Twin Cities, Twin Peaks

on impossible choices, our relationships to emotions, and what does rock n roll really mean anyway? but also, not really.

(If you’re wondering why the title sucks, it’s because I wanted to call this essay “A Tale of Twin Cities” but of course there’s already been an essay about these two bands called that. While you’re here, I’d also like to say I sourced a lot of my info here from Bob Mould’s autobiography See A Little Light as well as Bob Mehr’s Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements. I’m sure there’s no way I’m saying anything new about either of these bands— given that both are well-established music journalist favorites— but thanks for indulging me either way.)

INTRO BUST

As you might have guessed if you’ve been following me for any length of time, Michael Azerrad’s 2001 book Our Band Could Be Your Life left a profound impact on me. I read it around the same time as I read Stephen Blush’s American Hardcore (seventh or eighth grade), and both books managed to imbue the 80s American post-punk and hardcore scene with a sense of danger, discovery, and fun that was completely intoxicating.

While American Hardcore cast a wide net and covered the national hardcore punk scene from roughly 1979-1986, I remember the most compelling parts of the book to be the material that discussed the way hardcore interacted with mainstream America at large; the author’s shitty and at-times bigoted tone and the bizarrely self-congratulatory nature of many of the participants was a turn-off even as I found myself drawn into not just the music but the gossip and the scene itself.

Our Band Could Be Your Life benefited from tightening up the focus and more-or-less chronologically looking at the way that American hardcore and post-punk journeyed through the 80s to become indie rock and college rock through the stories of thirteen bands: Black Flag, the Minutemen, Mission of Burma, Minor Threat, Hüsker Dü, the Replacements, Sonic Youth, Butthole Surfers, Big Black, Dinosaur Jr, Fugazi, Mudhoney, and Beat Happening. While a few of these bands (namely Beat Happening, who I still loathe, and the Minutemen, who I’ve grown to appreciate with age as Creedence Clearwater Revival and Sun Ra both became dear parts of my musical life) were consigned to being “Homework Bands” that I felt obligated to listen to if only to understand where later music that I loved drew its influences from, many of the sections on each band merged with my love of their music to really become part and parcel with how I felt about them as a whole.

Black Flag’s story felt like I was traveling through a warzone with them as they willingly chose to sleep under desks and eat dog food rolled up in pieces of bread in their steadfast commitment to their craft and vision. That singleminded devotion, clarity, and desperation affected the way I heard their music and made records like My War feel that much more visceral and raw. Similarly, the acid-trip-like nature of the chapter on the Butthole Surfers complements and enhances the surreal vibe of their music perfectly, while the psychodrama of the relationship between J Mascis and Lou Barlow in the Dinosaur Jr chapter gave their music (Neil Young-and-the Cure-decide-to-go-hardcore, in a nutshell) an added tension and vibrancy.

Above all, however, the location and personalities that rang the most true to me were those of Minnesota’s proud Twin Cities, Minneapolis and St. Paul.

In the 80s, the Twin Cities was home to one artist who broke all the boundaries— who blurred the lines between and challenged our perceptions of race, gender, sexuality, art, and commerce, effortlessly wrote genre-defying masterpiece after genre-defying masterpiece, became an established guitar and vocal virtuoso, and changed the landscape of American music— both pop and underground— forever.

However, I am not qualified to talk about Prince in the least, so let’s focus on the more accessible rough-and-ragged shaggy-dog stories of the two bands that, in my opinion, helped shape the course of Our Scene™ more than any others, and who, together, were the great white hopes of the 80s American indie scene before they both burst into spectacular flames— seemingly incinerating everyone and everything they touched. Let’s talk about the Replacements and Hüsker Dü.

THE MATS AND THE DÜ

In many ways, in spite and because of their feverish competition with each other, the Mats (a nickname for the Replacements that came from vocalist/guitarist/primary songwriter and band leader Paul Westerberg’s habit of drunkenly calling the band “The Placemats”) and the Dü became perfect mirror images of each other as well as represented the opposite of the ends of the spectrum within the American independent rock scene of their time. In time, of course, their seemingly parallel paths converged, which is poetic in its own way. But for a time, and even today, dweeby guitar music geeks (who, to be fair, are the Twin Cities’ bread & butter) would try to suss out your values and personality by simply asking you to choose between these two bands.

In theory, the dividing lines are clear— Hüsker Dü were uncompromising in their vision, no matter how poppy they were and what label they were on, wrapped in layers upon layers of Bob Mould’s mind-melting guitar tone, driven by the frantic energy (at all tempos) of drummer Grant Hart, and grounded by the inventively melodic bass work of Greg Norton. Mould’s anguished howl and Hart’s warbly, stretched-past-its-parameters singing voice were both sugar and spice, assaulting the listener’s senses with reckless hardcore abandon and aggression while beckoning them closer with sweet pop songs, a give-and-take that separated the people who were actually listening from the casual observers.

Meanwhile, the Replacements were a rock band. Their iconic classic lineup— Westerberg, drunkenly freewheeling lead guitarist Bob Stinson, diminutive-yet-preternaturally-gifted teenage bassist Tommy Stinson, and drummer Chris Mars (who was quiet and unassuming until the moment he sat behind the kit)— was constantly embroiled in the same drama that became part of the legend of bands like the Rolling Stones, while their songs were always just as indebted, if not more indebted, to the melodic and anthemic classic rock and power-pop of the 60s and 70s as they were to the spirit of punk.

While the Hüskers were DIY to a very real fault— Bob Mould stepping into the role of band manager put very real stress on both him and the rest of the band, and financial quibbles ended up building bigger and bigger walls between Mould, secondary songwriter Hart, and eventually Norton as well (who began to be more of a hired gun than an actual participant)— the Mats did nothing themselves. They were intoxicated messes 200% of the time and relied almost entirely on the goodwill of those around them— in particular, manager Peter Jesperson, who first connected with the band based on a desire to become their Brian Epstein/fifth Beatle and ended up trapped in an increasingly toxic and codependent relationship that damaged everyone involved— in order to make it through each year, month, week, day, and show.

But the influence of both bands on each other and the musical world around them is incalculable. Hüsker Dü became the first band to truly transcend hardcore— to play non-hardcore while still being hardcore, to explode the boundaries of what hardcore music was supposed to look, sound, and act like, to be both blueprint and example for everyone who liked squalling guitar noise and the placid melodies of 60s pop in equal measure.

The Replacements, for their part, were the first hardcore-adjacent band (the lone contender beating them to the punch would probably be the Minutemen, who never played conventional hardcore but were more than accepted in the scene), in that they never really approached hardcore in the true, spiteful, purely angry sense, but they were accepted in the scene and provided an outlet for hardcore kids to explore and admit to emotions in ways that weren’t commonplace in the scene at the time. Before hardcore kids got sad and played the Smiths, they got sad and played the Replacements.

And on the subject of emotion, that’s the thing that both bands excelled at communicating. Hüsker Dü’s howling racket expressed so many things at once, in such cathartic and immediate fashion, that it was impossible to tell where their emotions stopped and the listener’s began. They were (and their recorded output continues to be) some of the most evocative music to ever be produced in the punk tradition, period.

And if the Dü were the sound of the emotions as they happened, in all their messy, loud, and uncontrollable glory, the Mats were the sound of reflecting on their emotions after the fact. Every Replacements song tells a story, and while the stories told by the Dü were in present tense, the stories told by the Mats were in the past tense— drunken, sopping wet rumination on all sorts of relationships gone awry, on the fleeting nature of youth even as they were living through reckless, youthful abandon, on being wise beyond your years and knowing it even as you self-destruct.

Both bands are incomparably brilliant, and are both collectively and individually Rosetta Stones that have helped chart a path forward for anyone in the years since who wanted to pick up a guitar and make an ungodly racket.

And yet, as time marches coldly and cruelly on, I can’t help but feel as though that even if their influence is still felt, it’s going unacknowledged. How can I convey to people that the Replacements’ music goes further and has a deeper legacy than the Goo Goo Dolls and the Gin Blossoms (both great bands, by the way)? How can I express my frustration that Hüsker Dü’s name only ever comes out of Dave Grohl’s mouth as he attempts to desperately grasp onto whatever punk cred his old-dad body can still manage to hold inside of itself?

