Album: Candy Apple Grey
Year: 1986
(Mould)
At some point in late 1985, I got a new car. Well, not a “new” car, exactly: it was a slightly used gold Toyota Corolla hatchback, and it was the only car I ever put a bumpersticker of a band on.
The band, of course, was Hüsker Dü, and I don’t remember where I got the bumpersticker from, but I was damn happy to have it on my car.
One more fact about that car: you could get a drum kit in it pretty easily: kick drum and hardware in the hatchback, toms on the back seat, cymbals behind the front seats and snare drum in the passenger seat.
Though that wasn’t until a couple of years later, when everything was accelerating out of control.
Side one of Candy Apple Grey ended with an all-acoustic Bob Mould solo song called “Too Far Down,” which starts with Mould singing “I’m down” and then somehow goes even lower. And then you flipped the record and got a couple of kick drum beats and then this:
Twenty years ago, saw a friend was walking by
And I stopped him on the street to ask him
How it went, and all he did was cry
I looked him in the face, but I couldn’t see past his eyes
Asked him what the problem was, he says “Here is your disguise”
And the music was like nothing they’d done before: a slow full-band dirge dominated multiple acoustic guitars — maybe a 12-string electric — and a piano echoing a single note after every single line, and a chorus that was utterly despondent.
Now he’s hardly getting over it
Hardly getting used to getting by
Now he’s hardly getting over it
Hardly getting used to getting by
Bye-eye
You know how some songs have sad lyrics but the music is a supersonic roar? You know, like “Pink Turns to Blue”? This wasn’t one of those.
Old man lays down by the railroad tracks
Got no paper in his pocket
Got no paper on his back
I asked him what the time was
He says “Hit the road now, Jack”
Went back to see him next week
He died of a heart attack and died away
“Hardly Getting Over It” was a terrible night of depression made manifest. It was like one of my drunken 2:43 AM post-breakup journal entries come to life. Not lyrically, of course, because it wasn’t about some stupid twentysomething hookup that was doomed from the start irreparably fracturing.
Nope, Bob Mould was singing about the big breakup. You know, when people break up with living.
Grandma, she got sick, she is going to die
And grandpa had a seizure
Moved into a hotel cell and died away
My parents, they just wonder
When they both are going to die
And what do I do when they die?
His singing on the phrase “died away” was an absolute marvel of dignified sadness.
Once “Hardly Getting Over It” establishes its mood, it never even wavers; even the stop-time parts after each chorus where it drops down to the kick drum for a few beats are sad. Oh, and the last half of the song is basically a long synth solo, that just plays the melody line again and again. It goes without saying that this isn’t the type of thing I came to Hüsker Dü for.
Hell, it wasn’t the kind of thing that I came to anybody to! And yet, I loved “Hardly Getting Over It” from the start — for the singing, for the gorgeous melody, for the risk-taking, for the lyrics to which I couldn’t relate, but knew someday that I would — and it remains one of my favorite Hüsker Dü songs.
“Hardly Getting Over It”
“Hardly Getting Over It” performed live by Bob Mould in 2011
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