Relaxed Parents

For years, Husker Dü were the only band I wanted to be in.  You need to understand that there is a profound difference between wishing one could emulate a much admired artist and actually wanting to be in their shoes and generate the same abundently marvellous noise (c.f. Crystal Stilts and the early Jesus and Mary Chain, for example).  And the Huskers generated a noise which was marvellously abundant, awash in the turn-on-a-dime speeding dynamics of hardcore, lush, Byrdsian melody (tellingly, they covered “Eight Miles High”) and the taut instrumental prowess that would later ossify as certain schools of mathcore.

The particular Dü album I wanted to have made was New Day Rising.  Looking back, I can see that I solved this problem by simply writing it all over again, changing the words and having a woman sign them.  Husker Dü were also a trio which (given that the drummer problem had been solved by the previously mentioned drum machine) just left us a bass-player short.  Efforts to teach the singer to play bass were utterly in vain.

There were obstacles, though.  For one thing, I had to write the songs! Me! I! NO-ONE ELSE!

This was a bad mistake, mulitplied by the fact that the person keenest on this policy wasn’t actually me (though I wasn’t entirely unkeen).  It was the singer.

Another intractable problem was that the singer would have been better off doing Pat Benatar covers.  Getting involved with her on a personal level had been a terrible error for both of us, one that would take a few more relentlessly grim years to unpick but agreeing that she could be the singer was far, far worse.  You can’t have Pat Benatar fronting Husker Du.  Just forget it.

(Most of us have relationships in our backgrounds which could be described as “Opportunities for personal growth” at best and pacts of “Mutually Assured Destruction” at worst.  I’m not passing judgement on her or me as people – we were young, after all.  Well, I was.  But we were, in combination, a couple informed observers described as “wrong” the way two headed bullfinches or Sting’s underwear in Dune are “wrong”.  As wrong as you can get, wrong in a way the universe should not be obliged to tolerate.  Wrong in a way that the standing monoliths of Easter Island have been known to groan aloud in protest at.  Wrong as in wrong, wrong, wrong!  Are we clear?)

Anyway, this post isn’t really supposed to be unpicking the dull emotional damage of my misdirected early twenties – it’s supposed to be celebrated New Day Rising, a record that begins at full throttle with the jack-hammer two-chorder title track (four word lyric – “NEW DAY RISING! NEW DAY RISING! AHHHHHHHH!”) and keeps the pedal down for another breakneck 35 minutes.  With tunes.  ”Terms Of Psychic Warfare” (our signature song in retrospect) breaks up the tempo a little but the feel throughout is open, rushing, freefall…it’s a record of movement and possibilities.  Still sounds that way.  Unlike a lot of music, it’s survived miraculously free of negative associations in itself.  And I still wish I’d made it.