Finding a Home with Minor Threat & Running away with Hüsker Dü: (Our Band Could Be Your Life Part II)

In my first essay in this series, I made the claim that Michael Azerrad’s book Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the Indie Underground 1981-1991, was not just a great history of an important decade in music, but could be used as a manual for DIY know-how as people seek a return to analog style networking and making.  I looked at Beat Happening, Black Flag and The Minutemen to see what I could glean from them to see how it might apply to the ongoing decline of western civilization. The Decline of Western Civilization is after all, the name of one of the great documentaries on the early punk movement, as well as the magisterial tomes of history penned by Oswald Spengler.

​In this iteration I will be looking at the bands Minor Threat and Hüsker Dü to see what they have to teach in this regard. These essays won’t go into exhaustive detail about the history or music of these bands. Azerrad has that amply and entertainingly covered. The focus here is on what these groups, and the underground culture and independent philosophy around them, can teach for those of us who are seeking to downshift and become downwardly mobile in a world of limited resources.

FINDING A HOME WITH MINOR THREAT

One of the beauties of Azerrad’s book is how he gets into ethos of regionalism and self-sufficiency in local scenes that helped build a network that became national. As punk evolved from the first groups who were playing it, variations emerged. One of the most prominent was hardcore and it came from a bunch of kids whose energies were bubbling beneath the surface of the swamp in Washington D.C.

Punk owed no small amount of debt to their predecessors the hippies. Many had grown up listening to hippie music and the harder edged rock that bounced out of garages where bored kids gathered together and found something to do. Beer cans and joints were surely passed around. Yet some punks tied the failures of the hippies to the way they lost their minds on drugs, lost their will power and became beholden to the bottle. One such punk was Ian Mackaye.

Ian Mackaye loved listening to Joe Cocker, and his performance at Woodstock became a major influence. Another major influence was the teetotaler Ted Nugent whose prowess on the guitar and whose ability to riff wasn’t compromised by getting wasted. Nugent was one of the few voices in seventies rock music who lived a clean life, who thought getting drunk and blitzed on drugs wasn’t a way to open the doors of perception, but was stupid.

One anecdote involves a time when Mackaye and friends went to see a big concert. So many of the other people who were there were so fucked up that they couldn’t even remember the show. It was something of a wake up call, to be at event, having a sacred experiences, where others were so obliterated they couldn’t even experience the experience. In an interview for Loud and Quiet, he states, “It’s so obvious to me that it’s a put on, that you have to be drunk, a fuck up, use drugs, I mean why? Music for me is sacred; it’s bigger than that. I don’t buy it, I don’t agree with it that those are some kind of prerequisites. So, when you have some band going: ‘oh, we were out of it, we didn’t care,’ well I fucking cared.”

Another concert experience changed his life forever. It was when he went to see The Cramps in 1979 at a benefit concert for the Georgetown University radio station WGTB. The show “blew my mind because I saw for the first time this huge, totally invisible community that had gathered together for this tribal event.” In that moment Mackaye found a home and he has never parted ways from being a punk. It was never something he grew out of, but something he continually grew into, and it wasn’t long before he started assembling a band of his own.

So many of us who were exposed to punk had similar reactions. I remember feeling that way at my first all-ages show, Rancid, with The Queers at Bogart’s. So many people who were so different from the ones I saw at school where I’d be getting bullied, or at the end-times church where I was told what to believe.

Mackaye’s first band was The Teen Idles and they made a point of distancing themselves from the decadence of rock. They tried to “get away from a really corrupted music, you know, basically, your heavy metal bands that were into heroin, cocaine, just a lot of drinking. We just drank a lot of Coke and ate a lot of Twinkies.”

But punk wasn’t immune from letting things get blurry, as I’d soon find out. Yet the importance of the straight edge philosophy remains, and it is likely we wouldn’t have it now in the way we do if it wasn’t for Mackaye, even if the role of figurehead is something he really didn’t want. Figureheads aren’t very punk after all, where part of the point is to think for yourself.

In a time when so many people are looking to political figureheads and will likely continue to do so the crazier things become during the years of decline ahead, thinking for yourself remains ever important. It is difficult to think when hung over, or otherwise intoxicated. The straight edge way looks to take responsibility for our own states of mind, and more importantly for what we do with our precious time here.

Ravaged by junk food and pharmaceutical products, mind onboarded into the simulacrum of screens, todays teens don’t have the luxury of pure boredom. What awaits them is a labyrinth where any wrong move might turn into a dead end, and possibly one with a monster lurking and leering at them as they find themselves up against the wall. To move through the labyrinth a clear head is necessary. In this respect straight edge is a counterpoint to the more Dionysiac extremes of the punk movement, especially when it is in its nihilist mode.
Granted, the nihilist mode can still be punk, but what Mackaye and his fellows helped to grow, was in actuality an antidote to the nihilism of McGovCorp seen all around them. For all the anger and aggression, it was a positive outlet, and a movement of positivity and hope, a Positive Force.

