TRAFFIC November 1989   GRANT HART   Two Years After A Stormy Breakup, The Insults Still Fly Between Hart And Former Partner Bob Mould. Is There Life After Husker Du?   By Tom Wrobleski

Grant Hart's pickup truck is a real piece of work; a gray, disheveled hulk littered with old shirts, some blankets, and a stray set of bongos. A self-painted Batman logo adorns the hood, a diagonal red slash going through it is in response to the "Batmania" of last summer. Flames have been crudely spray-painted along the front quarter-panels, as if on a drag racer. By Hart's tally, the truck has been set on fire at least twice, once by himself at a local art show where he also immolated some of his paintings, and again by somebody's jealous boyfriend. "And it wasn't even me they were after," Hart says as we get on the highway towards downtown Minneapolis. "It was one of the guys in my band." "And they just said, 'Hey, let's go burn Grant's truck'?" "Yeah," he says, "Just like that." Hart is a big guy, bigger than you'd expect if you've only seen him photographed next to his former partner-in-punk, Husker Du guitarist Bob Mould. Standing earlier at my hotel room door, Hart looked like some mad cross between Joe Strummer, Jackson Pollock and Sonny Barger: Tattered flannel shirt, ripped grimy jeans, and black biker boots liberally speckled with red, yellow and green paint. A blue bandanna was wrapped around his head, Axl Rose-style, and a Marlboro dangled between his fingers. Frankly, I was a little surprised that the Joe College desk-clerk had let him upstairs at all; Minnesota, being the home of Alcoholics Anonymous and the Hazeldeo foundation (Betty Ford Midwest), is not known as the most tolerant of the fifty states, and Hart's hulking, wild-eyed appearance would even turn heads in New York's trendy East Village. I was in town to hear Intolerance, Hart's first album since his superb, but impossible to find, 1988 EP Twenty-five Forty-One. Since then, Hart has founded a new band, Nova Mob, traded slings and arrows in the press with Mould, and even written an opera, which was due to premier at the First Avenue Club the following week. But Hart has other plans for this Sunday night, my second in the Twin Cities: some dinner first, then a party at a friends house. "There'll be some beer," he tells me. * * * Driving through town, it becomes clear that if Hart's musical career doesn't work out, he has a secure future as a Minneapolis tour guide. You'd expect Hart to be on a first-name basis with the city's musical meccas like the C.C. Club (a Replacements joint) and First Avenue, but he surprisingly knows where to find the cultural landmarks as well, from Bob Dylan's college apartment in Dinkytown to F. Scott Fitzgerald's home in Tonier St. Paul. Hart knows a hotel lobby where you can see a two-ton marble ball suspended in mid-air by a fountain of water. If you want to "go see some Deco," as Hart suggests, there's St. Paul City Hall, where an enormous statue of peace pipe-smoking Indians stands in a plaza that looks like it came straight out of Metropolis. The statute, Hart says like an art professor, turns slowly from side to side over the course of a few hours, so slow that it can't be seen by the naked eye. Another favourite haunt is the Black Forest Inn on Nicollet Avenue, a German beer-hall type place. We have dinner in the sunny, walled-in-garden out back. Inside hangs what Hart calls "the largest Avedon print in the world," a wall-sized portrait of several spinsterish Daughters of the American Revolution. The picture has been scarred, however, by several bullet holes, created by a customer at the bar who was apparently having severe lady trouble of the time. "Notice that they're all kill shots," Hart says, pointing out that all the wounds are to the head and heart. This part of downtown is a sort of Grand Central for Hart. Up the block a bit, next to Twin/Tone Records is Creation Audio, where Hart recorded Intolerance, and where, when it was known as Nicollet Studios, Husker Du laid down some of its finest work. While we eat, we're joined by one of Hart's buddies, and talk over my ahead for an hour or more about the Bauhaus, Hitler's staff cars, baseball caps, and William S. Burroughs. I do manage to learn, though, that Hart's farther is a thirteenth generation Freemason, and that Hart can trace his family in America back 400 years. Hart also mentions a brother who is deceased, and his own three-year-old son, Karl, whose mother is referred to simply as "the mother," as in: "There was a lot of heavy shit between me and the mother." Of course, there's much talk of Husker and Hart's poisoned relationship with Mould. The band, formed in 1981 by Hart and bass guitarist Greg Norton, emerged with R.E.M. and the Replacements as one of the breakthrough hopes for the