Celebrated Summer

So my husband asked me why I call this blog “Celebrated Summer.” And here’s the answer: it just popped into my head.

But the reference is to the Hüsker Dü song by the same name, first released in 1984. Here’s the info if you want to listen to it or read about it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebrated_Summer

When I first started writing this blog (sporadically) a couple of summers ago, the song title occurred to me because I was thinking of my younger days, in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, in the 1980s. Eau Claire is a college town located about 100 miles east of Minneapolis-St. Paul. We junior high and high school kids ate up anything cool that gravitated into town via our friends at the university (University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire). There was a little night life, on occasion, when a band like “The Church” or “The Violent Femmes” would play a small room at UWEC, or when some of our intrepid friends would organize an “all-ages” night at a downtown bar. Other than that, we gathered at keg parties and houses where parents had left town for the weekend. Think “Dazed and Confused,” only about a decade later and with an Upper Midwest accent.

Hüsker Dü was a Minneapolis band, and we were all the prouder of our local and regional talent. On any given night, a drunken conversation among us might yield a kid whose brother had been at a bar where Bob Mould drank, or who had been in a cover band opening for them at First Avenue Bar, or some such impossible-to-verify, likely tall tale.

But it’s funny, because Hüsker Dü isn’t really even a favorite of mine. I don’t exactly feel qualified to talk about Hüsker Dü. I bought the cassette “New Day Rising” at some point in high school, but it was a bit like having a copy of The Riverside Shakespeare, or a few years later, Generation X, on your bookshelf: mostly there for reference (or for looks). Listening to the song again, so jarring, not exactly dancable except in a drunken mosh pit sort of way, reminded me that it was mostly the boys I hung out with who were fans. Later, when I went to college in the late 1980s in New York, being familiar with stuff like Hüsker Dü (and oddly enough, the Velvet Underground) was one way to hang out with boys who loved alternative music — boys who made bad boyfriends but were fun in the mosh pit.