Reports are that Grant Hart of Husker Du has passed from cancer, still not officially confirmed but lots of sites covering it.
A friend saw him in passing in the last year and said he wasn’t long for this sphere.
RIP. He had a tough life and I hope he found some peace in his last days.
Man this sucks. I was a huge fan after I discovered Metal Circus back in the day
It was the Fall of 1978. I was attending Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. One block from my dormitory was a tiny store called Cheapo Records. There was a PA system set up near the front door blaring punk rock. I went inside and ended up hanging out with the only person in the shop. His name was Grant Hart.
The next nine years of my life was spent side-by-side with Grant. We made amazing music together. We (almost) always agreed on how to present our collective work to the world. When we fought about the details, it was because we both cared. The band was our life. It was an amazing decade.
We stopped working together in January 1988. We went on to solo careers, fronting our own bands, finding different ways to tell our individual stories. We stayed in contact over the next 29 years — sometimes peaceful, sometimes difficult, sometimes through go-betweens. For better or worse, that’s how it was, and occasionally that’s what it is when two people care deeply about everything they built together.
The tragic news of Grant’s passing was not unexpected to me. My deepest condolences and thoughts to Grant’s family, friends, and fans around the world.
Grant Hart was a gifted visual artist, a wonderful story teller, and a frighteningly talented musician. Everyone touched by his spirit will always remember.
Godspeed, Grant. I miss you. Be with the angels. --Bob Mould
That was the start of the ride, I guess. I mean, they had a record out before that, but that EP with “Real World” and “Diane” clearly sent out notice that Husker Du was going to be something amazing.
I mean, “Diane”. It has to be one of the most harrowing, uncomfortable but important songs of that entire era. It’s about a girl named Diane Edwards, who was a friend of Hart and his family when he was growing up in Minnesota. She was abducted, raped and murdered by a serial killer named Joe Ture. And in the song the way you’re never quite clear whether he’s singing her name, or singing “dyin’” is just…it’s ingenious and frightening at the same time.
He’s going to be remembered for a lot of things, but “Diane”, from that very start, that’s his masterpiece, unpleasant though it may be.
Like Alex Chilton he got the other bands writing songs named after him treatment
Oof, suck.
So many of the standout songs on HD albums are Hart-penned. Don’t Want To Know, Sorry Somehow, Pink Turns To Blue, Flexible Flyer, Diane, Charity Chastity Prudence and Hope.
I never thought his solo career was quite as successful, but that one Nova Mob album and a couple of his solo records were pretty good (especially the excellent “Good News For Modern Man”).
Being on the margins of the local hardcore scene in the early/mid-80s, I was aware of the enormous impact Metal Circus and Zen Arcade were making, but Husker Du was one of the many bands that I only got into long after the fact. When I finally got around to paying close attention to the music, it was Grant Hart’s stuff that really brought everything together.
Not much of Husker Du’s material can really be called rollicking, but listening to New Day Rising, I loved the unexpected bouncy lightness of “Books About UFOs”:
RIP
Last night listening to a GH solo record and a buddy reminded me that we saw the last live Husker Du show back in the day, at the Blue Note in Columbia. It was a terrible, messy show. They were due someplace else for a show the next day, and Hart had left his methodone at a previous tour stop the day before and was going through withdrawal and was pretty ill…and Mould seemed pissed about the entire state of things.
They canceled the rest of the gigs on the tour after that show, and that was it.
Wait, are you saying you saw their last show together?
Edit: oh yeah, I guess you did say that. Wow that’s nuts.
Yeah, crowded show, I think '88, about 250 people there. Things were definitely not good. Mould kind of drunk and irritated, Hart barely able to hold it together because of how sick he was with withdrawal. The breakup announcement came a week or so later, and in the stories about that, they mentioned cancelling the rest of the tour gigs right after Columbia.