I'm currently reading Bob Mould's biography See A Little Light. It reminded me that the first rock concert I ever attended was Hüsker Dü, at the Syria Mosque in Pittsburgh, during the band's final tour for their Warehouse: Songs and Stories album.
So I'm 17 and it's 1987.
I and my schoolmates Patrick and David are involved in our high school's theater program. Pat and Dave are the kind of kids who listen to "college music" when most kids our age are into FM pop radio. This meant a lot of mixtape cassettes of bands like R.E.M., Skinny Puppy, Guadacanal Diary and others. When Pat and Dave make plans to see Hüsker Dü in Pittsburgh that winter, they invite me -- and our faculty theater director, Mr. Hayward, who agrees to come along. Okay.
The venue is a downstairs room with a dirty linoleum-tiled floor. No more than a hundred people have come. We keep to the back as the crowd presses forward to watch the opening act, a local punk oufit called Half Life. I've never seen a punk band up close before, so the impression they make is very clear in my head: lanky lead singer, hair dyed orange with huge, sculpted spikes in all directions with whitish tips. Guitar player in black leather jacket, black-rimmed glasses hidden beneath a huge fluffy ball of jet-black hair.
They play furiously for an hour. As they dive into their finale, a cover of "Wild Thing," a fuse blows somewhere and we all plunge into darkness, amps going silent, the drummer rolling to a stop with a comical flourish. Somewhere in the dark, someone in the crowd shouts "it's a sign!" A few minutes later power is restored and they finish the set.
Now Hüsker Dü comes out, ripping the air with "These Important Years," the lead track from Warehouse. Until now the crowd has been thick against the front of the stage, but well-behaved. Pat, David, Mr. Hayward and I have been lingering near the back of the crowd, and now we sense a wave of pressure as people up front start moving -- first pogo-ing and bumping into each other, then outright shoving. I hadn't heard of a mosh pit before, let alone seen one, but here I am, about to experience one all up close and personal.
We escape to the back wall near the bar as the crowd becomes a storm of pinwheeling arms and thrashing heads, guys grabbing each other and pushing them away and toppling into others. It's scary, but I feel safer once I notice a kind of decorum: no one throws any punches, people who fall are immediately helped back up. The few people who stumble become unwilling crowd surfers, hoisted above the throng for a moment only to be set back down again.
A few songs in we're starting to get cocky, laughing and shoving each other towards the pit like kids horseplaying around a swimming pool. At one point, either Dave or Mr. Hayward pushes Patrick into the edge of the action. Pat takes two steps forward to escape, and then a guy with dyed red bangs covering his face comes running from out of nowhere to our right, tackles Pat around the waist and drags him backwards into the heart of the pit, which closes around him like a whirlpool.
We don't see Patrick again for several minutes.
During all this, Hüsker Dü is shredding through their set at top speed, just a smear of white noise. Avoiding the pit by entering from the front side, I push up to the foot of the stage. As a kid who loved bands like the Police, Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, Hüsker Dü is the weirdest group of guys I'd ever seen. Bob Mould, short-haired and wearing a tucked-in dress shirt, Flying V guitar slung down to his shins, pouring sweat. When he sings, his eyes stay on the ceiling, never looking down at the audience. When not singing, he looks at his hands. Bassist Greg Norton with his handlebar mustache spinning in circles (and flinging sweat into the audience; some gets on my shirt and possibly in my eye). Grant Hart looking like a strung-out caveman behind the drums, stringy hair long and flat, his head perpetually cocked to one side as he sings.
And they're tearing through some punk. Fast. But it isn't quite punk. It's something else. They certainly don't look like punk rockers. Throughout it all, they don't say a single word to the audience. Not one.
Things get a little weird later on. Mr. Hayward gets pulled into the mosh and loses his glasses. Luckily he didn't drive us there, but now he can't see anything. We can't find his specs, so he hangs out against the back wall. At some point, either Dave or Pat loses their shoes in a similar fashion.
And then, Hüsker Dü decides to prank us. What happens is hard to describe. They finish a song, set their instruments down, and walk off the stage. But they leave the amps on, so the guitar, bass and vocal mics start feeding back. The feedback rises and rises and eventually stabilizes until there's nothing but unbroken, ear-splitting noise. The crowd just stays put, wondering what's going on, like we are.
The band doesn't come back. For forty minutes. It might have been much less, but it feels like forever. The feedback shrieks on without end and the crowd just mulls about impatiently. But no one leaves.
After 20 minutes of this we're starting to get worn down. We sit against the back wall. We can't find Mr. Hayward's glasses or the missing shoes. The band still isn't coming back. The loop of noise goes on and on and on. It's starting to suck. I don't get it.
Then finally, finally, the band wanders back onstage. They don't say a word, they just pick up their instruments and leap into a song as if nothing had happened at all. WHAT.
Hüsker Dü finish out the set and leave the stage. No goodbyes. I couldn't have known at the time, but that's the first and last time we'd see Hüsker Dü; the band had already started to implode from personal grudges and drug use.
We start gathering coats as the crowd starts to disperse. Suddenly Mr. Hayward shouts gleefully. Some random dude has walked up and handed him missing glasses. We were sure they'd been crushed to bits out in the pit. But no, they'd been found, rescued! Likewise, we find the missing shoes set neatly on the front of the stage.
We emerge onto a snowy Pittsburgh street in the dead of night.
A few years later, I attend my second-ever rock concert: Boston, at the Richmond Coliseum in Ohio, during their "Third Stage Onstage" tour. It's okay.
Posted December 1, 2011
