I just finished Do You Remember, a podcast chronicling the life of the band Hüsker Dü, from Minnesota Public Radio’s The Current and have to say it was a great listen. It’s a short, five episode series, featuring interview audio from all three members of the legendary punk band, including what is probably the last recorded interview Grant Hart did before he died last September.
Among the things I loved about this podcast was learning little things I never knew about the band. Like how the band met at Cheapo Records in St. Paul. How Bob Mould was a Macalester student and planned to go back home for the summer because the band wasn’t getting any gigs. That is, until Grant booked them a show on the sly just to keep him in town. And how the band was sort of the first music internet start up with Bob using email to advance venues about upcoming shows before they arrived in town. The conflicts that kept the band going and ultimately broke them up.
I didn’t grow up with Hüsker Dü but I knew of them by way of The Hold Steady’s We Can Get Together (“There’s a girl on Heaven Hill / I come up to her cabin still / She said Hüsker Dü got cool / They started in St. Paul / Do you Remember Makes No Sense At All”) and later Bob Mould’s more recent solo work. Discovering the Hüskers later in life, their sound doesn’t make me wistful for their career, but reminds me of what I love about home.
Like their punk and hardcore contemporaries in the DC hardcore scene, the Hüskers and their main rival, The Replacements, together defined a particular sound that permeated through the Twin Cities scene — characterized by the climate, culture, and economy of the place. I knew bands that still sounded like the Hüskers when I was a kid, and I know some of them still today. If you were to ask me what the Twin Cities sounds like, I’d probably throw on my 7″ of In a Free Land I got at Record Store Day three years ago and follow it with some Prince. The Hüskers are the clustered up clever kids at the Triple Rock (RIP) on a February night; Prince, the weird, androgynous kids front row at First Avenue for the headliner. Either way, you’re having a music experience uniquely Minnesotan.
Listening to the podcast, I thought a lot about my uncle who bounced around different bands in the same era and my own peers who picked up guitars and started making noise decades later. The kids that wouldn’t let not being able to afford Marshall stacks or expensive music lessons stop them from being in a band. They had a sound and a story to share and damn if they weren’t going to share it. It’s the kind of stories I hope my own kids can hear when they find my sticker-riddled guitar from middle school, plug it into the 12 Watt amp, and start jamming.
Even if you don’t know the first thing about punk music or Hüsker Dü or the Twin Cities, give this podcast a listen.