[The Soup Nazi]

Originally Posted by The Soup Nazi

Zen Arcade and New Day Rising are great places to start. Fuckin' classics is what they are! Oh, and the "Eight Miles High"/"Makes No Sense At All" four-songer - that take on the Byrds song is a serious candidate for best cover EVER.

In somewhat rough terms, Mission of Burma is the link between Wire and the Hüskers, I think. Dunno if that helps.

Originally Posted by Torn Curtain

Thanks for the insight

From Michael Azerrad's Our Band Could Be Your Life:

The [April 1983] tour had been pegged on an appearance at the punk-friendly Music for Dozens night at Folk City, the fabled Greenwich Village hole-in-the-wall where Bob Dylan often performed in the early Sixties. The band knew their initial splash in New York was crucial. "And when the Folk City show presented itself, it was tailor-made for our manipulations," [Grant] Hart says. "I think it was a good way for us to demonstrate that we were part of a greater thing — we were today's manifestation of a type of freedom of thought that we had by no means originated."

So Hüsker Dü cannily covered the Byrds' "Eight Miles High" in homage to the Vietnam era folk-rock scene. Except they tore the song up into a million screaming pieces. "We thought we were playing it just like the Byrds," [Bob] Mould said. "That's been my personal problem for all these years: I always thought I was making pop records."

"Eight Miles High," of course, is a preeminent classic of Sixties psychedelia. At the time there was a slew of American bands —the Three O'Clock, the Bangles, Rain Parade, et al.— who were copping superficial aspects of the Byrds and other trippy Sixties bands but weren't actually psychedelic at all. This disgusted Hart, Mould and [Greg] Norton just as much as the conformity of the avowedly nonconformist hardcore scene did. So they took psychedelia's most sacred cow and gave it a good thrashing.

Quite simply, it's one of the most powerful pieces of rock music ever recorded. The Hüsker Dü version takes the song's original themes of disillusionment and foreboding and turns them into a death shriek for the collapse of the Sixities counterculture, something Mould had been ruing ever since his encounters with the Young Republicans back at Macalester. Mould's almost wordless vocals were a direct descendant of John Lennon's primal scream approach, only ten times as horrific; cathartic, ultimately life-affirming, his bloodcurling howls were as direct, honest, and arresting as an infant's wail.

Starting with Metal Circus and most powerfully evident with "Eight Miles High" (released as a single in May '84), Hüsker Dü was doing something that virtually no punk band had done before: making music that could make you cry. Songs like "Diane" and "Everything Falls Apart" were powerfully moving, not just bilious statements of alienation, but music you could hang your heart on.