Preview
GRANT HART
Saturday, May 21
The Hifi Club
"The one thing that I can safely say about my music is, it has never been taken up by the listener briefly and then put down," says Grant Hart. "Once they take it to themselves, they might go through phases of listening to different things, but usually I’m a part of their jukeboxes for awhile after that."
He’s grateful for that attachment. At age 44, after 31 years in the music business, Hart knows how fickle both longtime listeners and those fresh on the scene can be. "Maybe it’s heartening for them to know they’re not listening to something cranked out by a fool who just wants their money."
Hart comes across as anything but a money-grubbing fool. The former Hüsker Dü drummer, ex-admiral of the good ship Nova Mob, accomplished visual artist and sporadic solo artist tosses around polysyllabic gems like "obfuscate" with ease, and speaks knowledgeably about music, history, art, economics and politics.
Many a myth has been passed around about Hart and his music. It’s been 18 years since the demise of Hüsker Dü, the legendary pop-punk trio from St. Paul, Minnesota. Some say Hart was the pop side of that equation while guitarist Bob Mould was the punk (leaving bassist Greg Norton to be simply "that guy with the moustache"). Others claim he wasn’t as prolific a songwriter as Mould or that Mould wouldn’t let Hart write more than 50 per cent of an album. Then there’s the lingering feud between Hart and Mould (though they did briefly – some say miraculously – reunite to play two songs at last October’s benefit for fellow Twin Cities musician Karl Mueller), the heroin abuse and the royalties soap opera with the SST record label and blah blah blah.... Anyone with a serious interest in the history of American independent rock has read it all before.
"My recommendation at this point," Hart says, after volunteering an update on the continuing problems with collecting royalties from the SST record label, "is that any of the kids that are interested in any of that music, just go ahead and download it. I mean, they’re just putting money in the hands of evil people, so they might as well. Let’s put it this way: did Theo and Vincent Van Gogh get royalties from the Japanese when they bought Irises for $78 million? No. I mean, we’ve done OK with those records. It’d be nice to do as well as we really did with them, but I’m not going to keep beating my head against the wall."
Despite the headaches and heartaches sometimes associated with the people and music from his past, he’s happy to meet younger fans at his solo shows who want to pay homage to that past.
"It is really interesting to talk to these people that have come into music, let’s say post-Nirvana, where maybe they had an older brother who was into Nirvana or something like that. They’ve gone into a little music archeological discovery of their own and end up at your musical doorstep," he says.
They’re often astonished that they can meet someone who has influenced the bands that introduced them to the counterculture. "I think they’re used to seven layers of security around anybody that they appreciate."
As a youngster, Hart, too, had been to the kind of shows in stadiums where the audience is formally separated from the performer. The punk rock shows he later attended were much more fun, he recalls. "It was like being in the stream of things rather than just an observer. You could actually, as an audience member, participate and it was just very embracing. I tend to be a bit of a populist anyway, but break down those ridiculous walls!"
Hart worries that that type of coming together for a communal musical experience may eventually become a thing of the past. After all, there’s no profit margin in unity.
"It seems to me that year after year, American kids have less fun that they can have for free. Instead of the guy walking down the street with the boom box, you have all these different people with their own little private boom boxes. The closest they come to interacting is when somebody accidentally sings out loud to what they can only hear."
Instead of selling one device to play music, the same company gets away with selling hundreds and makes more money.
"Any time you can separate people from each other," he says, "you can sell ’em twice as much. The whole idea of ‘two can live as cheaply as one’ is just abhorrent to these corporate types that want to base everything on a vertically integrated model. There are some things that can’t be equated that way, and they insist on trying to push things into that format. It’s folly," Hart surmises, "and I think people have to take back their lives." |
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