�Husker Du� is Danish for �Do you remember?,� and I do, I recall very clearly my meeting with the guys from the rock ba.nd of the same name when they swung through Cincinnati the other night. If you dig virtuoso total recall, picture this:

We�re flung around on the various couches in Bogart�s dressing room like so many Heartland potatoes, and tonight I could use a scorecard in the worst way. These guys in Husker Du seem to be so average in every regard that they put my usual just-a-hick-from-Ohio interview shtick to shame, and I�ve got to tone it down some to keep from coming on like a fuggin� rockstar myself.

Well, Husker Du are just a li�l ol� rock band from Minnesota, as they�ve almost always claimed, but I didn�t bank on encountering this particular slice-of-life sample of humanity from my local K-Mart. Get it: guitarist/vocalist Bob Mould is sandycolored and rather chunky, short-haired and engagingly friendly all at once, he�d be the K-Mart cashier, carefully ringing up packages of curtain rods and cheerfully telling the kiddies to pay for their red & turquoise Icees at the snack bar. Bassist Greg Norton is lean and brown-haired, and his fine, fine mustache would place him right in the sub-Yuppie short-sleevedshirt & tie professional class; he�d work the service desk at K-Mart, and quietly and competently lay away half-size dresses for old black ladies for Xmas.

Drummer/vocalist Grant Hart has a strong back, longer dark hair, and that odd mustache that�s relatively bare in the middle but has dark points aimed right at his shoulder blades. Thus, Grant gets to be the consumer in my little K-Mart scenario: he�s the guy who goes through Bob�s line to purchase one quart of Quaker State 10W30 (79* with rebate), and then as soon as he�s outside he rips the tan plastic bag off and administers the motor oil to his thirsty �74 Nova right on the spot. I won�t have him toss the empty oil can onto the parking lot while he�s at it, though, as the real-life Grant Hart also appears to be tougher than me and six times healthier than Keith Moon in his prime, so don�t mess with this drummer, boy!

Actually the �reality� here in Bogart s dressing room tonight is only slightly less

^ surreal than my fictional excursion through the land of strong men and blue lights. Bob Mould is holding forth on the pitfalls of the rockbiz for a teenagelooking guy who has a local band called Squirrel Bait. Bob�s patiently adamant that this kid hang on to his publishing rights from the start, while the kid is excitedly recounting his first trip to N.Y.C. just last month. The Squirrel Bait guy and his li�l blonde girlfriend are so wide-eyed and exuberant in their precocious passion for rock �n� roll that they remind me of a couple of cute squirrels begging for nuts of wisdom at the back door of the kindly Bob Mould.

Grant Hart is meanwhile curled into a semi-fetal position in the corner of the couch, from which he�s relating his 115th dream of this tour: �I dreamed about black & white squirrels, striped like zebras.� �Maybe their father was a skunk,� sez some helpful bystander, ignoring the Squirrel Bait resource persons just a few feet away. �Naw,� says Grant, �I�ve felt like I have to shit for two hours, but when I go in, nothing comes out.�

* �Yep,� sez your local-color reporter, �you must have drunk our water, we call if �Pete Rose�s revenge.��

* Constipation�s not on Greg Norton�s mind tonight, he�s already planning bass licks for the gods, plus filling me in on the international side of the Husker Du phenomenon: �When we got to England, one of the critics said we must be �slobbering mastodons� to play the stuff we do, but after he caught our show, he admitted that we were actually �lepidopteran� after all.� Damn. Why didn�t Sir Limey Writer say �bright-colored (iron) butterflies� to start with, so I wouldn�t have to look it up? But Greg�s still rolling on Husker Du�s grand tour of Europe: �Then, in Geneva, Switzerland, this guy came up to us with this broken-English statement, �You are since the Stooges the most crazed band I�ve ever seen!��

But that�s now, 1986, with Husker Du on the verge of their best shot yet at a breakthrough right in their own U.S. of A., as Warner Bros, is releasing the band�s first major-label album, Candy Apple Grey. Do you remember that Husker Du already have six albums out on independent labels, including that famous double hardcore concept LP, Zen Arcade, on SST Records?

