HUSKER DU V. Replacements

the guy who did the mat documentary is doing one on grant hart now bringing things around to this thread

we're supposed to play an entire set of Mats tunes and we know zero at this point.

― Darin, Thursday, April 19, 2012 8:58 PM (41 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

haha actually sounds like you're perfectly prepared to do a Mats set

That seems appropriate in a way
(xp)

I can honestly say I've never heard Grant's bass on a Husker Du record.

― Waterloo? Oh, we've sunsetted that. (Tarfumes The Escape Goat), Thursday, April 19, 2012 1:11 PM (8 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is like the weirdest thing i've ever heard

....because Grant played drums.

no, no, aside from the typo

I have argued exactly this in regard to New Day Rising somewhere around here, against complaints that it sounds terrible. It doesn't sound terrible. It's a genuinely great record, and so is Zen Arcade, but Husker Du never really got the production they deserved. IMO, everything they did could be productively remastered, perhaps even remixed to advantage. "The band" might have wanted Grant's bass to disappear in the mix, but I seriously doubt that Grant did. And the wall of screaming cymbal/guitar hiss, however bracing it might be, could definitely use a bit more differentiation.

― yuppie bullshit chocolate blogbait (contenderizer), Thursday, April 19, 2012 12:10 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I can honestly say I've never heard Grant's bass on a Husker Du record.

― Waterloo? Oh, we've sunsetted that. (Tarfumes The Escape Goat), Thursday, April 19, 2012 12:11 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Drawing attention to the typo?

Maybe he thinks by bass somebody means bass drum

well in any event *greg's* bass playing is maybe my favorite thing abt husker du

i loved grant's handlebar mustache

this is like the weirdest thing i've ever heard

i figured Tarfumes was tweaking my nose cuz grant/greg brain spaz

http://userserve-ak.last.fm/serve/252/6697223.jpg

to the barbershop born

Just listened to "New Day Rising" and can confirm that there is indeed a bass on that track, but it doesn't come in until late in the song, and I had to wear headphones to be sure. Once it does show up it sticks around for "The Girl Who Lives On Heaven Hill" and presumably the rest of the album.

Grants the best most natural pop songwriter of these guys by a mile

― Mississippi Butt Hurt (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Thursday, April 19, 2012 8:17 AM (13 hours ago)

How is this intended? His inclination is more naturally toward a pop idiom? He has more natural ability in this area?

Yeah just natural at great hooks and melodies....like grant seems so effortless in his songwriting, even the best of his new stuff......like I'm not expressing myself well but mould and westerberg are very ”try hard” to me...but grant just seems like he just taps into something natural in the way he is

Yeah, I don't see at all why someone like Mould would be singled out for that criticism. If it's valid to level that at Mould, I wouldn't know where you would begin or end with making the same criticism of others.

"Diane" is a song that's all about Greg Norton's bassline.

I was wondering, wrt to the discussion upthread about the late 80s shift away from hardcore to that 70s sound, whether the Replacements might in some way be progenitors of that. Not that they ever sounded like Sabbath. But they certainly had no shame in liking and playing 70s hard rock and classic rock in an era when it was distinctly unfashionable in the underground. Must have been noted by other alternative scene musicians.

i remember evan dando back in melody maker circa shame about ray identifying dinosaur jr as the band that lifted the veil of shame from the 70s hard rock stuff for him and his contempos... lee ranaldo told me something similar, wrt you're living all over me, reclaiming uncool reference points and influences for the post-hardcore age. they ref'd the 70s hard rock stuff with a little less archness than the 'mats, say, rewriting 'cat scratch fever' as a tune about a dude getting a boner.

Makes sense. I guess Replacements were actually in the hardcore age, and odd ones out, rather than blazing a new trail after that scene faded.

the mats' take on hardcore, though, was so much looser than the drill-tight thrash of minor threat or the brawny malevolence of flag - you could hear a lot of, y'know, rock'n'roll within 'sorry ma forget to take out the trash' (which is a wonderful, wonderful album), a looseness and lightness that certainly owes more to, say, the faces than husker du.

Course. That's accepted within saying they were odd ones out. Love that old PW line about songwriting - he would only play things with melody, Bob would only play things that rocked. Hence the sound.

the mats' take on hardcore, though, was so much looser than the drill-tight thrash of minor threat or the brawny malevolence of flag

That's one place in Mould's book where he does single out Grant for praise - he refers to Minor Threat and similar hardcore bands as "oom-pah hardcore" because of their fast polka-like drumbeats, and compliments Hart for being able to give the Huskers some variety and swing.

hells yeah... 'land speed record' is like an album full of cro-magnon two-chord riffs sent skyward by grant's crazed dervish drumming and bob's speed-fuelled soloing.

i guess the thing about the mats, re: hardcore, is it was always obvious from even their earliest days that pw could write, y'know, actual songs. you wouldn't necessarily think, listening to 'land speed', that bob would end up writing stuff like 'if i can't change your mind'

i figured Tarfumes was tweaking my nose cuz grant/greg brain spaz

I was indeed. fwiw, not only can I hear Greg's bass playing loud and clear, but it's always impressive.

The bass is hard to hear, especially on the later records. There are some demos out there from Candy Apple Grey where Greg's playing pokes out through the fabric more, only highlighting how much the hiss and treble got raised later on in the mixing.

Weird, because CAG might be one of my favorite two albums by them.

Been reading more of Bob Mould's book, and it's hard for me to come away with any other impression than he consistently underplays others' contributions to his success, and overstates his own. It's kind of gross to read, and frankly, I'm surprised a writer as even-handed as Azzerad went along with putting his name on this book as co-author.

TS: Mould getting haughty over slide-guitar part on "Heaven Hill" vs Westerberg giving Bob a bottle of champagne and saying "Drink this or you're out of the band."