You can hear both bands to this day. When Touché Amoré covers the Replacements’ “Unsatisfied” while musically channeling Hüsker Dü, that’s obvious. But when a band like Gulch, who mostly play around with sounds derived from primordial Japanese hardcore and primitive, Neanderthalian death metal riffs, decide to throw a droning, drowning, deeply melodic, and yet still hardcore-as-fuck cover of Siouxsie & the Banshees at the end of their debut LP, while still channeling and respecting the emotion of the original, that’s Hüsker Dü covering the Byrds’ “Eight Miles High.” And when 100 Gecs— yes, I’m even going to bring 100 Gecs into this— careen wildly from heartfelt and intimate to irreverent and self-deprecating and back and forth twice again in the same song while spitting in the face of genre boundaries, that’s the spirit of the Replacements shining through, years and years later.

In the eyes of today, I think Hüsker Dü have a little bit more “cool cred”— in a scene where the ante of aggression seems to be upped every month, the Hüskers’ more hardcore offerings stand the test of time through sheer force of performance and ingenuity, while their pop songs still retain a hip cachet that years and years of being name-checked by painfully uncool dudes who write drearily unimaginative melodies in their milquetoast white rock outfits have seemingly robbed from the Replacements.

And yet I love both. And I will never be able to pick between them.

And as if this newsletter isn’t long enough, let’s go through their careers step by step in order to determine why this is.

ROUND ONE: SAVAGE YOUNG DÜ vs. POWER TRASH— FIGHT!!!
(roughly 1979-January 1982)

Both bands started out rather inauspiciously in the late 70s. Hüsker Dü began life as a messy and deeply Ramones-indebted punk outfit loosely revolving around Macalester student Bob Mould and record store clerks Grant Hart and Greg Norton in St. Paul, Minnesota. Famously, their name resulted from a jam session where the band and their friends were mocking the French phrase— “Qu’est-ce que cest?”— in the Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer.” Everyone was throwing out random foreign phrases in place of it, and someone shouted “Hüsker Dü”— a popular 1950s memory game, taking its name from the Norwegian words for “do you remember?”— and the name stuck.

The Replacements’ beginnings were even more humble— a ramshackle outfit based around troubled-but-trying-to-get-straight guitarist Bob Stinson, who had seen his baby brother Tommy traveling down the same path and handed him a bass to keep him off the streets. Under the name Dogbreath, the two practiced together with drummer Chris Mars and a revolving lineup of subpar guitarists and vocalists out of a basement based in working-class South Minneapolis. One day, a janitor named Paul Westerberg decided to walk home to save on bus fare, heard their unholy racket, and proceeded to take over as bandleader and primary songwriter, renaming the band the Substitutes as an homage to the Who.

The Hüskers started off their career much more aggressively than the Substitutes— while they were goofing off at band practice in between Paul’s shifts as a janitor and Bob’s shifts as a line cook at a place called Mama Rosa’s, the Dü was swindling gigs out of local rock club the Longhorn and making a racket opening up for everyone who came through town. The only problem: Hüsker Dü were not really very good. As you can see on early songs like “Do You Remember?” from their demos at the Northern Lights record store, the Dü were writing Ramones songs without the catchiness and energy.

There were two things that really caused a sea change in their approach to writing songs: one, Mould went to see the Buzzcocks play (with the guitarist drunkenly shouting the chord changes at him the whole time) and decided he wanted to play faster than they did; two, the Hüskers were introduced to cheap trucker speed, which, in conjunction with the gauntlet thrown down by the Buzzcocks, Hüsker Dü’s increasing brushes with the then-very-burgeoning American hardcore scene, and Mould’s functional alcoholism, resulted in the Dü becoming the fastest hardcore band in the world at the time (they would not be eclipsed until the release of the Dirty Rotten EP in 1983).

So with the Hüskers busy pushing themselves to the limits, the Substitutes were still trying to find an actual sound throughout the majority of 1979 and 1980. The majority of the band was resistant to punk, not quite understanding what it actually sounded like and dismissing it out of hand in a rather reactionary manner, preferring to cover songs by Yes, Aerosmith, and Ted Nugent. Westerberg, while no stranger to bar rock himself, was a voracious consumer of hip rock magazines like Creem and was knee-deep in the sounds of both American proto-punk like the New York Dolls (particularly the guitar work of Johnny Thunders) and the Dead Boys, as well as the more expressive and melodic work of first-generation English punk like the Jam and the Clash. He also felt what he described as “punk without knowing it” energy emanating from the fast, sloppy, and overbearingly loud approach the band took. Finally, one day, after forcing the rest of the band to listen to the Damned, the flamboyant sounds and styles of their guitarist Captain Sensible finally broke through to Bob Stinson, who took the Damned on as a seminal influence on his own inimitable style— what many have likened to thrashing on his guitar until it reacted as though it were an animal in pain.

The Substitutes— who were, by this point, known as the Impediments— played their first “gig” in a sober space. Of course, as anyone familiar with the legend of the Mats could guess, the band was unable to play without the confidence booster and social lubricant of alcohol, and got themselves booted from the space without even getting to set up, with the space owner proclaiming “The Impediments will never play a note of music in this town again.”

Then, in mid-1980, the band hooked up with Peter Jesperson, a manager— along with Paul Stark— of local hipster record store Oar Folkjokeopus. The world of the Twin Cities rock scene was extremely small back then, and Jesperson was known as someone whose support could make or break a band. Westerberg had submitted a rough demo tape to him in the hopes that they could get him to book a gig for them. Although Jesperson and Stark’s start-up label, Twin/Tone, had previously rejected a song of theirs for a compilation showcasing up-and-coming local artists, the Impediments had evolved a lot just in that short time, with Westerberg writing upwards of 50 songs and the band’s personality really beginning to take shape. The demo tape contained four primordial but energetic and surprisingly tuneful rock’n’roll songs— “Raised In the City,” the heckler-preempting “Shutup,” and lost-to-time boogies “Don’t Turn Me Down” and “Shape Up” (both of which are actually good songs in their own right!)

After hearing the beginning of “Raised In the City,” Jesperson phoned up Westerberg and said, “So, what, we doing a single or were you guys thinking of recording a whole album?” And so began several long years of Jesperson being the band’s enabler, handler, babysitter, but above all, biggest cheerleader. An attempt to get a gig at the Longhorn in July resulted in the Impediments getting slotted in as a replacement for another band, and realizing that their name had been blacklisted in the Twin Cities due to the debacle at the sober space, the band decided on a simple nom de plume to properly debut under— the Replacements.

Again, all of this was happening as Hüsker Dü were busy building their reputation as an indescribably powerful loud act. They were also not immune to the same puckish sensibility as the Mats— when they played with Minor Threat, Mould decided to voice his disapproval of the straight-edge movement that band had inadvertently fostered by scattering aspirin across the stage as they were about to play (ultimately a harmless and pretty funny heckle). For his part, Minor Threat’s Ian MacKaye had no problem with the Dü’s drinking and drugging, and only took issue with what he saw as a calculated and decidedly non-punk business move— for their first recorded release, instead of showcasing their punishingly loud and increasingly accelerating live set, Hüsker Dü instead pressed “Statues b/w Amusement,” a single that trafficked entirely in Joy Division-inspired post-punk dirges.

At the time, though, it was less of a business move than a survival tactic for the Hüskers, who had been refused a signing by Twin/Tone— who already had their hands full with the antics of the Replacements— resulting in Mould, Hart, Norton, and Twin Cities scene luminary Terry Katzman forming their own record label in January of 1981, Reflex Records, to press the single and take it on tour with them, bartering it for everything from food to clothes while they played gigs with everyone from the Dead Kennedys to DOA, while also giving it to record stores on consignment in hopes of having a little bit of cash to live on when they got home. Although the record didn’t do badly (and their record label would go on to press well-regarded records by bands who similarly blurred the lines between post-punk and hardcore like locals Man-Sized Action and Rifle Sport, Chicago proto-emo legends Articles of Faith, and their Californian compatriots the Minutemen), the Hüskers knew that their live set was what people should be hearing from them.

