I Hate 1984: Bob, You

No album will ever have quite the impact on me that Zen Arcade did in 1984. I'm not sad or wistful about that fact. Like I said, I don't want to be 14 again. But there's no denying that circumstances will never quite pile up on each other in that same way again to produce an experience that equals hearing Husker Du's best double album for the first time.

If you want to imagine what it was like, think of any moment in your life when you met something radically new that seemed to instantly fill a gap you didn't know was there in your mind.

I was an adolescent, first of all, and so I welcomed Zen Arcade's crazed depression into my self-absorbed mood. "What's going on!/What's going on!/What's going on inside my head?!" struck me as a funny, sensible meditation. The smeared, blue look of the cover was the world as I felt it.

Then there was the music going on inside my head. Not long after Mom and Dad decided to get divorced in 1978, both parents moved from the west side of Madison, Wisconsin, to the east, keeping joint custody of me and my younger brother. Dad bought a stereo, and over the next couple years, he got me most of the Beatles records from Revolver onward. The White Album, in particular, got heavy play in my living room when I was 9. I loved two other double LPs before Zen Arcade: London Calling, from about age 12, and Jimi Hendrix's Electric Ladyland, from about age 13. (The first album I ever bought was also a double album: the Star Wars soundtrack.) Hardcore punk reached my stereo that same year, in 1983, and was still an open book for me when my friend Joel Paterson played me Zen Arcade. In many ways, the new album seemed a culmination of all the others.

To back up for a second, Joel had already initiated me into hardcore: As I wrote here, I had already been to shows, and was wearing what I thought were punk clothes. The DJs at the local listener-sponsored station, WORT-FM, were clueless about hardcore, with the sole exception of Pete Rabid--Husker Du's biggest champion in Madison. Before Zen Arcade, it seemed like most '77 punks didn't take hardcore seriously. That might explain why Husker went from gigging at a club (Merlyn's) when they came to town to playing a tiny all-ages community center (Wil-Mar), then a gymnasium (Turner Hall, site of my first and last Husker show, in 1985, with Soul Asylum opening).

Joel had also gotten me into psychedelia (as well as Jimi Hendrix and the Clash, by the way). Later in 1984, I remember Joel playing me the Byrds' "Eight Miles High" and then the Husker Du cover version, back to back, and me having trouble deciding which was better. I didn't figure out until years later that both recordings, as well as much of Zen Arcade, owed a lot to John Coltrane. You can hear bop not only in the modal scales of "Reoccurring Dreams," but also in the way the way Bob Mould screams around a melody, sax-style, varying it the way Coltrane did. Listen now to how he does the same thing on Zen Arcade's "Chartered Trips," where he repeats the whole "I thought I earned myself a trip away" refrain, but makes the words virtually incomprehensible the second time.

To understand the impact Zen Arcade had, you have to imagine loving all these different kinds of music. Loving the Dead Kennedys, loving R.E.M.'s second album, loving Hendrix guitar trips, loving '60s folk-pop--but never hearing any of this stuff combined in the way Husker Du did: Like two adolescents giving in to an I-hate-the-world-from-pole-to-pole-and-myself-along-with-it screaming match.

   Greg Norton's bass was a melodic blur

I had never heard, for example, Husker Du themselves: I somehow missed their Wil-Mar show, and hadn't bought their albums. So the voice on Zen Arcade's first track, "Something I Learned Today," was entirely new to me. It was an almost abstract combination of scat and scream: Bob Mould's "Something I learned today/black and white is always grey" became "Su tin ah Urgh te-tay! Arghkawan-ah Ur! Tur! Tur!" Though not as fast as most thrash, the music was still speeding. It kept jerking you around, too--and CRASHSHSHSHSHING into itself. Grant Hart's drumming was one long fill. Greg Norton's bass was a motorized, bouncing blur. When the band jumped, they jumped together. It was the tightest imaginable mess.

What struck me as much was that the scream gave way to a wail whose melody sounded straight out of the '66-'67 pop I'd been soaking up that summer. Minor Threat had covered "Steppin' Stone," but this was something else. When Mould sang, "I'm not inside--iiiih iiiiiiihde--your braaaaain! Aaaaai-aaai-aai-aaain," he really sang it, square on key, and with resulting chords that reminded me of the pastoral "miles and miles" stuff of the Who, the Byrds, and, of course, the Beatles. This wail didn't soften the way those old voices did, though, and it didn't mock itself the way most punks would. "Hardcore R.E.M." was what I called the sound in the high school newspaper that year, writing my first record review. But it was more like a long soul shout without any blues intonation: This was white folk delivered with black R&B's intensity.

