See a Little Light

by Bob Mould

  Greg Ginn, the guitarist for Black Flag and the head of Southern California punk label SST, was blown away by this performance turned spectacle. Afterward, we talked for a while and he told us to get in touch with Mike Watt, who was the bassist for the San Pedro, California, punk trio the Minutemen, as well as the main force behind yet another new label called New Alliance Records.

  It was something else, having this kind of interest, especially since Twin/Tone had rejected us. Black Flag was already a major force on the national punk scene, so this was a very big deal. We promptly called Watt and began to set the wheels in motion. A long journey was about to begin.

  CHAPTER 4

  Getting on our way meant shedding the musical baby fat and developing our own sound. We did our first US tour, which was named Children’s Crusade ’81—maybe because, despite everything, our parents had made it possible. Grant’s mom’s credit union had facilitated the release of our first single, we rehearsed at Greg’s mother’s house, and my father bought, and drove out from Malone, a used rust-colored Dodge Tradesman van that we took out on tour.

  We were usually the opening act on multiband bills, so we quickly honed our ability to set up our own gear, tune our own instruments, and then race through a clutch of songs in our small window of opportunity. Because our sets were short, we whittled out most of the moodier songs we’d been playing in our two-sets-a-night performances back home. And in the circles we traveled, there was ample opportunity for me (and others) to procure and consume cheap amphetamines. All of these things conspired to change the band’s entire approach. Before, we had space to delve into atmospheric instrumental passages; now, we were confronted with a number of much tougher local scenes than our own, where bands blazed through twenty songs in forty minutes and people responded with unbridled aggression. We started doing the same. We had our Veggies in Minneapolis, our group of drinking buddies who would come to the shows and mock-wrestle in the crowd or even onstage, but the sights we were seeing on this tour were of a vastly harsher nature. Guys wore spikes and chains, did drugs and drank, and headed toward the front of the stage with malicious intent. Their dancing went well beyond pogoing, and veered into the realm of premeditated violence. Broken bones and bloody faces were not uncommon. The mosh pit, as it was later called, was not a place for arty girls or wimpy boys—it was dangerous.

  This tour was when we finally saw what the rest of North America was doing. Hüsker Dü had opened for the powerful Vancouver punk band D.O.A. back in Minneapolis, and we had hit it off with singer-guitarist and band leader Joey Shithead, guitarist Dave Gregg, and their manager, Ken Lester. Those guys were incredibly giving and helpful, and Ken arranged for us to play six shows in Calgary in July 1981. The idea was to work our way out to Vancouver, where the opening spot on some D.O.A. shows awaited us.

  D.O.A. and Dead Kennedys were the two bands that were the most instrumental in getting Hüsker Dü to the West Coast. It was part of what I liked to call “convergent evolution,” a biological term that refers to the phenomenon of two distinct species with differing ancestries evolving to display similar physical features. Many bands around the country had a similar take on underground music, lifestyle, and cooperation, and it was encouraging to find that we were not alone in our rejection of corporate rock music, our tolerance for kids who were outside the mainstream, and our anxiousness to build a new way of life through music.

  There was a loose network, which we often discovered by chance, where like-minded bands would share a stage and the hometown band would offer accommodations to the traveling band. In return, when that band came to your town, you would reciprocate. There was a remarkable lack of ego in all of this. Sometimes you’d run into a band that didn’t understand or appreciate the idea. When Bad Brains stayed with Grant and his parents, they took Grant’s pot and left behind an antigay note. Some gratitude. But once people caught the drift of those bands, they were usually shunned, and eventually they faded away.

  We lived and thrived off the generosity of the people who were kind enough to put us up. When a punk band came through Minneapolis, we’d offer them a place to crash and some beer to drink, and we’d sit up all night and trade stories. A lot of the places I stayed, people had no money—often they couldn’t even afford to heat their homes. We didn’t stay in many houses of opulence. I’m sure there were kids from wealthy families in that scene, but that’s the kind of thing you wouldn’t want to make known.