In August, after returning from a particularly grueling tour, they laid down one of the best sets of their early years during a homecoming show at 7th Street Entry and amateurishly recorded it on a 4-track soundboard for $300. The band reached out to Mike Watt, bassist and stalwart counterpoint of the Minutemen, whom they had met while touring with Black Flag in California. Watt had started a brother label to SST (the label started by Black Flag’s guitarist and bandleader Greg Ginn to release their own music), called New Alliance. Aside from the Cracks In the Sidewalk compilation and a few EPs by his own band (Joy) and some go-nowhere no-namers the Descendents (the Fat EP, back when they were a cross between surf rock and five-thumbed simplistic punk), Watt’s label didn’t have much to its name. But the deeply-ingrained camaraderie of the early American hardcore scene— a kind of national fraternity based on the fact that, at the time, it was extremely rare to meet anyone who loved the same weirdo music as you, and so you needed to stick together— prevailed, and Land Speed Record— so named as a hat-tip to both the Dü’s penchant for speed the drug and speed the sonic quality— was released in January 1982.

Land Speed Record, while not as much of an anomaly in the Dü’s catalog as the “Statues/Amusement” single, is still by far the most aggressive thing that this fundamentally-aggressive band ever released. Old, mid-tempo punk slogs like “Do the Bee” are given an amphetamine-fueled makeover, while the abrasive sloganeering of “Guns At My School” and “All Tensed Up” commingles with goofy hints of melody cropping up in the band’s light-hearted homage to Gilligan’s Island (“I wanna fuck Ginger/underneath a big palm tree/I wanna make the professor/make some good drugs for me”). The version of this record available on Spotify features both sides of the record flying by in one track each, which I think is the most appropriate way to listen. It sounds like absolute shit and that’s part of the larger conceptual point— the Dü was, at the time, the biggest sonic assault available to see live aside from the industrial/noise scene, which was a lot less accessible to American hardcore kids than they were. Amid the screeching guitar wallops, you can hear Hart’s drumming propelling the entire affair with few-to-no count-offs— a testament to how well-honed the band had become as a live machine— as well as the vaguest hints of melody bubbling up in Norton’s bass work. And of course, Mould can’t help himself from indulging in ridiculous guitar solos— noisy and disjointed enough to put Greg Ginn to shame, but with such an innate sense of just-enough-restraint and just-enough-harmony that they feel tasteful anyway amidst the ruckus.

Neither Mould nor Hart had reached their peak as screamers yet, but they hold their own, both managing to make themselves heard above the din (barely— but again, the muddiness and indistinct quality of the songs is part of the appeal). Surprisingly, Norton, who would soon become more of a silent assistant and grounding figure within the band, contributes vocals and songwriting to three songs on Land Speed Record— “MTC,” “Don’t Have A Life,” and the prototypical punk of “Let’s Go Die” (which had been recorded in a much more restrained fashion during a previous studio session, but was ratcheted up to ungodly tempo and decibel level here like everything else). The two big coups here, however, belong principally to the men who would become known as the twin engines of Hüsker Dü’s machine— Mould’s “Bricklayer,” which sounds like four different hardcore songs that aren’t supposed to fit together mashed into one and played with such ferocity that the song leaves a six-foot ditch as an impression, and the set closer, Hart’s “Data Control.” While I wouldn’t necessarily say Hüsker Dü would go on to write anything that sounds quite like “Data Control” ever again— think the slow and droning Joy Division quality of their first single meets screaming hardcore rage, brutal volume, and intensity for five minutes straight, replete with false climaxes and guitar “solos” that sound more like swarming bees attacking and retreating— the song possessed an intangible quality of unorthodox catchiness, irate irascibility, desperation, and experimentation-meets-catharsis that would come to define the best of Hüsker Dü’s output throughout the 80s.

Of course, with little more than a demo and some extremely messy shows to their name, the Replacements lagged far behind the Dü in every professional capacity except one— they had scored a manager (unofficially, but still) and, in the process, signed to the preeminent local indie label, Twin/Tone. The fact that the Mats got the support of Jesperson and his label while the Dü got approximately zero support from these local shakers and tastemakers provided basis for a near-decade-long competition between the two bands; while they remained friendly on personal terms (Mould often listened to oldies pop hits with Westerberg into the wee hours of the night, and an ill-fated motorcycle ride home after borrowing a single from Mould would provide the lyrical basis for the Mats’ “Run It”), there was undeniable tension between their respective fanbases and the bands’ career trajectories. The fact that the Mats managed to record and release their first LP without paying nearly any dues came off to many in the scene as not just entitled, but downright disrespectful when they compared the boozy, ramshackle, unstructured, unintentional-performance-art-piece quality of the Mats’ live set to the Hüskers’ workmanlike consistency and constant grinding.

The Mats also, more than any underground rock act from the Twin Cities, appealed greatly to rock journalists, who saw themselves in the band’s (semi-)functional alcoholism and working-class, Midwest-winter-bitten, unassuming dry wit. Even local new wave favorite the Suburbs, who gave quite a few opening slots to the Mats and the Dü as both were starting out, fell out of favor as it became clear that the local rock cognoscenti were really responding to the Replacements; the Dü’s audience, while not so different to the Mats’ audience in that they were dysfunctional and often substance-dependent kids with few real prospects and a chip on their shoulder, seemed almost un-intellectual in comparison.

(SIDEBAR: This is especially ironic, given that Mould, a white trash native hailing from the so-upstate-it’s-basically-Canada town of Malone, New York, was a gifted child who was attending Macalester on scholarship, while among the four members of the Mats, there was not one driver’s license or high school diploma to be found.)

Of course, nothing could have been more upsetting to the diehard sectarian fanbase of Hüsker Dü than the fact that the Mats started recording their debut LP five months before the Dü recorded Land Speed Record, released it five months before Land Speed Record (in late August of 1981), and recorded it in a proper studio rather than dragging it kicking and screaming from a muffled soundboard recording. Perhaps suspecting this tension (and wisely choosing to laugh at it rather than actively fostering acrimony), the Mats included a shout-out to their Twin Cities rivals, the raucous song-five-side-B burst “Something to Dü,” an ode to growing up in the Midwest with few options to express yourself other than picking up a guitar and wailing your head off.

“Raucous burst” really is one of the best ways to describe the first Replacements LP. Although a few other descriptors (“snotty funcore— because it’s having too much fun to be hardcore”) come close, the only one that really tops it is Westerberg’s own: when Twin/Tone pressed the record and sent it out to stores, they were accompanied by a note telling the clerks to “file under Power Trash.”

Recorded over the course of three chaotic months in sessions that ranged from “productive” to “drinking and smoking while the clock is running,” the record was produced by consummate booster Jesperson, Westerberg himself, and local engineer (and future Hüsker Dü business partner) Steve Fjelstad, a combination of people who would go on to produce every album the Mats recorded while signed to Twin/Tone (with the exception of Hootenanny, which traded out Fjelstad for the far stricter purse-string-holder of the label himself, Paul Stark— but more on that later). The result of the strenuous recording session was a litany of tracks that were deemed “not good enough” for the LP proper— ranging from a muddy jam the band produced in a basement to downright essential, wrongfully-tossed tracks like “You Ain’t Gotta Dance” and “Get On the Stick” to a groovy Bob Stinson-led instrumental called “A Toe Needs A Shoe”— and eighteen songs (squeezed into 36 minutes— not quite matching the Dü’s feat of squishing seventeen songs into 26 minutes, but nothing to sniff at) that seemed to fit together at least somewhat coherently, including newly-recorded versions of both the antagonistic “Shutup” as well as the song that drew Jesperson to the band in the first place, “Raised In the City” (now the LP closer instead of the demo opener, it also traded in its original opening line “Got a little honey, nice tight rear” with the less-provocative “Raised in the city, ready to run,” for little reason other than Westerberg got bored singing the same lyrics over and over and often improvised new ones on the spot, foreshadowing similar antics by Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain).

