Conversations With Grant

By Reed Martin

May 29, 2004

Grant Hart talks with Quintessentially Magazine (U.K.) writer Reed Martin.

[So what are you working on these days?]

I'm working on cleaning up the business end of things. There are like three different labels that have just sort of fallen from the sky with y'know, entertainable ideas. And two of them have their own studio facilities and such and I would be able to. . . you see, a cash-advance means nothing if you can't afford to make the record. I guess you know it's a natural progression that after something like "Good News," although the time span is a little longer than I would have hoped. . . you can't follow up with more production. You have to strip it down or change it somehow. You can't give someone a bigger cookie. You've got to give them a macaroon or a cup of coffee. You've gotta give them something different.

[Do you think you'll be going to a more stripped-down sound like your live shows?]

Not that stripped down but I think you're going to see a lot less. . . let's say "Good News" had bells and whistles that show up and disappear that are gloss. And it's nice to have but not everything is an homage to Brian Wilson or whatever.

[What about putting out a live album or something to one-up the bootleggers?]

Well, with the occasional live album now. . . the Husker live album, I don't even consider that to be. . . in existence. I don't know why. I guess I just never got behind the project as much as other people did but uh, to me, a live thing. . . unless it's something like "The Last Waltz" or something where it's like an event in itself, to me, you're kind of encroaching on the job of the bootleggers. You know, God forbid we should take the enthusiasm away from these people. And I enjoy people taking a vested interest and somewhat of a financial risk, where they don't even involve me. . . and then you know there's the tape traders where, especially with the Husker catalog, the tape traders are the ones who have been keeping the identity of that band alive.

[But shouldn't you be getting a small cut from the people who are enthusiastically buying or trading these recordings?]

Well, what goes around comes around. There's lots of stuff that people get for free from the world and I think that's kind of a trade off that you have to make in order to be treated seriously.

[Karmically or seriously?]

Seriously-karmatically. I mean um, I think an artist's karma is hand in hand with their reputation and when it comes down to it, that is the thing to preserve at all costs. The artistic reputation at least. And you know, it's not like the Ballet Russe gets a royalty when people talk about Vaclav Nijinsky 100 years later. And I think it's part of the payback of being acknowledged. It in part is the acknowledgement. And in a big way it's free market survey. And I don't know. There's so many people that, I don't know, the word "sellout" is a pretty easy flag for people to wave. But you have to throw stuff in the compost heap. And. . . you're already getting paid for the performance once.

[But wouldn't some fans want to buy a burned CD or a previous recording of a live show at the end of one of your performances?]

Yeah. Or there could be a special code to download it or something. I was pretty impressed when Husker did the Glastonbury Festival, there were seriously tapes of our show, for sale, with covers, with the song list 45 minutes after we finished. That was in early 1987.

[That was in front of 100,000 people or something?]

There were a few. . . there was a hellacious number of them.

[How can people hear the song "Evergreen Memorial Drive?" It's a really stirring number that people may have heard at your live shows but they may not be able to hear it again after that.]

Well, unfortunately, two sources I believe, are both out of print. Now, one that I would discourage people from seeking out is the Restless [Records] album. If I could edit that into an extended play single, I'd be happier with it. But it was a project that was compromised from the very beginning. Then there was like a BBC-only, no wait. . . a small label named "Black Box" that did a different version. . . that was uh, I think limited to 500 copies. I'm going to have to do my homework on that one. But what's really funny about that Restless album and that's the Nova Mob album with the chimney on it. . . is that for eight months we had been talking to Rykodisc and Rykodisc was talking to us. . . They dropped the project back in my lap after we were already in the studio. So signing with Restless was kind of like a bail out the lifeboat kind of operation. And Restless at the time had made P&D [packaging and distribution] deals with Twin-Tone Records and immediately started dropping things from the catalog. They immediately started dropping entire labels from the catalog. And just not fulfilling what Twin-Tone had set out to do. And what's really ironic now is that now Restless is out of the picture but their liabilities have been assumed by Rykodisc. And according to a letter I got, it says that there have not been any copies sold in nine months, which to me tells me that they're all at distributors already or that they've kept it out of print. What I'd like to do with the next group of people is to take a small group of those songs and put them back in the hands of the listeners. You know, record them again. You know, you can never go back to the place that you were when you were originally recording it but with an eye to the past and grounded in the reality of the present you can do just as good of a job.

