RIP Grant Hart

When I saw Mould a few yrs back he played See A Little Light in the midst of an otherwise all Husker set and it sat just fine among those songs.

I did all the Sugar records, his solo career I've dipped into here & there and its always "good" without being great or really compelling to want to revisit.

Grant's solo stuff, possibly just becuz I'm so familiar with it, has always been more interesting to me.

The FUEL record was boring to me, too much of that one guitar sound.

Selfishly I sort of wish he had retired the electric band set up after 98 and go the full Richard Thompson route

He plays Hoover Dam and If I Can't Change Your Mind live with the distortion and I don't really get it. Has this dulling effect after a while.

I can live in the Mellotron solo in "Hoover Dam" forever.

I can imagine Workbook as "aggressively boring" – I don't think so; the album was a comfort to me in early college too – but Sugar?

I can remember the exhilaration when I first heard "Helpless" and "Changes" on the radio.

MoTreacle, I saw a Bob solo show a while back (with Kristin Hersh, Christ, maybe 2005?) and it was pretty Richard Thompsonish except louder.

lol I was such a purist snob back in the day that I have STILL not fully listened to Candy Apple Grey or Warehouse, let alone Sugar! I did review The Argument like 4 years ago, I like that one. Definitely need to hear Intolerance.

my loss w/those later Husker records, I know, but when I tried I couldn't get past the terrible sound, whereas all the earlier stuff sounds fine to me.

when I saw them in '86 it was the first time I had seen a circle pit in a big venue, even at like lol age 20 I was like "these kids are RUINING MY HARDCORE"

Pits at those late Husker Du shows were confused phenomena. Like pretending to throw the ball for the golden retriever, and it still runs furiously to find it.

This one is especially insane (people jumping from the balcony into the pit):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1fBMtaVd9s

btw that is easily one of my favorite live videos on youtube, full on stun guitar, and Bob plays his guitar like it's a machine gun

I was such a purist snob back in the day that I have STILL not fully listened to Candy Apple Grey or Warehouse, let alone Sugar!

haha that was me too. except i did give mould's post-du career a shot for awhile and found things to like about both workbook and copper blue. but the noisier his post-du guitars got, the less i liked him. i thought the guitar sound was consistently terrible and hard to listen to for any length of time. whereas his gtr sound in husker du's heyday is one of my favorite things ever.

i still don't have much use for warehouse, though listening to "could you be the one" this week for the first time in years i can appreciate, even fall for, the craft. change some words and clean up the sound and it would be a good sitcom theme song.

i would still take my least favorite post-Huskers solo song (which might be "Gee Angel" if I had to pick) over "Dyslexic Heart"

I'm p sure i heard Land Speed Record on college/indie radio, but i didn't actually get to a gig til the New Day Rising tour, where I got socked in the nuts in the pit.

i guess that was Sugar not solo but whatever
i irrationally hated that song the first time i heard it

sorry you got socked in the nuts, dr m

thx, i got over it.

i would take getting socked in the nuts in a pit over "dyslexic heart."

really really didn't like Warehouse at the time, but I sure as hell liked the below…watching this now is awaking muscle memory from watching this over and goddamn over…is it possible this has not been posted yet? sorry if it has…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vefkvjcjNj8

that joan rivers perf is the one that made me start to appreciate "could you be the one." listening to it again right now i can hear pretty much sugar's entire oeuvre inside that song.

that something i learned today clip is great

it's so nuts that in 1984, Purple Rain, Zen Arcade and Let it Be all came out of Minneapolis

was kinda disappointed to read in Bob's book that "Could You Be the One" was a total toss-off, I forget the exact phrase he used but he essentially called it totally meaningless & an assembly line sort of song. he said the same thing about "Don't Know for Sure," which I can see more sort of, even though I love that song too...

there was a real cookie-cutter quality to late-era Bob HD songs

"Could You Be the One" is where he learned to write a Hart-style knockoff minus the desperation

Even "makes no sense at all" is a bit cookie cutter imo

The only non item on FYW I would say that about

Typo bob = non

that is one sublime cookie cutter.

