Compositions for the Young & Old, Pt. 3 | Hüsker Dü, “Everything Falls Apart” (1983)

Jason Green: We now move on to 1983’s Everything Falls Apart, Hüsker Dü’s first full studio album. Well, “full” might be a bit of a misnomer, seeing as it tops out at 12 songs in 19 minutes. So the “faster harder faster stronger” of Land Speed Record is still in full effect, but it’s obvious right away that a lot has changed in the year between the two were recorded.

Mike Koehler: Within the first 10 seconds, you already know this is gonna be a helluva lot better than LSR. The sound, the lyrics, everything is just light years better.

The sound is so much clearer here. The percussion particularly is tight sounding and thunderous. It’s great that we can actually hear what Bob is doing on guitar without it just being drowned in a river of distortion.

Jason: I think the biggest thing behind the clarity of sound here is the remastering by Rhino. Let’s be frank: The SST albums, for the most part, sound like shit. The bass is way too low in the mix and very flat sounding, and the drums sound tinny and lack power. EFA is the only Hüsker album to get a modern remaster, and the results are revelatory. This is how good the albums sound on vinyl. I wish to God that Grant and Bob could bury the hatchet long enough to sue back the rights from Greg Ginn to get someone to put out a proper remaster of all of the Hüsker catalog that sounded this good.

Mike: Amen to that. That really is my only beef with Zen Arcade and New Day Rising. They sound so damn tinny and flat. EFA sounds massive in comparison.

Bob showcases some serious riffage on EFA. It’s more than just one or two chords at breakneck speed. Overall, on this album he develops some great chord progressions and some hella good soloing. Some of it is downright un-hardcore. Throughout the album, Bob showcases some serious guitar chops. He does the buzzsaw punk chords, riffs, solos, and you can totally hear where alternative and grunge gets its inspiration.

Jason: I think the solo on “Afraid of Being Wrong” is a perfect example. It’s nimble and quite metal for a punk guitar solo, and really sets the template or a lot of what you hear Bob do all over Metal Circus and Zen Arcade.

Mike: Some of the album is still very much in the hardcore style but they really start branching out here. I also cringe when I read or hear people claim they sold out or went soft, especially after the Warner signing. Did those people ever listen to this album? They essentially write the blueprint for post-punk–meets–punk-pop right here on their second album. Hell, they covered Donovan, for shit’s sake. And did a damn great job of it, too.

Jason: I think it’s fascinating how much resistance to punk dogma the band is already putting forth on their second album.

Mike: I’m not sure if it’s from them being bored with just doing punk, or if they realize there is so much more they could do.

Jason: It’s made explicit in “Target,” as Bob rails against dogmatic punkers in a way that would be a suitable dis on hipsters today. “You’ve seen it all before, you think it’s passé/ You listen to the same fuckin’ records every single day/ You don’t like the people who caught on late/ If they’re having fun.”

And then they add to that by not only covering Donovan’s “Sunshine Superman,” but doing a very straightforward, un-ironic cover. I mean, there it is, this perfect pop song, with Grant in pure pop voice, shoved right in between two of Bob’s biggest hardcore freakouts in “Afraid of Being Wrong” and “Signals From Above.” And they make that shit work.

Mike: My point exactly. Bob has always said “Sunspots” [the gentle acoustic guitar instrumental that opens his 1989 solo debut, Workbook] is his big “fuck you” to the punk movement, but a case could be made that that three-song transition was. Yes, you have two slabs of kinda big dumb rock surrounding a fantastic cover of the antithesis of punk, a shiny happy hippie song. Anyone who said they stopped being fans because Hüsker Dü stopped being a hardcore band really was not paying attention. They stopped being a full hardcore act here.

And “Gravity.” My god, “Gravity” is so great and so not a hardcore song in my book. You really cannot place that this song is written in 1983 as it sounds totally at home in the early ’90s alternative nation.

That solo is so fucking great, too. He builds and builds and builds and just explodes the end. Damn. Bob really is a grossly underappreciated soloist.

Jason: “Gravity is great.” It’s like they saved that song for last just to say “…aaand now we’ve grown up.” What really cements that song for me is the bass, how Greg alternates between a somewhat typical bobbing beat and a two-note throbbing piece that sounds like something from a carnival funhouse.

