What would Husker Du?

Nostalgia's hard to figure. No matter the timeless beauty of Days, when Ray Davies leans into the microphone to sing it, I'm Marcel Proust flashing back to college, my now dead friends William and Aleta in the car laughing and singing, loving the sincerity in the midst of irony. It's creepy, too. The past creates such static, especially when it's idealized. Being transported back to an illusion of an illusion. Yikes.

The Fillmore has a habit of producing this nostalgia/artistry tension for me. Ray Davies slipped into the nostalgia side, I think because he is intentionally nostalgic, and idealizes past rapture, and so believes that it's OK to appear in his own context. His discomfort with his own living in the past adds emotion to his show. At least he doesn't go so far as Jonathan Richman, who won't let on which side of the joke he's telling -- the gloppy sincere one or the cruel ironic one.

Heading the other night to see Bob Mould, I was thinking about two prior concerts, one from 25 years ago, the other last year. When I saw Husker Du at what turned out to be a famous concert at Irving Plaza or the Ritz, they were on the verge of breaking up. I didn't know that. But I did know that I had seen the second coming of Lennon and McCartney. I could not figure out how Bob Mould could keep so many lines going at once on a single guitar, and for that matter I couldn't figure out how he was making any music with such motionless, clumsy looking fingers. That show shot to second place on my all-time concert list, which had been held for 15 years by the Jefferson Airplane the night that Jorma handed me a joint and Gracie stared at me through the entire concert. I was 16 and very impressionable.

The other show I was thinking about on the way to the Fillmore was last year's Dinosaur Jr. show there. I had braced for the possibility of post-punk nostalgia, and was amazed at the currency of D. Macsis' raging, impossibly loud and intricate guitar work. Now he had set the standard. Those two, Macsis and Mould, broke through the ban on musicality in punk, and set the stage for the watered-down grunge bands. Thrash, and specifically Dinosaur and Husker Du, reopened music from its most treacherous drift into fashion.

What I got with Bob Mould was a different kind of nostalgia. As the concert progressed, I hoped for the sublimity that I remembered from 25 years ago, and when that came in the last half, I felt both rewarded and confused by my own demands of an artist who clearly wants to change on his own terms, not mine. It was funny that he was featuring, in the first half, an early Sugar album that toned down his guitar work, while the brand-new album he featured in the second half met the rave-up thrash expectations of a diehard Husker Du fan like me.