epilogue
Music & Literature
HUFFINGTON
09.23.12
New Day Rising
by Hüsker Dü
This record was released in 1985, on SST
Records, and I was in graduate school at the
time, at Columbia, and drinking too much.
This album, therefore, was a great tonic in bad
days. The track that made the deepest mark
was “Celebrated Summer,” which featured:
“Getting drunk out on the beach, or playing in
a band / And getting out of school meant getting out of hand.” Beside the nostalgia of this
thought, the tenderness of it, which was not something we
associated with Midwestern hardcore in those days, there was
an acoustic guitar break in “Celebrated Summer.” I got it, the
loud and fast part and the quiet part, and falling in love with
this track then led to their great cover of “Eight Miles High,”
originally by The Byrds, which led to their masterpiece Zen
Arcade. Bob Mould, who wrote 51 percent of the songs, made
some great music later, but no one who was in Hüsker Dü ever
again scaled these heights — of tenderness, nostalgia, vulnerability, and rage. I was never quite that way again, either.
Anthology of American Folk Music
Various Artists
I guess if I’d had especially hip parents, I
might have heard about this recording in the
sixties, but I didn’t have hip parents. So I
was primed for the CD re-release by Smithsonian Folkways in 1997. I had started gravitating toward quieter things by then, things
that preceded digital recording, things that
had traditional arrangements (where banjo
and fiddle were especially relevant). I also
loved (and love still) the lyrics of old folk songs. Those
songs were all murder and union halls and disconsolation.