As indicated in my introduction, music (and more often than not, punk music) has been a passion of mine throughout my entire life. I would like to dedicate one of my entries per week to that passion. But, rather than cover that topic in its entirety, I'll try to only focus on one or two bands of importance to me in each blog.
Tonight, I finally got to listen to the much-anticipated release of Hüsker Dü - Savage Young Dü. I know what you may be thinking, but there are plenty of places around the internet to read reviews. This is not one of them.
Also, there are plenty of places around the internet to read the band's history. I'd prefer to hone in on this band on a more personal level.
If you know them, you know what they meant. They were (and are) Minneapolis punk rock royalty. The news of the recent death of drummer/singer Grant Hart was a sledgehammer blow to the gut of anyone who knew of their musical prowess.
Everyone mentions the more polished Zen Arcade or Everything Falls Apart albums, but barely anyone mentions my favorite of them all - Land Speed Record.
I first heard it on legendary New Jersey independent radio station WFMU when it first came out. They played it in its entirety. WFMU was apt to do such things. It was unlike anything I've heard before or since - recorded live on August 15, 1981 at the 7th Street Entry in Minneapolis, the entire set played with no breaks in between songs. Just a rapid-fire assault of unhinged mayhem.
I was captivated, I had to have this wax. The next weekend I went with my parents to the Orange County Plaza in Middletown, NY and stopped at the record store in the basement which had a surprisingly decent bin of what they called "imports" which was just code for weird shit that nobody else at the time listened to, whether it was imported or not. There it was, in all its shrinkwrapped glory, waiting for me to call it my own.
It didn't leave my turntable for at least a week. To me, this was as raw as it got. Unbridled, messy yet catchy, pure punk rock energy.
I probably recorded this a dozen times on blank cassettes throughout the 80s. Cassettes had a way of getting lost or ending up a tangled spaghetti mess which required careful, surgical extraction from the shitty Sparkomatic tape player in my '71 Plymouth Duster. But, I perpetually had a copy sitting in my little tape case, and played it quite frequently. It never got old. It still never has.
To those of you who know this album, give it a spin for old times' sake. For the uninitiated, click on this and feast your ears to the soundtrack of my early teen years...