Teen Idles spearheaded the straight edge way of life, but it continued in his next band, Minor Threat. It’s hard to underestimate the impact and gut punch Minor Threat gave me when I first heard them in junior high. It was an awakening. The year was around 1991, just about ten years after this stuff first came out, and I had already been primed on years of heavy metal. I grew up on Cincinnati’s westside, where metal heads and hoods reigned supreme. Since I was a reader, into fantasy and science fiction, watched Doctor Who, getting into skateboarding and punk was a natural progression. From there the influence of punk came into my life full force.

One of the legacies of Minor Threat, and deeply intertwined with the philosophy of straight edge was the all-ages show. One reason for staying sober back when it was started was because you were too young to drink. Many clubs wouldn’t cater to people who weren’t going to buy any booze, but the punk rockers worked to get them in the door -partly because sometimes they were even too young to play the shows themselves.

The Teen Idles had been the immediate predecessor to Minor Threat and were also the beginning of Dischord Records. “After nearly a year of playing together, the Teen Idles decided to break up. It was late summer 1980 and the only thing left to sort out was what to do with the money in the band fund. All of the money we had earned from our 35 concerts went into a cigar box in my room, and we had managed to save over $600. Instead of splitting it up, the band decided to release a record.”

It was clear from the beginning that no label would be interested in putting out a Teen Idles “record, particularly since we were no longer a band, so we decided to do it ourselves. We turned to our friend Skip Groff, who ran a record shop called Yesterday and Today. He had put out a number of small releases on his own label, Limp Records, and was able to explain the basic mechanics of putting out a record. We came up with a name for our label, started designing the cover, and sent off the tapes to a pressing plant. Finally, in December 1980, the Teen Idles' "Minor Disturbance" E.P. (an eight-song 7") was released. This was Dischord Records #1.”

The label is still around today, continuing to document a wide range of independent music, and show that a good living can be made in music without compromising values. The independent integrity Dischord showed came full force later during Fugazi, when all aspects of the way the band operated punk as fuck.

The community around Minor Threat also helped plant a root for the tradition of the punk house, in this case Dischord House, where Mackaye still lives. It seems like things got tense inside that house where the band practiced and worked on records together.

In a time when it is sometimes preferable to blunt the senses the straight edge life, and the work ethic that went with it, has many advantages. Living in a punk house with people who aren’t druggies and drunks may be preferable to waking up next to someone you have to give Narcan to in order to revive them. Keeping the mind sober can also  help keep things clean when interpersonal conflicts do happen, and won’t exacerbate the flames with paranoia, as can easily happen when you are sped up or cruising along on cocaine.

​Minor Threat’s intense energy was hard to sustain over the long term as the band was worn down from the inside with conflict, and worn down from the outside as the scene, with so much unity at first underwent quick transformations.

RUNNING AWAY WITH ​Hüsker Dü

The next phase of this journey takes us to the dark heart of Minneapolis where the raw melodic sounds of Hüsker Dü were carved from the frostbitten ice. The members of the band met in 1978 at Cheapo Records where Grant Hart worked as a clerk and Bob Mould liked to go hang out. Greg Norton had applied to the same job as Hart, and had met in the process, and though Hart was hired first, he eventually got on as well. Cheapo Records brought the trio together, and their love of records brought them to life where they exhibited the power of three. 

Outside the Twin Cities, Minneapolis was like many other places in the Midwest: a world of farmers. Those formers had been high on the hog in the 1970s. Things took a downward slump in the 1980s under Reagan’s aegis. The farms weren’t exporting as much and the costs of running a farm were growing higher, leading to bankruptcies and abandonment of land. For those in agriculture it was a rough time, almost akin to the times in the Great Depression. No one was doing things for them, they had to do it themselves, but not before sending their first single to local independent label Twin/Tone Records, home of The Replacements. That first single was rejected and so began a friendly crosstown rivalry between the different hometown punk bands.
Hüsker Dü got Reflex Records up and running with help from supporter, friend and fellow record store denizen Terry Katzman. The venture was begun with a loan of $2,000 dollars from Grant Hart’s mom. Out came their first 7” record in 1981 with the songs “Statues” and “Amusement.”

Reflex Records was short lived but during its day it helped solidify the regional scene by issuing several compilations and albums by other locals such Rifle Sport, Man Sized Action, Otto’s Chemical Lounge and Articles of Faith. Being dedicated to the artistic life of the people in your own area was an important component of punk philosophy. At the same time, working with bands from other parts of the country increased the analog network effect. They practiced this when they released the Minutemen EP Tour-Spiel was released in 1985.

In the meantime the Minutemen had released the Hüsker’s first full length album, and live show recording, Land Speed Record on their own label New Alliance, after they’d been introduced to each other by Black Flag. Things got done because people cooperated and networked. Their immediate follow Everything Falls Apart was their debut studio album and was released on their own label. By this time there were already some tensions in the band and the title track sums up the precarious nature of friendships and, could by extension be seen in the way that the center does not hold. “I got nothing to do / You got nothing to say / Everything is so fucked up / I guess it's natural that way.”

