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The Living End (1994)
 
The Living End Cover Image
Tracks:
1. New Day Rising
2. Girl Who Lives On Heaven Hill
3. Standing In The Rain
4. Back From Somewhere
5. Ice Cold Ice
6. Everytime
7. Friend, You've Got To Fall
8. She Floated Away
9. From The Gut
10. Target
11. It's Not Funny Anymore
12. Hardly Getting Over It
13. Terms Of Psychic Warfare
14. Powerline
15. Books About UFO's
16. Divide And Conquer
17. Keep Hanging On
18. Celebrated Summer
19. Now That You Know Me
20. Ain't No Water In The Well
21. What's Going On
22. Data Control
23. In A Free Land
24. Sheena Is A Punk Rocker
Length: 76 minutes
Engineer: Lou Giordano
Producer: Lou Giordano; Husker Du
Notes:
Recorded live during the Husker Du's last tour in October 1987.Husker

   
Liner Notes...by Davie Fricke of Rolling Stone magazine.
From: bill.hyman@ccmail.bsis.com


This album is not how I originally remembered Husker Du's lasthurrah. The show forever etched on my brain -- right next to the 1984 firestorm at New York's Folk City ("Eight Miles High" is still ringing in my ears) and the Irving Plaza gig two years later where the Huskers literally blew the slamdancers out of the pit with a Coltrane-on-feedback expedition through "Reoccurring Dreams" -- is the night at the Ritz in the Spring of '87 when the band, fresh out of the studio with _Warehouse: Songs and Stories_ hit the stage and played the entire double album. In sequence, no less.

For the first twenty minutes or so, the audience stood slackjawed,dazed by the torrent of brand new songs. By then, the Huskers were pushing maximum-warp. Bob Mould's eyes rolled back in his head as he sprayed the crowd with fuzz guitar shrapnel. Bassist Greg Norton was airborne more often than not, looking (with that handlebar beauty of a moustache) like Cardinal Richelieu on amphetamines as he alternated between pogo-bouncing and Pete Townshend scissor-leg splits. One minute, drummer Grant Hart was negotiating the tidal jazz-waltz surge of "She Floated Away"; a couple breaths later, in "Actual Condition," he was Tommy Ramone hammering away behind Eddie Cochran. Finally, as the band turned into the hyper-mantra home stretch of "You Can Live at Home," voices, rhythm and feedback dissolved into a stage-wide wall of white light/white heat.

There were encores -- all covers, including the Huskers' famous B-side romp through "Love Is All Around", the _Mary Tyler Moore_ theme. Which ended, appropriately, with the line "You're gonna make it after all." Coming at a time when Husker Du were caught between their liberation vision of post-punk & roll and the hardline of moshpit purists who still swore by the speed-of-light gospel of 1982's _Land Speed Record_, the all-Warehouse set was the ultimate declaration of independence from the cretin hoppers -- a reaffirmation of punk as a lifeforce, not just a tribal stomp. "Those who can't, slam," I wrote in a review for the show for Melody Maker in England. "Those who can, do." And the Huskers did it all over us, big time, that night. Nine months later, Husker Du were history, undone by accelerated internal pressures and irreconcilable differences. But in between, the Huskers took one more glorious turn on the boards, tearing through the East and Midwest -- including one last visit to the Ritz in New York -- with a strictly-hitsville set list and an incandescent live vibe that even the breakup blues just around the corner could not dispel. "If I'd only known what was coming," Bob Mould told me sometime after the band dissolved, "I'd have just left after that and stopped." That tour, he claimed, was one of the best that the band ever did. This album is proof.

* * * * * *

By any measure, critical or commercial, Husker Du were at the top of their game by the end of 1986. Formed in Minneapolis in late '78, the band formally arrived on the still-deeply underground American punk scene in 1981 with the one-two punch of "Statues"/"Amusement," released on the trio's own Reflex label, and _Land Speed Record_, a classic document of machine-gun stage etiquette issued under the Minutemen's New Alliance imprint and recorded at a hometown show fo rthe princely sum of $400. After that, Husker Du's recorded output snowballed, totalling six albums (two of them, the epic _Zen Arcade and _Warehouse_, were doubles) inside five years -- not to mention a cache of explosive singles and EP's.

The rapid maturing of the group's songwriting and the vigorously independent rock & roll spirit implicit in Husker Du's no-prisoners three-piece roar were no less stunning. As the band's dominant writers, Bob Mould and Grant Hart always prized melody and menace in equal measures, yielding such early torpedoes as Mould's "In a Free Land," a 1982 single, and Hart's "It's Not Funny Anymore"from the 1983 mini-album _Metal Circus_.. They were also not afraid to challenge the "fuck society" party line of most hardcore punk lyrics, zooming in on personal relationships and private emotional torment with an impassioned directness that reached a dark apex on the Huskers' 1986 Warner Bros. debut _Candy Apple Grey_. "It's and admission of humanity," Mould once said to me of _Zen Arcade_. "You can't just scream and holler all your life. You have to step back a minute, look at yourself and say 'Yeah, I am fucked.' And try to change it."

