Mike: We begin our trip through Bob Mould’s discography with Land Speed Record! Definitely the fastest and loudest album in Bob’s catalog. Possibly the most abrasive, as well.

Jason: Agreed. First, an introduction: Formed in 1979 in St. Paul, Minn., Hüsker Dü was a power trio consisting of Bob Mould on guitar, Grant Hart on drums, and Greg Norton on bass, with Bob and Grant going pretty close to splitsies in sharing the songwriting and lead vocal duties (and Greg pitching in on both on occasion). First released on Mike Watt’s New Alliance Records in January 1982, Land Speed Record is a live album recorded in 1981 in Minneapolis shortly before the band left for tour. The story goes that the band came back from the tour even LOUDER and FASTER, which, when you listen to LSR, doesn’t even seem possible, does it?

Mike: I’m not sure that it is possible. Clocking at 26 minutes, they cram, what, 17 songs in? This is just intense speed already.

Jason: Yeah, and of those 17 songs, 7 clock in under a minute, and another 7 clock in under 2. It’s madness.

Mike: It’s like a tweaked version of an early Ramones show.

Jason: Land Speed Record is a live album, but it should be noted it’s the only one we’ll be covering as part of this project. While live albums tend to exist outside of an artist’s general discography (especially when they’re released years after the fact), LSR was Hüsker Dü’s first public arrival—their Kick Out the Jams, as it were—and it seemed like an oversight to not discuss it.

Mike: It’s really hard to listen to this album knowing what they become later on. Don’t get me wrong; I love punk and hardcore, but knowing just how incredibly brilliant they go on to be, hearing any lack of melody and them banging on their instruments as hard and as fast as amphetamines will allow them is a bit…jarring, if you are used to the more melodic version of them. LSR is just solid, nonstop hardcore. The lyrics are almost indecipherable through the barrage of feedback, Bob’s guitar is played at ridiculous speeds, and Grant’s drumming like a caveman.

Jason: I do have to say, as someone who loves a lot of punk music, the nonstop barrage of LSR is a bit much. I mean, I love when the Descendants will throw in a 30 second hardcore burst into the middle of an album, but sitting through 26 straight minutes of it is pretty brutal, especially with how starkly recorded this stuff is.

Mike: Exactly. It’s a bit jarring if you work your way backward through their albums like I did. The complete lack of any melody or variance in tempo or song structure until the end doesn’t make for the best listen.

Jason: It almost sounds like an Anal Cunt album in that way: just lightning fast thrashing and gibberish. You’re right, it is jarring from that perspective, although at least Zen Arcade has some things that are along the same lines (“Pride,” “I Will Never Forget You”…most of side 2, really). It’s just not this much, for this long. For only being as long as a sprint, LSR sure feels like a marathon at times.

Mike: And as difficult as this is to listen to, it’s not on the bottom of the list! Every band and artist has to start somewhere. Sometimes that debut is amazing and revolutionary; other times it’s just best to mention it.

Jason: So when in the course of your fandom did you first hear LSR? I’m thinking it was either the last or second-to-last Hüsker album I picked up (either it or Everything Falls Apart).

Mike: It was a very late album for me. Early ’00’s. I only went back to Zen Arcade when I first discovered Bob. It was the pre-internet days, so you had to do some work to track stuff down then.

At least it was work for a slacker misanthrope, like I was.

Jason: Oh, for sure. And it’s not like SST made the things easy to come by.

Mike: No. In the pre-internet era, you had to hunt for things. We had a great chain in Omaha back then (Homer’s Records) that was the hookup for stuff like that, if you knew what you were looking for.

Jason: Back when I worked at a record store (R.I.P., Streetside Records), it always felt like SST must have waited for a certain number of orders before they’d let anything go. It’d be months and months with something on order, then it would suddenly appear with a whole bunch of other SST stuff in one big batch.

 

DOGS & PONIES

Jason: All right, then, let’s talk Dogs and Ponies—a discussion not exactly made easy when (1) all the songs kind of sound the same, and (2) SST’s CD release of the album bunches all of the songs into just two tracks, one for each side of the original LP, so you have to do a little work just to figure out which songs are which.

Mike: Yeah, that does make picking a song hard. Easily the best cut is “Data Control,” and frighteningly accurate still 30 years later. Both Bob and Grant had a strangely accurate vision of things to come, didn’t they? This, and “Divide and Conquer.”

Jason: Yeah, “Data Control” is far and away the best cut here. After the nonstop thrash assault of the rest of the album, I love how “Data Control” swoops in at the end with that sludgy, chugging, almost Black Sabbath–y guitar riff.

Michael: “Data Control” is the best cut on the album because they take their time and slow it down just a smidge, and actually give some thought to song structure, pacing, and lyrical content instead of just trying to assault your ears. An eerie tone for the eerie lyrics.

