Album: Don’t Want To Know if You Are Lonely EP
Year: 1986
(Mould)
In the long, hot summer of 1986 there were two 60-minute tapes (Maxell XL-II, naturally) that dominated the car stereo of my gold Toyota Corolla hatchback. One was my dub of Blood on The Tracks to which I appended the Biograph outtake “Up To Me”.
And the other was Candy Apple Grey, to which I appended the massive, monster b-side “All Work and No Play.”
Hüsker Dü were probably my all-time favorite band to play on KFSR — holy shit, did they sound good with the in-studio monitors cranked loud! — and “All Work And No Play” may have been my favorite Hüskertoon to play.
For one thing, it was over 8 minutes long, which meant that I had time to take a piss as well as put away some of the albums I’d already played, and gather new ones to play later on in my airshift.
Also: it’s gorgeous. At least until it descends into complete and utter madness. And given that it’s based upon The Shining (“You’ve got the shinning! “You mean shining!” “Shh! You wanna get sued?”), it also means that there is actually some kind of conceptual reason for the song to get utterly nuts.
At first, it’s relatively straightforward — Mould is playing a catchy riff, Hart a basic beat, with cool psychedelic paradiddles on his snare.
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
He says “No way!”, she says “No boy!”
Says he’s got it, says “I know”
It’s all work and no play, makes Jack seem that way
And hell, even the guitar solo is basically the melody line, something I now realize that Mould did quite a few times.
But just after that, you start noticing that they’ve stopped singing any other lyrics other than:
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
Trust me, that’s not even close to how many times they sing “All work and no play makes a Jack a dull boy.”.
The song breaks down to just a kick drum and they’re singing “All work and no play makes a Jack a dull boy.”.
Mould’s axe breaks through a doorway, and they’re singing “All work and no play makes a Jack a dull boy.”.
Their voices start echoing around each other in an infinite loop, and they’re singing “All work and no play makes a Jack a dull boy.”.
The guitars start going backwards, going over, going under, going sideways, and going down and Bob Mould and Grant Hart are singing “All work and no play makes a Jack a dull boy.”
While only half as long as say, “Sister Ray,” I’m guessing that “All Work and No Play” was equally as annoying to a certain segment of my audience. Because it’s so repetitive, so bloody minded, and so insane.
So insanely catchy, that is!
And that was the genius of “All Work And No Play”: it could easily have been another four-minute song on Candy Apple Grey, with the second half of the song just the title being repeated over and over again, like “Dead Set on Destruction,” or “All This I’ve Done For You,” Instead, they took what was kind of the songwriting formula for that album and stretched it beyond all reason.
And 30 years later, it’s incredibly ironic that I didn’t see “All Work And No Play” as a cry for help from a band that had released five albums worth of material in two years.
I don’t think you can actually purchase “All Work And No Play” anywhere: it’s not on iTunes or Amazon, and it’s not even on Spotify. And it certainly isn’t on the shitty shitty CDs that represent Hüsker Dü these days.
Where are my Hüsker Dü reissues?!?
Rescuing a grand statement like “All Work And No Play” — the best song ever based on a film made from a Steven King novel — from the slag heap of history is exactly why we need the reissues before it’s too late.
“All Work And No Play”
“All Work And No Play” performed live in 1985
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