Having argued, somewhat fancifully, that Hüsker Dü were the Great American Rock Band, America's Beatles even, let MRML present you with not only their single greatest achievement but also one of their Beatles covers.
"Don't Want To Know If You Are Lonely" is the perfect example of what made Hüsker Dü so thrilling. It's all here; fuzz guitar attack, propulsive drumming, psychedelic break-it-down parts, melodic bass work, an indelible chorus and bitter lyrics ("Please leave a number and a message at the tone or you can just go on and leave me alone" goes the final line). And it's a Grant Hart song. Yup, Hart, the singer/drummer whom bassist Greg Norton called the McCartney to guitarist/singer Mould's Lennon. While this analogy quickly breaks down in their solo careers, the greatness of Hüsker Dü, like the Beatles, wastheir collective strength. As a songwriters Mould and Hart were equals in the band and the latter's solo dominance, in contrast to the former's marginality, does not prevent this song from being their finest moment.
The B-sides here include the song that inspired the Manson murders and an eight minute song that repeats the lines, "All work and no play make Jack a dull boy" that sent Jack Nicholson into that murderous rage. Both songs are harsh, abrasive and endurance-defying. Just as the boys intended I'm sure.
There' a pointless yet deeply enjoyable game of Rock Nerd one-upmanship being battled out over at the Onion A.V. over the question of who were the Great American Rock Band (i.e. the American Beatles). America is fixated on the cult of the individual and so the clearest choices (Elvis, Dylan, Hendrix) are disqualified and, judging by the number of names in contention, no final victor is likely. We can't cover all of the nominees (plus Sly and the Family Stone and Bruce Springsteen and E-Street Band count as solo artists to me) here are a few of the prominent ones:
The Beach Boys? Brilliance in composition, harmonizing and studio wizardry does not make the Beach Boys a rock n' roll band. The Beatles were an ass-kicking bar band before Epstein put them in suits, Jagger-Richards bonded over old blues records and Dylan wanted to join Little Richard. Brian Wilson wanted to be in the Four Freshman. No knock on his well-established genius, his band just lacks rock cred.
The Funk Brothers? It's no compliment to these masters to claim that they, and not the singers and the songs (um, Smokey Robinson anyone?), were what made Motown the Sound of Young America.
CCR? Too few great years, with their awe-inducing run of singles lasting between 1969-1971.
The Velvet Underground? Their intensely adventurous, frequently beautiful body of work is wounded by art-school self-indulgence.
The Ramones? Would get my X on the ballot straight off but since they didn't develop terribly well and really only upset the status quo's apple cart once (while the Beatles did that a few times) they lose some points.
The Grateful Dead? Fuck. Off.
So with no indisputable winner, why not Hüsker Dü?
Yes, Hüsker Dü's so-called creative arc was more imperfect than the Beatles. In fact, they had no hits, no support from the music industry and no media presence. But that was the fate of most Great American Rock Bands of the eighties, from the Bad Brains to the Replacements to the Pixies. Unlike the sixties, it was a terrible time to be great, at least if you played guitar and wrote your own rock n' roll songs without dominant keyboard parts. So Hüsker Dü accomplished one of the most wild, sustained creative streaks in American music almost entirely under their own power.
With Hüsker Dü, you had Bob Mould and Grant Hart, two fantastic song-writers locked in an epic struggle between each other and their addictions, churning out glorious pop songs and sprawling conceptual double albums at an incredible pace, all of which redefined what constitutes rock n' roll. While Land Speed Record is definitely no Meet the Beatles, Zen Arcade might be the White Album AND Sgt Pepper's combined, thus allowing New Day Rising and Flip your Wig to be their double whammy like Rubber Soul and Revolver. A stretch perhaps, but well worth considering.
Let's consider an example shall we? Listen to the distorted, ringing folk-rock put-down that is, "Makes No Sense At All" followed by the pulverizing but sweet cover of the "Mary Tyler Moore Theme" and deny that Hüsker Dü are anything less than a Great American Rock Band.