[The place you were emotionally, you mean?]

Exactly. And you know with the multi-tracking they have nowadays, you don't really need to go in there with a full band. A full band for me takes more time than doing it alone.

[You can do the drum line yourself, obviously.]

Yeah, there are so many steps that you can save just not having to send information from one mind to another. The frustrating thing about the last stages of Nova Mob was to reiterate all the time to people. . . Tom and I had great communications all the time. And Chris Hessler was fine but you know, you're trying to do a democratic band thing and you know damn well you could do the drumming better yourself. You know, you start to think: "It's time for a little monarchy."

[I once heard a version of "2541" that had some echo on it and it seemed to be really raw and emotional and a little more keyed-up than the version that's on "Intolerance." I think it was a single.]

Yeah, there was a single version that we released with "Come Come" and "Let Go." I ended up getting a pile of the three-inch versions.

[Are you finding your fans at the live shows are older? Are they younger? What's the split there?]

They're tending to be I would say about. . . a good quarter of people that are. . . almost like obnoxiously celebrating the fact that they've been y'know, affiliated listeners for years. Well, it's not too obnoxious and I don't mean to insult anybody but it's like: "Hey, we've been on the same team!" And a lot of those people are people that were in bands for a while and perhaps aren't any more, who may have claimed some great affinity or influence or something y'know with Husker. And in that group you get the people that are like: "This song saved my life," or something like that.

[That's true for a lot of people though.]

Yeah, more on that in a second. . . it's kind of a chicken and egg thing. Y'know, are they there just because they're at a club every night? Then you get about fifty percent of the people who are like: "Yeah, I never got a chance to see Husker, I saw Nova Mob twice. . . I've been a big fan of your music. My older brother was really into Husker." And you'll also get an amount of kids that are like y'know: "Yeah, I heard about you from a friend of mine. . ." Those are the under 25-year-olds who have an interesting passion for it but are almost a little disappointed that they're not part of a bigger group of people who appreciate it. It's almost like they want to be part of a bigger crowd seeing the show. Or they wish their peers were attending or something like that. But, by that, it kind of defines who they are: a little more conscientious about music, a little more introspective. It's funny because the older fans seem to be the rowdier, more boisterous. . . and that works both ways. They're also the ones that choose the time of the performance itself as the time to reminisce very loudly with their friends, front row! Within that group you have people who feel they have some sort of a birth right, because of time put in, to talk during the songs and during the show. You know: "I'm the oldest fan here. I was listening to you way back when." And just by that you can kind of gauge what their like.

[I know you've gone back and forth with people singing along or coming in with applause too early and possibly stepping on the ends of your live songs, which in many cases are some of the most emotional moments or the most poignant moments. Do you have to bite your tongue to not go after them and tell them to keep it down?]

I play "fool the listener" a lot where something about my body language tells them, "well, it's not over yet," or he's waiting to say something else or sing something else. Or if I leave a line hanging, there are those that are familiar enough who wait for the other shoe to drop as it were. The biggest defense I have with the chatterboxes is just to get quieter and quieter and quieter. And that's like the first stage. You get people reacting to the volume level. And so you've already established that there's a certain amount of hypocrisy, where they're willing to be inattentive when they can be covered up for it. . .

I mean, it has to be a problem for me to persist or at least a problem in my mind for me to persist but then they'll be like the sudden quietness in the middle of a louder passage, so it kind of like catches some people practically yelling when the volume drops away, so if that doesn't make them notice that they're yelling their conversation during the songs. It's really funny how that in itself will disarm people. And if they still need to talk they can go into the bar area and finish their conversation and most of the time they do. Very rarely, but more often than I would prefer, do I have to actually come out and say something.

[It may be a recent phenomenon of people who feel they can talk during movies of people talking at home when they're watching TV with other people.]