    Can you believe this '84 flyer?

Grant Hart's singing arrived only at the end of "Something I Learned Today," and made me laugh. Joel and I looked at each other. What is this? The backing voice was downright pretty, his ay-ay-ay even more startlingly than Mould's ai-ai-ain. Years later, I felt Husker Du lost something when Hart started screaming more and Mould began screaming less. On Zen Arcade, though, the drummer was a feminine foil for Mould, a Mick Jones to Mould's Joe Strummer. (I have a feeling they will both hate me for saying that.) The Hart moment everyone remembers comes on Side Three, which Joel skipped to right away: "Pink Turns to Blue," the most eerily lovely thing on the album. Whole genres were contained in its falsetto feedback. When I learned years later that Mould was openly gay, and Hart openly bi, I began to see the pink as well as the blue in Zen Arcade. "The Biggest Lie" claws at some kind of closet: "Back to your day job/back to your girlfriend/back to your hometown--the biggest lie!"

      from a recent Bob Mould gig in NYC

Zen Arcade was no more autobiographical than most punk albums: It dealt with issues, and appeared to follow a narrative. "Broken Home, Broken Heart," the second track, had a title that was self-explanatory: "Your parents fight/You don't know who's wrong or right/have to cry yourself to sleep at night."

Still, I couldn't help but feel something of myself in that song. I should say right now that my parents' breakup ended with two happy families. But the definition of a trauma is any swift, severe delivery of evidence that the world is not as you think it is (or think it should be), and watching my mother and father fight their way out of love fits the bill. I don't remember any band before this song tackling the subject of divorce in such a straightforward way. I wonder why not? Maybe because no music before punk seized on conflict as its richest subject, or because the tone of most punk up to that point was to sneer at pain rather than wallow in it. Or maybe it was just that more parents were getting divorced by then.

Husker Du wallowed with the best of them. And "Whatever," the album's emotional climax three sides later, had a Mould character even blaming his parents' fights for the alienated dreamlife he made out of adulthood. "Mom and Dad, I'm sorry/Mom and Dad, don't worry/I'm not the son you wanted, but what could you expect/I've made my world of happiness to combat your neglect." Then he turns the end of that "neglect" into one of his punk-melismatic abstractions: "eehhh-eh-eh eh...eeeh-eehh, eeh-eehhhhhhhhhh." Whenever I hear that, I feel like I'm back in 1984, wallowing with him.

                            Bob Mould's Wall of Flying V

I won't continue any kind of track-by-track analysis, in part because Bob Mould himself is due onstage at First Avenue at 7:00 p.m. tonight (here's David DeYoung's review of the show--Shit, I guess I missed the relevant fact that Mould moved to D.C. three years ago. It was nice, if extraneous, of Walsh to mention this blog).

Track three, "Never Talking to You Again," seems a good place to stop, anway: a strummy 12-string acoustic number sung by Grant Hart (with Mould's weird, froggy backing vocals) that might have been a welcome study in contrast for the first 50 listens to Zen Arcade, but is now one of the three songs I skip over every time I play the CD. (The other two being the instrumental "Reoccurring Dreams," unless I'm in the mood for extended meltdown, and "The Newest Industry," which feels like too little melodically too late in the album.)

And speaking of the Who, while I've been calling Zen Arcade a rock opera all my life, I never quite saw the story, and now I wonder if using classic rock terminology wasn't a plot by Who fans-turned-critics to tame an entirely unprecedented and unaccountable masterpiece into something more familiar. (I seem to remember the band guffawing on Rabid's radio show about the running "theme," the implication being the only connection was, you know, drugs.)

  1994 tribute album on Synapse by various artists

Comparing Husker Du to the Pixies, whose tantrums seem to me to be entirely free of pain, seems equally reductive. I won't bore you with the old saw that Zen Arcade birthed modern rock as we know it ("hardcore R.E.M."), or talk about the way the band's non-punk appearance, obscured on album covers, changed the way punk looked at itself. ("They look like truckers," Joel said. "I always imagined they'd have Mohawks.")

It was the best album ever from Minneapolis, and I couldn't have placed it on a map in 1984.