Jason: That is one that held up better than pretty much anything else on LSR, for sure. I think there’s a reason why it and “In a Free Land” are the only songs of that vintage that the band was still playing in 1987 (as evidenced by the great version on the live album The Living End).

As for Bob’s songs, I’d say his best are probably the opening one-two punch of “All Tensed Up” and “Don’t Try to Call.” The latter actually isn’t that far from what Bob was doing circa–Metal Circus. There’s a discernible melody there, and even a pretty great little guitar solo.

Elsewhere, Bob’s stuff really isn’t much to write home about. “Guns at My School,” while one could argue it was fairly prescient, has just terribly dopey lyrics. Although it’s undone on the dopiness scale by “Bricklayer,” which I’m sure we’ll discuss more when it crops back up on Everything Falls Apart.

Mike: Interestingly, “Don’t Try to Call” is the only track I can tell it’s Bob singing. The rest the vocals are distorted enough that I can’t tell him and Grant apart. And yes, that’s a nice little solo he busts out.

Jason: See, now I can tell Bob, but Greg and Grant sound pretty much the same to me on LSR. Hell, I would have bet you $100 that Greg sang “Do the Bee” until I just checked Wikipedia today.

Hot damn…I’m listening to “Data Control” now, and that solo is just unreal. It’s like it was performed in the belly of a dragon or something. It’s downright unworldly.

Mike: The chord progression is nice, as well. The rest of the album is the same, but here there is an actual progression. As I mentioned earlier, song structure. This is less hardcore and more metal.

Jason: Oh, yes, tres metal. The other highlight for me is “Let’s Go Die,” which is a fantastic little Greg Norton song. Norton barely wrote any songs after Everything Falls Apart, which is a shame because I think the few songs he did write, especially “Let’s Go Die” (though more so in the studio version that was a bonus track on the EFA reissue), show a lot of potential. I think he’s got a bit more of a sense of humor than Bob and Grant that could have added some variety to their overall sound.

Mike: Yeah, after this, Greg is just the bassist. I forget he wrote some songs. Bob is actually a very funny guy from various interviews and his autobiography [See a Little Light: The Trail of Rage and Melody, published in 2011], but you would never know it from these songs.

Jason: The biggest dogs for me on LSR are both Grant songs, “Strange Week” and “Gilligan’s Island,” and it’s mostly due to their truly terrible lyrics. “Strange Week” just finds Grant screaming “Strange week!” a few times, then screaming the days of the week, with a guitar solo thrown in there. Yeah, it’s only 57 seconds, but c’mon, aren’t you even gonna try?

And then “Gilligan’s”: “Gilligan’s Island/ Is where I wanna be/ I wanna fuck Ginger/ Under a big palm tree” Uh…wut?

Mike: Yeah, those are frighteningly embarrassing lyrics. And from the guy who would go one to give us “Sorry Somehow” and “Turn on the News.” At least it rhymed!

 

FINAL GRADES

Mike: LSR is not an album I break out very often just because it’s not what I think of when I think of Hüsker Dü. If I’m in a completist mood, I’ll play it as I’ll start and run end to end, but I almost always just pass over this one. But it’s not worst album on this list. I feel like Nega-Obi-Wan: “There is another.”

Jason: Agreed on all counts. It’s interesting in terms of contrasting it with their gradual growth out of hardcore on Everything Falls Apart, Metal Circus, and Zen Arcade, but as a standalone record, there just isn’t a lot to offer there.

Mike: I was thinking just that listening to these over the weekend. The change they make is remarkable; I wouldn’t even call it gradual. It’s crazy to think that they released so much in such a short time period

Jason: Honestly, listening to LSR just makes me wish I could someday track down this, an album by this guy who goes by Apple-O who covered the entire album in a wide variety of disparate styles. It sounds amazing.

Mike: I remember you telling me about this.

Jason: But yeah, it’s unreal when you put a timeline on this stuff. I’m sure we’ll get into that when we hit how quick Zen Arcade, New Day Rising, and Flip Your Wig followed each other.

Mike: Yeah, this to Zen Arcade/New Day Rising in two years. Amazing. Actually for all members, not just our beloved Bob

Jason: All right, overall letter grade? Again, as you said, it’s not quite the worst record we’ll cover here, and it gets some leeway because what I find so grating about it is kind of inherent in the hardcore genre, so it shouldn’t really be counted against the album. But all that said, it’s empirically not as well written as anything else HD, or Mould, in general, would ever do, and it’s just a slog to get through even if it is so short. I’m going with a D-. Definitely not recommended as anyone’s first foray into the world of Bob.

Mike: I would give it a solid D. It’s an album one would go back to after you immersed yourself in the good. It’s a curiosity you go back to and discover how it all began. Similar to my Flaming Lips. You would never guess who they are today from listening to these early releases

Jason: Very true. An album for the completist, the curious, and fans of hardcore only. Others seeking something like Copper Blue most definitely need not apply.

Stay tuned for Part 3, covering Hüsker Dü’s first studio album, Everything Falls Apart.