I think it has a lot to do with the fucking cell phone culture, I think it has a lot to do with the whole attitude that the performer is actually the consumer. And that goes back to you know, the post-Nirvana "everybody belongs in a band" thing, where you started to see guitar warehouses cropping up and where being in a band was a right of passage for young teenagers rather than a career choice. And so you had more people putting more money. . . and even the rock and roll trade schools. . . I don't know if they have any out East but I know that Julliard has turned quite pop-oriented as far as: "We'll teach you how to become a pop star." There's actually a school run by some former producers in town here called Music Tech, which is basically teaching kids how to be the next Nirvana.

[How about the origin of some of the songs you play live that many of your fans may not be as familiar with, like say "Centre Pompidou?"]

That was from real experience. We had a day off in Paris, or as much as a day off as you could get. We were going to drive at about 9 p.m. to the next gig but there was no gig that day and is my habit on tours, I will and I did get up around 8 a.m. and I was going to get to the Pompidou Museum, the modern art museum in Paris. And I finished eating breakfast and Tommy from Nova Mob comes down and says: "Oh, let me eat really quick and I'll join you!" So, add another 20 minutes to my departure. And we're just heading out the door and the drummer is like: "Oh, let me take a quick shower and I'll join you." So we're waiting around and waiting around and we go upstairs to his room and the guy is on the phone to his girlfriend. So my steam is rising a little bit. By now it's 10 a.m. and we're leaving and we're walking down the Champs Elyisse, and I make verbal and pantomime reference to "take your billfold and put it in your pocket," because believe it or not, we're not in Kansas any more. And this drummer fellow was like: "Ah, I don't need a babysitter. I don't need people to tell me what to do. . . " But then ten minutes later, "My billfold's missing!"

Later we're crossing where Napoleon built the arch for the Battle of Austerlitz. And this guy asks me: "Hey, translate that for me." So I'm looking at the arch and I'm trying to figure out what it says and I'm reciting it as I go along and when I'm done I look down and these guys have walked on ahead like a block. I'm standing there reading them the sign and meanwhile they've walked away. You know, for people that wanted to go someplace with me, I might as well have been alone. And then of course as soon as we get to the Centre Pompidou they were drawing the little rope thing across the entrance: "Oh, it's a private reception from noon to the rest of the day." So it's like: "Well, I hope you clowns had a good time." The first thing to erupt in that song in my mind with that song was like the "Ooooo, Pom-pom-pidou." That's just the perfect background vocal for that kind of a song. And I thought the scramble of imagery between West Coast American hot rod and surfer sounds and Parisian reality. . . they kind of melded really interestingly for me in that song.

[What's really amazing is how you're able to get all those locations to rhyme and come together.]

And still not speak French!

[Right! How about "Evergreen Memorial Drive." I think a lot of people probably take their own experiences and superimpose them on that song.]

Yeah, well. As stated in the song. There's a less-direct route to Duluth which is the Great Lakes port in Minnesota. That's kind of oxymoronic: "Great Lakes Port." It's a lake, it's not a sea. But there was a route on which a friend of mine's family had a cabin. And it would be kind of like: "Go to the cabin along this route and continue on to Duluth if you were heading to Duluth. But it's definitely the more scenic route to Duluth. And there's the names of a few towns in there that are thrown in. There's a Danish town called Askov which the street signs and everything are still in Dansk. And maybe they keep it up for their own traditions but for years people have said there are covens of witches in Askov.

Also, these people's cabin was in a little town called Duquet and farther up the road there's a town called Nickerson and everyone from Duquet was like: "Oh. Don't go to Nickerson. They'll just overcharge you if they know you're from Duquet. Go south to Branson if you need to buy anything because if you go up to Nickerson you'll just get ripped off," and it probably had some basis in reality but I liked the way that Nickerson worked with "son-of-a-bitches." That's how it goes: "Askov has northern witches, Nickerson has son-of-a-bitches." So in that's the insider version of it which is. . . meaningless. . . whatever other people are putting into it is probably more valid to more people than the actual intent, or the original intent.

[How about the song "The Last Days of Pompeii?" What were some of your inspirations there?]

I originally liked the rhythm of the words. You know? "These are the last days in the city of Pompeii." The title. . . There was originally a novel around the turn of the century called "The Last Days of Pompeii" and there were a couple of cinematic attempts at it. It's the story of a fighter in the Coliseum who is freed and a soothsayer tells him you are going to meet the greatest man in the world.

