In the late 80s and early 90s, there wasn’t a week that went by that I didn’t get a new album. I had a turntable and there were still record stores galore and records (GOOD RECORDS!) were *CHEAP*.
A bunch of the silents and boomers were moving their collections from vinyl and tapes to CDs and so they were offloading entire discographies to the used record stores. I picked up dozens of Who albums, Led Zeppelin, Rolling Stones, and, perhaps most importantly, Elton John. I can’t believe how many good albums he had that I kept finding in the 99 cent stack.
There were also a bunch of tapes to go through from time to time and, it being the early 90s, there were a bunch of the punk/alt rock tapes being brought in by the sk8ers and punks who were also, presumably, switching to CDs. Maybe they were switching to Grunge. I don’t know. But that’s when I first started listening to Hüsker Dü. My immediate thought on seeing their name was something like “two umlauts?” but it was their cover of Eight Miles High that killed any joke I might want to make in my throat. It wasn’t even one of their albums where I first heard them. Lisa borrowed a punk compilation from Anne and loaned it to me and I wasn’t really that impressed with the compilation at all except for that one song, which shook me to my core.
I thought that the Byrds song was fine, you know? Hippie music. There was worse stuff, certainly, but much better. When Hüsker Dü covered it? I felt the way that the hippies must have felt when they listened to the Byrds the first time.
My pupils turned to saucers and I thought “I get it now.”
So I got Zen Arcade and it was good… but I never felt the way I felt when I listened to Eight Miles High. (Even now, I can feel a whisper of it when I listen to it again).
So, yea, when Bob Mould comes out with new stuff, I tend to pick it up.
I was one of, like, three people who liked File Under Easy Listening more than Copper Blue (or, at least, found myself listening to it while saying “I’ll listen to Copper Blue next time”) and when Bob Mould went solo, I kept being surprised by this or that new album (Silver Age is pretty good!) and picking it up cheap from the used CD section.
Well… we don’t really have record stores anymore, do we? The places where I would wander up and down the aisles and pick up albums or CDs and look at the cover art and read the track list and look at the cover art some more have all disappeared. They went from selling mostly music, to mostly music and DVDs, to mostly music, DVDs, and “adult novelties” (either weed-related paraphernalia or stuff that anthropologists are likely to call “objects used for ritual purposes”).
As such, I rarely encounter new music anymore if I don’t hear it on the radio first. Luckily, I listen to some of the good radio stations, one of which pointed out that Bob Mould has a new album! Here We Go Crazy.
I asked Maribou to get the album for me. It arrived the other day. I will listen to it in my car on the CD player.
Here’s the first single:
