August 15, 1981 was a Saturday with temperatures
in the 70s—on the cool side for the
height of summer in Minneapolis. Diana Ross
and Lionel Richie’s Endless Love was at number
one on the Billboard Hot 100, and MTV
had been on the air for precisely two weeks.
This was uninteresting, though, to the crowd
pushing into 7th St. Entry, a one-year-old,
black-box annex to Sam’s Danceteria (months
later to be rechristened First Avenue), a
downtown music club in the former Northland-Greyhound bus depot fast becoming one of the
Twin Cities’ premier music venues for emerging
talent. They were here for punk rock,
and for the homecoming of three young musicians
from St. Paul: Grant Hart, Bob Mould,
and Greg Norton—collectively known as Hüsker Dü–returning to town at the end of a tour
they named the “Childrens’ Crusade.” The
tour marked Hüsker Dü’s international breakout,
as it began in Calgary and Victoria. It
then meandered from Seattle to Portland to
San Francisco and Sacramento and back to the Midwest through Chicago and Madison. But here
at the Entry (as it was called by its regulars),
Hüsker Dü was a fixture, having played
the venue on at least 50 occasions—sometimes
several times in one week—since January 1980.
The cramped Entry—capacity 250—had been
hewed from the bus depot’s former cloakroom
and cafe. In its corner was the low-ceilinged
stage, swathed in peeling black paint and
scattered with plastic beer cups. It barely
accommodated Hart, Mould, Norton, and Hart’s
Ludwig drum kit, inherited at age 10 from his
older brother, tragically killed by a drunk
driver. The crowd in the smoke-filled room
was partying, restless, waiting to experience
the contagious energy that by now they knew
well. Touring had tightened up the material,
and new songs had been written on the road,
so the band knew it was a moment to capture.
Short on funds for a studio album, they had
cobbled together $300 to record the show with
the intent of releasing it as a live LP.
From the moment Hüsker Dü took the stage,
the first set was unrelenting. It began
with “All Tensed Up” and proceeded to compress
17 songs into less than a half hour,
kept on pace by Hart’s ferocious, high-speed
drumming: insistent, decisive, with clear
purpose. The LP would be called Land Speed
Record and was released shortly thereafter
with assistance from Mike Watt of the Minutemen and his label New Alliance. The
jacket, like those of many hardcore punk and
ska records of the time, was requisite black
and white, its DIY graphics (designed by Hart
via his pseudonymous Fake Name Grafx with
Xerox copier and Sharpie marker) advocating
the same urgency and immediacy as the music
within. While less melodic and textured than
Hüsker Dü’s subsequent albums, this one
was special in its unruliness: it not only
revealed a band on the verge of its collective
potential, but also captured the essence
of the venue that had been its incubator. For
26 minutes and 35 seconds within its enveloping
black walls, 7th St. Entry became a
creative tinderbox, encapsulated within Land
Speed Record.
as had Hart’s subsequent band, Nova
Mob. By the channels through which artists
and performers often discover shared sensibilities,
Grant Hart, now a solo performer,
met Chris Larson. Both were from St. Paul,
both had a fascination with a certain history
of American culture, both understood music’s
relationship to art. Their friendship through
the years became a collaborative one: Hart
appeared in Larson’s live performance work
Shotgun Shack and his film Crush Collision
(both 2006), and Larson provided album art
for Hart’s independent release Good News for
Modern Man (2014).
A musician in addition to being a visual
artist, Larson has broad interests. His roots
in sculpture have led him to explore film,
video, photography, performance, drawing, and
painting. His most memorable projects have
stemmed from architecture—from vernacular
building types (coal mine tipples, shotgun shacks) to imaginary, illogical structures—which inspire sculptural or filmic environments
rooted in his skilled carpentry. These
structures are layered with a strong narrative
armature; he often lays plans within
them for some unexpected action, such as the
rural shack in Deep North (2008) encrusted
inside and out with ice and housing a
strange, human-powered machine, or the floating
house adrift on a lake in the film Crush
Collision (featuring Hart among its performers),
in which a rough-hewn machine, a gospel
quartet, and a drummer share parallel narratives
and spaces within.