And, damn, I don’t know that I’d ever really paid that much attention to the solo, but you’re right. It does sound way ahead of its time. Bob certainly wasn’t really playing solos like that again until you hit Warehouse, at least.

Mike: All of their playing just sounds way out of place here (in great ways, mind you). Bob just layers and layers and layers that solo. Being a guitar guy, stuff like that is so much more fun for me. It’s the buildup and explosion, channeling emotion into your notes—that is what’s great. You don’t get that in much hardcore or punk.

Jason: Yeah, a lot of punk guitar solos come down to playing the melody of the vocals on the guitar, but Bob rarely plays that way. He tends to favor the orgiastic layers of guitar squall that take the song in new directions, but they always fit (and generally enhance) the song.

Mike: He does the same to a lesser degree on “In a Free Land.”

Jason: That’s another boon that Rhino granted us by reissuing this album: bonus tracks! (That, more than double the length of the album, no less.) “In a Free Land” is easily the cream of the crop, and I’d argue probably one of their best political songs.

Mike: It may be Bob’s most overt political song, in fact. He hated the Reagan era politics and the conform-or-be-squashed ideals of the greed generation. “Everyone is an authority in a free land”—sad that it’s still the same attitude 30 years later. Everyone still thinks they know everything and that they are right because they can now instantly post it online.

I know you generally do not like long songs, but I love “Statues.” If you didn’t know this was HD, I would swear to Christ it was PIL minus John Lydon’s snarl. Go back and listen to some early PIL work up to about 1984 and it really sounds like them. This is just a great jam. If Hüsker Dü were the type of band that played extended jams on stage, I could easily see this going on for quite some time, letting Bob just unleash everything in his arsenal in that solo.

Jason: I think the biggest developments on EFA are twofold: The first, that they’re actually playing and not hiding behind distortion anymore, we discussed already. But the second, bigger factor is that these songs are actually memorable. “Blah Blah Blah” or “Afraid of Being Wrong” or “Signals From Above” or (especially) “Punch Drunk” aren’t musically that far from what the band was doing on LSR, but they have actual hooks that stick in your mind enough after you’re done listening to them, something that happens little, if at all, on LSR.

Mike: Agreed. The only memorable song on LSR is “Data Control.” EFA is much more memorable.

Jason: Also interesting to note: “Punch Drunk” is, as near as I can tell, the only song Bob wrote in the entire 20th century that addresses his homosexuality. (“Take a look around this bar/ Take a look around this gym/ Take a look right in the mirror/ What are you, a fucking queer?”) Amazing, considering it took him another 10 years before he came out of the closet, and another almost 10 years before he addressed the topic in song.

Mike: I never even thought of that. Damn, good catch.

Jason: “Punch Drunk” also wonderfully illustrates a weird dichotomy I’ve noticed between punk and metal fans. See, I grew up a metalhead, but as soon as I discovered punk (thanks to Nirvana, Green Day, the Offspring, and Bad Religion), I was an equal-opportunity offender. So when I discovered hardcore, stuff like Hüsker Dü and Black Flag, it worked for me because it was the best of both worlds. But I’d play it for my metalhead friends and they didn’t get it: Yeah, the guitars are heavy and the signing is guttural, but none of it is clean the way, say, the guitar playing and singing in “Master of Puppets” are.

When I used to work at a comic book store, I made the questionable choice of playing “Punch Drunk” for some of the metalhead dudes who hung out there. “Isn’t this amazing?!” 19-year-old me said. “It’s 30 seconds long but it’s got two verses, three choruses, a bridge, and a guitar solo! HOLY SHIT!”

And these dudes heard the cacophony coming out of that crappy little boombox and just didn’t even know how to process it.

Mike: A lot of that attitude, I think, has changed with the popularity of metal core. Traditional metal heads would never get it.

Jason: Yeah, I mean we’re talking about a time when the biggest metal stuff was Korn. Not a lot that Korn and Hüsker Dü have in common.

Mike: Oh, nu metal. [shivers]

 

DOGS & PONIES

Mike: “Gravity” and “In a Free Land” are my top EFA tracks.

