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Liner Notes...by Davie Fricke of Rolling Stone magazine.
From: bill.hyman@ccmail.bsis.com
This album is not how I originally remembered Husker Du's lasthurrah.
The show forever etched on my brain -- right next to the 1984
firestorm at New York's Folk City ("Eight Miles High" is still
ringing in my ears) and the Irving Plaza gig two years later where
the Huskers literally blew the slamdancers out of the pit with
a Coltrane-on-feedback expedition through "Reoccurring Dreams"
-- is the night at the Ritz in the Spring of '87 when the band,
fresh out of the studio with _Warehouse: Songs and Stories_ hit
the stage and played the entire double album. In sequence, no
less.
For the first twenty minutes or so, the audience stood slackjawed,dazed
by the torrent of brand new songs. By then, the Huskers were pushing
maximum-warp. Bob Mould's eyes rolled back in his head as he sprayed
the crowd with fuzz guitar shrapnel. Bassist Greg Norton was airborne
more often than not, looking (with that handlebar beauty of a
moustache) like Cardinal Richelieu on amphetamines as he alternated
between pogo-bouncing and Pete Townshend scissor-leg splits. One
minute, drummer Grant Hart was negotiating the tidal jazz-waltz
surge of "She Floated Away"; a couple breaths later, in "Actual
Condition," he was Tommy Ramone hammering away behind Eddie Cochran.
Finally, as the band turned into the hyper-mantra home stretch
of "You Can Live at Home," voices, rhythm and feedback dissolved
into a stage-wide wall of white light/white heat.
There were encores -- all covers, including the Huskers' famous
B-side romp through "Love Is All Around", the _Mary Tyler Moore_
theme. Which ended, appropriately, with the line "You're gonna
make it after all." Coming at a time when Husker Du were caught
between their liberation vision of post-punk & roll and the hardline
of moshpit purists who still swore by the speed-of-light gospel
of 1982's _Land Speed Record_, the all-Warehouse set was the ultimate
declaration of independence from the cretin hoppers -- a reaffirmation
of punk as a lifeforce, not just a tribal stomp. "Those who can't,
slam," I wrote in a review for the show for Melody Maker in England.
"Those who can, do." And the Huskers did it all over us, big time,
that night. Nine months later, Husker Du were history, undone
by accelerated internal pressures and irreconcilable differences.
But in between, the Huskers took one more glorious turn on the
boards, tearing through the East and Midwest -- including one
last visit to the Ritz in New York -- with a strictly-hitsville
set list and an incandescent live vibe that even the breakup blues
just around the corner could not dispel. "If I'd only known what
was coming," Bob Mould told me sometime after the band dissolved,
"I'd have just left after that and stopped." That tour, he claimed,
was one of the best that the band ever did. This album is proof.
* * * * * *
By any measure, critical or commercial, Husker Du were at the
top of their game by the end of 1986. Formed in Minneapolis in
late '78, the band formally arrived on the still-deeply underground
American punk scene in 1981 with the one-two punch of "Statues"/"Amusement,"
released on the trio's own Reflex label, and _Land Speed Record_,
a classic document of machine-gun stage etiquette issued under
the Minutemen's New Alliance imprint and recorded at a hometown
show fo rthe princely sum of $400. After that, Husker Du's recorded
output snowballed, totalling six albums (two of them, the epic
_Zen Arcade and _Warehouse_, were doubles) inside five years --
not to mention a cache of explosive singles and EP's.
The rapid maturing of the group's songwriting and the vigorously
independent rock & roll spirit implicit in Husker Du's no-prisoners
three-piece roar were no less stunning. As the band's dominant
writers, Bob Mould and Grant Hart always prized melody and menace
in equal measures, yielding such early torpedoes as Mould's "In
a Free Land," a 1982 single, and Hart's "It's Not Funny Anymore"from
the 1983 mini-album _Metal Circus_.. They were also not afraid
to challenge the "fuck society" party line of most hardcore punk
lyrics, zooming in on personal relationships and private emotional
torment with an impassioned directness that reached a dark apex
on the Huskers' 1986 Warner Bros. debut _Candy Apple Grey_. "It's
and admission of humanity," Mould once said to me of _Zen Arcade_.
"You can't just scream and holler all your life. You have to step
back a minute, look at yourself and say 'Yeah, I am fucked.' And
try to change it."
Then, to paraphrase one of the band's own album titles, everything
falls apart -- beginning, on the eve of the Spring '97 U.S. _Warehouse_
tour, with the tragic suicide of the group's manager David Savoy.
The shows went on, but the novelty of the all_Warehouse set began
to pale for the band by the tour's end. "It became very walking-through-the-motions,"
Grant Hart says now. "Once people realized that we were doing
the fourth song in a row from the album, it got so predictable.
We could have put on the most spirited presentation in the world.
