Grant Hart

Though I hesitate to big foot my own post, I have to here. It is Friday, when I usually try to say something about music - and god damn it - there's another obituary to write about. Two actually, though one in front of the mics and one behind....

Grant Hart is dead. He was 56. He had cancer. It's still too soon. I've written about Husker Du - it's probably true that I've listened to them less, thought about them less, than the other bands I loved in the mid-80s - but that is praising with very faint damns, since I go back to all those groups a lot. Replacements and Meat Puppets and Butthole Surfers and Feelies and REM - and Husker Du. I could praise them with faint damn by saying they were the third best band out of Minneapolis in the 80s - you know, after Prince and the Replacements.

That's trivia, I guess. I sure liked Husker Du. I started buying their records when they came out; a friend of mine who knew them gave me a tape of a bunch of their early stuff, singles, maybe, pus Metal Circus, and I gave that, along with tapes of some of their newer records, to another friend, and we wore them out (we wore out a lot of tapes), driving around the South Shore. (That reminds me - he bought New Day Rising on his own, maybe because I hadn't bought it yet...) So yeah.

I have to admit as well, I always liked Hart more than Mould. He was a better singer, and he had a better way with melodies - and, I think, usually a better way with words, though both of them seemed to be slipping by the end... Mould talked about how much he loved the Beatles, but Hart's songs were the ones that sounded like the Beatles - at least like the early, direct, Beatles impersonators, like Badfinger and ELO. (Not coincidentally, the guy who kept their tapes in his car was a huge ELO fan; and I have always adored Badfinger. Everyone loves the Beatles, obviously.) So - all right. A sad day.

The other obituary is for Paul Hamann - who, following his father Ken Hamann, was a major studio force for bands like Pere Ubu - and thus, another rather important person in my world.

So: here's Hart solo, singing So Far From Heaven, from his recent Paradise Lost album:



And here he is with Husker Du in full flight, doing Books About UFOs:



And Hart solo, singing one of those magnificent ballads from Candy Apple Gray:



And here is a Pere Ubu video for We Have the Technology, produced by produced by Paul Hamann: