![]() ![]() Was he the leader of the first “college rock” band? Close, but that title, with its arty-academic connotations, probably belongs to Mission of Burma (Hüsker Dü were too lumpen to write a song about Max Ernst). ![]() Was he the first screaming fat guy in rock? Nope, that would be Pere Ubu’s David Thomas (though they’d both be outshrieked by Black Francis). Was he the first musician to incorporate ’60s pop melodicism and personal angst into punk rock? No, that was the Buzzcocks. Their savage 1984 cover of the 1966 Byrds classic “Eight Miles High”-something of an aesthetic mission statement-boasted one of the most harrowing vocal performances ever recorded, with Mould’s primal-scream take on the lyrics eventually degenerating into wailing-child glossolalia.Īs friendly hometown rivals the Replacements sang on their early dis song “Something to Dü,” the Hüskers weren’t “nothing new.” Indeed, Mould was less an innovator than an aggregator. ![]() (Nothing in music says “icy tundra” like a Sus2 chord, a perennial harmonic move in Mould songs.) Alienated by the lockstep nonconformity of hardcore (and its attendant machismo and violence), the Hüskers quickly evolved into one of the key bands in rock history, retaining the speed and intensity of their seed genre while incorporating elements of the ’60s and ’70s pop they secretly loved. Playing faster and louder than anyone in the underground of the time, the Hüskers were initially associated with hardcore-the purist, political, Reagan-era version of punk-and their frenetic, abrasive early sound could be summed up by effecting a temperature drop in an EP title by friends and labelmates the Minutemen: Buzz or howl under the influence of cold. ![]() The name, sans umlauts, derives from a Danish board game (“in which the child can outwit the adult”) and means “Do you remember?” in Danish and Norwegian. The story of “alternative rock,” indie rock, or whatever you want to call it largely began with Hüsker Dü, the incomparable Twin Cities power trio, formed in 1979, by Mould (guitar/vocals), Grant Hart (drums/vocals), and Greg Norton (bass/vocals). They didn’t sell many records, but a skinny, sensitive kid in Aberdeen, Washington, was listening very closely. The Pixies were adored by post-punks and indie rockers, critics and college students. Kim Deal, later of the Breeders, answered the ad, and the rest was history. (It also didn’t hurt that Mould, like Thompson, was a chubby, average-looking guy who could scream like a banshee.) Citing folk-lite trio Peter, Paul & Mary seems like cheap punk irony, but one can imagine Thompson wanting a more controlled sound than that of his thrashy idols, and perhaps a clear, pretty voice to counter his unhinged bellowing. From Hüsker Dü, he took the pulverizing distortion and trenchant chording of Bob Mould’s Flying V guitar-and the surprisingly melodic wall of sound it generated. Influences: Hüsker Dü and Peter, Paul & Mary.” With hindsight, Thompson’s stylistic coordinates-which must have seemed pretty mystifying when it ran in 1986-could serve as a fairly accurate description of his band’s sonic palette, if you threw in surf music, science fiction, and Puerto Rico. When a young, Boston-based musician named Charles Thompson-soon to be known by the nom de guerre Black Francis-needed a bassist for his fledgling group the Pixies, he ran a classified ad reading, “Seeking bassist for rock band. ![]()
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