But by the end, it wasn't working without the element of surprise."The
Huskers took a summer concert swing through England and Europewith
a revised set list, combining a condensed _Warehouse_ presentation
with older material and, for the occasional encore kick, a cover
of the Ramones' "Sheena Is A Punk Rocker." By September, Mould,
Hart, and Greg Norton had reconvened in Minneapolis for what was
supposed to be the third Warner Bros. studio album.
It was not a productive time. Tensions within the band were rising
and there was pressure on the Huskers from the record company
to use an outside producer. More critically, there wasn't much
in the way of new material to rehearse. Mould recalls having an
embryonic version of "Compositions For The Young And Old," which
eventually surfaced on his first solo album _Workbook_. He also
had a fuzzbox hoedown, "Ain't No Water In The Well," which he
now concedes is just "okay". Hart had the pop-punk driver "Now
That You Know Me," which he later recorded for his own solo album
_Intolerance_. He also remembers rehearsing "She Can See The Angels
Coming," a power-hymn (as he calls it) that he'd written partly
in memory of David Savoy and which also ended up in solo form
on _Intolerance_. "We were grabbing at straws in the end, to come
up with something," says Mould. So the band decided to take what
ideas they had and hammer them out on tour, which was the way
the Huskers always used to work. "_Warehouse_ was the only record
that we didn't really tour until after we recorded it," explains
Greg Norton, whose generally overlooked writing for Husker Du
gets some daylight on this album with the bullet-rock _Warehouse_
outtake "Everytime," "From The Gut" (which he co-wrote with Mould
for _Everything Falls Apart_), and "New Day Rising" (a band composition).
"Every record before that, we'd write the songs, hit the road,
start playing them live and then eventually get into the studio
and record them." Which certainly explains the firewall live-in-the-studio
sound of hallmark Husker albums like 1985's _New Day Rising_ and
its speedy follow-up _Flip Your Wig_. "When _Flip Your Wig_ came
out," Norton adds, "we were already playing songs from _Candy
Apple Grey_." "This time," Mould says, "we figured if we packed
it up in the truck and just went and played, the new stuff would
take shape. And we didn't want to do the same show we'd been doing
on the _Warehouse_ tour. So we decided to do a show with everything."
* * * * * *
_The Living End_ isn't quite everything. Some of the song-grenades
from the October '87 shows that, for one reason or another, didn't
make the cut here included: the obvious singles, "Could You Be
The One?," Don't Want To Know If You Are Lonely," and "Makes No
Sense At All"; a full electric band arrangement of "Never Talking
To You Again" from _Zen Arcade_; a great version of Zen's "Pink
Turns To Blue"; "Diane," Grant Hart's serrated meditation on rape
and murder from _Metal Circus_; and "Flip Your Wig," which was
the Huskers' alternate show opener. "It depended on where our
wig was," cracks Norton. "That is, if we felt like just torching
it from the beginning with 'New Day Rising' or, with 'Flip Your
Wig,' going from a slow simmer to a boil." Mould also mentions
a crazed stage recreation one night of the circular _Zen Arcade_
jam "Hare Krsna" which "goes on for nine minutes and gets so improvisational
at one point that it doesn't sound like music anymore. Then on
a dime, it comes right back."
But the 77 minutes of music crammed on to this disc -- edited
and sequenced from mixing deck cassettes as a kind of dream-date-with-the-
Huskers by Lou Giordono, the band's soundman from 1984 to the
bitter end __ are still prime, primal Husker Du, an essential
testament to the band's mindfucking concert prowess even at a
time when, offstage, they were coming apart at the seams. "Once
we hit the stage," says Norton, "all that was put aside. We had
some fun, played some good music and watched people go apeshit."
"It was a very competitive time for the band," Hart claims. "Not
in direct animosity, but you can hear Bob and I trying to outdo
each other with each subsequent song. Not pulling anything out
or holding back on the other guy, but just putting a lot into
it." "For all the problems," Mould insists, "once you cross the
imaginary threshold and when you're lit up on stage, it all goes
out the window. A good show you shouldn't even remember. It should
be a blur." Appropriately, the Huskers hit the ground running
here to the starting gun of "New Day Rising," a ferocious reveille
set in motion by Hart's migraine drum-pulse, tailgated (as it
was on the original album) by the breathless pop melancholia of
"The Girl Who Lives On Heaven Hill." The mini-suite of songs from
_Warehouse_ provides a locomotive look at what those all-Warehouse
shows were really like, in spite of what the band may think of
them now. Mould's acidburn guitar break in "Standing In The Rain,"
in particular, captures the Husker mindset in microcosm: equal
parts distortion-in-excelcis and pungent, skidding melodic shorthand.