Basically this is:

TS: Character assessments based on systematic patterns of behavior vs. Character assessments based on specific incidents

Both can tell you interesting things, surely... but that Westerburg incident was 25 years ago, when they were in their 20s. Mould is much older and I would think wiser now, and he's consistently writing like a smug, self-aggrandizing tool.

To be honest, I'd have them both over for dinner.

maybe grant norton could cook for us.

I was wondering, wrt to the discussion upthread about the late 80s shift away from hardcore to that 70s sound, whether the Replacements might in some way be progenitors of that. Not that they ever sounded like Sabbath. But they certainly had no shame in liking and playing 70s hard rock and classic rock in an era when it was distinctly unfashionable in the underground. Must have been noted by other alternative scene musicians.

― Manfred Mann meets Man Parrish (ithappens), Friday, April 20, 2012 3:49 AM (9 hours ago)

i remember evan dando back in melody maker circa shame about ray identifying dinosaur jr as the band that lifted the veil of shame from the 70s hard rock stuff for him and his contempos... lee ranaldo told me something similar, wrt you're living all over me, reclaiming uncool reference points and influences for the post-hardcore age. they ref'd the 70s hard rock stuff with a little less archness than the 'mats, say, rewriting 'cat scratch fever' as a tune about a dude getting a boner.

― I accidentally sonned your dome (stevie), Friday, April 20, 2012 4:51 AM (8 hours ago)

Black Flag & SST followed and started unironically worshipping the Sabbath skull-head doom bong in 84 on side two of My War and the Saint Vitus debut. Same year saw Meat Puppets II and, so it was pretty clear by that point that classic rock and American post-hardcore were gonna get along just fine. Dinosaur's debut finally came out in 85, and the Flaming Lips dropped the sonically & thematically similar Hear It Is less than a year later. All of these albums and bands got a lot of positive scene and press attention at the time, so it's hard to pick any one as ground zero. If I had to point my finger at anyone, it would probably be Redd Kross (another acknowledged influence on Sonic Youth).

^^^ was gonna say that about Black Flag myself

And of course the Minutemen were covering Van Halen, Steely Dan and CCR on Double Nickels in '84 too.

yeah, good point. green river's come on down = another c.84 doom-dirge 70s metal album that was made by and marketed to punk peoples (with little success, irrc).

lol, 84 was the year the 70s broke.

Wasn't Blue Oyster Cult D. Boon's favorite band?

Minutemen cover choices did more to predict/determine what my tastes would later evolve into than I care to admit...

xpost i thot watt was the cultist

maybe both. i though d. boon took his name from e. bloom.

Minutemen cover choices did more to predict/determine what my tastes would later evolve into than I care to admit...

me too. first place i ever heard "the red and the black" f'rinstance.

thx guys

re: all that history junk i posted upthread, i do understand how dino's 70s revivalism might have been or seemed especially influential on punk people and scenes in the NY/PA/MA/CT/NH area.

like minutemen, flag, meat pups, red kross and the surfers were all west coast, 'mats and lips were midwestern. dinos were some of the first northeastern ex-hardcore types to really go that way.

uh, if arizona = "west coast"

you know

or y'know, texas

wow this 85 full huskers show youtube posted upthread is solidfying my already pro-huskers opinion

Makes sense.

No--makes no sense at all. (I didn't scroll back far enough to see what made sense--just couldn't pass that up.)

or y'know, texas

lol, yeah. i get caught up in the typing and forget to thimk. add a seperate category for "southwest" i guess...

It occurs to me that this was "MY MUSIC", the post-hardcore 70's revival moment. This is the sound that introduced me to a world larger than the radio, MTV and my friends' & parents' record collections. I loved all the bands & albums mentioned up above, along with associated & similar stuff like Camper Van Beethoven, Violent Femmes, The Jesus & Mary Chain, The Pixies, Pussy Galore, Halo of Flies and Mudhoney. All of it seemed like punk to me, or like a version of punk I could relate to and make my own. As embarrassed as I am to admit it, I saw this music an "artful" version of punk, one "liberated" from the tiresome loud-fast orthodoxy and polemical simplicity I associated with 77 punkrock and American hardcore. It fit together in my head with the Nuggets & Back From the Grave comps; with The Stooges, Dolls & Ramones; freakazoid outliers like Chrome & F/i; and Aussie shit like The Saints, Scientists & Radio Birdman.

What seems strange now is simply the fact that this music seemed so radically adventurous and forward-thinking to me at the time. It's clear in retrospect that it was simply an attempt to forge a connection between punk rock, itself already becoming dated, and what punk had supposedly replaced. I flirted with more genuinely futuristic stuff like Skinny Puppy, Sonic Youth (and their Blast First sistren) and weird new trends in club music. I liked a lot of fairly straightforward punk-punk like Naked Raygun, Squirrel Bait, the Didjits and Husker Du, spent time with the thrash, speed and crossover metal my sketchier friends dug, but crit-approved revivalist rock-as-punk was MY SHIT. I wasn't inclined to follow Big Black into the Wax Trax scene, Foetus & Skinny Puppy into industrial goth, Voivod into death metal, or MARRS into house. Instead, I followed the children of Redd Kross into indie rock. GBV here we come...

No regrets, but there's something kind of funny about my naivete when I look back on it now. I was so certain that this was THEE MUSIC OV THEE FUTURE!

Arizona's Pacific Time for eight months a year anyway.

It occurs to me that this was "MY MUSIC", the post-hardcore 70's revival moment.

Me too, for real. Well, that, twinned with UK 'modern rock' (Echo, New Order, solo Robyn H, etc). Those were the left and right shoes of 14 y.o. me walking into THEE_FUTURE