MRML Readers: Who do you believe is the Great American Rock Band?
Me First and the Gimme Gimmes are a cabaret punk band. The band, Bassist Fat Mike (NOFX), singer Spike Slawson (of the Swingin' Utters) singer/guitarist Joey Cape and drummer Dave Raun (both of Lagwagon) as well as guitarist Chris Shiflett (Foo Fighters) have mastered the Dickies finest shtick, which can be described as, clown-punks on speed butchering the classics.
Like the Dickies, and unlike the Ramones who chose cool classics to rev up, Me First and the Gimme Gimme's succeed by creating reverential piss-takes of easy listening oldies (a.k.a. mom-core). Those oldies (o Sole Mio!) are always well-written but usually embarrassingly anchored to an awkward place in time. However, at some primal level these songs have infected their consciousness and, whether they believe that these songs almost brought humankind to the brink of of a very mellow meltdown, they love them, as many Russians still love Stalin. So in their performances they always cling to the core of the song, even as they add parts of old punk songs (i.e. "London Calling", "Blitzkrieg Bop") amp up the guitars, treble the tempo and ruthlessly mock the schmaltzy elements. Life is a cabaret, mothefuckers.
This particular single, Paul, was from their first run of thematic singles (all named for a seventies singer-songwriter) . The A-sides all went to their first album, 1997's Have a Ball while the B-sides only showed up over a decade later on the sequel, Have Another Ball. First they attack Mr. Simon's "Me and Julio Down By the Schoolyard" giving it a stuttering ska-punk riff and some background hey's, Finally "Mother and Child Reunion" gets drained of all the sweet sentimentality and then injected with a playful belligerence and of course a round of those tough-guy shouted yeah's they add to the end of almost every song.
That fact that the kiddie-punk veterans the Dickies ended up on Fat Wreck-Chords, the label that got rich on their idea, is most fitting. After all label boss and NOFX mouthpiece Fat Mike's other band Me First and the Gimme-Gimme's are almost a Dickies tribute band. The Dickies' 2001 Fat album, All This and Puppet Stew justifies their album-a-decade policy by eschewing the Fat Wreck-Chords standard strategy of putting out the exact same album once a year and then going out on the Warped Tour. Instead, this album sticks to the rules laid out by their last album, Idjit Savant, of being a clearing house of L.A. pop history, somewhere between the fey-pop of bands like the Quick and the pummeling punk of bands like the Weirdos (each of whom shared a member and a song with the Dickies).
One stand-out is, "My Pop the Cop" which could be an old Allan Sherman novelty number but isn't. For a fevered 2:20 song, it's packed to bursting with sound effects, hummable guitar licks and catchy hooks. Flip the record over and you get the other side of the band, the power-pop wusses that kept "Pretty Please Me" alive, with the, kinda lovely actually, "Marry Me, Anne".
The arrival of the Dickies Idjit Savant in 1994 came as a surprise. After all, it had been years since the "Just Say Yes" and "Roadkill" singles, both of which did end up on the album. Another surprise was an increasing hard rockin'-ness, evidenced not just in Stan's Brian May style guitar heroics but in Leonard's almost Freddie Mercury-ish moves as well as the less frenetic tempos. The final surprise was a lack of any goofy covers. Sure the boys do Grapefruit's "Elevator (to the Brain Hotel)", the Left Banke's "Pretty Ballerina" and, most fascinatingly, the final Darby Crash/Pat Smear song "Golden Boys". However, these songs are not triple-time thrashings of overly-familiar standards but are instead seem chosen to place themselves where they feel they belong in pop history. An unusual record that both recalls their early work (and that of many older bands) and yet sounds like nothing else.
Of course the goofiness remains. The final single from the album, after all, was the Star Trek referencing rocker, "Male it So" backed with a live cover of Neil Young's "Rockin' in the Free World."
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Re: Re-Ups
MRML does not plan to restore all of the content lost in The Great Mediafire Gutting of 2012. Polite requests may be made in the appropriate section, regular commenters will get priority.