In the lead-up to the LP’s release, two important developments occurred. First, and more iconic, is the record’s title— Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash— a paean to the fact that if Bob Stinson hadn’t taken the trash out before the band started rehearsing, their sheer volume would cause the trash can to tip over and spill its contents; it also functioned as a neat encapsulation of the Mats’ self-deprecating loser image. Secondly was the fact that Jesperson had talked the band into releasing a promotional single for the record. Although in my opinion he could have done better picking an A-side— his choice of “I’m In Trouble” isn’t a bad song by any means, but it’s a little less immediate and the performance is a little flatter than most songs on Sorry Ma— but on the B-side, he included a song that Westerberg had recorded himself and quietly shown to Jesperson for fear of the band mocking him: the country-flavored acoustic ballad “If Only You Were Lonely.” As time went on, the solo tapes that Westerberg showed to Jesperson would get more plentiful, and more of this soulful energy would seep into the band’s ouvre.

Taken on its own merits, though, Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash is the definitive document of the early Replacements sound, before they really began to evolve into who they were with Let It Be. Stink and Hootenanny— more to come on them later— were both fine records, but were also held back by various almost-imperceptible flaws, whether it’s the band trying to be something they weren’t on Stink or whether it’s the band leaning into who they were a little too much on Hootenanny. Sorry Ma is tight and focused, a single-minded battalion of bar rock, masquerading as punk, masquerading as bar rock, masquerading as punk. The production warbles and shifts around a bit, owing to how long it took the Mats to actually make the record, but it’s ultimately dry and tight, with Bob Stinson and Westerberg each taking up a channel and playing off each other in more imaginative ways than the typical lead-rhythm dynamic— both of them play off-kilter riffs that woozily call and respond to each other, letting each other take this solo and that solo.

The Mats’ unique guitar style comes from both Bob’s never-fully-tapped reservoir of extremely physical and kinetic energy as well as the way Westerberg writes songs; his hands are slightly deformed, he never learned how to read music traditionally, and he is dyslexic, so he would often form chords in a non-traditional voicing as well as play certain chord progressions backwards. Because Westerberg isn’t playing “normal” chords, it allows bassist Tommy Stinson— only fourteen at the time of recording, but a nearly supernatural musical prodigy by the standards of punk— to avoid simply backing up the guitars with root notes, and so he fills in the plentiful sonic gaps with nimble eighth notes and an acute ear for sculpting his own melodies within the song. And always the secret weapon, Chris Mars wacks away with reckless abandon, avoiding kick drum patterns almost entirely and relying on a restless hi-hat attack (an approach he shares with Grant Hart, surprisingly enough, although Mars is both less frantic and less disciplined) which drives the intensity of the whole band’s sound forward.

The songs themselves are phenomenal, catchy punk/hard rock/power pop gems ranging from the moody herky-jerky rhythms of opener “Takin’ A Ride” to the howling four-on-the-floor workout “Customer” to my personal favorite song on the record, “Shiftless When Idle,” one of the Mats’ many tributes to Midwest boredom but imbued with a swaggeringly confident verse, an ascendant and triumphantly melodic chorus, a deft and dynamic bridge that oozes tension and release, some “na-na-na” contoids courtesy of Westerberg (I’m always a sucker for that shit) and a take-it-home finale that features some of Westerberg’s most shameless yowling yet.

I’d also be remiss not to mention some of the earliest hints of the Mats’ wiseass immaturity going so far that it folds back into wise maturity. There’s “Johnny’s Gonna Die,” a slower, almost nightclub-esque tribute to Johnny Thunders, who wouldn’t die for another decade, but Westerberg had seen him live, seen the way the man consumed drugs like they were water and he was dehydrated, and rightfully, almost dispassionately, came to the obvious conclusion. There’s also the other audience antagonizer on the record, “I Hate Music,” which in between snotty and quite-punk declarations of instrumental inadequacy (“I hate music/it’s got too many notes”) secretly slips in one of Westerberg’s most quietly profound statements about angry teenagerdom (“I hate my father/one day I won’t”).

The whole record is full of Matsian idiosyncrasies— from Westerberg’s wordplay in “Careless” to the extremely weird guitar hooks that Bob Stinson would come up with to complement (or in some cases supplant) the vocal hooks, like the line breaks in the aforementioned “Careless” as well as the simultaneously comforting and menacing minimalist guitar phrase that casts itself all over early LP standout, the melancholic mid-tempo “Kick Your Door Down.” There’s also “Otto,” which would have been one of the most forgettable tunes on the record if not for the song’s merry-go-round-broke-down hairpin turn into despondent countrified rock.

Westerberg’s lyrics, which would soon become the dominant force and appeal of the Mats in this writer’s opinion, were already in fine form. As discussed previously, Westerberg is bγƨlɘxiɔ, but when he decided to become the primary songwriter for the Mats, he forced himself to go the library and read literature, even though it was hard for him, just to work out that muscle in his brain. It paid off in spades in conjunction with his sometimes-dry, sometimes-dark, acutely self-aware sense of humor— see his warning to his lover that he’s a “Rattlesnake” (at this time Westerberg was, by all accounts, a bit of a lech) or the charmingly roguish “Love You Till Friday” (which predates the Cure’s reversal of the concept, “Friday I’m In Love,” by over a decade).

That sense of humor seeped into the LP’s packaging as a whole— one of my favorite Mats touches is the liner notes for Sorry Ma, which are mostly made up of Westerberg ripping into his own band as if he were reviewing the record for Creem (he was openly influenced by that magazine’s own Rick Johnson in his succinct, droll writeups): of “Otto,” he writes “We ain’t crazy about it either. Also, this song is proof that Chris Mars is one of the best drummers we could find at the time”; of “Kick Your Door Down,” he admits that it was “written 20 minutes after we recorded it”; “Careless” prompts him to reassure the listener “Don’t worry, we’re thinking about taking lessons”; and best of all, he describes Bob’s lead in “Customer” as “hotter than a urinary tract infection.”

WINNER: THE REPLACEMENTS.

Hüsker Dü was weighed down by several things in this early round: their difficulty with writing discrete, memorable songs; their inability to pin down their own personality and stylistic sensibilities; lack of confidence when they were in the studio and poor recording quality when they were outside the studio. While I personally love Land Speed Record, I’m fully cognizant of its flaws and inaccessibility. I’m also not hot on “Statues/Amusement” simply because for me, Capital-P Post-Punk rarely reaches the standards set by Wire’s Pink Flag or Gang of Four’s Entertainment!. Don’t worry, though— in just a few short months, Bob Mould would discover the Cure and adapt their textured, gauzy, cascading guitar layers for a hardcore context, while Hart would find more confidence in indulging his hippy-dippy side. For his part, the production would soon allow us to actually hear Norton’s bass.

Meanwhile, even in the yet-to-be-codified American hardcore scene of the early 80s, which allowed extremely bizarre acts who didn’t fit in anywhere else— Minutemen, Flipper, Saccharine Trust, Meat Puppets— to flourish as long as they were uncompromising, had a work ethic, and were at least informed by punk in spirit, the Mats managed to eke out a sound of their own in an astonishingly short amount of time. Sorry Ma attracted a lot of attention from the rock press, who at the time were mostly ignoring straightforward hardcore in favor of New York’s no wave scene, and for good reason— it’s an uncouth, blurry fun-fest, and even the songs that aren’t necessarily standouts, like “Don’t Ask Why” and “More Cigarettes,” carry the energy along smoothly and stand up well in their own right.

MATS 1, DÜ 0

ROUND TWO: IN A FREE LAND? OR HEY, FUCK YOU, MAN? FIGHT!!!
(February 1982-January 1983)

In late 1981 and early 1982, the Dü, proving that there was no ill will towards the Mats (or maybe having been softened up by the good-natured “Something to Dü”), took the latter band on a string of dates in Chicago, playing with more straightforwardly-hardcore bands like the Effigies as well as bands visiting from out of town, like LA’s prides and joys Black Flag and the Circle Jerks. Although both bands were intrigued by hardcore, they took these new influences in radically different directions.

