The story goes that back in 1984, the Minutemen–a political Punk band from working-class San Pedro, CA–found out that their SST label-mates Hüsker Dü–a Hardcore trio from Saint Paul, Minnesota–were recording a double-album. Their competitive nature kicked in, and in short order the Minutemen decided to record a double-album, too.
For context, this was an era when American Punk was about as marginalized and non-commercial a genre as you could get: It was the U.K. Punk rockers who got major label contracts, not the U.S. ones; bands like The Clash are who could afford to record double- and even triple-albums, not anyone stateside. American Punk rockers by contrast had to self-release on independent DIY labels strictly out of necessity. A phenomenal runaway best-seller from this side of the pond sold maybe 10,000 copies total (for comparison, The Clash’s London Calling sold over 1,000,000 units in America alone), with next-to-zero chance of crossing over to the mainstream.
Compounding the difficulty was that it was freakin’ expensive to book a studio and record on one’s own dime (this was loooong before the advent of personal laptops and audio-editing software). What most of these fledgling bands would do is cut, maybe, four to six songs of one-or-two-minutes each, and then cram them all onto a 7″ single and call it an EP, simply because they couldn’t afford to record more. Both the Minutemen (as accurately named a Punk band as any) and Hüsker Dü had started out in just this manner. If a band sold enough of those 45s and EPs at various basement shows while sleeping out of their van, then maaaaybe they could reinvest those meager profits into recording a full-length LP. The goal of these various bands was, at best, to break-even, not go Gold. You’d be broke, but–like John the Baptist in the wilderness or Ether living in the cavity of a rock–you’d at least have your freedom, and your integrity. You had to consciously choose to seek not for riches but for wisdom if you went Punk in Reagan’s America.
All of which is to say that it was simply beyond the pale at this point in time for any American Punk band to record a double-album, let alone two. Not to mention counter to the supposed ethos of Punk itself: first-wave Punk Rock had emerged in 1970s New York and London as a very self-conscious reaction against the perceived bloat of “Classic” Rock so-called. Punk’s fiery demi-urge was to cut the fat, burn it all down, bring it back to basics, and make Rock ‘n Roll accessible to the working classes again; lumbering dinosaurs like Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin are who recorded self-indulgent double-albums, not lean & mean Punk Rockers (no matter how much those older bands actually admired Punk themselves—or how quickly The Clash started recording double-albums as well). For an American Punk band of this era to record a double-album was almost a contradiction in terms, and ran the risk of alienating whatever meager audience they did have.
But then, one didn’t start a Punk band back in the day unless one wanted to willfully antagonize audiences to begin with, so why not antagonize your own while you’re at it? Every argument against recording a double album swiftly became an argument for it, and in short order both Hüsker Dü and Minutemen released what are now recognized as two classics of ‘80s American underground: Zen Arcade and Double Nickels on the Dime respectively.
Though released only two days apart on the same Hardcore indie-label, this pair of double-albums took vastly antithetical approaches to their project: Hüsker Dü’s Zen Arcade for example is very much a story-telling concept album, in the explicit lineage of The Who‘s Tommy or Quadrophenia. It narrates the tale of a depressed young man who runs away from a broken home (“Broken Home, Broken Heart“) in search of some measure of inner peace; he briefly joins the military (“Chartered Trips“), converts to Hinduism (“Hare Krsna“), experiments with BDSM (“Masochism World“), and broods beside the ocean (“Standing by the Sea“); he’s frustrated both by the failure of others to listen to him (“I’ll Never Forget You“), and by his own failure to listen to others (“What’s Going On“); he seems to finally peace in true love (“Somewhere“), only to promptly lose his lover to a drug-overdose (“Pink Turns to Blue“). Towards the end of the album, this nameless young man suddenly wakes up to realize he has merely dreamt all these escapades–that he hasn’t even run away from home yet (“Whatever“)–that all his future life-choices still lie extant before him, as anxious and unresolved as ever.
Though most the tracks are recorded in the thrashing Hardcore that had been their bread-and-butter up to that point, Zen Arcade also finds Hüsker Dü fearlessly expanding into decidedly non-Hardcore genres like piano instrumentals (“One Step at a Time” and “Monday Will Never Be The Same“), acoustic guitar (“Never Talking to You Again“), psychedelia (“Hare Krsna” and “The Tooth Fairy and The Princess”), and an extended, ecstatic, 14-minute guitar jam for the finale (“Reoccurring Dreams“) that blows up the entire raison d’etre of Hardcore in the first place. From top to bottom, Zen Arcade is a profoundly personal, intimate, and internally-focused album. They may sing “Turn On the News” in the penultimate track, but remain very vague as to what is actually on the news. If there are any political statements to be found here (about how, say, we need better Child Protection Services, poverty-relief programs, and/or drug-addiction resources in this country), you’ll need to read between the lines to find them.
