Illustrations by Jason Bowes.
By fall 1985 I’d been living in Marquette, Michigan for nearly a year. I’d barely survived the awkward, miserable search for new friends, somehow inexplicably learned to embrace punk rock, and even started getting into some trouble on both fronts. We had a band and played punk and 60’s garage covers at basement parties and teen-clubs, and our drummer John would return from summer vacations, visiting his hip mom in Ann Arbor, with stacks of flyers, albums, and 7-inch singles from Schoolkids Records and stories of seeing Black Flag, The Replacements, and REM while we listened in envy.
Hüsker Dü was at or near the top of our lists of favorite bands around then. Flip Your Wig wasn’t out yet, but there were hints of a new record in MAXIMUMROCKANDROLL. Someone saw a mention of a new single in a fanzine, or maybe even Rolling Stone, and did we read that right? They were covering the theme from the Mary Tyler Moore show on the B-side? In the pre-internet era, it was fanzines and blurbs in Rolling Stone - that’s all we had to learn about what was going on with our bands.
Hell, I was still digesting the sonic fury of New Day Rising, released that same year, and working to parse the complexity, rage, depth, and beauty of Zen Arcade – their two-LP hardcore masterpiece that was barely a year old itself.
Getting drunk out on the beach or playing in a band
and getting out of school meant getting out of hand
- Celebrated Summer
These guys were our Midwestern prophets, and along with their Twin City peers, our Beatles. They looked and dressed like us, and they sang about things we understood.
We met at John’s house, where he lived with his grandma, hiding his Jesus and Mary Chain tee shirts and albums from her evangelical gasps and grasp. We probably had $5 between us, a half pint of some horrible swill, and a pathetic, beaten-up baggie that was more stems and seeds than leaf and bud. Fall and winter come early in Marquette, and they stay too long at the party - and it was somehow always a party, supplies notwithstanding. We headed off on foot into the frozen night, up the Lincoln Street hill, past our high school, and onto the campus of Northern Michigan University. We didn’t know many of them, but we identified with the college kids more than most of our high school classmates. We even played a couple gigs on campus, excited to see people we didn’t know who shared our look and the love of the bands we were covering.
In the middle of campus, on the ground floor of a random classroom building or dormitory, was WBKX – NMU’s student radio. Like John returning from Ann Arbor in the late summer and the small “Import” rack at Tele-Tronics Records, the DJs at `BKX were our link to what was happening in the outside world. They didn’t care for us burnt-out, buzzed-up high-school kids much, but I like to think they at least appreciated our tenacity, if not our Dead Kennedys tee shirts and Buzzcocks pins. The lobby was like a green room in a dive bar; ratty couches, an empty mini-fridge, a stinky, overflowing ash tray, and tattered, dated music biz magazines spread around on water-damaged end tables. We’d meander in often to escape the cold, smoke cigarettes, and see what was playing over the speakers piped into the lobby.
That day, however, we had a special motive. A mission. A purpose greater than staying warm, catching a buzz, and avoiding the cops. We intended to march up like a small band of guerilla solders fighting for a cause, but still outcast from the greater army, and request, no – demand - that they play the new Hüsker Dü song. It was unspoken, but understood that we wouldn’t leave until our mission was complete. Or the campus cops came.
The DJ closed the door to the sound room when we walked in before we could even make our intentions known, having seen us before and most likely just not up for entertaining. We sat and waited. Eventually he came out, or one of us knocked on the door and got him to come out, and we told him we had to hear that song. It sounded familiar, he said, annoyed, but he’d have to look under his stack of Smiths, Bauhaus, and Joy Division records to see if he could find it. We sat and waited. At least it was warm. But we liked guitars, drums, and angry singers pissed off at the world, not drum machines, reverb-drenched acoustics, and whiny, introspective crooners. We sat and waited. After what seemed like hours, but was probably just a few songs, he flashed the 7” through the window of the DJ booth and nodded. Here it comes! We sat and waited.
That intro drum roll – sometimes it seems like every Hüsker Dü song starts with a drum roll – right into the lyrics:
Walking around with your head in the clouds – makes no sense at all
Sell yourself short but you’re walking so tall – makes no sense at all
Is it important? You're yelling so loud - makes no sense at all
Walking around with your head in the clouds - makes no sense at all
What even is this? It’s not hardcore. It’s not pop. It’s punky, but it’s not punk. It’s like…The Monkees on meth, like The Clash covering The Raspberries, but not really like anything we’d ever heard. It was angry, lost, and confused, but confident and optimistic. It was fucking beautiful. And it was over in a flash. In a blur we were back out in the Arctic UP air; no direction, no plans, just each other and that song swimming around in our heads. It was the top-spot in the soundtrack for the next year, right along with the rest of Flip Your Wig and The Replacements’ Tim.
And somehow, coming up on 40 years later, that’s where I still am with “Makes No Sense at All.” I’ve probably heard it more than any other song, except maybe a few of my own that have been beaten to death in basements, recording studios, and dive bars. I still pull that album out of its sleeve (water-damaged from the great flood of `89, living with John in Ann Arbor half a decade later, the result of an unnecessary, poorly executed, and ill-conceived midnight air-conditioner extraction after a fog party…a story for another time) and listen to it in wonder, asking myself if I could come up with something so simple, so different and effective, and so etched into the arc of my own life. It’s not just nostalgia either, even though I do go back to that night at WBKX as the song plays. This song, and all of Flip Your Wig, still holds up today. Play this one at my funeral please.
Jeremy Porter lives near Detroit and fronts the rock and roll band Jeremy Porter And The Tucos. Follow them on Facebook to read his road blog about their adventures on the dive-bar circuit.
www.thetucos.com
www.facebook.com/jeremyportermusic
www.rockandrollrestrooms.com
Twitter: @jeremyportermi | Instagram: @onetogive & @jeremyportermusic