Then, to paraphrase one of the band's own album titles, everything falls apart -- beginning, on the eve of the Spring '97 U.S. _Warehouse_ tour, with the tragic suicide of the group's manager David Savoy. The shows went on, but the novelty of the all_Warehouse set began to pale for the band by the tour's end. "It became very walking-through-the-motions," Grant Hart says now. "Once people realized that we were doing the fourth song in a row from the album, it got so predictable. We could have put on the most spirited presentation in the world. But by the end, it wasn't working without the element of surprise."The Huskers took a summer concert swing through England and Europewith a revised set list, combining a condensed _Warehouse_ presentation with older material and, for the occasional encore kick, a cover of the Ramones' "Sheena Is A Punk Rocker." By September, Mould, Hart, and Greg Norton had reconvened in Minneapolis for what was supposed to be the third Warner Bros. studio album.

It was not a productive time. Tensions within the band were rising and there was pressure on the Huskers from the record company to use an outside producer. More critically, there wasn't much in the way of new material to rehearse. Mould recalls having an embryonic version of "Compositions For The Young And Old," which eventually surfaced on his first solo album _Workbook_. He also had a fuzzbox hoedown, "Ain't No Water In The Well," which he now concedes is just "okay". Hart had the pop-punk driver "Now That You Know Me," which he later recorded for his own solo album _Intolerance_. He also remembers rehearsing "She Can See The Angels Coming," a power-hymn (as he calls it) that he'd written partly in memory of David Savoy and which also ended up in solo form on _Intolerance_. "We were grabbing at straws in the end, to come up with something," says Mould. So the band decided to take what ideas they had and hammer them out on tour, which was the way the Huskers always used to work. "_Warehouse_ was the only record that we didn't really tour until after we recorded it," explains Greg Norton, whose generally overlooked writing for Husker Du gets some daylight on this album with the bullet-rock _Warehouse_ outtake "Everytime," "From The Gut" (which he co-wrote with Mould for _Everything Falls Apart_), and "New Day Rising" (a band composition). "Every record before that, we'd write the songs, hit the road, start playing them live and then eventually get into the studio and record them." Which certainly explains the firewall live-in-the-studio sound of hallmark Husker albums like 1985's _New Day Rising_ and its speedy follow-up _Flip Your Wig_. "When _Flip Your Wig_ came out," Norton adds, "we were already playing songs from _Candy Apple Grey_." "This time," Mould says, "we figured if we packed it up in the truck and just went and played, the new stuff would take shape. And we didn't want to do the same show we'd been doing on the _Warehouse_ tour. So we decided to do a show with everything."

* * * * * *

_The Living End_ isn't quite everything. Some of the song-grenades from the October '87 shows that, for one reason or another, didn't make the cut here included: the obvious singles, "Could You Be The One?," Don't Want To Know If You Are Lonely," and "Makes No Sense At All"; a full electric band arrangement of "Never Talking To You Again" from _Zen Arcade_; a great version of Zen's "Pink Turns To Blue"; "Diane," Grant Hart's serrated meditation on rape and murder from _Metal Circus_; and "Flip Your Wig," which was the Huskers' alternate show opener. "It depended on where our wig was," cracks Norton. "That is, if we felt like just torching it from the beginning with 'New Day Rising' or, with 'Flip Your Wig,' going from a slow simmer to a boil." Mould also mentions a crazed stage recreation one night of the circular _Zen Arcade_ jam "Hare Krsna" which "goes on for nine minutes and gets so improvisational at one point that it doesn't sound like music anymore. Then on a dime, it comes right back."

But the 77 minutes of music crammed on to this disc -- edited and sequenced from mixing deck cassettes as a kind of dream-date-with-the- Huskers by Lou Giordono, the band's soundman from 1984 to the bitter end __ are still prime, primal Husker Du, an essential testament to the band's mindfucking concert prowess even at a time when, offstage, they were coming apart at the seams. "Once we hit the stage," says Norton, "all that was put aside. We had some fun, played some good music and watched people go apeshit." "It was a very competitive time for the band," Hart claims. "Not in direct animosity, but you can hear Bob and I trying to outdo each other with each subsequent song. Not pulling anything out or holding back on the other guy, but just putting a lot into it." "For all the problems," Mould insists, "once you cross the imaginary threshold and when you're lit up on stage, it all goes out the window. A good show you shouldn't even remember. It should be a blur." Appropriately, the Huskers hit the ground running here to the starting gun of "New Day Rising," a ferocious reveille set in motion by Hart's migraine drum-pulse, tailgated (as it was on the original album) by the breathless pop melancholia of "The Girl Who Lives On Heaven Hill." The mini-suite of songs from _Warehouse_ provides a locomotive look at what those all-Warehouse shows were really like, in spite of what the band may think of them now. Mould's acidburn guitar break in "Standing In The Rain," in particular, captures the Husker mindset in microcosm: equal parts distortion-in-excelcis and pungent, skidding melodic shorthand. Underneath all the corrosion, Mould, Hart and Norton, were popsters at heart, hitting all the right car-radio G-spots. The bait was speed and harmonic overload. But the payoff was always in the hook or the chorus, whether it was the opening guitar riff of "Friend, You've Got To Fall" (an inspired rewiring of the signature lick from the Yardbirds' "Over Under Sideways Down") or the way in "Ice Cold Ice" that Hart sings the chorus in high, aching echo-laden harmony to Mould's yelping vocal -- half-sneering bravado, half-naked fear.