(the cookie cutter that cut "makes no sense at all" in particular, that is)

Keeblerian in its grandeur imo

lol

Even "makes no sense at all" is a bit cookie cutter imo

― harbinger of failure (Jon not Jon), Tuesday, September 19, 2017 4:48 PM (thirty-seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

omg...

fwiw that was the song that got me into Hüsker Dü. i was 19 and found that music video and was hooked instantly. so much fun to play on guitar

that was the song that got me into Hüsker Dü

Same. It was the first I heard and I still really love it. The second I heard was "Eight Miles High", which really knocked me out.

I do like it but the lyrics are unusually dopey for a Huskers song

HI DERE

the hokeyness of the lyrics feel of a piece with their cover of Love is All Around. Makes No Sense At All totally sounds like a tv theme song.

that's part of what i didn't love about it
eight miles high on the other hand - looooooooooooooooooooove

enjoyable funny interview
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzAhcyZDKo8

he gripes about the death of classic thrift store shopping

Not really tangential I mean relevant to this thread but, the little pentatonic- no four note- guitar melody in "Eight Miles High," I think it goes D,B, G, A, every once in a while I hear something like it in a jazz tune during the soloing and I wonder, did Roger McGuinn hear it on a Coltrane record as did others, or is it just popping up due to the law of averages, about which The Beastie Boys may have had something to say.

It is reputed to be a direct Coltrane homage

"India" iirc?

We were on a tour of America, and someone played us the Coltrane albums Africa/Brass and Impressions. I had just picked up a cassette recorder – it was such a new thing, you couldn’t buy any tapes to play in it. But I had some blank tapes so recorded the Coltrane albums, along with some Ravi Shankar, and took them on tour. It was the only music we had, for the whole time on the bus. By the end of the tour, Coltrane and Shankar were ingrained.

There was one Coltrane track called India, where he was trying to emulate sitar music with his saxophone. It had a recurring phrase, dee da da da, which I picked up on my Rickenbacker guitar and played some jazzy stuff around it. I was in love with his saxophone playing: all those funny little notes and fast stuff at the bottom of the range.

Yeah. Just looked it up and listened to it. Pretty obvious. Feel like I must have noted it before and forgotten.

Pits at those late Husker Du shows were confused phenomena. Like pretending to throw the ball for the golden retriever, and it still runs furiously to find it.

Haha otm. I was in the balcony, afraid as I was of possibly getting hurt in the pit, but it was kind of hilarious: one, maybe two kids slam-dancing (I didn't hear the term "mosh" until the '90s), everyone else just digging the show, maybe unobtrusively pogoing.

was kinda disappointed to read in Bob's book that "Could You Be the One" was a total toss-off, I forget the exact phrase he used but he essentially called it totally meaningless & an assembly line sort of song. he said the same thing about "Don't Know for Sure," which I can see more sort of, even though I love that song too...

"I Don't Know For Sure" always struck me as a blatant rewrite of "Makes No Sense At All," but in the classic "I Can't Help Myself"/"It's The Same Old Song" sense.

Ha, that is indeed one of the canonical examples.

haha yes otm. probably why I like "I Don't Know for Sure," which really does have lyrics that read like a homework assignment done in the hallway on the way to class

It doesn't surprise me at all, it doesn't mean its not great.

re: solo Bob, I like Workbook a lot, and the two solo albums he did post-Sugar. I find Bob's at his best as the petulant, betrayed one - he does self-pity and self-righteous anger really well, cf Poison Years, Whichever Way The Wind Blows, New No 1 and Anymore Time Between. Bob-as-craftsman, I agree, is kind of dull, though I must also say that I find pretty much all of Grant's albums to also be patchy. Grant always struck me as more mercurial than Bob, who was more consistent and more dependable, but rarely hit such peaks as Grant, who seemed looser, less self-conscious, more open and more up for taking chances.

I found Bob's memoir sour and unreadable.

Actually I just revisited the hubcap album and it is strong throughout.