But it didn�t always seem that easy. Or

did it? �We got together in St. Paul in 1979,� explains Bob Mould. �I met Grant when I was at Macelester College, and he worked in a record store by the campus. And he knew Greg through the store.� The incipient power trio were inspired by the punk and new wave bands of the time, especially by the do-it-yourself ethic they had brought back to the rockbiz.. �We loved the Ramones,� says Bob. �It sure seemed easy to just get up and do it ourselves. There were a lot of skinnytie bands with vomity names out in �79, so we decided we�d be �Husker Du� and give people something to wonder about.�

I warn Bob that I�ve done my research,

that I spotted a �60s-era kids� board game entitled �Husker Du� in a thrift store just the other day. Mould concedes there might be a connection there, and adds, �That game is still made, by the way.� But he�s not going to let me pin that �hardcore� tag on Husker Du�s style of rock so glibly. �We were playing so fast we couldn�t hear the word �hardcore� when people tossed it at us. We wanted to play music, and we were just pleasing ourselves first.�

Fair enough, Bob, if you can�t live with �hardcore,� how about �instant real life everyday workaday musique based on a non-Mary Richards vision of MinneapolisSt. Paul� as a coinage to capture that elusive Husker Du essence? (I just found it on one of my caffeine-stained pages of notes on the H.D. recordings, so it must mean something.) Not to mention that almost all those skinny-tie bands with vomity names who wanted to please everybody are long gone by now, while Husker Du have survived and thrived by pleasing themselves first, last, and always. Back in those power-popped days of �79,1 foolishly thought that Cheap Trick were something of an anti-glamour band, but even Rick Nielsen (Danish for �Rick Nielsen�) hedged his bets by making himself and Bun E. Carlos into stylized nerds, and by keeping a couple glamour boys on the premises just in case of image emergency.

Whereas Husker Du are one of the most imageless, positively generic rock �n� roll bands I�ve ever witnessed. They just exist and play their own sizzle-pound music, and you can supply whatever image strikes your fancy. That�s why I had to create that whole K-Mart cash-only express line fantasy up above, just to give you some kind of handle to cling to while focusing on these guys.

But Husker Du are determined to continue controlling every aspect of their presentation to the public, to insure that they remain as generically pure as they�ve been able to throughout their six indie-label albums. �That�s why we went with Warners,� says Bob. �They let us retain our own production, singlesselection, artwork, everything.� Hmm, sounds like the band�s total control is still working, as the advance cassette of Candy Apple Grey Warner Bros, sent me contains a set of three songs in the middle of the first side that sound like Husker Du�s best hardcore-pop singles yet.

We were playing so fast we couldn�t hear the word �hardcore� when people tossed it at us.�� —Bob Mould

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CONTINUED FROM PAGE 43

Check out this power trio: �Don�t Want To Know If You Are Lonely�; �I Don�t Know For Sure�; �Sorry Somehow.�

Bob Mould agrees with my picks-to-click: �Bands shouldn�t say they�ve done fucking great songs, but those are. They�re about, things everyone can relate to.� But since my% cassette of Candy Apple Grey is sheathed in generic black & white, I wanna know what kind of killer artwork Warner Bros, has allowed Husker Du to lay onto the jacket.'Another junkyard diaspora like Zen Arcade, or another l-get-to-lick-the-frosting still life like Flip Your Wig? �Oh, it�ll be the usual stuff,� says Bob, with that bland grin, �no pictures of the band, just a lyric sheet, you know.�

Yep, I sure do, sounds like Husker Du all over again. Bob Mould would give me the J.C. Penney shirt off his back if I needed it, but right now he�s non-embroidering the Husker Du anti-legend: �So we were eating Sunday dinner at Red Lobster—our second Sunday dinner in a row at Red Lobster on this tour—and somebody mentioned �South Of Mars,� and the waitress says, �Where�s that, in Florida?� � Grant Hart doesn�t wanna hear about any fried food at this juncture, the Freddie Prinze of the Prairie uncurls himself from the couch and trudges into the restroom again. A couple minutes later we hear the slurping gurgle of a plumbing device, and Grant emerges with a new spring to his step. �Any luck?� I query. �McGovern by a landslide!� enthuses Grant. Husker Du didn�t tell me they�re into politics, too! ®