You know some times different things that you're reading at one time can kind of like meld together and you notice similarities in tone or what-have-you, and what I originally hooked up with that whole "Last Days of Pompeii" album is like okay, you have: Werner Von Braun and the German scientists that are escaping. . . they have nowhere to run except toward the United States Army. They are hoping that they'll be treated better by the Yanks. They know that their worst enemies at the time, the biggest danger was the [Nazi] S.S., particularly Von Braun's like. . . I'm sure they did a lot of playing with the story to make it acceptable to Americans but they pretty much painted him as this almost innocent scientist who in order to fund his dreams of space exploration was building these terrible weapons. And there's quite a bit of. . . it's hard to call Von Braun too much of a liar in that respect than say someone like Albert Speer.

And since Von Braun was most qualified to run the Saturn V program, especially when we had the Vietnam War going on at the same time, I'm sure they were asking themselves, "What are we going to highlight in this guy's bio? What are we going to say?" So the thought of him escaping and going back in time. . . well, I didn't pin that down so much on the album but y'know the original experimental librettos for that work were more definite as far as time and place and especially the characters where originally we had Werner Von Braun escaping in a rocket and when he releases the hatch he discovers that he's gotten away from the war but y'know, here he is in the Mediterranean in 79 A.D. and he's got worse problems. And not only that, he's got less technology than he's used to solving his problems with. . .

[Is that a nod to the original novel "Planet of the Apes?"]

There's a bit of "Planet of the Apes" there, yeah. Cornelius and Zira escaped the Planet of the Apes as it was being destroyed, in the future, but end up being the parents of all the apes, because they end up going back in time and being the first apes. And it doesn't really point out how they split into orangutans and chimpanzees and gorillas, by having the ancestors being both chimpanzees but there are holes in a lot of scripts. But getting back to the Pompeii thing, I've linked together the whole Kennedy thing, there's less of it that actually comes through but there's the thing about having a good regime and an evil regime sneaking around in the background there. And the "giant flash," that could be framed whichever way: It could be Zapruder, where the brain explodes or it could be nuclear, y'know, it could be a rocket. And that's how nebulously I've played with the metaphors in that one. I've stripped it back so lyrics could represent different things.

[How about the inspiration of your song "Admiral of the Sea?" The lyrics sound like they could be cinematically-inspired as well.]

There are two versions of "Admiral of the Sea" because in the big stereo-opiticon picture here, you have Admiral Pliny The Elder who is investigating this plume of smoke from Vesuvius and who inadvertently dies in the process. . . everything we know about Pompeii comes from the writings of Pliny The Younger. And that's why in the narrator's voice he says: "My name is Pliny and these are observations I have made." I believe they're known as "The Observations of Pliny The Younger." Or at least that's the title they had when I ran across them in the inception of this work. But originally there was more detail. I made a chart originally before I wrote the song.

There was a big overview as far as what the "novel" was going to encompass. In the final version there's no presence of the Russian Army, because that would confuse the threat to Von Braun. The threat to the people of Pompeii was pretty much Vesuvius but at the time it was a very class conscious place and you had people, tradesmen in Pompeii who were ascending to the aristocracy. You know some of the biggest villas and buildings had belonged to people who made fish sauce and things like that. Pompeii to Rome was kind of like Miami to New York and Pompeii was the pleasure dome. There was steam and hot baths and cold springs. And Romans liked nothing better.

[And has that inspired some of the arrangements in your solo work?]

I'm sure very unconsciously and it has also given me a knowledge and an appreciation of my place and my type of music and the punk place in the whole history of shtick. Let's face it, it's all showbiz and if you got a safety pin in your ear it's the same thing as a white tie and tails for a different period. It's a shtick, it's a costume.

[I was wondering if you have any favorite soundtracks and if that was something you'd ever consider doing, perhaps lending your music to the silver screen.]

Yes. If someone wants to put something that they think is appropriate and that means something to them into their art work, that to me would be an honor. I love movies and I'm a huge, huge film fan. In a lot of ways that was my original kick when I was quite young.

