Hüsker Dü took hardcore beyond the threshold with the experimental angst of this sprawling concept album. The Minneapolis trio had proven themselves in the scene with their loud abrasive wall of noise on albums like the live (and messy) 'Land Speed Record', their full length studio debut 'Everything Falls Apart', ands the 'Metal Circus' EP. Their cover of 'Eight Miles High' hinted at their expansive aspirations.
Grant Hart would express: "Well, this is where it starts being a little bit divisive, because I didn't enjoy playing hardcore. At the time, while I was drummer for Hüsker Dü even though I played other instruments, it was just such a damn boring job for a drummer. [Mimics fast, repetitive drum beat.] I saw it as part of a whole set of possibilities for expression, but I found the hardcore thing very limiting and very... dumb. It was just, you know,'Let's be super politically paranoid on the surface, and let's jump into a more stringent set of rules than what we're supposed to be rebelling against.' I've never really enjoyed that macho, 'Here are the rules, here's how you conform' stuff. That kind of attitude seems to have found full bloom in the character of the work of, say, Henry Rollins. There's this hard-ass stuff that didn't do anything for me. The compositions I had that could be classified as hardcore were already moving away, occupying a different topical ground. The first song that really comes to mind is from an early EP that we did: The song is called "What Do I Want?" and it was simply that. The questions, 'What do I want? What will make me happy?' repeated over and over ad nauseam. That's all I could really express with that genre of music. Starting off in '82, late '81, before we really worked our way into Metal Circus, my hair got long again. All of a sudden, all these great, liberated people were 'not digging it.' These people who were supposed to be about throwing away all the rules were suddenly getting caught up in their own hypocrisy. They're singing about how people 'don't like me because I've got short hair' or whatever, 'because I stand out in the crowd.' They ended up doing the same thing, so I was kind of delighted surfing on that iconoclasm. Originally, it became apparent to me that there was more rebellion in bringing the music back into... the first term that comes to mind is 'a thing of beauty.' Not that there's not a place for some of that ugliness, because a lot of it is a component of my work to this day. But a steady diet of nothing but that... [Mimics the drum beat again.] I don't know if you're familiar with the album Land Speed Record, but the next album we made after that was pretty much a studio version of the same damn thing. I just started interjecting more of my material into the balance of things. You'd have to ask Mould this, but I'd assume that writing hardcore was fairly easy for him. Maybe he hadn't written enough different kinds of things to really know where songwriting could challenge you. Around the time of Zen Arcade, he started really blooming as a songwriter, even though he'd been in the band for a while. Things like "Chartered Trips" and "Celebrated Summer," these songs are associated with him to this day as the finer points of his musical upbringing. I'm certainly not taking credit for anything he's written, but I really started the ball moving in the other direction, as far as within the band was concerned."
The band traveled to California to record 'Zen Arcade' at Total Access Recording in Redondo Beach. SST house producer Spot (Glen Lockett) produced and engineered alongside Hüsker Dü. With Grant Hart on drums, lead and background vocals, percussion, and piano (on "Chartered Trips", "What's Going On", "Standing by the Sea" and "Monday Will Never Be The Same"); Bob Mould on lead and background vocals, electric guitar, acoustic guitar, percussion, piano (on "Chartered Trips", "One Step at Time", "Newest Industry" and "Monday Will Never Be The Same"), and bass on "Turn on the News"; and Greg Norton on bass and background vocals, the sessions took place over forty-five hours with all but two of twenty-five songs being recorded as first takes. The mixing was done in another forty hours. Dez Cadena did guest vocals on "What's Going On" and "other folks" sang on "Turn On".
Mould mused: "When we go into record, we always say ‘This is going to be a record, one way or the other’...We don’t go in and do demos. If we go into record, it’s a keeper, no matter what it comes out like. I always felt records should really be snapshots of what you did at the time, for better or worse...Because we don’t want to be part of that hardcore thing. Frankly, I don’t think we ever were. Our music may have been inspirational for some people that like that kind of stuff, but we weren’t doing it to placate them. 'Zen Arcade' - it’s a hard thing to explain. We had that story together with all the characters. We knew it was going to be a double album, so it made sense to make the music a little more varied. It just hit us over the head one day that we were really growing and that 'Zen Arcade' was going to be something special. It broke a lot of rules people thought we were following...These albums are an admission of humanity. Many of the incidents in 'Zen Arcade' were very personal. Those songs could well be all three of our autobiographies set to music. Some of us come from broken homes, some of us have had friends die, stuff like that. But you still have to get up, get on with it. You can’t scream and holler all of your life. You have to step back and say ‘yeah, I am f****d. I’ve got to try and change it or everything else is going to stay that way’...We started out as a punk band, no two ways about it. We wanted our songs to be presented well, but we’d get so puffed up that a song that was generally mid-tempo would go on full-throttle and we wouldn’t have a whole lot of control over it. We had to learn to control that... ['Zen Arcade' is] part of a movement where people have learned to elaborate on their emotions - besides screaming...It was a pretty important record - it was certainly important to me. I think people will look back in five or 10 years and say ‘Yeah, that was something different. That opened a lot of doors.’ Fine. I’m happy with that...But we haven’t reached out peak. In our minds, we’re just starting."
The storyline follows a young man as he becomes dissatisfied with his home life, joins the military, dabbles with religion, and finds love before losing it to drugs. The despair over his life gives way to the realization that it has all been a dream. SST only printed five thousand copies of 'Zen Arcade' and the album was out of print for months as the buzz built about the album. By 1985, it had sold over twenty thousand copies.
http://bobmould.com/
http://granthart.com/
Hüsker Dü database
http://www.thirdav.com/hddb.shtml
"Something I Learned Today"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnUaFCPo7zY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1fBMtaVd9s
"Never Talking to You Again"
"Chartered Trips"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0emHpV2k0Jg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0puqNxNDVo
"What's Going On"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBQM6pYQy9c
"Pink Turns to Blue"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kwRNXLjPS0
"Turn on the News"
'Zen Arcade' full album:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwOMXfkh1c8
Side one
1. "Something I Learned Today" Bob Mould 1:58
2. "Broken Home, Broken Heart" Mould 2:01
3. "Never Talking to You Again" Grant Hart 1:39
4. "Chartered Trips" Mould 3:33
5. "Dreams Reoccurring" Hüsker Dü 1:40
6. "Indecision Time" Mould 2:07
7. "Hare Krsna" Hüsker Dü 3:33
Side two
8. "Beyond the Threshold" Mould 1:35
9. "Pride" Mould 1:45
10. "I'll Never Forget You" Mould 2:06
11. "The Biggest Lie" Mould 1:58
12. "What's Going On" Hart 4:23
13. "Masochism World" Hart/Mould 2:43
14. "Standing by the Sea" Hart 3:12
Side three
15. "Somewhere" Hart/Mould 2:30
16. "One Step at a Time" Hart/Mould 0:45
17. "Pink Turns to Blue" Hart 2:39
18. "Newest Industry" Mould 3:02
19. "Monday Will Never Be the Same" Mould 0:54
20. "Whatever" Mould 3:50
21. "The Tooth Fairy and the Princess" Mould 2:43
Side four
22. "Turn on the News" Hart 4:21
23. "Reoccurring Dreams" Hüsker Dü 13:47
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