Greg Norton left music in 1988 after the group he had been in since 1979 broke up. He married and settled in Red Wing, a river city on the Mississippi, located more than an hour from Minneapolis. Since the distance didn’t help him being in another band, he focused on his other love. For the next 20 years he worked as a chef, 15 of them in his own restaurant. “He was very good,” Norton says matter-of-factly in a video interview from his home. “One of the best compliments I heard came from Grant. In an interview he was asked about the food at my restaurant and he said it was wonderful. ‘Greg’s food is to gastronomy what Hüsker Dü is to music’. He said just that.”
Grant, nicknamed Hart, was the drummer and singer of Hüsker Dü, the trio in which Norton played bass. Bob Mold provided lead vocals and guitar. The first time the three met together was in 1979, while watching a Ramones concert. “Bob hung out at the record store where my friend Grant worked as a clerk. I met him later, watching the Ramones. Weeks later we met to play their covers. We had so much fun that we decided to move on. And little by little we started making our own songs.”
Five years later, the trio released their first major contribution to popular music, a double album that became the closest thing to a rock opera that punk had at the time. Published in 1984, Zen Galleryit was just the prologue to what would be the trio’s key year. Its consolidation during 1985 coincided with that of two other groups that in the same year abandoned the category of cult bands to begin carving out careers that, growing in crescendo, marked the eighties. That same year, REM published Fables of reconstruction and Sonic Youth were released Bad moon rising. Together with Hüsker Dü, they advanced what years later would be known as alternative music.
“That year was amazing,” says Norton, who says he enjoyed supervising 1985: The year of miraclesa live box. “I liked listening to those recordings live, they made me relive that stage. Six months after the excellent reception Zen Gallery let’s take it out New day on the rise and we record Turn the wig upside downreleased at the end of that year. We also performed in Europe for the first time and did three or four tours in the United States. And we signed a contract with Warner. “It’s amazing how good we were, how tight our sound was.”
Although Hüsker Dü began fighting in hardcorethey have evolved towards more melodic terrain without losing any of their strength. Live they were a real hurricane, which is perfectly reflected in the stellar concert of 1985. The year of miraclesrecorded during a freezing night in January of that year. “It’s not that we were angry young people, we just felt frustrated. We didn’t even make overtly political music, but the social and cultural context that existed in those years had its impact on our songs. The Reagan years stripped us of the safety net we had at our feet, starting with the spillover effect that his administration’s economic policies brought with them. I think that’s what made us Zen Gallery AND New day on the rise They would connect with thousands of people, because our music appealed to their experiences. At that time, being young could be very frustrating. The unemployment rate was very high.”
For Hüsker Dü, 1985 was the year of ascension and consecration, but also the beginning of the end. Mold and Hart were the primary songwriters. The understanding between them was good until tensions began to rise during that miraculous year. Disagreements that escalated until it led to the end of the trio in 1988. “We were very different. Bob had studied at one of the best liberal arts colleges in the United States, Macalester College in Saint Paul. Grant was brilliant, a great joker who loved to make people laugh. And I came from listening to jazz and avant-garde music. Also, Bob was very prolific, he always had new songs to develop. Grant found it a little more difficult to present the songs, but the ones he contributed were pretty much defined and that made me inhibited when it came to teaching my songs. Then the competitiveness between the two arose, a creative battle that has been widely documented,” says the bassist.
“The tension reached the limit when Warner signed us. I remained in a neutral position, otherwise it would have been fatal for me,” he says. “I didn’t compose anything for Gray Caramelized Apple (the first album they recorded for the multinational) and the only song of mine we recorded for Warehouse: songs and stories (his farewell album) ended up on the B-side of a maxingle. “There were supposed to be my compositions for the next album, but there was no follow-up album.”
After the debacle, Grant, who had started using heroin while in Hüsker Dü, continued to record solo albums. Mold did the same too, until in 1992 he formed another trio called Sugar, before returning to work as a soloist. Hart died in 2017 from liver cancer. Six years earlier, a fire had devastated the house where he had stored much of the archival material from Hüsker Dü and his other projects. The cassettes with the 1985 concerts survived the catastrophe. Norton says he maintains a cordial relationship with Mold; They see each other when they meet in a city and congratulate each other on their birthdays. A few years ago, Norton returned to music and is now the bassist for Ultrabomb. He says his knees are no longer ready to spend fourteen hours standing behind a counter. 1985 is now forty-five years ago.
1985: The year of miracles
Hüsker Dü
Group Number / Popstock!