Meanwhile another track from the album, “In a Free Land,” rings still true today. “Why bother spending time / Reading up on things? / Everybody's an authority / In a free land / In a free land / Government authorize education / (Don't mean a thing) / They'll teach you what they want you to think / (Don't mean a thing) / Saturation, stars and stripes / (Don't mean a thing) / The only freedom worth fighting for is for what you think / (It don't mean a thing)”

These days there are even more authorities because the internet. But they were doing this before the internet and their album was self released as were many of the punk records back in the day.
 
Hüsker Dü was a linchpin in taking the energy of punk to build a new sound musically, and give birth to a wider range of styles that would be cloaked under the bailiwick “college rock” and “alternative rock” in the years to come. They did it first through getting fired up by the energy of hardcore, an impeccable work ethic, and the time they put into mining their imaginations for new grooves that melded melody with speed and intensity. (Speed as a drug also seemed to help in this regard.) Being from Minneapolis. I think the harsh winters in their city gave them some extra grit to keep going with their music when others might have caved in.
Before their masterpiece Zen Arcade came out in 1984, Hart spent a summer taking LSD with a bunch of runaway kids and drifters, while Mould was getting amped up on speed and keeping the edge off with alcohol. The mixture of a psychedelic mindset and an adrenalized mind in the two songwriters combined as they carved away and sculpted the block of their music to reveal its true form.  Not everyone was interested in clean living.

Ian Mackaye came from a stable home. His parents were civil servants and had been involved in the civil rights movement and the liberal end of the Episcopal church. Not all of the kids in the punk scene were so lucky and as supported as he was, and encouraged by their parents. This isn’t a comment about the parents of the members of Hüsker Dü as it is about the many punk kids who found themselves in the position of running away from home.
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The quintessential masterpiece of music that came from Hüsker Dü was a concept album called Zen Arcade that explored the world of those kids who had been left behind by their Boomer parents -the world of Gen X runaways. The members of the band spent a lot of time hanging out with such kids. This was common throughout the punk scene. The underground was a haven for those who were escaping from bad situations at home, or just escaping period. No one else had made an entire concept album out of the issue. Yet no one had yet made a concept album in the idiom of punk, and the carved out that place for others to follow, proving it wasn’t just the gambit of prog rockers. The closest thing that comes to mind is the “Girl on the Run” single from Honey Bane, which dealt with the subject from the British side.It did follow the 1983 release of the Penelope Spheeris film Suburbia, that also dealt with the theme of runaways.

​Zen Arcade came out in 1984. That was the same year the documentary film on homeless kids in Seattle, Streetwise came out. I remember watching Streetwise when my cousins moved into a new house and Betamax player with a bunch of Betamax videos was left behind. The film was among them. I’d already been shown Suburbia by older punks, but this one hit home in a different way, because it was all factual. Memories of the movie haunted me for years. Zen Arcade is just as haunting, though I didn’t hear the whole thing until years later.    

The album was written and rehearsed in an abandoned church in St. Paul that became a haven for runaways, musicians, and drifters. There record wasn’t a punk rock answer to Go Ask Alice, though. Heroin, speed and alcohol all overshadowed the band. Whether these chemicals were a help or a hindrance, I won’t deign to say, but they did seem to lend themselves to their inscrutable Dionysiac fury. Their struggle with these issues is highly relatable. Though some of us may have aspired to straight edge, as I did when I was first turned on to hardcore, it wasn’t much longer before I was turned on to the kaleidoscope of LSD and had close friends and family go down the scary path of heroin, meth addiction and homelessness. Their story is as important as those who refused and managed to live a clean life. Zen Arcade tells one of these familiar American stories.

The story follows a young man who is escaping a terrible home situation. Bob Mould lays it down on the song “On Broken Home, Broken Heart” where he sings about what is going on beneath the pretty exterior. “I looked at your house / I look through your window, deep inside, how you gonna cry yourself to sleep tonight? / Your parents fight / You don't know who's wrong or right, have to cry yourself to sleep tonight.” The theme turns up on the “Never Talking to You Again” which has the sound of proto folk-punk with its acoustic guitar strumming and accompaniment limited to backing vocals.

“Pink turns to Blue” tells another story all too familiar, and even more so with deadlier street drugs like fentanyl that have reduced the OD threshold. “No more rope and too much dope, she's lying on the bed/Angels pacing, gently placing roses 'round her head,” An unfortunate end to so many runaway kids escaping the abuses of Reagan era fundamentalism.

One wrong decision is all it takes to start on the road of getting hooked, and while I very much admire the ethos Mackaye and crew have built, and think it is important as ever, compassion for those who took the needle in their arms is just as important. During the long emergency we are even now caught up in, the hardcore pharmaceutical end of the drug problem is likely to revert to simpler and preindustrial means of making drugs from plants like poppies and the cocoa leaf. Yet there will still be teens running away from home, and dens where drugs are imbibed, just like in Victorian times.

In the deindustrial times to come, there will be plenty of reasons as ever to leave home, and get wasted. What new stories of homelessness, squatting and runaway teenagers will there be to tell? 

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