Hüsker Dü, perhaps influenced by the more sonically adventurous yet still ferocious tunes coming out of Chicago via Articles of Faith and Naked Raygun, realized they could maintain their intensity and volume without sacrificing the, at their heart, pure pop songs they still wanted to write. Rapidly recording and releasing a new single for New Alliance, this acknowledgment of broader ambitions as songwriters resulted in a spectacular proclamation— the chiming and anthemic political cattle prod “In A Free Land.” Although R.E.M. certainly wasn’t an actual influence, nor was their early work influenced by the Dü— they were yet to issue the Chronic Town EP and were known, if they were known at all, for the plaintive and indecipherable jangle-mumble-rock-pop of the “Radio Free Europe”/”Sitting Still” single on tiny indie Hib-Tone— one can almost pick up a precedent to the ringing, unorthodox creativity of Peter Buck’s guitar work in Mould’s 60s pop-inspired chord progression and meticulously spare guitar solo, buried as it is under a trebly and over-driven mix. “In A Free Land” sounds like what Hüsker Dü had really been trying to become since the beginning— thunderously powerful, speedy yet weighty, and almost unbearably catchy and cacophonous all at once. It’s their first truly perfect song, a harbinger of things to come even if it isn’t as polished as the Dü would become at their peak.

Tellingly, the B-side of “In A Free Land” tempered the band’s newfound melodic explosion with two hardcore flamethrowers— the inchoate, formlessly noisy and nearly rhythm-less Hart-led rambler “What Do I Want?” (don’t let my description turn you off, the song’s a ripper) and the Mould-led rambler “MIC,” which is much more straightforward and less politically articulate than the A-side. Still, it was a smart move to dose their ever-sweetening stew with a couple of spices— even if, lyrically, “In A Free Land” was one of their least sunny outings yet.

Meanwhile, the Mats took hardcore’s raggedy, roughshod energy, kids-soccer-team-energy tempos, and political sloganeering as a challenge. While the Mats would whip out a “pussy set” to infuriate hardcore audiences when they were opening for acts like Black Flag— a set entirely composed of their slower tunes (including artificially slowing down and slackening the performance on fast songs), meandering covers of lackadaisical country and bar band standards, switching instruments on the fly, and enjoying an acidic verbal back-and-forth with pissed-off audience members— Westerberg was secretly taking hardcore’s musical maxims to heart, if only as a dalliance. Despite Westerberg pretending to see hardcore as only an object of derision— he is quoted as saying that he thought the incessant anti-Reagan posturing was foolish, if only because of how obviously bad Reagan was, so can you please try to say something new?— the lines between parody and sincere affection were blurred as the Mats took to their now-well-worn Blackberry Way studio to record their follow-up to Sorry Ma. Twin/Tone’s Paul Stark was hesitant about allowing the Mats to record another LP so soon (roughly seven months) after the release of their debut, but the band’s guardian angel Jesperson, as always, managed to convince Stark to relent with the promise that it would be short (“an EP or mini-LP”) and that the label wouldn’t have to pay for artwork— instead, they’d get a bunch of blank white sleeves and the band and Jesperson would stamp each record themselves, by hand.

Jesperson wouldn’t have been so adamant about the Mats getting back in the studio if he hadn’t already heard the first song they’d written for it— “Kids Don’t Follow,” a deliberate send-up of then-rising-stars U2 and their anthem, “I Will Follow”— and thought to himself, “People need to hear this now.” And while the band would eventually be less than satisfied with the results of the record (naming it Stink and, in typical Mats fashion, stamping “The Replacements Stink” on the jacket of every single copy of the record), the high quality of “Kids Don’t Follow” was so immediately apparent that the EP was subtitled as “‘Kids Don’t Follow’ plus seven.”

The EP begins with a stroke of anti-authoritarian genius— a recording of a Minneapolis police officer busting up a house gig that the Mats were playing (very famously, the kid who yells “Hey, fuck you, man!” at the cop is Dave Pirner, who was at the time playing in a rough-hewn local hardcore band called Loud Fast Rules, which would later become one of the preeminent breakthrough bands of the alt rock era, Soul Asylum). Then the band launches into a not-great-but-completely-perfect recording of “Kids Don’t Follow,” which, for what it’s worth, is probably their first truly perfect song. I don’t know exactly where Bob Stinson came up with that guitar line, but it’s beautiful— heroic and pugnacious and sensitive and powerful all at once, it carries the song on its back while Westerberg howls his words with the conviction that all great anthems are made of.

Unfortunately, in an attempt to fill out space (and keep in mind that the whole record still clocks in at under fifteen minutes), the record becomes home to more than a few misses— the heart of the record is taken up by middling quasi-hardcore rants “Stuck In the Middle,” “Dope Smokin’ Moron,” and “God Damn Job,” all of which are serviceable teenager complaint-core but fall a bit short of what the Mats had already proved they were capable. It also stutters to a close with “Gimme Noise,” a stale rebuke of their friends the Suburbs “going disco” that doesn’t rock hard enough to justify its existence.

Still, the bright spots on Stink are blindingly bright. Aside from “Kids Don’t Follow,” which we’ve established is phenomenal, there’s another deviation from formula in the form of distorted blues number “White and Lazy,” which accentuates the Mats’ traditional white-trash self-deprecation with an enjoyably haphazard harmonica performance and lopes along at its own speed, relative to the manic quality of most of the rest of the record. The other sonic deviation is “Go,” which also slows the tempo down to a relative crawl and makes the most of the record’s claustrophobic production, deliberately making much of the verses spare and allowing Tommy Stinson to show off his expressive and nuanced bass work before the elder Stinson gently leans into wistful, haunting guitar breaks during the “chorus,” creating masterful tension between the highly malleable guitar melody and what we already know about Bob as an eccentric and unpredictable guitarist. And of course, the song where Westerberg’s flirtation with hardcore turns into full-blown romance, “Fuck School,” succeeds precisely because it lands in that Mats sweet spot of marrying affectionate parody (Westerberg has gone on record that much of Stink was written to spoof hardcore— whether that’s actually true or it’s just a post-facto face-saving maneuver is up in the air) with in-jokey ribbing (it’s one of Westerberg’s many cheeky winks and nudges about Tommy Stinson’s youth) and genuine emotion (say what you will about it being a joke, Paul— you really sound like you hate school on this track).

Still, the Mats could do no wrong in the eyes of the critics, and Stink garnered even more rave reviews than Sorry Ma. The jury is still out on how exactly the Dü and the rest of the band’s hardcore peers felt about a kinda-sorta dig at their genre of choice becoming more critically acclaimed than most of the actual records in the genre, but it also allowed the Mats to continue to soldier on, so I can’t grouse too much.

At this point, though, the Dü were decidedly less concerned with the Mats as their own musical maturation was starting to come fast, hard, and almost involuntarily; the Hüskers had spent the summer and fall of 1982 recording enough material for two LPs with SST’s in-house producer, Spot. The earlier sessions yielded their proper studio debut, Everything Falls Apart, which the band would release on Reflex in January of 1983, while the material from their autumn session would be edited down into their SST debut later that year.

Everything Falls Apart feels exactly how its title suggests— a grab-bag of disparate hardcore, pop, and pop-hardcore songs, Hüsker Dü was bursting at the seams and desperate to shed their cocoon and become the band they were meant to be. The LP is structured pretty traditionally, in that the A-side features the more accessible “hits” while the B-side features more exploratory material. Opener “From the Gut” is fairly simplistic— a militaristic oompah beat and palm-muted chug guitar alternating with a more ethereal mid-tempo section, the lyrics are sparse and the song reminds more of how nowadays a lot of hardcore bands will open their records with a short, straightforward mosh part to get the listener in the mood for the rest of the album. Aside from a traditional Mould solo, “From the Gut” is a rambunctious anti-classic that sets the tone for Everything Falls Apart more than it functions as an actual song, but it’s still an essential part of the LP.

The record truly begins in earnest with “Blah Blah Blah,” a collaborative song between Mould and Norton (evidenced by the strong, catchy bass line that opens the track) that sounds like proto-pop-punk, what with its gang-vocal-suffused chorus, hooky verses, and straightforwardly rock’n’roll guitar solo. It’s a great song, and a fine entry point to the early Hüsker ouvre. It’s fitting, then, that it’s followed by a three-song suite of Mould-driven ripping hardcore; “Punch Drunk” and the returning “Bricklayer” are both frenetic forerunners of the powerviolence genre (Charles Bronson even covered the former), while “Afraid of Being Wrong” is a rough-and-dirty primitive three-chord hardcore song in the vein of the earliest Black Flag material. Again, these are all fantastic songs, but they fly by so quickly that the listener is unable to digest the depth of each song’s construction without multiple listens; nonetheless, the energy is so infectious and irresistible that I wouldn’t trade these songs for anything else.

