On January 26, 1988, one of the most important contemporary American rock bands came to an end at a kitchen table in St. Paul, Minn. Exhausted from nearly a decade of nonstop touring and recording, compounded by the recent suicide of their manager and, most pressingly, drummer Grant Hart’s spiraling heroin addiction, guitarist Bob Mould and bassist Greg Norton sat down with Hart at his parents’ house. A few awkward minutes later, Hüsker Dü was no more—out with a whimper unbecoming of the noise they were semi-famous for.
And they never looked back; in fact, no band of their stature has ever looked back less. There were no gussied-up reissues or valedictory anthologies to cement the band’s legacy for latecomers or fans who wanted something beyond the sludgy audio quality of older recordings that was growing less romantic with age. A lot of this had to do with sundry legal and label entanglements, but there was a festering spite that time seemed to intensify rather than heal. “I’m blessed to have such a nice history,” Mould told me in 2008, “but I’m careful not to cash in on it.” Hart’s death this past September at 56 from liver cancer closed the book on this for good, but the band is no less worthy of reappraisal and recontextualization.
This longstanding animosity and frustration isn’t mere backstory; it’s the reason Savage Young Dü is an event at all, more momentous than the sum of its ramshackle parts. It was only two years ago that the appearance of a bare-bones official online merch store augured a major breakthrough; after nearly 30 years of post-breakup enmity rivaled only by the Smiths and the Gallagher brothers, all three members coming together to sell lapel buttons was a hard-fought victory. But the notion of them collaborating on a project as comprehensive and thoughtful as this still felt as fantastical as a headlining spot at Coachella. That it ultimately could only be undertaken by Chicago-based excavation specialists Numero Group, speaks to the degree of difficulty
Comprised of 69 chronologically sorted tracks, most live and 47 previously unreleased, Savage circumvents the nightmarish parsing of rights from SST and Warner Bros. by focusing on raw recordings from the band’s formative years in the Twin Cities between 1979 and 1982. Beyond heralding the band’s youthful prolificacy with a book including archival photos, a comprehensive band history, and the provenance of every salvaged track, the box set offers a slight revisionist tweak to the band’s generally accepted narrative arc as a Very Fast, Very Intense Hardcore Band That Evolved To Slow Down A Little And Write More Nuanced Songs. Even in unvarnished recordings, some of the earliest tracks here—the innocent teen angst of Hart’s “Can’t See You Anymore” and “Sore Eyes,” the handclap-abetted “The Truth Hurts,” and Mould’s studio outtake “Writer’s Cramp”—show an attention to and ease with pop songcraft that later became a hallmark. Hart’s Thin Lizzyish demo “All I’ve Got To Lose Is You” could have been one of their most beloved songs had anyone known about it.
That playfulness was largely jettisoned once they got out of the Midwest and started spending time with punks like Black Flag, Dead Kennedys, and DOA. By the time they’d returned home from an eventful three-month 1981 West Coast tour, they had a mission: “If the Ramones were fast and the Buzzcocks were faster and the Dickies were even faster, that meant Hüsker Dü needed to be the fastest band in the world,” Mould wrote in his 2011 memoir See a Little Light. “Before we left, there was breathing room in our performances; now that breathing room had been replaced with a claustrophobic, frenetic intensity that reflected our eye-opening experiences on the road, our elevated ambitions, and our burning need to upstage any band in sight.”
Much of the box set captures that mission in full bloom, highlighted by a dutiful recreation of the band’s aptly titled debut Land Speed Record taken from a 1981 show a few weeks after the one that formed the original live album, showcasing the trio at their most punishing and political. The sheer speed is as shocking now as it must have been then—possibly more so given the clearer understanding that it was a conscious shift rather than overcompensating for tunelessness—while Reagan-era rants like “Guns at My School” and “Push the Button” feel depressingly up to date.
Nestled amid the amphetamine-fueled primordial punk are tracks like “Industrial Grocery Store,” “Outside,” “Call on Me,” and “Private Hell,” which stand as undiscovered blueprints for the rest of the band’s career, surrounding pop hooks and melody with discordant noise—a concept that is a lot more familiar in 2017 than it was in 1980. While any rarities collection is a map of paths not taken, Savage Young Dü presents dozens of crudely recorded castoffs as evidence of mounting confidence and feverish productivity; a different band could have built a career solely off the songs Hüsker Dü routinely discarded. The objective of a project of this magnitude and care isn’t just to show how a particular artist got to a particular place, but how we all got there, too; to remind, again, how things we take for granted about culture stem from basement experiments no one was supposed to hear.
Which is not to say that the non-hardcore songs here are an easy listen; production miracles were no doubt performed on all these recovered tapes, many of which were culled from the band’s former engineer and early acolyte Terry Katzman. But once you get used to the fidelity, the voyeurism makes the sense of discovering these otherwise fully-formed songs feel that much more palpable. By the time the set gets to the 1983 studio debut Everything Falls Apart, it’s a little like Dorothy stepping into Technicolor. Perhaps the most shocking takeaway is that for all this collection’s depth and intensity, it’s largely prelude. In the two and a half years between July 1984 and January 1987, Hüsker Dü released five bona fide classic albums (two of which were double LPs) and zero bad ones—a winning streak that deserves to stand with any in rock history, if one unlikely to yield the same trove of orphaned, unheard ideas.
In a Facebook post eulogizing Grant Hart in September, Numero Group’s Ken Shipley, who spent seven years tracking down tapes and artifacts and contracts, remembered a visibly ailing Hart asking him in March if there was any way the box set could come out “before I go.” While Mould has long been the most visible member of Hüsker Dü, Savage Young Dü makes the case for Hart as its, well, heart. His drumming propels the most brutally fast songs here while his barefoot-scamp charm grounds the catchiest; nothing defines the band better than its alchemy of those two elements. But it was his addiction issues that hastened the band’s demise, and the rest of his career, despite brilliant moments, can’t help but feel like a cautionary tale compared to Mould’s. If only an accident of timing, this immersive, high-profile origin story, cleaved from its messier conclusion, can be read as a redemption of sorts.
“We’re not the most professional band in the Twin Cities,” Hart sheepishly tells whoever happened to have been in the Minneapolis club Jay’s Longhorn in July 1979, right after tearing through the rarely heard, dizzyingly fun entomology-themed romp “Insects Rule the World.” Just 12 tracks into a collection that makes the definitive case for Hüsker Dü as the platonic ideal of a band discovering, absorbing, exemplifying, then eclipsing an entire subculture, it sounds like an apology and a promise to do better.