When I was like 10 and 12, I was really big into like the different Golddiggers of 1933, ‘35, ‘37, Forty-Second Street, all that, you know if it had a Busby Berkeley scene in it I was gone. And old movie soundtracks were what I was buying before I was buying rock and roll. There was a really good box of Warner's film music that came out in the mid-70's that was like a four-record set that was called 50 years of film music and that would have had to come out in ‘77, if it was 50 years from "The Jazz Singer."

I've done background music for a few independent filmmakers. People got the idea that my early material was unavailable but that's actually not the case. If another artist wants to take a song of mine and put it in their work, I'd consider that a great acknowledgement. But as far as talking to a director or producer about what their needs are for a film and then coming up with something, usually that has been on the upper end of the amateur level in a lot of different student productions and very, very independent film people.

[It seems like you would have such a wealth a treasure trove of songs that would be really great over a lot of Sundance films. Is that something you would be opposed to, or that people just don't know the mechanism of how to contact people?]

I think that has a lot to do with it. People don't think of looking at the publishing company on the records sometime.

[Is that as simple as it is? You just look and it says - ]

Yeah. It says Bug Music. That's the production company that I work with. They're at Bug Music Inc. 6777 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood, CA 90028. 323-466-4352.

[So a they could just contact them and go from there.]

Yeah, there was a thing that I wasn't aware of where a former partner of mine, it was assumed that he was speaking for both of us when he rather broadly said none of our stuff, speaking of H¸sker D¸, none of our stuff is ever going to be in any movies, the stuff is not available, blah, blah, blah, and that statement went back to the late 80's and it wasn't until about four years ago that's somebody was speaking to me about it and said, "Hey, Grant, why is your stuff unavailable for films?" And I'm like, "What?"

So somebody down the line had assumed you know, Bob was speaking for both of us. What happened was Bob and I shared a publishing company of our own, and then when we divided we took our respective songs and started our own companies and then I have Bug Music which is kind of like the collector for my music company, Nora. So that was a little bit of a handicap. I think that possibly closed some doors. But there was the "Matter of Degrees" soundtrack that broke the dam on that. The film didn't last long in town here. And the song in there was kind of like a jukebox. It was assigned to a moment but it wasn't as if the moment was tailor made or anything like that. It's like a movie about the music business so it was kind of easy for them to fit anything and everything into it.

[Anything recent that you've enjoyed or that you've rented?]

What I thought was really impressive was the opening credits for "Shadow of the Vampire." I don't know the name of the graphic artist, I think it might have been an old like Weimar era German etcher or something, but the opening credits for Shadow of the Vampire I though were very suitable to the, I mean they were grand. There was music over it and it just seemed to fit really well. And I guess an early person that I like, if there was anybody that I like studied what they were doing soundtrack-wise, I would say Tiomkin. . . Dimitri Tiomkin worked a lot with Frank Capra, he did the Victory at Sea soundtrack. It was wartime movies and I was to find out years later that during Nixon's crisis that he pretty much played the Victory at Sea soundtrack non-stop.

[Just to sort of psych himself up?]

Yeah, like he had been a Navy man , and you know it inflated his balls for him.

[I know that there was a Violent Femmes song "Out the Window" that was inspired by an obscure reference in a Woody Allen movie about a depressed philosopher. Have you ever seen a film that inspired you to write a song? A subtle line or a riff that came of it?]

Oh yeah, it's more of an instrumental on "Good News for Modern Man." On that record is a song that's titled after a line from Rosemary's Baby. "Let Rosemary rock him Laura Louise." There's the scene in "Rosemary's Baby" where Rosemary wakes up when they're having the coven meeting next door and Satan's baby is in the crib and Patsy Kelly, an old comedienne from the 30's, is playing the nanny and she's rocking the cradle and the a baby's crying and the head devil-worshipper guy says "Let Rosemary rock him Laura Louise" and the baby is calmed by its real mother. So there's a very obvious one. Maybe playing on the rock him you know as far as you rocking is what fans do, and also I don't shy away from making the audience think or giving them some satisfaction of a puzzle that they can figure out.

People were walking up to me right after the release saying what's this title mean or hey, I know where you got that title, so it adds a different dimension as opposed to just calling it whatever. There's another song there that in the respect that he worked in film, that is fairly well-inspired by the work of Marcel Duchamp. And he did some films throughout his life, but one in particular that was called "Dreams Money Can Buy," and I'm sure that had quite a bit of inspiration for the song Teenie's Hair, or at least part of the mood. That's also on Modern Man.

