While a full reissue campaign of Hüsker Dü’s SST Records discography remains stalled due to longstanding disputes between the two parties, Numero Group continues to help fill the void. The label has set a Nov. 7 release date for 1985: The Miracle Year, a four-LP boxed set spotlighting the hugely influential Minneapolis trio’s Jan. 30, 1985, performance at hometown venue First Avenue, plus 20 extra live cuts from throughout the year.
By July 1984, Hüsker Dü had been tearing up the American underground circuit for five years and then fully kicked down the doors with their sophomore SST album, Zen Arcade. Another new LP, New Day Rising, emerged just six months later on Jan. 14, 1985, and The Miracle Year deftly chronicles the continuing musical evolution of vocalist/guitarist Bob Mould, vocalist/drummer Grant Hart and bassist Greg Norton in its aftermath.
Four songs from the boxed set are out now: “The Girl Who Lives on Heaven Hill,” “I Apologize,” “If I Told You” and “Folklore.” The First Avenue show, held on a day when the temperature was -11° by evening, also features five songs that wouldn’t appear until the September 1985 album Flip Your Wig, plus covers of the Beatles’ “Helter Skelter” featuring a pre-fame Dave Pirner of Soul Asylum and the Byrds’ “Eight Miles High.”
Numero notes that “a precious portion” of the extant Hüsker Dü archive was destroyed in a January 2011 house fire, making it “a kind of subordinate miracle” that the First Avenue recordings survived. They were painstakingly restored by engineer Beau Sorenson, who has worked behind the boards with Mould in the past.
“When I think of that time, it was three guys doing what they loved, having fun and basically showing other people that you can be true to yourself, true to your music and not have to bow down to fashion or expectations to make something really great,” says Norton.
Hüsker Dü split acrimoniously in 1988 after a brief, failed tenure on major-label Warner Bros. Records. Mould went on to a fruitful career as a solo artist and with his ’90s band Sugar, while Hart also recorded solo and with Nova Mob before his 2017 death from liver cancer. After years of refusing to do so, Mould now regularly performs Hüsker Dü material in concert, including such classics as “Flip Your Wig,” “I Apologize,” “Makes No Sense at All” and “Hardly Getting Over It.” Norton largely stepped away from music in the early 1990s to pursue a career in the restaurant industry.
Numero Group began excavating the Hüsker Dü back catalog with the 2017 boxed set Savage Young Dü, a long-gestating project featured four LPs of rare and unreleased music dating from the band’s 1979 formation to its 1983 signing with SST, including alternate takes of their entire 1982 debut full-length, Land Speed Record.
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