Hüsker Dü
1985: The Miracle Year
NUMERO
I in no way want to be the person who tells you that if you weren’t there, you missed out. I missed out on the Mozart-Salieri feud, all live things Coltrane, and the entirety of The Velvet Underground’s reign, yet damn well insist that my innate knowledge and feeling for all of their music is as intimate and deep as it would be had I actually been there. But, whoa, you should have been there in 1985 when the spleen-on-the-sleeve brand of hardcore noise that Hüsker Dü splayed forth became something beholden to real melody and harmony—like hummable, contagious songcraft that sounded way bigger than three guys.
In 1985, Bob Mould, Grant Hart, and Greg Norton went from being hammerheads to chirpers without losing their blunt-force impact or punch-in-the-face shake appeal. At least according to the January 30 set from the trio’s Minnesota hometown club First Avenue, recorded for the live LP The Miracle Year that additionally includes reams of added live tracks from that same championship season. The Düs did this by straightening out the crinkles and peeling away the crust from their 1984’s Zen Arcade and its barking ardor, breaking the rules of all things SST label, finding slowed tempos and lingering melodic bars, and eventually opening themselves up to pop in increasingly larger doses for 1985’s New Day Rising and Flip Your Wig before their time at Warner commenced in 1986. Then again, the trio loved chiming, rhyming psychedelic-pop heads like The Byrds and Donovan and made their trippiest hits parts of the Hüsker set list, so the love of pop was always there—as was the lyrical mind’s-eye introspection of Roger McGuinn and David Crosby—even if they waited until the mid-’80s to make it loud.
Here, throughout the surprisingly warm mix of The Miracle Year, the fresh-faced likes of “New Day Rising” and “I Apologize” and soon-to-be-recorded-raw anthems such as “Makes No Sense at All,” “Every Everything,” and “Green Eyes” bump up against early-era classics “It’s Not Funny Anymore” and “Pink Turns to Blue.” All of Hüsker Dü’s past and present melt into one new reality of stinging, ringing melodicism without explanation. The ease with which an older, heartily hardcore track such as “Diane” takes on the sing-song-y-freshness of “If I Told You” is almost shocking in retrospect—even if you did witness Hüsker Dü’s transition as I did, The Miracle Year’s overall musicality comes together more broadly and loudly than you might recall.
The Dü closes out their First Avenue set with a racing, happy-go-lucky version of “Love Is All Around,” the theme song to The Mary Tyler Moore Show—a series based on concepts of liberation, so it all suddenly makes sense. Mould, Hart, and Norton—the early ’80s quintessential cold-weather hardcore heads, the young icons of icy emo-punk and lonely romantic wandering—snapped their fingers and made their own independence from the stricture of their form. To quote that closing track, they’re gonna make it after all. And that’s the miracle.