Side one concludes with Hart’s first earnest contribution to the record, an entirely unironic cover of 60s hippie icon Donovan’s “Sunshine Superman", replete with bubbly bass and a thin, playful guitar showing from Mould that accentuates the goofy, endearing amateurishness of Hart’s vocal work. It’s at once a hello and a goodbye— the beginning of Hart letting his barefoot hippie flag fly in the face of punk orthodoxy, which would become an essential element of subsequent Dü releases, as well as the last real “old-school” Hüsker song before side two would introduce a more confident band, more in line with what the band would write throughout their legendary mid-80s run.

Side two begins explosively with “Signals from Above,” an experimental noise rock number that does in under two minutes what it was taking Sonic Youth a full album to accomplish on that year’s Confusion Is Sex LP. It showcases both Hart’s drumming prowess along with Mould’s ability to harness static and feedback in ways that feel absolutely essential to the texture of the song.

Following “Signals from Above” is the title track, which is in my opinion one of two huge standouts on the LP. It’s hard to convey how revolutionary this song sounds in the context of today, when we have heard a million guitar pop songs that sound exactly like it— although there had been forerunners, like Mission of Burma’s “Academy Fight Song” and “That’s When I Reach for My Revolver,” I would say that “Everything Falls Apart” is the first fully-formed Alternative Rock song, as the genre would later be codified. It’s got that immediately recognizable chord progression in conjunction with Mould’s vocal hook, it’s got clever dynamics out the ass, and it has both a solo and a lilting, uplifting, atmospheric-yet-punchy chorus which serve to exemplify Mould’s ability to build iconic guitar tones from scratch.

In comparison to both the title track and the LP’s monumental closer “Gravity,” it’s easy to make the argument that the three tracks in between are filler, but again, I wouldn’t sacrifice them for the world— Hart’s noisy and literally-offbeat ode to going on a date with Sharon Tate, “Wheels,” is deceptively dark and moody in a sonic sense, which belies the light-heartedness of the lyrics (“I got a really big engine/and it goes vroom, vroom”) and adds dissonance to the whole affair. Meanwhile, Mould contributes “Target” and “Obnoxious,” minuscule and vibrantly catchy rebukes to the stagnating social policies of the hardcore scene at the time, proof that Westerberg’s antipathy towards de riguer hardcore attitudes had begun to rub off on his rivals (and providing thematic fodder for the not-conforming-with-the-anti-conformists lyrical firebrands that Mould would continue to explore on later releases).

And, lastly, there’s this LP’s masterpiece, “Gravity,” which is in my shortlist for the best songs this band ever wrote. Hart provides one of his most steady and focused beats on the record and, indeed, the whole band’s catalog— without his assiduous control of the song’s tempo and tone, it would sound completely different, but he takes a wisely restrained approach to the affair that helps make the rest of the song’s elements stand out even further. For the majority of the song, Mould takes a relative backseat as well, sidelining his more riffy sensibilities for a textured wash of chordal and tonal ephemera, and for the first time Norton’s bass work takes center stage. Norton absolutely owns the primary section of the song, opting to play an oceanic ascending-descending melody on his bass, rocking the listener back and forth gently while Mould delivers his lines in a sing-shout-spoken-word hybrid that would eventually become the standard for bands like mewithoutYou and La Dispute.

All this would make for a great closer on its own, but the band completely pivots for the climax of the song, with Mould and Norton both mimicking a sort of stutter with their respective instruments, relishing in a brief respite of empty space where Hart’s spare, steady drum work takes center stage, and then locking into what I can only describe as Queen-gone-hardcore, or maybe more accurately hardcore-gone-Queen. Mould uses the opportunity to prove for perhaps the first time why he is considered to be among the true guitar heroes of 80s indie rock along with J Mascis and D Boon, taking what starts as a few simple scale runs and turning them into a full-blown triumphant finale, sliding from movement to movement with grace and ease. It’s a moment that gives me chills every time I listen, both a fitting coda to Hüsker Dü’s time as one of the best bands to ever play hardcore and a taste of them as the band who would rip up the rulebook and change what hardcore could and would be.

WINNER: HÜSKER DÜ

This round really came down to whether or not each band had settled on their voice; the Mats had already found a voice and decided to sideline it for the majority of their sophomore release. If Stink had been a 7” or EP with “Kids Don’t Follow” and “Fuck School” as the A-side and “Go” as the B-side (maybe throw in “White & Lazy” as you see fit), it would have been an unimpeachable and seminal record, but it’s bogged down by Westerberg’s uncertainty as a songwriter, vacillating between genuine moments of catharsis and ingenuity and bog-standard tunes that don’t quite reach the threshold of “hardcore.” Like I said, the Mats were the first hardcore-adjacent band; their flaw on Stink was fooling themselves into thinking they could play in the hardcore sandbox without committing to the real anger that all hardcore is rooted in. I don’t mean to say that the Mats couldn’t be pissed off, and in fact anger is a running undercurrent in several of their best songs, but it works best as part of the greater tapestry of feeling they could evoke, not as a flaccid and forced attempt to be anything other than themselves.

Hüsker Dü, on the other hand, really came into their own here, with a cumulative 24 minutes of near-flawless material that cements their versatility as songwriters— not only could they play searing hardcore with more virtuosity and energy than pretty much all of their peers (excluding Bad Brains, objectively the most talented hardcore band of the 80s), they were writing pop songs that would make Billboard chart-toppers jealous and deliberately choosing to bury them under walls of distortion, speed, and fury, announcing themselves as a band that was bulldozing boundaries without even knowing it. If the Mats were already inadvertent experts at self-mythologizing, Hüsker Dü bypassed the myth-making altogether in favor of letting their music do the talking, and set the stage for the massive leaps forward they would make in the process.

MATS 1, DÜ 1

ROUND THREE: IT’S YOUR HAYDAY, PLAY WHAT YOU WANNA PLAY— FIGHT!!!
(February-December 1983)

Stink was the Mats’ only real stab at playing anything like hardcore, and they seemingly share my opinion that they were ill-suited to being any band other than the Replacements. Following Stink, the Mats were ready to take back their identity, and in the process discovered yet-more avenues in which to play— some of them succeeded on their own merits while others failed, but all are quintessentially the Replacements in the way that only they could be.

The Mats were, as stated above, singular experts at self-mythologizing without even knowing it. Jesperson had said before that part of what drew him to the Replacements was the way that their bottled-lightning chemistry mimicked that of his childhood idols the Beatles— each of the four members had stepped into a codified role within the band absent of any major-label image-sculpting or calculated marketing.

The two indisputable stars were, of course, Paul Westerberg and Tommy Stinson. Westerberg was the unconventionally attractive focal point of the band, shy and retiring when left to his own devices but with the capacity to meld the rueful magnetism of a poet laureate with the understated yet undeniable charisma of a dry-witted stand-up comedian; the type of person who was unquestionably the smartest guy in the room, and therefore smart enough to play to the unspoken expectations of his background and upbringing, often over-exaggerating his natural Midwest accent and playing dumb for his own amusement. The younger Stinson, then, was the consummate teen idol— constantly surrounded by girls who were suckered in by his tousled hair, sleepy eyes, and baby face, Stinson leaned into the role, dropping out of school to tour with the band and playing up his youthfulness by occasionally dropping obscenities into a special microphone set up just for him. Stinson was also (at least for a while) the only band member to abstain from alcohol, choosing instead to play arcade games whenever the band played a bar and generally giving the band an air of innocence they might not otherwise have had.

This isn’t to give short shrift to Bob Stinson and Chris Mars by any means. The elder Stinson was an essential element of the chaos of the live Replacements experience— standing up straight, his height and weight gave him the appearance that he was a hulking ox (which wasn’t incorrect— he at one point accidentally absorbed a massive electric shock from a mic stand that probably would have killed anyone else and was ready to play the next day). He would contrast his imposing figure by getting sloppy drunk for nearly every show— Westerberg and Mars were heavy drinkers, too, but Stinson was a hard alcoholic by the age of seventeen and could never quite quit the bottle— and agitate the audience by stripping naked or wearing dresses and skirts onstage. Mars, despite his occasional psychotic breaks (he would occasionally disappear and reappear, having taken on the persona of “Pappy the Clown”), was the quiet and well-coiffed figure who functioned as the eye of the hurricane everywhere the Mats went; despite occasionally missing a beat here and there (and how would it be a Replacements show otherwise?), Mars behind the kit was often the only thing an audience member could regularly rely on.

In time, similar to the nicknames that the Beatles developed (John Lennon was “The Smart One,” Paul McCartney was “The Cute One,” Ringo Starr was “The Funny One,” and George Harrison was “The Quiet One”), the Mats stepped into their own informal nicknames the longer they were on the road and their own interpersonal dramas and dynamics developed: Tommy, using his age as an excuse to be a whiny nuisance, was “The Brat”; Bob, for obvious reasons, was “The Drunk”; Mars was branded “The Chince” due to his stinginess with his per diem; and Paul Westerberg, who was by turns the life of the party and an antisocial asshole, got dubbed “The Louse.”

The Mats’ outsized personalities stood in stark contrast to the singleminded, driving intensity of Hüsker Dü, but that wasn’t the only difference between the two bands’ reputation in the Twin Cities music scene. In fact, Tommy Stinson, with a typical adolescent smirk, not-so-subtly underlined one of the open secrets of the 80s music scene in a zine interview, answering the question of how the Replacements differed from the Dü with the succinct one-liner “We like girls.”

In fact, while Bob Mould was gay, Grant Hart was bisexual and often wrote explicit love songs about girls (Mould’s songs tended to be more ambiguous and gender-neutral). Greg Norton, the most stereotypically gay-looking member of the band with his pierced ears and handlebar mustache, was actually the only straight member. Still, much of Hüsker Dü’s aesthetic was defined by Mould’s hyper-masculinity— with his weight fluctuations (induced by his level of consumption of alcohol, speed, and meth) highlighting either his muscly and tall figure or his sheer burliness, Mould would go on to admit he felt much more at home when he finally accepted his gayness as a member of the bear community, and emphasized a very no-frills, flannel-adorned aesthetic when playing live. Mould was also fascinated with the transgressive and deliberately discomforting work of the outsider gay icons in the Beat movement, in particular William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch— a far cry from the campy and fussy gay stereotype that he saw himself as actively rebelling against.

The Replacements, by contrast, were enamored with Prince’s androgyny; aside from Bob Stinson’s cross-dressing, Westerberg would often gender-bend with his onstage presentation and became a fan of an understated, make-up-adorned look. The Mats would also later on explore a lot of themes of confused sexuality and gender on Let It Be, which lent an extra level of irony to Tommy Stinson’s offhanded quip. Yes, the Replacements liked girls (and girls liked them back), but they were the ones highlighting their ostensibly feminine traits and flirting with the mainstream rock press, while the rugged look and road-dog lifestyle of Hüsker Dü sealed them off in the hardcore scene despite their oft-unorthodox approach to songwriting and their glowing, rave reviews in The Village Voice.

And while Mould was still struggling with accepting his own sexuality (lyrics on “Punch Drunk” included the hilariously un-self-aware “Take a look right in the mirror/what are you, a fucking queer?”), and would continue to bottle up that confusion until it seeped deeply into unspoken themes on the next year’s Zen Arcade, the Replacement’s confusion was part and parcel with their identity; in effect, their identity crisis was an element of their identity itself. And nowhere did they lean into this harder than on their second full-length record, Hootenanny, released in April of 1983.

Recorded in another haphazard three-month stretch at their by-now-trusty Blackberry Way studio, Hootenanny was absent Steve Fjelstad for unknown reasons and was instead presided over by the band’s nemesis-in-chief, Twin/Tone label head Paul Stark. The Mats chafed at any sort of authority, and Stark provided a convenient figurehead for them to rebel against; in one session, instead of recording the song they had actually came to lay down, they famously staged an impromptu switch of instruments and improvised a down-tempo country-western jam to fuck with Stark, and then told him “first song, side one.” With the only lyrics being Westerberg’s bleating of “It’s a hootenanny,” the song became the title track of the record.

That rough-shod, spontaneous energy is all over the record. In a lot of ways, it’s the band sonically and emotionally clearing the slate after the distaste they felt over how Stink came out; it’s also the sound of the band hitting an uncomfortable growth spurt throughout, not yet the band that would write two college rock masterpieces in Let It Be and Tim, but also not the band that was uncomfortable playing anything that wasn’t balls-out rock.

Part of this had to do with their ever-more-eclectic musical palette; long nights spent in the tour van or in Peter Jesperson’s apartment yielded a fascination with 70s power pop standbys like Big Star and Badfinger, while Westerberg was becoming more comfortable exploring entirely different genres in his ever-increasing solo tapes. One of these tapes contained a spare arrangement of a yearning pop gem called “Within Your Reach,” which Jesperson demanded to be recorded as soon as he heard it, rushing Westerberg to the studio late at night to do so without informing the rest of the band. Despite running into Chris Mars at the studio, the three were unable to get the drum sound that both Westerberg and Jesperson felt was essential to the song’s feel— a mechanical, staid beat that owed much to the burgeoning synthpop movement that was branching out of the new wave and New Romantic scenes, a la Gary Numan, Spandau Ballet, and Depeche Mode— and so they resorted to using a drum machine (much to Mars’s chagrin— and in typical Mats fashion, the machine would drop the beat anyway).

Still, with Westerberg playing all other instruments on the track, it’s not a stretch to call “Within Your Reach” the first Paul Westerberg solo song released on an LP. And what a debut it is— possibly the first Mats song that could be called top-down beautiful, it’s easy to see why Westerberg was shy about showing the track to the rest of the band, but it’s drenched in the sort of idiosyncratic pop genius that would have, in an alternate reality, become an MTV hit. Of course, in the ensuing years, songs with similar aesthetics but less of the Mats’ grit and grime would become standards on the channel, like A-ha’s “Take On Me,” but what a great place that alternate reality would be.

If “Within Your Reach” was a stylistic departure in the context of the Mats’ prior material, it fit right in with the rest of Hootenanny in that Hootenanny is consistently inconsistent. While the band was still fine-tuning their trademark blend of insouciant dry wit and aching vulnerability, including two of their best songs— the sublimely-constructed introvert-at-a-party calling card “Color Me Impressed” and the propulsive yet deeply melodic “Hayday”— much of the rest of the album exists as a study in how disjointed and incoherent an LP can be before it ceases to be an LP.

A full half of the album consists of irreverent toss-offs that barely rise above the category of joke songs, and while there’s at least one genuinely hilarious song— “Lovelines,” which features Westerberg doing dramatic, Beat-poetry-influenced readings of the classifieds from City Pages while the band plays an over-the-top pastiche of a groovy lounge performance, always elicits a giggle from me (“Oh yeah, oh yeah, love, kitten!”)— others, like the aforementioned title track, the forgettable surf rock instrumental “Buck Hill,” and the Beatles parody (credited on the record as “mostly stolen”) “Mr. Whirly” all leave me more than a little cold. Bookend tracks “Run It” and “You Lose” are both by-the-numbers punk tunes that not even the Mats’ peculiar performing style can make interesting. It all adds up to a record that’s more fun than it is good, and while it’s essential like all early Replacements LPs, it’s best listened to as a whole while a bit tipsy— the perfect-for-mixtape standouts are few and far between, and if you have an itchy skip finger, there’s plenty of tracks on here that are essentially inessential.

Still, the band’s stylistic detours do provide for at least one interesting diversion— the gloomy, spacey post-punk of “Willpower” is intriguing, despite being a little long— and two all-time classics. The first, “Take Me Down to the Hospital,” is a bluesy boogie-rock number about Westerberg’s bout with pleurisy that again demonstrates their ability to meet real, deep fear of their own mortality with a freewheeling humor, resulting in a captivating gem. The second is the self-deprecating, sloppy, acoustic blues dirge that closes the record, “Treatment Bound.” Again, there’s a fatalism apparent that grounds the song and gives it an air of importance, but that same fatalism allows the band to dismiss any and all concerns about their substance abuse and self-destructiveness with a detached inevitability.

