I wanted to meet the person whose job I had performed the previous week. I thought, sure, why not. The supervisor approached a middle-aged gentleman, slight of build, working with his back to us. The supervisor called his name and said, “I’d like you to meet the young man who filled in for you while you were on leave.” The man turned around in the chair and reached out to shake my hand. The man had lost both his hands and was living with two prosthetic metal hooks. No wonder it took me half the time. I didn’t feel so great about myself after that.
That summer, I was listening to the British art-noise collective Throbbing Gristle, whose albums d
epicted an apocalyptic world of suburban industrial parks and supermarkets. They mingled that imagery with grisly photographs of World War II atrocities, medical procedures, and barbarism to create a disturbing and psychotic visual landscape. They also eroticized their work, giving it an additional emotional charge, then manipulated layers of sound to the point of unrecognizability, and the result was unlike anything I had ever seen or heard. It fit well with my reading of William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, done in one sitting. It was dangerous, erotic, emotional art. I became obsessed.
I wasn’t the only one. I befriended a fellow named Stefan Hammond who wrote for the Minnesota Daily, the University of Minnesota campus newspaper. Stefan was a big Throbbing Gristle fan and even went so far as to travel to the UK to visit them in their “factory.” We published a fanzine dedicated to their work and mimicked their aesthetic.
With all this in my head, some evenings, I’d drive myself to the Minneapolis–St. Paul international airport to drink White Russians at one of the terminal bars. I think it was actually called “Terminal Bar.” I would listen to the Muzak and slowly stir my drink with a straw, watching the solitary macadamia nut spin around in the milky liquid, and sometimes a traveler would catch my eye. I never actively sought out sex at the airport, but the transitory nature of airports brought with it the prospect of a random, anonymous, and somewhat detached sexual encounter. I fetishized impersonal spaces. I can remember one awkward sexual encounter when I tuned the radio to KEEY-FM, “the music of your life.” It was strange to be having sex while listening to Muzak. It was as if I was creating a performance piece, living out the imagery of the industrial music I listened to, to a kind of sound that was totally divorced from it.
The bleakness of the literature and the heaviness of the music were steering me toward the darker side of life—notions of uselessness and death added up to thoughts of suicide. I was becoming nihilistic, and on top of it all, I was suppressing my emotions with nicotine and alcohol and the speed was curbing my libido. I was fucking with my metabolism and my mind.