[You know when you walk around New York with your own little soundtrack movie with your headphones, some of the stuff off of Intolerance would really lend itself to that sense of so atmospheric and sort of catch the mood.]

Right. What comes to mind?

[Well, there's the instrumental right after "2541," would be great and then "The Victim" song.]

The instrumental song, I believe you're referring to "Roller Rink."

[Right.]

Now I had very cinematic ideas about that.  What I conjured up hearing that song is that when you're at the roller rink and you do what's called a snowball. It starts out with one couple and the when the guy blows the whistle they each grab somebody so there's four skaters, blow the whistle, eight skaters, you know, boy grabs another girl, girl grabs another boy. And my idea at the time was if we're gonna make a video for that album, to make it off the instrumental and just have this surreal snowball skate where it's eventually so packed that people cannot even move because it doubles every time.

[Is there anything you would shy away from or not want to do? I think the songs probably lend themselves to melancholy moments like in say a John Cusack movie like when he's on the up end or the falling in love part or the middle ground before the falling in love scene.]

Anything except "Fat Man and Little Boy." The reason I mention that is that in that movie there is a ridiculous dance sequence with Cusack where eventually he dies in the movie of radiation poisoning and it's got this little jazzy Take the A-train number for a minute and his dancing is just completely not timely to the forties. You know, just a little too funky white boy.

[So continuity would be important.]

Continuity is important. Now violence, I guess it would depend on the gratuity of it. Because if there's something that either through the irony or juxtaposition of it, of the existing work that could add a specific dimension to the violence or to the sex or to the chase scene, I guess I would have no restrictions as long as it wasn't gratuitous.

[One example that comes to mind is "Stuck in the Middle With You" in "Reservoir Dogs" where it's sort of difficult to hear that song now without imagining that scene.]

Right. Isn't that a horrible use of that song?

[It is sort of ironic but also sort of grotesque and over the top.]

Now what I had was real confrontation with my own work - of course every body is affected since the terror attack - but I was doing a firemen's benefit in Milwaukee and it just seems every song had a line that was transfigured by the events and there's so many songs that you could make a real tackily inappropriate usage of them with news footage. The mood of "Woton" is kind of like taking the spirit of adventure and the pragmatism of the Apollo program and taken for granted the fact that they couldn't get network coverage because the time Apollo 13 got launched it was like a non-event. But then kind of combining that with the field reportage of the [Space Shuttle] Challenger event and the Hindenburg where the announcer on my record is kind of at a loss for words there at the end.

[Kind of like the "Oh the Humanity. .  ." sort of thing.]

Yeah, kind of like "oh I'm speechless here." Did you see the movie "Oxygen?" Yeah, Richard Sheppard called me up because they wanted to use the Husker Du logo on the antagonist's T-shirt, which turns out when I saw the movie it didn't make that much sense. He didn't seem to be our typical fan. They wanted the rights to that. And then through discussions and stuff I was gonna be there when they were doing some of their primary locations and I spent two afternoons running back and forth on the subway while they were doing their interiors on the subway shots. I was on set and I'm doing like a cameo. The actor was actually a young Adrian Brody, and he was wearing a Husker Du T-shirt in the movie. They had me wearing a T-shirt and on the back it said Brody, so he was wearing a me shirt, and I was wearing a him shirt.

[I guess the good news is that you've got all the stuff that really would make a lot of scenes resonate, a lot of really emotional, heart-felt music that hasn't been overused, like so many other songs have been.]

But it's been my experience that people have called up SST records and have not been served with, any kind of tapes. Even after Bob's given the approval. I've been requested to make alternate versions. But of course with a lot of that stuff being H¸sker D¸ material, I'm kind of like, well, that would almost be a little cheesy. I'd rather have the struggle - I'd rather have somebody else fighting to break the dam. But I have the rights to my songs. 

[So will there be a second coming of Grant Hart?]

Yeah, or whatever number we want to put on it. My career is not sullied with embarrassing things. I'm not Vanilla Ice. I don't have a pop plateau that I've descended from. Even at our most popular we were still innovative.