How Hüsker Dü became Hüsker Dü
The Husker Du They don’t exist anymore, but they were a great band. Greg Norton on the bass, Grant Hart (passed away in 2017) on drums and the singer and guitarist Bob Mouldwho turns 64 today, admirably married their hardcore punk inclinations with pop before dissolving in 1987, at the height of their success, due to constant arguments between the group’s two leaders, Hart and Mould. The box set was published in 2017 “Savage Young Du” which took stock of the first period of the band from Saint Paul (Minnesota), between 1979 and 1982. This is our review of that box.
Net of the emotional implications – “Can you get this out before I leave?”, Grant Hart asked a few months ago, shortly before leaving us, to Ken Shipley, head of the Numero Group label and curator of the project – “Savage Young Dü ” is certainly a precious document, which reconstructs with the precision and attention of those who are used to looking through the archives the adolescence of a band that a few years later would change, in its own way, the course of history: in sixty-nine tracks included in the box set – forty-seven unreleased recordings plus remasterings of the 7-inches “Statues”https://www.rockol.it/”Amusement” and “In a Free Land”, and of the debut album “Everything Falls Apart” , basically all non-SST production – there’s everything you need to know to understand how Hüsker Dü became Hüsker Dü.
From the immature “Do The Bee” and “Nuclear Nightmare” to the more defined “Sore Eyes”, where perhaps for the first time Mold and his companions succeed in the feat – which will later become their trademark and passport to glory – of making melody and dissonance coexist, the merit of “Savage Young Dü” is to dig into the most artistically vivid and exciting period that a band can ever experience: that of the beginning.
The inclusion of “Everything Falls Apart” – among other things already sent back to stores in ’93 as “Everything Falls Apart and More”, in the form of a CD reissue with the first two singles and a handful of bonus tracks – is not a clever trick to lengthen the story, but the indispensable trait d’union to link the demos and recordings recovered by Shipley to a discussion which – in a few years – would have led the trio to consign “Zen Arcade” to the annals, and therefore to consecrate oneself.
It has the merits and peculiarities of both a prequel and a making of, “Savage Young Dü”, with all the annexes and connections of the case: if you are already familiar with the works of Bob Mould, Grant Hart and Greg Norton this box set could really close the interrupted discussion – among other things not in the best way – in 1987, paradoxically giving that sense of completion that Hüsker Dü’s career was still missing. Newbies and the curious, on the other hand, should not give in to the lure of an excellently packaged product: to enjoy the ending, which in this case is the beginning, it is better to know what came before.