Hüsker Dü Live... First Avenue 85 (CD)

Hüsker Dü

Hüsker Dü's performance on the 28th August 1985 at the First Avenue Club in Minneapolis, recorded for and broadcast on the Spin Radio Concert Series and distributed to radio stations for airplay on a double-12" vinyl album, remains very collectible to this day. Bob Mould, Grant Hart and Greg Norton played their native St. Paul's in Minnesota immediately prior to the release of Flip Your Wig, the second of two albums from 1985. The legacy of this album can be confirmed by Mould's own defining reference to it as "the best album Hüsker Dü ever did". The pace was set by a Land Speed Record in 1982 confirming the arrival of two songwriters, Bob and Grant, and a guy on bass with a handlebar moustache.

Hüsker Dü, a Danish board game from 1970 "where the child may outwit the adult". Strangely, Flip Your Wig was also the name of a board game that centred around the mop tops of The Beatles in 1964. Facts aside, the set for their appearance at the First Avenue Club in Minneapolis from August 1985 draws from a prized handful of albums that results in their eventual contract with a major in 1986. Heresy for some, but signing with Warners was an inevitable chapter for realists, and besides, Hüsker Dü were not going to be dictated to by anyone, especially a culture that was vehemently at odds with dictatorship! It was that same ethos that had delivered their second studio album Zen Arcade, a rebellious strike that surprised numerous 'rebels' and allowed the band to consolidate on their freedom of expression and own influences. Zen Arcade was a polarized piece of ambitious work strangled only by hardcore/punk expectations and just maybe, too punk.

It's concept structure spanning four sides of wax with a mix of psychedelia, folk and various estranged sub-genres, divided an audience, but the seeds of something wholly different had already been planted when Diane appeared on the previous year's Metal Circus ER As a song that narrates the viewpoint of a rapist and murderer, the levels of toxic subject matter and a melodic backdrop would confirm that Ginn's SST had indeed made the right decision to invest in the talents of Mould and Hart as songwriters...