American indie-label underground. After some pure thrash efforts like Land Speed Record, Husker's 1984 double album Zen Arcade had critics comparing them to the Beatles, with Hart's more melodic, almost psychedelic songs providing a pivoted counterpoint to Mould's stormier punk odes. Hart songs like Pink Turns to Blue and Masochism World weren't exactly sunny, but you could tap your toe to them. "I got saddled with the Grant writes the pop songs' routine," Hart told me in an earlier conversation that summer. "And Bob's the philosophical one." But he's got such a narrow philosophy, it's like the 'boo hoo hoo' philosophy. With the whole Bob being Lennon and me being McCartney shit, what's confusing to people is that Lennon turned out to be such a fascist." Even within the relatively narrow scope of the early 80's punk scene, Hart was given scant credit for his singing and songwriting contributions to the band. Mould wrote the lion's share for the album material (although by 1985 the two were alternating their songs live), and was speaking for the band in interviews as well. "I wasn't really the hardcore writer that Bob was," Hart says of that time, "and I guess I was just coming into my craft there at the end." Husker Du moved from SST Records to Warner Brothers in 1985 and released the acclaimed Candy Apple Grey and Warehouse albums before collapsing under the combined weight of their personal differences and the suicide of manager David Savoy in 1987. Mould has been on tour this year behind his well-received Workbook LP. Though their battles lack the bitter mistrust of Lennon and McCartney's best spats, or the pissy bickering that marked Mick and Keith's recent quarrel, Hart and Mould remain stubborn in their beliefs over the band's demise. Mould insists that Hart's heroin addiction had long undermined the group, while Hart, who freely owns up to a past problem with heroin, begs to differ. "During the last year of the band," Hart told me, "Bob was touting Greg as an equal songwriter, which was far from a realistic attitude. He wrote like one song, meanwhile me and Bob had written fucking forty. Without sounding too opinionated, Bob used Greg to kind of put a harness on me." "Why not fight back?" "It's always been easier to just let Bob have his way than to deal with him," Hart said. "And you don't complain to Bob Mould. When we recorded the In a Free Land EP, Bob was such a bastard at that time. Literally the meanest person that I have ever met. You know the silent psychic intimidation routine, where somebody just fumes for like four days? Bob can fume like nobody I know. He's intimidating you without saying a word."

!Besides a chance meeting here and there in Minneapolis, Hart and Mould have confined their sniping to the pages of the music press. "Bob and I are both taking credit for being the first one to leave the band," Hart said. "Giving him the benefit of the doubt... I don't know if he heard me when I said 'I quit.' "Again, like the Beatles. Who quit first? Ringo? I forget which article it was, but it talks about how many times Bob would come over to my house, trying to help me out with my 'problem.' You know, he never did that. The last time he came over to my house, I said, 'Let's forget the bullshit, put the equipment back in the practice space and jam.' And Bob said 'Well, if we get back together, we have to find a way to do it without Greg.' That's never come out before." The animosity, it seems, runs both ways. During my visit, Hart found himself at the same Pere Ubu concert as Mould and Norton, but neither approached him. "I've got better things to do than hang out with those fuckers," Hart says when I met up with him later. And earlier in the summer, Hart had to keep his distance at Mould's First Avenue show. "I was just going to go in and say, 'hey, Bob,' but there was a problem with me getting into the dressing room. I knew that came from him." * * * Nova Mob's practice space is a cramped, cluttered room in a warehouse cum office building just outside Minneapolis. To reach the room , you have to climb three pitch black flights of stairs and sort of feel your way down the dim corridor, using the cacophonous strains coming from the back of the floor as a guide. You'll know you're getting warm when you can discern the Nova Mob graffiti that's sprayed-painted on the walls. Inside, Hart, playing rhythm guitar and singing, is leading the band through a 1AM rehearsal for next week's gig at First Avenue. The space is decorated in Early Dorm Room style, with assorted amps, guitar cases and keyboards crammed into every corner. There's a ladder leaning against one wall, a rolled up rug by the door and a selection of ashtrays and candles scattered around the room. Sundry sheets and blankets are tossed hither and yon on the floor (more than