We’ll do it our way this time

Hüsker Dü | Tonite Longhorn

It’s been a little longer coming than I’d hoped when I broke the news that a new Hüsker Dü album was on the way, but finally Tonite Longhorn received a full launch last week.

The double live album first saw the light of day in April in a limited Record Store Day release earlier this year from the band’s own Reflex Records label and is now fully available to buy and stream.

It captures three very early, and very rare, sets the pioneering Twin Cities trio performed at Jay’s Longhorn. The downtown bar was dubbed Minneapolis’ CBGBs, with good reason given it played host to the likes of the Ramones, Iggy Pop, the Buzzcocks, Gang of Four, Blondie and Talking Heads in the late 70s.

For Hüsker Dü, who formed in 1979, the Longhorn quickly became a regular haunt through to the end of 1980. During that time they appeared so often that the generic poster the new album takes its name from was created to save time on advertising.

Tonite Longhorn kicks off with the second of Hüsker Dü’s gigs at the Longhorn. The seven-song set from 6 July 1979 captures a band still finding its feet but sounding far more confident that you’d expect from one that had only been together five months.

That first set mixes goofy originals like ‘Insects Rule the World’ with ‘I’m Not Interested’, the first of the album’s tunes that would eventually be amped up and speed-injected for the band’s 1982 live debut album Land Speed Record.

There’s an awkward version of ‘Can’t See You Anymore’. It’s one of the album’s many tracks that would remain unreleased until the 2017 boxset Savage Young Dü, and here a tentative Bob Mould vocal is balanced with his already accomplished guitar playing.

There’s nothing tentative about Tonite Longhorn’s second set. That 16 July 1980 performance, ahead of a date the following night with The Replacements, sees a more muscular Hüsker Dü increasing the power and velocity, but still some way off the white light hardcore blur of Land Speed Record. Consequently, individual words can still be clearly made out on tracks like ‘All Tensed Up’ and ‘Don’t Try To Call’ (after which Bob remarks, “We’ll do it our way this time”).

That July 1980 date is also notable for the inclusion of ‘Ode To Bode’, whose noise vamping over a Bo Diddly beat would later be reworked into Zen Arcade’s ‘Hare Krsha’.

The year gap between the two sets on Tonite Longhorn’s first disc is best illustrated by its two versions of ‘Do You Remember?’. Captured in 1979 (listen above) the band’s theme song of sorts (hüsker dü being ‘do you remember’ in Danish and Norwegian) is a charming, but slightly rinky-dink song. By 1980 it’s become a punk rock charge.

The album’s second disc, home to a single 13-track set from 25 September 1980, comes within touching distance of the sounds of their first records. There’s the post-punk of debut single ‘Statues’, ‘Gravity’ - which wouldn’t turn up until their second album ‘Everything Falls Apart’, plus ‘Call On Me’, one of Hüsker Dü’s many early could-have-been songs that were discarded in the rush of their own productivity.

Although the recordings themselves are rare, Tonite Longhorn’s only unreleased song is ‘Ode To Bode’, after the wide-ranging Savage Young Dü boxset included pretty much all the band’s early material that hadn’t already appeared on an official release.

So the selling point for the new album is in the complete sets it contains and the full looks they offer into the band’s first 18 months together as they rapidly gained in confidence and skill. Tonite Longhorn is still the sound of a young band – neither Bob nor Grant had yet turned 20 when the third of the album’s sets were recorded – but Hüsker Dü was already on the path to punk rock greatness.

Bonus writing: Greg Norton’s new band Ultrabomb