Hüsker Dü’s Propulsive Liberation
NYT Sunday Book Review
It was early 1983, probably, after the “Everything Falls Apart” EP presaged Hüsker Dü’s departure from hard-core punk and before the “Metal Circus” EP made it official. Just a gig at a crummy club near CBGB, and late — after 1. There weren’t a dozen onlookers, but Hüsker Dü’s two early records were knockouts, and that Minneapolis trio never came east, so there we were. From our booth in back the music sounded terrific: headlong and enormous, the guitar unfashionably full, expressive and unending, with two raving vocalists alternating leads on songs whose words were hard to understand and whose tunes weren’t. Another half-dozen curious fans drifted in. And then, halfway through, the guitarist passed into some other dimension. When he stepped yowling off the low stage, most of us gravitated closer, glancing around and shaking our heads.
Lisa Haun/Getty Images
A roller coaster screaming off its tracks: from left, Greg Norton, Grant Hart and Bob Mould, circa 1987.
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Excerpt: ‘See a Little Light’ (Google Books)
Excerpt: ‘Hüsker Dü’ (Google Books)
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Books of The Times: ‘See a Little Light’ by Bob Mould (June 15, 2011)
The climax was the band’s now legendary cover of “Eight Miles High,” which transformed the Byrds’ gentle paean to the chemical-technological sublime into a roller coaster lifted screaming off its tracks — bruising and exhilarating, leaving the rider both very and barely alive. Three decades later I still feel lucky to have experienced that transmutation of wrath into flight. Not only did Hüsker Dü generate an impressive recorded legacy during their eight years on earth, they were ferocious live — as memorable onstage as Nirvana or the Rolling Stones. They deserve one great book, not these two mediocre ones.
The memoirist Bob Mould was Hüsker Dü’s guitarist and power source, and he has mixed feelings about it. He’s led an eventful life, and most of his adulthood postdates his first band’s permanently acrimonious breakup in January 1988. It must have hurt him to give his estranged mates the 125 pages he manages in “See a Little Light.” But even with editorial advice from Michael Azerrad, whose 2001 indie-rock history, “Our Band Could Be Your Life,” looms admonishingly over both books, the many subsequent projects he details don’t generate much pull, and neither does the Memphis-based journalist Andrew Earles’s story of Hüsker Dü proper. Earles plods usefully through the band’s catalog and chronicles the trail they blazed on the nascent indie circuit in shows he’s too young to have witnessed. But plod he does, and without any access to the guitarist with his own book in the works.
This is not to blame Mould, exactly. He did have a tale to sell, and though the Hüsker Dü angle couldn’t have hurt his advance, the core audience for his book is Bob Mould fans, who do very much exist as such. Unlike the Hüsker Dü bassist, Greg Norton, now thriving as a restaurateur in Minnesota, or the band’s drummer and co-leader, Grant Hart, still scuffling in the Twin Cities, however valiantly Earles praises his negligible solo music, Mould, at 50, remains a modestly prominent musician. Starting with the 175 I.Q. he confesses to on Page 6, he wants to explain how that happened in his own words.
Even more in his memoir than in Earles’s slightly less positive account, Mould comes across as an intensely driven man. As Earles insists, Hart is a talent and probably a nice guy, and he wasn’t just Mould’s creative partner. He was in many respects also Mould’s business partner, as the two ran Hüsker Dü’s busy little label (Reflex Records), produced Hüsker Dü’s many records and booked Hüsker Dü’s grueling tours. (Norton drove.) But as Mould walks away from booze and speed and later steroids; negotiates the labyrinthine ups and downs of the record business; relocates from Minnesota to New York to Austin to New York to Washington to San Francisco, with real estate deals every step of the way; spends six months scripting professional wrestling; and D.J.’s the parties he promotes in the gay “bear” subculture where he finally finds a fit for his lifelong homosexuality, there’s no doubt who’s the achiever of the two, or who deserves a memoir.
The problem is that Bob Mould couldn’t be the only fully formed human being to have entered Bob Mould’s life story, but except for his bitterly abusive yet heroically supportive father and one departed lover, he seems to be. For financial reasons he lays out and personal ones he leaves indistinct, he cares so little for Hart and Norton that they seem like repositories of minor vices like lassitude and passivity — deficiencies Mould feels were more destructive in the end than Hart’s hidden heroin habit. His stories about the celebrities whose paths he crosses stay on the terse surface. And his prolonged dealings with a number of fascinating, not-quite-major figures — the down-and-dirty SST Records house producer, Spot; the Warner Brothers A&R goddess Karin Berg; the drum maestro Anton Fier; Mould’s larger-than-life wrestling colleagues — fail to result in the character sketches such characters deserve. For an amateur, Mould’s an efficient stylist. But he either leaves his gifts as a raconteur at the dinner table or hasn’t matured into empathy quite as ripely as he thinks.
Robert Christgau writes the record blog “Expert Witness” for msn.com.
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