Page 31 - the NOISE October 2013

b Ugh
bb Eh
bbb Solid
bbbb Gold bbbbb Total Classic
alone.
We conferred with a manager and he in-
formed us that our store could not put the item up for sale to the public.
If my coworker or I had discovered the record’s secret before the deal was closed, we would have alerted the seller to its value and offered them at least $200. But we both missed it. The seller had gladly taken $30 for all twenty LPs and walked out of our lives. For us to give a customer a buck fifty for an al- bum and then charge $500 for it was unethi- cal, no matter how much it was worth or how honest our mistake.
All of us silently gazed at the relic. My fellow record nerd mentioned that I had claimed the LP before we realized what it was. Everyone now turned to me. Our man- ager smiled.
“I guess we have to let him buy it, if he’s still interested.”
I was.
He made me swear not to sell it on eBay (are you kidding?), and then allowed our re- cord head to affix it with a fair price for an employee.
So here I sit in my garage with the spiders and crickets and my four thousand flat black plastic discs that spin round and round. The beetles and The Beatles, as it were. My butch- er cover and I stare at each other. I welcome it to its new family.
The era of people ruining this rare gem by trying to remove the trunk photo with Scotch tape and saliva is over. Today the technology exists to unearth the original with only minimal damage. Collectors call it
“peeling.”
I don’t want to peel my Yesterday And
Today. It doesn’t seem right somehow. The knowledge that a treasure is lurking unseen beneath the album’s surface greatly excites me. I can detect the V of ringo’s shirt bleed- ing through and that’s good enough.
What am I going to do with my butcher cover? I’m filing it between Rubber Soul and Revolver, where it belongs.
Am I ever going to play the LP? I’m playing it right now. records are made to be listened to, not looked at.
That’s what their covers are for.
— Tony BallZ
Grant Hart, The Argument reVieW’d
The Argument
Domino
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In 1987, after reading a four star review in rolling Stone, I purchased Warehouse: Songs And Stories by Hüsker Dü on cassette. I en- joyed it but didn’t quite understand what all the fuss was about. Six months or so later, my roommate played me Zen Arcade and I saw the light.
Zen Arcade changed my life. The compo- sitions of Bob Mould and Grant Hart are so intertwined, so enmeshed that they feel like the left and right hemispheres of the same brain. The lyrics about a young man leaving home and trying to figure out what adult- hood means struck a personal chord at that time. It also showed me a different way to ap- proach music, both as a listener and a player.
The record has it all: hardcore punk, pop tunes, acoustic ditties, backwards tape ex- periments, quickie piano instrumentals, fist- pumping anthems, trippy psychedelia, and a crazed fourteen minute atonal meltdown jam which closed the LP with a full sixty seconds of squealing feedback. Side three, containing “Somewhere,”“Pink Turns To Blue,”
“Newest Industry,” and “Whatever” remains one of the most perfect album sides in rock.
There’s something more, something un- explainable in Zen Arcade, something buried in the sound of Grant Hart’s loose but tight drumming, Greg Norton’s rumbling bass, Bob Mould’s buzzsaw guitar, and the whole group’s howling vocals, something primal and dark and scary yet complete and com- fortable and compassionate.
It became ground zero, the standard to which other music was held up, and it ab- solutely flattened 99% of all challengers. It continues to do so nearly 30 years after its release. Hüsker Dü is still my favorite band, and not just for nostalgic reasons.
Since the dissolution of Hüsker Dü, Bob Mould’s solo career has gotten a thousand times the attention Grant’s has. rolling Stone just loves the guy. Many articles describe Bob as the group’s principal songwriter, an untruth that Mould does little to dispute.
Grant Hart
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thenoise.us • the NOISE arts & news
• october 2013 • 31