  This door-to-door approach, what I call “preaching,” was the main way all the various local scenes became connected. There were a few national punk fanzines, most notably Maximumrocknroll (MRR), that would publish reports from all the scenes around America. More often than not, however, information was traded hand to hand. Bands kept information in their notebooks, and when we played together, we would sit down and trade information to fill in the gaps. This is how we built our community: no fax machines, no cell phones, no internet.

  When we set out to do that first tour, the three of us got in the Tradesman van and headed north to Canada. Greg did the lion’s share of the driving on this and all subsequent tours. As Grant and I were the main songwriters, Greg’s major offstage contribution to the band was driving.

  We had several boxes of the “Statues” single with us; those singles and our ability to play music were the only currency we had. We bartered our single for anything and everything: food, gas, places to stay. We sold them at shows. We left copies on consignment in record stores around the country. They only fetched us a dollar apiece, but it was all we had.

  The tour began at the Calgarian Hotel, which was a flophouse with a bar and lounge on the ground floor. We were booked to play Monday through Saturday, three or four sets a night.

  I’d sat next to bleeding, unconscious people in bus terminals, I’d watched Johnny Thunders shoot up, and I’d watched drunk women attempt to vandalize our musical equipment; I’d experienced sketchy before. But this was a whole new level of sketchy. One woman who was a regular at the Calgarian was stabbed on Monday night, and then stabbed again that Wednesday. It was that kind of place.

  Early in the week, we were playing our first set while a handful of local Native Americans were getting drunk. During the second set, some ranchers started showing up. Then the two groups started going back and forth at each other. A fair amount of fighting happened around the pool table between the cowboys and the Indians—those are crass stereotypes, but it was the reality. We would fire the music back up, and they would stop what they were doing and say, “What the fuck is this punk rock? This band sucks!” So now the cowboys and Indians were putting their beef on hold and uniting against the punk rock; not only against us, but also the punks in the audience. Of the fifty or so people in the bar, there would be a dozen cowboys and a handful of Indians, but the majority were the punks. You might think that ratio would have discouraged the cowboys and Indians, but it didn’t. We’d finish a set, get off the stage, leave the drums and amps behind, run upstairs, go back to the rooms they gave us for free, and just sit there and say to one another, “We have to go back down there?” Fights were pouring out into the street, and since our room was in the front of the hotel, we saw everything. It was like a barroom brawl straight out of an old western movie.

  This continued for six straight days. By the end of the week, we’d not only managed to keep ourselves out of harm, trouble, and jail, but we’d also become acquainted with several folks in the Calgary punk rock community. It was a hell of a way to start a tour.

  After Calgary, we went to Vancouver for a week. Grant had an ear infection, so he stayed at Ken Lester’s place, a proper apartment, while Greg and I stayed in an abandoned house in Chinatown. We had no money for food; we had nothing. Ron Reyes had just left Black Flag and moved to Vancouver, and at night Ron would go to the food warehouses in Chinatown, where there were flats of strawberries and twenty-pound boxes of precooked ribs. He would climb over fences and concertina wire, throw boxes of food back over the fence, a
nd bring them to the house. He’d haul the food up to our second-floor sleeping loft, and we’d eat strawberries and precooked bone-in ribs, then throw the bones downstairs and fall asleep, with the remains of our dinner rotting on the floor down below. We did that for most of the week. Then we played Canada Day in Victoria on Vancouver Island. Since the ferry charges were calculated per head, we hid under the amps to save money. Days later, we played with D.O.A. at the premiere punk room in Vancouver, the Smilin’ Buddha Cabaret.

  Seattle was up next. We used a couple of houses in the University District as home base for our stay, one of which was occupied by local scenester/writer Dennis Brown. I had the ear infection next and was in pain for most of the week, but we played a handful of shows at nightclubs like Gorilla Room and WREX with bands like the Fartz, who were a circle-A anarchy band. Seattle was full of runaways and heroin addicts, and in one of the clubs, someone blew up the toilets with fireworks.

  Somehow we ended up playing early on a multiband bill headlined by the Dead Kennedys at the Showbox, one of the larger rooms in town. Jello Biafra, the lead singer of the band, was impressed by our set. After the show he asked us where we were headed. Portland was next on our itinerary, but after that things were uncertain. We had little money and no real shows booked. He suggested that we just continue down the coast to San Francisco, where we could stay in his spacious apartment and he’d find us some gigs in the Bay Area.

  So after Portland, we continued down the coast to San Francisco, which at the time was arguably the most gay-friendly city in the United States. I was twenty years old, I was in a punk rock band, and this was my first time in SF. Maybe I’ll have some time away from the band, have a little fun, maybe even meet somebody, I’m thinking. That would make sense, right? Maybe not.

  Around this time I began to see newspaper articles about a strange new disease that was killing gay men. At first it was thought to be a form of pneumonia. Maybe it was caused by using amyl nitrate inhalers, also known as “poppers.” Nobody knew what was going on, and it was scary as hell. This information, or lack of accurate information, made me leery of messing around with other guys.

  When we arrived in San Francisco on July 14, we went right to Biafra’s place, a two-floor apartment in the Mission. Biafra, his then girlfriend Theresa, and visual artist Winston Smith all lived there. Biafra was beyond gracious, allowing us to stay for almost two weeks. We forged rent receipts to get food stamps, then went to a Safeway to buy food (and beer) to repay the hospitality. One evening, a pizza cook-off between Grant and Greg got rather competitive, with Grant’s pizza being a little better.

  Another evening a large group of us trundled off to the Roxie Theater in the Mission where the now-classic LA punk documentary The Decline of Western Civilization was playing. There was a rivalry between the SF and LA punk scenes, and it was interesting to attend the movie with Biafra and company and get his take on his Southern California counterparts. The film featured several LA-area bands, including Black Flag, X, Circle Jerks, and the Germs. The Germs played fast, sounded angry, and vocalist Darby Crash wrote some of the best lyrics I’d ever heard from someone my own age. Their album (GI) made a strong impression on me, and to this day it’s still one of my favorites.

  There was a taqueria named La Cumbre on Valencia between Sixteenth and Seventeenth Streets that served up the largest burritos I had ever seen. The price was right, so we would eat there as often as money allowed. (I still eat there to this day.) As a way to drink cheap, we’d go to a gay bar that served fifty-cent beers and showed Wheel of Fortune on the TV during happy hour. It didn’t matter that I was in a gay bar—what was important was that I was in a bar that had fifty-cent beer.

  At this time, Greg was very fond of wearing lots of bandanas. The thing was, in the gay community, there is something called the “hanky code”—a way to signal to other gay men the type of activities you prefer, and the roles you prefer to play.

  The first time we walked into this bar for happy hour, we all looked very punk—a look, mind you, that is not very far from some gay fetish looks. Boots, ripped jeans, leather jackets, T-shirts: that’s all basic Tom of Finland stuff. Throw in a little camouflage and a few bandanas and you can easily pass as street trade. So we walk into the bar and Greg has at least four bandanas around each shin, one on each wrist, and probably another half-dozen protruding from Lord knows where. Every head in the bar turned to him with an expression of complete befuddlement.

  We played the Mabuhay Gardens nightclub four times in eight days. The Fab Mab, as it was sometimes called, was booked by a wonderfully irascible gentleman named Dirk Dirksen, the self-styled “Pope of Punk.” The first time we played the Mabuhay, Dirk came onstage to introduce us. His preamble went along the lines of “Jello Biafra, while touring in the Northwest, ran across these people and asked me to book ’em, so here they are, an addition to the program. Here’s… [ sounds unsure of the pronunciation] Hüsker Dü.”

  We set the stage ablaze that evening. By that time we’d gotten really good at pile driving as many songs into the set as possible, and this breathless approach left crowds a bit bewildered. No time to talk, think, or react. Good.

  In photographs taken at those early shows, I look possessed. People who saw me scowling and lurching around the stage back then probably wondered what was going on inside my brain. It just felt like loose electricity was flying through my hands and off the guitar, and it sounded like my head was being riddled with pellets of ice—it was almost like being locked in the trunk of a car during a massive hailstorm. The treble on-stage was frightening; people often comment on the shrill nature of some of the band’s recordings, but they sound positively soothing compared to standing in the center of that stage.