"I always had the opinion that even if it was just two bars, if it didn't move the song along in some way, I could live without it," says Hart of his own writing. "Go for something else. Or just have nothing there."

Mould, in turn, feels that if they had lived to see another year or two, Husker Du might have gone into a deeper, darker musical space. On _Candy Apple Grey_, his long acoustic agony-blues "Hardly Getting Over It" had a grim, stripped-down momentum, with a simple melody and a repetitive chorus "to keep it open," he says, "so the words do all the work." But in the version here from the RPM Club in Toronto, there is a greater, soaring payoff -- a transcendent open-ended throb that has few equals even in the Huskers' own stage logs.

"There wasn't much stuff in the Husker Du repertoire that had much room for dynamic interpretation," Mould notes, "but I suspect that is the direction the band would have gone in if it had stayed together. The rehearsals were becoming more improvisational, less structured."

At the same time, Husker Du had a mthhodical, modular approach to performance. Songs of like mind and attack were grouped into what the band termed "packs of three": "Standing In The Rain," "Back From Somewhere" and "Ice Cold Ice" from _Warehouse_; the _New Day_ hat trick of "Terms Of Psychic Warfare," Powerline" and "Books About UFO's" (Mould: "These always went together"). The three-way collision here of "From The Gut" and "Target" from _Everything Falls Apart_ with "It's Not Funny Anymore" shoots by in under six minutes, but there is no mistaking the packet's thematic lash against punk fundamentalism ("You don't like the people who caught on late/If they're having fun") and the mob rule psyche of the moshpit ("Act like you want to act/Be what you want to be/Find out who you really are/And don't pay attention to me").

With hindsight, you can also trace in these songs and performances a subtext of frustration and loss that was being played out in Husker Du's offstage turmoil. the climactic tag-chorus in "Celebrated Summer" - - before Mould goes into the final guitar sqwack -- speaks volumes about scarred innocence and the weight of experience. "WHat's Goin' On" from _Zen Arcade_ is a manic Grant Hart song about someone consumed by inner chaos; you can certainly hear much of the Huskers' own combustible self- absorption in the awesome brutality of this rendering, sung with hysteric conviction by Greg Norton. from Toad's Place in New Haven. For all of the talk about taking new ideas out on the road, of using this tour as a mobile song lab, the Huskers only played two new songs on thisjaunt: "Now That You Know Me" and "Ain't No Water In The Well." They found their succor and inspiration -- and all the appropriate emotionalparallels -- in their greatest hits.
"I don't know who said it, but it might apply here: 'Nostalgia isthe symptom of a dying culture,'" says Hart. "In the case of Husker Du,we were pulling back. We were digging so much into the back catalogm notmeeting the quotas we set for ourselves.
"There was an amount of denial, of being able to focus so much negative energy on what we were doing. And yet it's rather obvious from the sound of these recordings that there was also a lot of positive stuff between us."
"That's the weird thing," Mould agrees, "In spite of how everyone was retreating to his own corner, it never affected the performances. The music was so strong, everybody got caught up in it. It was easy to say 'Fuck all this other shit' for an hour."

* * * * * *

The end came in January, 1988. Greg Norton likens it to "a little bug flying along and then, all of a sudden, a semi comes out of nowhere. Next thing you know, you're all over the windshield." That was six years ago -- a lifetime in rock & roll and long enough for the Huskers' mighty noise, ghettoized as fringe music even in their prime, to become a defining, commercial force in the 90's. Just as the Ramones, Patti Smith and the Buzzcocks begat the Huskers, so the Huskers to no small degree begat the Grunge Generation. They are the name to drop, under "seminal influence," in reviews and interviews, which makes the release of these live tapes especially propitious. "It's a little unnerving," concedes Mould. "I have this real strange feeling that this record is going to be successful."

If so, it will be for at least four of the right reasons, as laid out here in "Powerline": "It aggrevates and it pacifies...It captivates and it hypnotizes/Hear the power in the lines." You may have heard it before -- on the original records, on bootlegs, on other unforgettable nights that (like mine) still ring in your ears. But one listen to _The Living End_ and this will be the way you remember it from here on out.

-- David Fricke Rolling Stone

 

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