Underneath all the corrosion, Mould, Hart and Norton, were popsters
at heart, hitting all the right car-radio G-spots. The bait was
speed and harmonic overload. But the payoff was always in the
hook or the chorus, whether it was the opening guitar riff of
"Friend, You've Got To Fall" (an inspired rewiring of the signature
lick from the Yardbirds' "Over Under Sideways Down") or the way
in "Ice Cold Ice" that Hart sings the chorus in high, aching echo-laden
harmony to Mould's yelping vocal -- half-sneering bravado, half-naked
fear.
"I always had the opinion that even if it was just two bars, if
it didn't move the song along in some way, I could live without
it," says Hart of his own writing. "Go for something else. Or
just have nothing there."
Mould, in turn, feels that if they had lived to see another year
or two, Husker Du might have gone into a deeper, darker musical
space. On _Candy Apple Grey_, his long acoustic agony-blues "Hardly
Getting Over It" had a grim, stripped-down momentum, with a simple
melody and a repetitive chorus "to keep it open," he says, "so
the words do all the work." But in the version here from the RPM
Club in Toronto, there is a greater, soaring payoff -- a transcendent
open-ended throb that has few equals even in the Huskers' own
stage logs.
"There wasn't much stuff in the Husker Du repertoire that had
much room for dynamic interpretation," Mould notes, "but I suspect
that is the direction the band would have gone in if it had stayed
together. The rehearsals were becoming more improvisational, less
structured."
At the same time, Husker Du had a mthhodical, modular approach
to performance. Songs of like mind and attack were grouped into
what the band termed "packs of three": "Standing In The Rain,"
"Back From Somewhere" and "Ice Cold Ice" from _Warehouse_; the
_New Day_ hat trick of "Terms Of Psychic Warfare," Powerline"
and "Books About UFO's" (Mould: "These always went together").
The three-way collision here of "From The Gut" and "Target" from
_Everything Falls Apart_ with "It's Not Funny Anymore" shoots
by in under six minutes, but there is no mistaking the packet's
thematic lash against punk fundamentalism ("You don't like the
people who caught on late/If they're having fun") and the mob
rule psyche of the moshpit ("Act like you want to act/Be what
you want to be/Find out who you really are/And don't pay attention
to me").
With hindsight, you can also trace in these songs and performances
a subtext of frustration and loss that was being played out in
Husker Du's offstage turmoil. the climactic tag-chorus in "Celebrated
Summer" - - before Mould goes into the final guitar sqwack --
speaks volumes about scarred innocence and the weight of experience.
"WHat's Goin' On" from _Zen Arcade_ is a manic Grant Hart song
about someone consumed by inner chaos; you can certainly hear
much of the Huskers' own combustible self- absorption in the awesome
brutality of this rendering, sung with hysteric conviction by
Greg Norton. from Toad's Place in New Haven. For all of the talk
about taking new ideas out on the road, of using this tour as
a mobile song lab, the Huskers only played two new songs on thisjaunt:
"Now That You Know Me" and "Ain't No Water In The Well." They
found their succor and inspiration -- and all the appropriate
emotionalparallels -- in their greatest hits.
"I don't know who said it, but it might apply here: 'Nostalgia
isthe symptom of a dying culture,'" says Hart. "In the case of
Husker Du,we were pulling back. We were digging so much into the
back catalogm notmeeting the quotas we set for ourselves.
"There was an amount of denial, of being able to focus so much
negative energy on what we were doing. And yet it's rather obvious
from the sound of these recordings that there was also a lot of
positive stuff between us."
"That's the weird thing," Mould agrees, "In spite of how everyone
was retreating to his own corner, it never affected the performances.
The music was so strong, everybody got caught up in it. It was
easy to say 'Fuck all this other shit' for an hour."
* * * * * *
The end came in January, 1988. Greg Norton likens it to "a little
bug flying along and then, all of a sudden, a semi comes out of
nowhere. Next thing you know, you're all over the windshield."
That was six years ago -- a lifetime in rock & roll and long enough
for the Huskers' mighty noise, ghettoized as fringe music even
in their prime, to become a defining, commercial force in the
90's. Just as the Ramones, Patti Smith and the Buzzcocks begat
the Huskers, so the Huskers to no small degree begat the Grunge
Generation. They are the name to drop, under "seminal influence,"
in reviews and interviews, which makes the release of these live
tapes especially propitious. "It's a little unnerving," concedes
Mould. "I have this real strange feeling that this record is going
to be successful."
If so, it will be for at least four of the right reasons, as laid
out here in "Powerline": "It aggrevates and it pacifies...It captivates
and it hypnotizes/Hear the power in the lines." You may have heard
it before -- on the original records, on bootlegs, on other unforgettable
nights that (like mine) still ring in your ears. But one listen
to _The Living End_ and this will be the way you remember it from
here on out.
-- David Fricke Rolling Stone |
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