  There was white-hot energy emanating from the core. Greg jumped up and down a lot, doing kicks and twitching. Grant flailed wildly on a trash-can kit, replete with his trademark bare feet. The barely constructed stages in these busted-up venues always felt as if they were about to blow into a hundred pieces. I used as much duct tape a I could to hold down my MXR Distortion + box, but invariably, stage divers would get tangled up in my guitar cables and I would have to either block them with my body, spear them with the headstock of the Flying V, or boot them back into the crowd.

  I was also concerned with protecting my teeth. If someone in the pit hurtled toward me while I happened to be in midverse, that person would usually slam into the mike stand, which would then smash the microphone into my mouth. Occasionally I’d wipe my bottom lip with the back of my hand and find bloody chunks of skin, like small pieces of red grapefruit pulp.

  There was not a lot of money to be made by playing clubs like the Buddha or the Mabuhay; on a weeknight, you might be paid with eight bucks and a plate of spaghetti. But none of this—the fear of getting assaulted by the audience, the stolen, rotting food, the illnesses, the fraudulently obtained government assistance—ever struck me as difficult or odd. It was what we were doing; there was nothing else to do. We got to play music.

  We had quickly worked ourselves up into a lather. It took us less than two years to convince ourselves that we were the best band in the world and that all we had to do was find a platform to tell people. We created this blistering wall of sound—bright white radio static with occasional melody, with words buried deep in the storm, as if encrypted for shortwave transmission. The overall effect was blinding, bringing uncertainty and sometimes fear, not unlike emotions I had sometimes felt as a child. We were always grateful for the guidance and generosity of bands like D.O.A. and the Dead Kennedys—but when it was our time to take the stage, we were not going to let anybody get in our way.

  I wanted Hüsker Dü to be the best band at all times.

  And I could get anything done, maybe because I got myself so worked up about being the best. I had an incredible power of persuasion. If I got a thought in my head, I could make it happen—to a fault. I think that power came down to a mixture of testosterone, cheap speed, alcohol, and a
lot of ambition. I could get people to change what they were thinking.

  * * *

  After San Francisco, we played an Indian reservation in Reno with D.O.A.; the flyer listed us as “Who Screwed You.” There was a forgettable gig in Sacramento and then one last show with the Kennedys at the Mabuhay. After that we said farewell to San Francisco and began a forty-hour, 2,100-mile nonstop drive to Chicago.

  One of the more memorable parts of that journey was entering Utah from the west on Interstate 80 and driving through the Bonneville Salt Flats. It was a vast expanse of light-grey salt, occasionally punctuated by signs reminding drivers to “stay on the road” (there were a few slushy areas). Since 1914, nearly all land speed records had been set at the salt flats, a fact not lost on us at the time.

  When we arrived in Chicago, we went straight to O’Banion’s, a punk rock club where DC’s Minor Threat and their Ohio friends the Necros were playing. I thought these two bands were something like oompah hardcore. They were missing the anticipation in the backbeat, and it sounded like polka music. We’d heard about their straight-edge thing; Hüsker Dü was definitely not a straight-edge band.

  The Naked Raygun folks, Jeff and Patty Pezzati in particular, very graciously put up Grant and Greg for a few days. I found other accommodations. The night of our first Chicago show, I had befriended a handsome Hispanic fellow named Richard. He was military, stationed at the Great Lakes naval reserve outside Chicago. After the show, I went back to his studio apartment in Boystown, a somewhat seedy gay neighborhood. We spent the rest of the weekend together. He and I drove together to Madison, where the band played the final show of Children’s Crusade ’81.

  Gays in the hardcore punk scene were much like gays in the military: if the military says, “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” the hardcore punk corollary was “Don’t advertise, don’t worry.” If someone made a disparaging remark about gays, I would simply say, “That’s not cool,” or, “You’re so ignorant.” It was a way to make my feelings known without broadcasting my sexuality.