Zen Arcade

I first saw the words "Hüsker Dü" on my friend Pete Legrand's car bumper. He had affixed a black and white sticker of the band's name to his Toyota or Honda or whatever he drove in high school. The Hüsker Dü sticker had company: At the Drive-In was also part of Pete's bumper advertisement, and others that I can't remember--but I do remember that the back of his fucking car was, essentially, a syllabus of music that can and will rip open a high school punk's skull. Pete was, in a way, the coolest guy at our high school. He had a band, called Emily's Bat Mitzvah at the time, that had played at New York clubs we had heard of and been to. Me and my friends Ben and Chris had only ever played in Chris's basement (upsettingly loud and weird tho, which made it OK to us). Pete would sit in on drums when Ben and Chris and I struggled through our favorite songs--The Stooges' "I Wanna Be Your Dog", Black Sabbath's "Paranoid", and Devo's "Be Stiff" among them. He drove us to JV Tennis practice, our joke of a sports requirement--we made up our own game called Tigerball MOTHERFUCKER and played it with the abandon and disregard for things like sanity and physical safety. Most of the time Pete just played us music on his car stereo in the parking lot. One band in particular, Necrophagist, still haunts me to this day. But that's another story.

One day I asked Pete, after walking to his car for practice, who "Huh-sker Duh" was (I didn't then know how to pronounce umlauts.) He said "You've never heard them? Fuck. Hang on a minute." He pulled out his wallet of burned CDs from the back seat (it was about a square foot, with more than 400 CDs in it) and flipped thru them, only to find that it was in his other wallet (another 400) at home. Needless to say, we were bummed. It didn't last long tho--on the short drive to the tennis courts, we all hung out of the windows screaming, "SLAYER!" and "METALLICAAAAA!" at the cross-country team. They liked running and Dave Matthews Band. In other words, they lived on a different planet.


Later--or it might have been earlier, now that I think of it (doesn't matter)--my dad got a new computer with a CD burner, which he (for some reason) gave me permission to use. At the time, the CD burner was, like, the greatest thing that had ever happened to me. Immediately I invited Ben and Chris over for an all-day burning session.

Inspired in part by Pete's brain-melting music library, we all had a considerable amount of CDs. Each of us knew that the other one had awesome music, and we wanted it. I amassed quite a haul that day, and I still have some of those burned CDs: Can ("Tago Mago"), The Pretenders ("Pretenders"), Television ("Marquee Moon"), Magazine ("Real Life"), and The Stooges ("Fun House") were among them. As I paged through Ben's CDs, I came across a Hüsker Dü album: Zen Arcade. The combination of the name and the title struck me--I saw it in a kind of dulled gold calligraphy. Benjamin pointed to it and said, "This one. Do it."

I did it, and then didn't listen to it for quite a while. I had a lot of new CDs to absorb, and lots of homework to (pretend to) do, so it didn't even touch my CD player until one night when my mom pleaded with me to do the dishes. I always tried to be nice to her (she was basically the only one to ever do the dishes--me and my sister helped occasionally), so I said OK.

I went upstairs to pick out a CD and immediately chose Zen Arcade. It was now or never. No time like the present. Etc.

I had never heard anything so angry, and certainly nothing as fast, as this was. I couldn't even hear what the fuck was going on, I didn't know what instruments they were playing. I didn't know how many were being played. I didn't know what the guy was screaming--but what a scream! Whatever he was saying, he really meant it. It made washing the dishes go by really quickly.

As I continued to listen to Zen Arcade, I discovered that one has to listen to it at the highest possible volume one can stand. This is not only to hear the lyrics and the intricate layerings of distorted, lysergic guitar and some of the most precise basswork you'll ever hear--high volume also gives the songs the power they require to break open your head.