Jason: “Gravity” is a quality song. It’s such a departure from everything else here, and while it’s not Hüsker Dü’s best, or even best song in this vein, it’s definitely a portent for the breadth of songwriting styles they’d be hitting in short order.

And “In a Free Land”…yeah, awesome stuff. For being a punk band in the ’‘80s, Hüsker Dü didn’t really hammer on politics all that often, but when they did, Bob was pretty damn great at it. I think he kind of got it all out of his system with Metal Circus, really.

Mike: I watched an interview from the ’90s with Bob and he said he didn’t like just throwing politics in people’s faces, as fans were smarter than they were given credit for and could figure out what his ideals were.

Jason: My favorites are hard to boil down because I like a lot of stuff here for different reasons. Being a fan of the underdog, I love Greg’s two contributions to open the album. “Afraid of Being Wrong” is a stellar example of HD’s hardcore days, and as I mentioned earlier, that guitar solo is wicked hot. But because I’m a power-pop guy at heart, I think my favorites of the main album are “Sunshine Superman” and the title track, “Everything Falls Apart.” They’re the ones that get (pleasantly) stuck in my head the most often.

Mike: It really is a great cover and is on a list I keep of great and (somewhat) obscure covers

Jason: Of the bonus tracks, “In a Free Land” is the clear winner. Powerful, political, heartfelt, and also the first appearance of the Bob/Grant call-and-response vocals that I’m a total sucker for. I do also love “Let’s Go Die”; whereas a lot of heir other LSR-style stuff was fast just to be fast, the speed here gave the song a giddy bounce that’s damn infectious, and comes through a lot better in the studio than it did on LSR.

And for historical import, you gotta love “Do You Remember?” the song that gave the band their name [Hüsker Dü being the name of a Scandinavian memory game], and the closest the Hüskers ever got to making a Ramones song.

Least favorites: Oh, god, “Bricklayer.” God, that song is dumb.

The other big, bad number on this album for me is “Obnoxious.” It seems silly for an underground, DIY band to write a song railing against record labels who won’t sell what they’re offering. Bob was only 22 or so when he wrote this stuff, and while his lyrics throughout EFA aren’t generally up to the standard he’d set later, they’re at least not embarrassing like they are here. That’s a song written by a 20-year-old looking for people to be mad at.

Mike: “Wheels” wins least favorite for me. It’s not horrible, but it’s not that great, either. And it’s interesting that it was the only Grant song on the proper LP.

Jason: “Wheels” is another weak one for me, although I do appreciate that the lyrics are so outside anything Bob was writing at the time. Bob was being very straightforward in a lot of ways, a very “I’m an angry young man and this is who I’m angry at and why.” But on “Wheels,” Grant crafts a weird little story song that stands well outside of that. Bob and Grant were always very different lyricists—Bob’s songs tend to have a lot of I’s and me’s and Grant’s tend to be either abstract or story songs/character studies—but it’s interesting to see it so obvious when Grant only has the one song on the record.

The altogether worst song (coming from the bonus tracks) is a Grant song, though: “What Do I Want?” Ugh. The song is another uninteresting bit of thrash, and the lyrics are so straightforward and insipid they’re almost a parody. (“What do I waaaant?! What will make me haaaapy?! NOTHING NOTHING NOTHING.” C’mon, Grant.)

“Amusement” is another pretty bad track. Like “Statues,” it’s way too long, and doesn’t go anywhere interesting musically. The demo quality recording doesn’t help, either. Honestly, it’s probably the one song I skip the most on here.

FINAL GRADES

Mike: Overall, my appreciation of this album has grown. On our Bob scale, I’d give it a solid C+. That might seem low; however, what gets higher rankings for me are really, really spectacular

Jason: I’d say a C/C+ is totally appropriate. This is definitely a building album, the one where you can see all the pieces starting to click together, but they’re not quite there yet.

Mike: And they were shedding the hardcore roots, which I feel they needed to if they wanted to grow and become bigger.

Mike and Jason return tomorrow in Part 4 to explore the EP that set the trademark Hüsker Dü sound in stone, 1983’s Metal Circus.