one Mobster has been known to use the place as a crash pad), and the band plays facing each other in a tight circle, either for a sense of community or for lack of space, it's hard to tell which. The only place where you can even attempt to sit is a narrow window sill that looks out on the long, straight drop into the parking lot. The band is an odd lot. If Hart, as he jokes, is the demented artist, then guitarist Kevin Lavely, with his curly hair, somewhat subdued manner and wire-thin frame is most quintessentially the Rock Star. Called "Snake" by the rest of the band, Lavely had the good fortune to study guitar in shop class at school. Bassist Tom Merkl would be the Wymenesque Quiet One. The band's unofficial chauffeur (he drives the "Nova Mobile," Merkl is the only "meat eater" in the group (the others claim to be strict vegetarians). Pleasant and somewhat shy, as well as a wicked bass player, I don't think I heard Merkl say more than five words in succession the whole time I was out there. Drummer Tommy Rey might be the Pretty One in another band, but with the Mob, he's now the Goner, having quit in early autumn. John Pederson, another local musician, has taken over his spot. The band goes through an hour-long stint, spewing out some of the Intolerance numbers, including one of Hart's current favourites, the boozy sing-along, "The Main." "That's real waltzy," Hart said of the song. "I ended up doing like ten tracks of background vocals on the record and mixing them down to one until it sounded like a beer hall song or something." The new album will also include "All of My Senses," a drum machine and synthesiser track that Hart calls "probably as synthetic as anything I'll ever do," as well as a Husker remnant called "Now That You Know Me." "It's one of those rockin' pop songs of mine," Hart says almost derisively. Side two has as a more electric version of the EP ballad "2541," ("Come, Come" is also bombastically done here), and a "sombre little number" called "You're The Victim" which the critics will no doubt opine is about Mould. "I've heard that already," Hart says "It's about a lot of people." "She Can See the Angels Coming" is just chord organ and vocals. It's chillingly bare, just grief on a record. What's really nice is that all the songs come out sounding different. They don't sound like they were recorded on the same three days, or even mixed on the same days." After covering some choice Husker cuts ("Heaven Hill," "Green Eyes," "Never Talking to You Again") the Mob works out on some material from Hart's as-yet unrecorded opera The Last Days of Pompeii. "It's sort of a science fiction opera," Hart says of the piece. "Werner Von Braun escapes from his American captors in a V-8 rocket, ending up in Pompeii in 79 AD. This girl who's engaged to the King's son kind of goes for Von Braun, and tense political situation develops. Von Braun, whom the locals mistake for a deity because of his knowledge of the planets, then builds a rocket in a hollow mountain" and when he takes off, the volcano Vesuvius goes with him." One week before its premiere, Hart still doesn't know how the opera will end. "I'm kind of thinking about maybe the cop-out ending," he says, "where it turns out the whole thing is an hallucination Von Braun had while under sodium pentathol administered by the Allies trying to extract military information from him." He does, though, have definite plans for the Mob to perform the piece much like the Who's version of Tommy, just the band, maybe a few extra musicians. When I tour the group, the set will be the opera, which is none of the songs from the new album. Then there'll be an encore set of songs from Intolerance." The band has been gigging around Minneapolis a bit, but major tour plans remain amorphous. SST Records has pushed the album's release date back for a third time, now scheduling it for November 17. By then, Hart will have sailed on the QE II for a press tour of England. While overseas, he may also record a live album of solo acoustic material. "I've got real good support over there," Hart says. Sounds magazine really got behind '2541.' It was a single of the week or something." For all his recent activity, though, Hart seems at least passively resigned to being known for the rest of his career as "ex-Husker Du drummer Grant Hart." He even jokes about including some "signature" Bob Mould songs in the Mob's live set. "I think I'm depending a little less on the past than Bob is," he says. "It's so funny, because Bob's out there doing acoustic versions of Husker songs, and I'm doing them with my band straight up, the way they were written. "The buzz is out about us now, and surprisingly, it's not limited to just the old fans. The situation has been such that we haven't had terrific crowds, but it's beginning to happen."