Double Nickels on the Dime, by contrast, couldn’t be more externally-focused! They are very much interested as to what’s on the news right now! They take their cues not from The Who, but The Clash: on incendiary tracks like “Viet Nam” and “West Germany“–as well as cheekier titles like “Political Song for Michael Jackson to Sing,” “The Roar of the Masses Could Be Farts,” and “Untitled Song for Latin America“–the Minutemen make no bones at all about where they stand on recent and current events; you never need to guess where their politics lie. If there are any personal statements to be found here (beyond, say, the singer’s resentment at having to work for a racist boss on “This Ain’t No Picnic“), you’ll have to read between the lines to find them.
The Minutemen were constantly conversing with the world around them—which even extended to the album title itself: whereas the name Zen Arcade refers to a solitary young man’s spiritual journey to find inner peace, the title to Double Nickels on the Dime is a direct call-out of Sammy Hagar, who had recently scored the Top 40 hit “I Can’t Drive Fifty-Five,” which annoyed the Minutemen to no end, because he was bragging about being some sort of road-racing rebel all while releasing the absolute safest, most commercial music possible; by contrast, “Double Nickels” is trucker-code for driving 55 miles an hour, so the Minutemen were insinuating that they would drive the speed limit but release genuinely daring and adventurous music instead. They wanted to be actual rebels, not mere road rebels.
More contrasts: unlike Zen Arcade, Double Nickels has no overarching narrative aside from its own playful insouciance; where Hüsker Dü is all serious and brooding, the Minutemen are endlessly jokey and good-humored (which isn’t to say they weren’t serious; jokes are often the most serious statements we make—“serious as a heart attack!” is literally the album’s opening line); whereas Hüsker Dü weren’t afraid to give their songs room to breathe, the Minutemen can’t ever wait to get to the next musical idea (that is, if you don’t like a song, literally just wait a minute); and whereas Zen Arcade is by design more solitary, Double Nickels is intentionally more collaborative. The Minutemen had outsourced some of the lyric-writing to other members of the San Pedro Punk scene—partly because they wouldn’t have been able to finish the 40+ songs they needed in time to match the Hüskers (a few of which became instrumentals anyways), but also so that the resulting record would be a collective project, a cooperative product, one produced by an entire community rather than a single ego or individual (it’s a ZCMI, United Order of an album, in other words).
None of this by the way is to imply that one album is somehow superior to the other, on the contrary: what is exhilarating about these two double-albums is the sheer fact that they are so wildly different from each other, yet there was still room within the same scattered and sparsely-populated Punk scene, among two tiny bands on the same tiny label living two time-zones apart, to release such an astonishing diversity of music the exact same year as each other! Despite being near complete opposites of each other in tone, style, content, and structure, these two double-albums nevertheless form an elegant sort of symmetry and mirror image of each other, as well as of the larger Punk scene more broadly. One album may be more personal while the other is more political, but then, as ever, the personal is always political and the political is always personal.
Nor did these two ambitious albums go unnoticed: Despite the utter obscurity of their origins, major news outlets like The New York Times and Rolling Stone magazine condescended to print rave reviews of each. Indeed, music journalist Michael Azzerad, in his popular 2001 book Our Band Could Be Your Life (a title lifted from a Minutemen song on Double Nickels), argued that these were exactly the sorts of bands and albums that laid the groundwork for bands like Nirvana and the entire early-’90s Alternative scene to break into the mainstream less than a decade later.
In fact, both bands almost broke through then and there: Zen Arcade became a runaway best-seller (at least by ‘80s Punk standards), selling not just 10,000 but a staggering 20,000 copies by 1985. The majors soon came knocking, and they swiftly signed with Warner Bros. Alas, they were never able to capitalize on their growing fame; their two major label releases (1986’s Candy Apple Grey and 1987’s Warehouse), though vastly outselling all of their SST output combined, never even threatened to go Gold, nor did they ever come close to overshadowing Zen Arcade in the Punk Rock imagination. Hüsker Dü broke up before the end of the decade (though frontman Bob Mould continues to record critically-acclaimed music down to the present day).
The Minutemen by contrast ended much more abruptly in 1985, when frontman D. Boon was killed in a tragic automobile accident. They had released the more radio-friendly Project Mersh EP earlier that same year, but by their own admission it sold only half of what Double Nickels did–which in turn sold less than half of what Zen Arcade did. Yet curiously, Double Nickels on the Dime has arguably has had the wider pop-cultural impact in the long run: their pro-Mexico solidarity song “Corona” became the theme for Jackass, of all things; their Reagan-needling video for “This Ain’t No Picnic” got bona fide MTV airplay; Sublime name-checks all three band members on “Thanx;” and as noted earlier, “History Lesson – Part II” gave Azzerad the title to Our Band Could Be Your Life. But again, this all is not to imply one album was ultimately better or more “successful” than the other, but only to highlight how wildly far above their weight-class both bands punched with these two double-albums. It’s a deceptively feelgood story.