While the rock press was, at this point, completely gripped by the Replacements, and either overlooked or glorified Hootenanny’s fundamental incompleteness as part of their charm, fueled by booze and coke (which they had now graduated to from speed), what Hootenanny really looks like is the fork in the road. The Mats could either grow up or blow up, and although they never really abandoned their sense of humor, Hootenanny is a last hurrah for the earliest days of the Replacements, when self-sabotage was the goal rather than an unfortunate byproduct of their behavior. In that way, Hootenanny is kind of a beautiful record— but only in that way.

Now fully committed to SST (being the label’s first non-West-Coast signing), Hüsker Dü was also going through similar growing pains. But whereas the Mats couldn’t decide whether to abandon adolescence for the intelligent rock they were destined for, the Dü was ready to dispense with the spastic fits and spurts of their past, instead leaning into a more dynamic, focused, and borderline-manic approach and kickstarting their “classic” era. Their debut for SST, the Metal Circus EP, appeared in October of 1983, and it’s hard to listen to it keeping in mind that they had recorded Everything Falls Apart just a few scant months prior. Hart’s precise and nimble yet crashingly heavy drumming style, always one of their trademarks, had been honed by years of touring and recording into a session-player-level proficiency. Norton’s bass work was finally given the spotlight it deserved, and Mould’s guitar tone and playing style was all at once exactly where he wanted it to be— his signature method of suspending certain notes with effects pedals while rapidly maneuvering chords and bathing the whole affair in a wash of fuzz and cranked-up treble was in full effect. Mould easily dips in and out of focus, between iconic riffs and a complementary background buzz, while Norton’s bass provides counterparts and driving melodies as needed, resulting in the most coherent sound of the band’s career thus far.

This is controversial, but I’m willing to go on record as saying neither the Mats nor the Dü ever produced a record that was top-to-bottom perfect, and I say this as a warning before I dash people’s hopes of unabashedly showering praise upon Metal Circus. There are two big misses— the completely unmemorable hammerhead hardcore of “Lifeline” and the floppy, messy stab at noise of EP closer “Out On A Limb” hold Metal Circus back from being shimmering genius all the way through. I also think there were some missed opportunities with several of the tracks they chose to cull from the 12-track recording session, which you can hear in unmastered form on the Extra Circus EP the Numero Group put out a few years ago. While the early version of “Standing by the Sea” is much less immediate and tight than the version that would show up on Zen Arcade, four of the lost tracks— the micro-hardcore blasts “Heavy Handed” and “You Think I’m Scared,” the hyperactive swirl-pop gem “Won’t Change,” and the aggressive weirdo-noise “Is Today the Day”— all could have slotted into the “Lifeline” and “Out On A Limb” spots easily.

Despite these quibbles, there are five undeniable justifications for Metal Circus’s place as an iconic mid-80s hardcore EP: “Real World,” “Deadly Skies,” “It’s Not Funny Anymore,” “First of the Last Calls,” and “Diane.” As you may have noticed, the kick-ass song ratio here is 3:2 Mould to Hart, with Mould still penning the majority of the band’s songs but Hart’s quantity and quality both catching up to him quick. “Deadly Skies” is the only real “hardcore” song here, but its construction is so unorthodox and outsized, its presentation so overbearing and over-emotional, that simply calling it “hardcore” feels like a disservice. “Real World” and “First of the Last Calls” are hypersensitive and melodic without becoming “melodic hardcore,” while “It’s Not Funny Anymore” is perhaps the first song on a hardcore record to be defiantly optimistic and pure pop. “Diane” is, well… it’s “Diane.”

The more expansive soundscape that the Dü has built on Metal Circus provides ample space for both Mould and Hart to explore lyrical topics with more nuance and range than they ever had before— the molten core of their music is still rooted in the seeing-red white-hot rage that defines hardcore, but they had given themselves license to filter other emotions through the din, to build new elements around it, to give themselves an entirely new playground that, at least for now, belonged to them and them alone.

The guitar riff that Mould uses to open “Real World” immediately takes up all the space in the room— it’s so vibrant and cinematic that when the bass and drums come in it feels like wide-screen borders getting blown into full-screen. Mould’s vocals are also reaching their peak on Metal Circus; on both “Real World” and “Deadly Skies” he builds a simmering, passionate desperation and rage throughout that eventually boils over in the climax of each song, his anguished words jutting out of the songs’ rocky textures and providing emotional hand-grips for the listeners.

As far as lyrical concerns go, “Real World” and “Deadly Skies” also share a focus. Mould, while not politically apathetic by any means, was bristling even more at what he saw as hardcore’s dogmatic all-bark-no-bite approach, a sort of “lifestyle anarchism” that he felt would garner no positive systemic change, and a lack of dedication to actually learning about the issues. On “Real World,” his pleas are more plaintive and empathetic— “You’re not a cop or a politician/you’re a person too”— and when that doesn’t work, he switches to churlish and hectoring sarcasm on “Deadly Skies” (“I’d like to protest, but I’m not sure what it’s for… I made a sign to carry to show that I really care”).

The overwhelming fuzz of Mould’s guitar tone gets weaponized for particularly harrowing effect on “Diane”— it’s another example of Hart penning a post-punk dirge in the vein of Joy Division, but Norton’s watery and unnerving bass line as well as the smothering atmosphere of Mould’s guitar turn it into a messy murder ballad with ambience to spare. Reportedly written from the perspective of a real-life serial killer, the lyrics on this one are a little too blunt to really be unnerving (although there is a fairly blasé admittance of rape early in the song which is shocking in its nonchalance). Really, it’s Hart’s vocal work that sells it— his desperate strained shout is always a good sign that things are dour in the world of Hüsker Dü. “Diane” also doesn’t succeed without Mould’s performance in the bridge— I still am not sure how the man did it, but he managed to wrestle swirling guitar sludge into something truly orchestral and poignant.

Hart and Mould further compete for centerpiece of the EP, with Hart contributing “It’s Not Funny Anymore” and Mould offering up “First of the Last Calls.” The former is, like I said earlier, the most sugary pop song to come out of a hardcore band up to that point in time, even surpassing the poppy inclinations of the previous year’s Milo Goes to College. With that in mind, it’s a testament to stellar songwriting and the energy of the performances that it doesn’t feel out of place following up the positively lacerating “Deadly Skies” in the least. Hart turns in another fantastic and sweatily passionate lead vocal as well as providing a much brighter and more earnest counterpoint to Mould’s pessimistic worldview; for Hart, the act of rebelling against punk and hardcore orthodoxy isn’t a snarky too-cool move but an act of genuinely liberating joy. Add in Norton’s iconic bass line and more from Mould’s bottomless well of innovation (it literally sounds like his guitar is whistling during the short phrase between lines in the chorus) and you have the most melodically complex, introspective, and vulnerable hardcore song of 1983. It’s no wonder Lifetime ended up covering this song on Hello Bastards— it’s the entire raison d’etre for emo.

“First of the Last Calls,” for its part, is home to both a whirlwind performance and one of the most affecting melodies of Hüsker Dü’s entire career during the final refrain. A grimacing self-portrait of Mould’s own functional alcoholism, the song is also a bit of a flippant tribute to the Replacements’ hard-drinking ways— it isn’t super-noticeable at first beneath Mould’s unorthodox style and tone, but the climactic riff is actually a deliberate homage to Bob Stinson’s iconic riff on “Kids Don’t Follow.” Either way, it’s just as good as any of the other songs on Metal Circus, and its clear-eyed self-assessment would be something that Mould would continue to plumb the depths of throughout his career.

WINNER: TIE

Although it appears that the Dü submitted a stronger effort simply due to cutting down on quantity of songs, when I look at the situation objectively, I see two bands that each put out five career-best songs, and then otherwise took the year off. The good shit on both Hootenanny and Metal Circus is very good, but neither is a flawless masterpiece and I have to call this one the first draw of the season.

MATS 1, DÜ 1

Sorry that this week’s newsletter was so long. In order to keep from becoming entirely inaccessible, I’m gonna have to split this project in half. Next week we’ll cover the Dü and the Mats from their 1984 opuses— Zen Arcade and Let It Be, respectively— until the end of both bands’ careers. Stay tuned.

-xoxo, Ellie

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