NT's greatest hits, No. 17 (of 34)

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"Could You Be the One?" by Husker Du

I wasn't really into music at all until I was 13, when I discovered classic rock. I've written before about how I developed a knee-jerk disdain for most new rock & roll being made at the time, but in hindsight, this was mostly due to the fact that I had no idea what was going on in the rock underground. Scratch that—I didn't know what was going on anywhere but classic-rock radio.

An exception was Hüsker Dü, the pride of the Twin Cities postpunk scene, who came to my attention when I was 16 and never left it. I saw "Could You Be the One?" on MTV's 120 Minutes, which is appropriate, since I imagine 99% of "alt" music discoveries among people of my generation were made through this show. The video:

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The headlong melody of this song, the palpable desperation of the lyrics—a seamless combination that hooked me instantly. I went out and bought the nearly perfect album Warehouse: Songs and Stories (which, I later learned, was the last record by the band, since broken up) and played it till my crappy Walkman ate the tape. I was edging into the alt scene, slowly, and part of what attracted me to Hüsker Dü was its inate understanding of the transcendence of classic rock & roll. It's no coincidence that around the same time, I was developing a passion for The Byrds; at its best, Hüsker was essentially a faster and louder reconfiguring of the Byrds' hook and jangle. (Similarly, I would later fall in love with the Buzzcocks, who did a similar trick with the Beatles' template.)

BTW, I still think Warehouse is Hüsker's best album, which is an unusual opinion, I know; I really don't care for most of the band's early, more hardcore material—no, Zen Arcade never did it for me— and I think Bob Mould needed more time to flower into a class-A songwriter. But by the time the band got to Flip Your Wig, they might have been the best rock band in America. No small honor, even in the mid-1980s.

More of NT's greatest hits:
"Summer in the City," "Teenage Kicks," "Strawberry Fields Forever, " "Tunnel of Love," "I Get Around," "Local Girls," "Don't Let's Start," "Suffragette City," "See-Saw," "My Name Is Jonas," "Mr. Tambourine Man," "Reelin' in the Years," "Objects of My Affection" and "Crimson and Clover," "OK Apartment" and "Just What I Needed"

NT's greatest hits, vol. 4

Yet another entry from my list of favorite songs of all time. I'm like a Facebook meme, but with superfluous detail."Mr. Tambourine Man" by the Byrds
Someone (else) is going to get on me for this, but I far prefer this version of the song to Bob Dylan's original. It's a folk-rock masterpiece, a soaring, sharp-edged song with a palpable folk grounding; I love Dylan, sure, but at least in his early incarnation, it's hard to find genuine examples of him rocking out. (Hence, "Judas!")

Roger McGuinn's guitar in this cover version, a jangling 12-string electric Rickenbacker, packs an incredible amount of texture into its recurring riff, giving a lot of fire to what's really a fairly simple song. And then, of course, the lyrics are Dylan at his best: concise and beautiful psychedelia, wide-eyed but not naive. The Byrds excise an entire verse from the Zimmy's lyrics, but I think the tune really benefits from the economy (it runs only 2:20); by making this trip upon a magic swirling ship a brief one, it avoids a slide into pretension.

"Mr. Tambourine Man" was a monster hit in 1965, became a staple of forward-thinking oldies radio (where I discovered it in the '90s), and is a strong testament to what a lot of people were calling the Byrds the American Beatles for several years of the '60s. Far out, in all the best ways.

Earlier editions of NT's greatest hits:
"OK Apartment" and "Just What I Needed"
"Objects of My Affection" and "Crimson and Clover"
"Reelin' in the Years"