Hüsker Dü – “No Promise Have I Made” from Candy Apple Grey (1986 Warner)
You know, at 45 years of age, I’m coming to terms with the fact that I’m both a terminal and a lousy punk. I guess I contain multitudes.
Take for instance, the recent death of Mojo Nixon. My point of reference was the Dead Milkmen’s “Punk Rock Girl” (If you don’t got Mojo Nixon then your store could use some fixin’), a song I think I had probably heard by 1990 or so. In other words, I’ve had 35 years to muster up the energy to sample even part of one Mojo Nixon track. But did I? Of course not.
(And honestly, I probably won’t. Reading about his catalog in the obits was enough for me, I think.)
In a similar vein, having received my punk rock education on the not-so-mean streets of Minneapolis, you’d think I’d have spent more time immersing myself in the Hüsker Dü or Replacements catalogs. I try to rationalize this by plotting time on an axis, given that I didn’t really start attending shows until 1996, but that doesn’t work, because by that metric I shouldn’t like early DC hardcore, or Middle Class, or, shit, bop. And anyway, didn’t I recently procure both a Man-Sized Action LP and the Twin/Tone 1979 compilation Big Hits of Mid-America Volume III?
I guess I know enough. I know that my favorite Replacements song is “Kids Don’t Follow” but that “Skyway” is the saddest, even though “Here Comes a Regular” isn’t close behind*. I know that Flip Your Wig is my favorite Hüsker Dü album, and that really I like Sugar better than anything Bob Mould did in this iconic trio. I know that Jason Narducy has been touring and recording with Bob since forever ago because forever ago I worked for Narducy’s suburban Chicago painting company DaVinci Brothers** until he let me go for being too slow (he wasn’t wrong). Finally, I even know that “It’s Not Funny Anymore” is a Hüsker Dü song, even if I did labor for years under the illusion that the Lifetime version was an original, not a cover.
But there are people out here who know the difference between Hootenanny and Pleased to Meet Me, or Land Speed Record and Zen Arcade, and, well, I’m just not one of them.
All the same, when I see someone on the street in my new Southern California environs wearing a Replacements shirt, I feel like I’m supposed to say something as a native Minneapolitan and a punk. Thankfully for all involved, I keep my fucking trap shut.
In the end, Minneapolis punk for me will always be Dillinger Four.
I don’t know. Maybe it’s just that the two punk powerhouses that preceded them have such deep catalogs that it feels intimidating to find my way in. Because when I do, it’s not like I have ever found anything that I don’t like, even if I would probably rather listen to Minor Threat than early Hüsker Dü.
Candy Apple Grey, though, coming as it does after Flip Your Wig introduced a new level of tunefulness to the band’s sound, kind of foreshadows all that I would later love about Sugar, especially their album File Under: Easy Listening. Perhaps no track on the album does this more than the closer, “All This I’ve Done for You,” which comes immediately after “No Promise Have I Made,” which to my ears foreshadows Semisonic. You get to decide how to feel about that.
And I think maybe that’s all I want to say about that. This is a band that has been dissected and reconstructed and redissected by people, as we’ve established, far more qualified than myself. I’ll spare this track that treatment.
NOTES BEFORE THE FOOTNOTES:
one → If you find that you are interested in this fertile period of Minneapolis music, please allow me to suggest the book Complicated Fun by Cyn Collins. Ordinarily I’d recommend buying books from Bookshop.org, specifically the site affiliated with the excellent Says Who? podcast (kickbezosintheballs.org), but given that I see that the book is available via the Minnesota Historical Society, I feel like that’s a pretty noble destination for your dollars.
two → the picture that accompanies this post is from an appearance the band made on Good Company, the long-running afternoon talk/variety show on Twin Cities ABC affiliate KSTP. If it seems oddly familiar, that’s because it made an appearance in Fargo in 1996. Sort of. As I understand it, it was a facsimile of itself.
*For that matter, I also know that this song is likely set in the legendary C.C. Club at Lyndale and 26th, a bar whose bathroom I have definitely puked in, and what’s more Minneapolis punk than that?
**I don’t know a better way to do this but I want to highlight Jason’s business partner at the painting company, Ben Byer, who had just been diagnosed with ALS at the time I was hired, and made a documentary about his time with the illness called Indestructible. Ben was a good man.
The Shuffler 