Larson’s works are often linked—a sculpture
becomes a film set that then becomes
a photograph, for example—and are also
regenerative, as an element used in one
piece has the potential to appear again in
another. While his earlier works embraced
archetypal structures and improvised apparatus,
more recent endeavors have investigated
specific architectural sites. For
Celebration/Love/Loss (2013), he meticulously constructed a full-scale wood-and-cardboard
facsimile of the only Marcel Breuer–designed
modernist home in the Twin Cities, then proceeded
to torch it in a grand spectacle of
flame. For Larson, the process of replication
is a route to new meaning.
With Land Speed Record, his latest video
installation, he focuses on the objects (and
memories) left behind when their context and
architectural enclosure have disappeared. In
2011, Hart’s childhood home in South St. Paul
caught fire and partially burned. The smoke-blackened
contents—furniture, appliances,
antiques and collectibles, Studebaker parts,
ephemera from gigs, art supplies, clothing,
master tapes, guitars, and drums—had
to be quickly cleared from the home, and
Larson volunteered his studio as a storage
space. For almost two years, the accumulation
occupied the studio, itself a former
warehouse for furniture in transit from factory
to home. Hart would occasionally rearrange
things on periodic visits, but Larson
lived with and contemplated the items as they
sat dormant, without framework or circumstance,
unmoored from the house in which they
had been collected, where Hart had learned
to play the drums used at 7th St. Entry on
August 15, 1981.
Larson did not focus on the house.
Instead, he began to build another machine,
this time a motorized track for a camera that
could provide new perspective and capture a
slow, methodical pan across the 85-foot-long
drift of Hart’s possessions. This became a
pair of films—one in color, one black and
white—each mirroring the 26:35-minute duration
of Land Speed Record. At first the
films, at once reverential and haunting, were
silent. But the work wasn’t finished. Larson
began a new sculptural element, this time
using the less physical materials of sound,
memory, and place. He bought drums from Twin
Town Guitars (“Keeping your life loud & local
since 1997”)—a crystal-clear Ludwig Vista-
Lite kit in mint condition. He commissioned
a young musician with a passion for hardcore
punk to learn the drum track of Land Speed Record, in its entirety and to meet him at
7th St. Entry when he was ready. The empty
venue was unlocked, lights turned on, and the
transparent drum kit arranged on the stage.
Quietly placed alongside it was a Ludwig
snare, unearthed from the pile of burned
objects. After recording equipment was set
up, the musician, sticks poised, donned headphones.
Seven seconds passed, during which
one could faintly hear through his headset
the sound of a crowd, a squeal of feedback,
and the opening chords on Land Speed Record.
Then he began drumming, playing with surgical
precision alongside the recording of
Hart. Live then and live now. This time, distilled
and stripped away from band and crowd,
Larson’s recording captured just two things:
the crystalline syncopation and the walls of
7th St. Entry that carried its sound.
In Larson’s installation within the dark
gallery space, this pure and specific sound
is layered with sculpture (based on the
venue’s black room divider/drink rail) and
with the films. The sound interrupts, then
fades through the filmed images, wrapping
Hart’s inert and orphaned belongings in the
moving image with the liveness of August 15,
1981. Recorded by the camera and scaffolded
by sound, the charred objects are no longer
ruins but are emancipated—they no longer
require the enclosure of the house, the studio,
or specific recollections.
When Land Speed Record hit stores just
before Christmas 1981, a local critic admiringly
called it “a repository of strength and
horror” (City Pages). For Larson, the notion
of the repository remains rich and spacious,
filled with the possibility for reinvention.
Likewise, the vestiges of what a space has
once held, whether objects, sounds, words,
or memories, can perpetually be re-embodied.
In Larson’s Land Speed Record, these remnants
layer to form a larger narrative.
Hüsker Dü was named after a family board game
that tests one’s ability to recall images: a
childhood home, a music venue, a furniture
warehouse. The words are Norwegian for “Do
you remember?”
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