Turn The World On. (A Requiem for Grant Hart.)

(In response to yesterday's sad news about the death of Grant Hart, many people are writing reminiscences of the band Husker Du. Here is mine - it's a brief excerpt from Almost Infamous, my never-to-be-published memoir.)
 In 1984, I graduated from college and immediately had to move home. There I was, living with my parents in my boring home town, wishing that my life could be more like a movie: the kind where the formerly average girl uncovers a terrible secret and starts an exciting campaign to get rid of the evil corporate entity that’s taking over her town, or meets a wacky and charming boy and together they galvanize the community by starting a dada theater group, or even just discovers that there’s a ghostly presence in the local woods. In fact, daily life as an adult had none of those elements. It was very disappointing.

To pass the time, I volunteered at the local college radio station, KFJC and they made me the editor of their newsletter. One of the first events I attended in that capacity was a fundraiser the station was giving at the cafeteria. My friend Isabelle, who served as my assistant editor, and I had never heard of the first three bands, and only knew the headliner, the Dead Kennedys, by repute. Even people a lot squarer than us knew who they were, because their lead singer, Jello Biafra, had run for mayor of San Francisco, but this was 1984, and the Kennedys had been around a long time at this point. Is and I showed up to the gig early, because I was supposed to interview the Dead Kennedys. It wasn’t the first time I’d interviewed a band -- I'd interviewed Jonathan Richman for the Daily Cal – but the Dead Kennedys were a lot more threatening because there were four of them and they were punks.

four years before they were dicks to us.

Well, I don’t know what went wrong in our first few minutes together, but I know that the interview went south very fast. It might have been my own fault, it often was in those days, but my impression at the time was that they were extremely obnoxious to me, in what I now recognize as a sexist manner, though at the time – not having the language we have now to describe that kind of power play -- I just thought, “Jeez, what dicks!”

 The problem wasn’t just that we were women. It was that we were dressed wrong. Despite our great and sincere love of rock music and punk rock in particular, we weren’t so immersed in it that we looked like we liked it. We didn’t have tattoos, or wear peg leg black pants and stilettos and torn white t-shirts with red bra straps showing. We didn’t even dye our hair. We looked like exactly what we were: two girls in college, with fluffy 1980s haircuts. And I can tell you, DJ Peligro, East Bay Ray, and Jello Biafra, were not nice to people who looked like us, i.e. ordinary.

The interview lasted all of five minutes before we got pissed off and left the room. I can’t remember what they said to us, but I can assure you it was horrid. Outside the “backstage” area, on the cafeteria stage, the first band was just starting: we’d never heard of them, but we stopped to see what they were like. Hopes were not high, to say the least. We were about as depressed as we could be, having just been called ‘dumb bunnies’ (or possibly ‘lame groupies’) by some stupid looking punk poseurs.

But just then the weirdest thing happened. We walked into the cafeteria, and a wall of sound hit us in the face, and locked us onto the floor, right in front of the band. We were riveted, not metaphorically, you know, but literally: we could not move because we had been enchanted. It was a magical thing. There was hardly anyone in the room yet, the place still smelled like food, and the band, a trio of men who looked about as opposite to the Dead Kennedys as it is possible to imagine, pudgy, mustachio’ed, in plaid lumberjack shirts – far, far more ordinary than us, if such a thing was even possible -- was playing like the world was about to end.

Not dicks to us.

I believe we gasped, more than once. We did not speak. We just…listened. It was like what Jacques Attali says about music being a harbinger, a bell tolling that the world is changing: we had quite literally met our future face to face. The music simply roared at us. When the band finished their set, which was short, we looked at each other, astonished.

 Then we walked out the door and into the parking lot and drove straight to the University Creamery, because why stay when we knew that we would not be seeing a better band that night. If ever.

“Jesus!”

“Did that just HAPPEN?” Isabelle asked. 

I was shaking my head. Then I laughed. “What the hell was I doing interviewing the Dead Kennedys, anyway?”

Isabelle nodded. “Well, at least you know what to write about.”

“Yeah, I’m going to shine those assholes. Their day is through. Now, what was that band called again? At the meeting they said they were from Minneapolis, I think. On SST Records.”

It was like the opening shot of that movie that I wanted to be in. We solemnly chanted the name together. Husker Du.