The 1985 Project Part 8 - Hüsker Dü - New Day Rising

They sure did raise a musical ruckus

The first time I saw Hüsker Dü was in either late 1982 or sometime in 1983. They were supposed to be touring with the Dead Kennedys, the most famous hardcore punk band in those days, and one which I actually knew a couple songs already. But the DKs cancelled, and Hüsker Dü played the small club, Billie Goat Hill, where no other punk bands had played, though plenty of New Wave and roots rock bands had appeared.

There wasn’t even an under-21 section, which meant the crowd was small, consisting mostly of me and my other curious friends who wanted to know what all the fuss was about with this new-fangled take on punk. I think we lasted forty-five seconds inside the club, as Hüsker Dü didn’t care that it was a small room and a small crowd – they were playing with the kind of volume that could have filled a room four times the size. We spent the rest of their set across the street, where we could hear the music, which didn’t quite make sense to any of us yet.

I heard their Metal Circus EP a year or so after that, and was still not too interested, though I recognized the song “Diane” was something a little easier to appreciate. By mid-1984, when the double album Zen Arcade was released, I had come to love hardcore – naturally that was the point when Hüsker Dü started playing around with the constrictions of the form. There were acoustic guitars, backwards psychedelic tracks, and most of all, melodies mixed in to the usual loud and fast punk. I loved that record at the time, though in later years I took it to be more of a prototype of the band’s much better songwriting breakthroughs to come.

This brings us to New Day Rising, the first of two albums released in 1985 and the one Pazz and Jop voters chose as 8^th best of the year, two slots below its follow-up Flip Your Wig. I haven’t played this one in a long time, and it definitely isn’t as consistent as the next record. The highlights are pretty dang good, though, and the record goes down nicely as it presents 15 diverse takes on super speed, super volume, and frequent catchiness. The title track opens the record with an explosion of utter ridiculousness that somehow still gets me pumped up – there is one beat, three chords, three bass notes, and three words over two and a half minutes. Hüsker Dü always liked to see what they could pull off if they broke their own rules – that’s how they ended up writing melodies that could have been pop. Here, they thought they would see how they could hold interest without any musical creativity at all, just a loud and somewhat hopeful expressiveness.

“The Girl Who Lives on Heaven Hill” and “I Apologize” give Grant Hart and Bob Mould respectively a chance to show off their growing tunefulness and penchant for impeccable hooks. “Celebrated Summer” was the single from the record, another catchy Mould number with an acoustic break in the middle. The other two most memorable songs here are by Hart – “Books About UFOS” and “Terms of Psychic Warfare.” The rest of the record has plenty of energy, occasionally odd vocal approaches, and some tricky guitar and bass licks now and again. It’s a cool thing to revisit, though what I probably need to do is put together a career-spanning collection of this band’s finest material to get a measure of just how great they really were.

Here's where I’m having trouble with my point system – I can’t rank this higher than the R.E.M. album last week, but it shouldn’t be so far below Flip Your Wig. I guess I’ll say it’s 7.5 and see how things lay at the end of this project.