It's All Coming Back...In A Way...

I actually came to love Husker Du in retrospect; not really being moved by them as others who claim they were upon first hearing the Husker’s explosive, no holds barred take on 60s psychedelia meets 70s punk. The Minneapolis, MN trio had already been broken up for several years when, on a warm summer night while climbing into a friend’s jeep for an evening of absolutely nothing at all, an impressionable high-school student from suburban Chicago first heard playing through the car’s tape deck Bob Mould’s famous scream that sounded nothing short of extreme agony with a bit of torture thrown in for good measure. At the time, I was already familiar with REM and a little bit of the Smiths but this was coming off as something completely different.

“Who’s this?” I asked my buddy as we ambled our way down Willow Springs Rd with the windows rolled down, arms hanging out. “Husker Du,” he reponded as I sat and curiously listened to a guitar sound that I thought, at the time, could have only been produced by no less than an army of guitarists; the same reaction I would have a couple of years later when hearing Richard Thompson play for the first time. Long story short: I was intrigued but not quite hooked, an act which would came via the dubbed tape’s flip-side on which my friend had copied Mould’s debut solo album, Workbook.

To say it was love upon first hearing might be a tad hyperbolic but there was a definite sense that I was listening to something a bit more seeming to the familiar sounds of the 60s yet which sounded compellingly different at the same time. The beautiful acoustic guitars, mandolin and cello were presented in stark contrast to Mould’s fiery electric guitar playing and howl that seemed to present a wonderful tapestry of all the things I absolutely loved about not only rock ‘n roll, but music in general. It was almost as if Mould had tapped into a subconscious, dream-like state; that place where perhaps the best songs always seem to come from. All in all, Workbook just seemed like not only an easier, but more natural way into the world that Husker Du and their contemporaries (i.e., the Replacements, Minutemen, Pixies) inhabited.

I was reminded of all of this while sitting in the audience of Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk Music last night during Bob Mould’s performance, at which point between songs Bob thanked the show’s sponsor, WXRT, for championing Workbook upon its release 20 years earlier right before proceeding to launch into a core group of songs from the album. And for just a moment, I once again felt like that sixteen year old kid sitting in his friend’s car, oblivious to the whole wide world that lay outside those rolled down windows. "I'll make across the wall, I'll tumble down the wall..." Workbook is one of those special records that easily sits in my Top 10 list of desert island discs that all us music obsessives keep should the need arise in such an unlikely event.

Bob Mould – “Dreaming, I Am” (mp3)

(from the Virgin Records CD, Workbook, 1989)