But then, having read Azzerad’s book myself, I can tell you that though he largely writes with the infectious enthusiasm of a true fan and dedicated scenester, he ultimately ends his book on a melancholy note. He had previously written the only official Nirvana biography to be published in Kurt Cobain’s lifetime, which was likewise a feelgood story right up until it wasn’t. Similarly in Our Band, Azzerad tells of how he got to see the entire underground alt-Rock scene he loved as a youth conquer the mainstream, only to watch it just as quickly get co-opted, watered-down, de-fanged, and drained of all its genuine danger and subversive appeal. By the end of the ’90s, Punk & “Alternative” had become just as formulaic and safe as any of the Pop genres they were supposedly once rebelling against. American Punk’s mainstream victory was ultimately a pyrrhic one. There is a sense in his book that great potential had been wasted, and something vital lost, in the scene’s pursuit of the “mainstream.”
And it is here, on this LDS site, that I must at last connect this fanboyish discussion of two Punk Rock double-albums from the ‘80s to the Faith of my Fathers. I have argued before that the reason why the Youth of Zion always seem to be way more into Punk & Indie than one might initially suppose is because the kids also intuit our own marginalized position, and hence feel after fellow models for how to not only survive but thrive on the cultural margins–to in fact share with Punk & Indie the same conviction that the margins is where all the really interesting things, the stuff that actually matters, are happening anyways. This site has likewise pleaded before to “Keep Mormonism Weird,” and for much the same reasons: we were much more adventurous, much more free-wheeling, much more interesting and (I dare say) attractive, when we were still the freaks out on the margins.
Cause let’s face it, we’re still the freaks on the margins, in spite of all our best efforts otherwise. However much money Church HQ has spent on trying to “mainstream” the faith over the course the course of the past half-century–on Worlds Fairs exhibits and “Isn’t It About Time” ads and 60 Minutes interviews and Winter Olympics and “I’m a Mormon” campaigns and Presidential runs and Times Square “Light the World” machines and new Church logos and what have you–our largest cultural impact to date remains a crude and mocking Broadway musical.
And there are days when I wish and pray that we could just lean back into being marginal again. It’s where we thrive more! It’s where we’re more interesting! Heck, it’s where everyone is more interesting! We keep trying to release our own Candy Apple Greys and Warehouses and Project Mersh EPs, so to speak, all to nail down that ever-elusive mainstream appeal, even though that is exactly what gets forgotten the swiftest. We wish to be safe and respectable, acceptable to all the right people in power–understandably, but also futilely. By contrast, Joseph Smith said he wanted to lay the foundations of a system that would revolutionize the world–and he said that in 1830 to a room with fewer people in it than your average basement Punk show. It’s that same swing-for-the-fences mentality that saw Joseph Smith publish entire new volumes of scripture and establish cities and build Temples against not only the severe-disinterest but active-hostility of the broader public at large (you know, kinda like a Punk band releasing a double-album in 1984), all of which however did more to attract everyone’s attention than our most measured modern commercial releases today. Smith, too, was always punching above his weight-class.
There are a wide variety reasons why Church growth has plateaued over the last decade or so, but I’m willing to bet money that at least part of it is that we are now too mainstream–yes, even with our still comparatively small numbers. We are like Hüsker Dü after they signed to Warner Bros.: vastly outselling what we did in our old independent days, but still utterly failing to capture anyone’s imagination to the same extent. Part of it too is (I’ll just go ahead and say it) we also have simply too much money nowadays; yes, it makes us so much more respectable, powerful, and influential; it also makes us seem like just another wealthy institution, and there’s nothing less Punk Rock than that. Seriously, there’s nothing unique about wealth; no one ever does anything interesting with wealth; no one ever does anything adventurous with wealth. There’s a reason why the rich young man walked away when the Savior told him to sell it all and give it to the poor; it was too radical for him, in every sense of the word. He wanted to do something safe to get him into the Kingdom of God, when there’s no path more dangerous than that. Yet that’s also the reason why the rich young man’s name has been long forgotten, while we’re still preaching Christ over two millennia later: even at our most selfish and cynical, there’s something about Christ’s mission and preaching that still stirs the soul.
In our mad pursuit of respectability, we keep forgetting that it’s always the destitute prophets in the wilderness–the ones eating locusts dipped in honey, the Enochs and Elijahs, the hairy men who cause exclamations of “A wildman hath come among us!”–who attract the most disciples, not the comfortable ones in the mainstream. Rather than trying to force everyone into the same dull corporate mold, we should allow and encourage the same wild diversity as Zen Arcade and Double Nickels on the Dime.
Besides, we’re never gonna be mainstream anyways–heck, per 1 Nephi 14:12, we’re never supposed to be mainstream to begin with–so let’s get back on the wild frontier, out in the wilderness, out in the margins, because that’s where the really interesting music is being made (“if ye have felt to sing the song of redeeming love, I would ask, can ye feel so now?”). It’s where the real preparations, the real groundwork, is being laid–not just for some brief, flash-in-the-pan mainstream crossover, but for the Redemption of the world–which is accomplished not by trying to appeal to a mainstream sensibility but rejecting it entirely and bidding Babylon farewell–