Grant Hart – Live @ Middle East Upstairs

Maybe it’s because I saw my first kick ass rock and roll show there (Lucero, the spring of 2004), but I’ve always counted the Middle East Upstairs among my favorite musical venues. It’s a small room, holding less than two hundred people in its capacity, with a tiny bar stuffed in one corner and only a metal folding chair or two to seat the weary. It’s not much, but the place has heart. So it’s appropriate that it was there that I saw my first kick ass rock and roll show of the decade, starring one of my first rock and roll heroes, the notorious but sadly almost forgotten Grant Hart. When you’re 16 and trying to figure shit out, music is the end-all be-all, so I spent many a day and a night listening to songs like “Somewhere” and “Turn On the News” on repeat. In my haughtier stages, I’d play “Pink Turns To Blue” for Nirvana fans and say with an unflattering intensity “THEY DID IT FIRST!”

Hart didn’t play “Pink Turns To Blue,” his most lauded song, that night in Cambridge, but he did play songs from throughout his entire career going back to Zen Arcade. From the Husker Du catalog, the 25-year-old New Day Rising got the most love as Hart wooed the crowd with rousing versions of “The Girl Who Lives On Heaven Hill,” “Terms of Physic Warfare” and “Books About UFOs.” Hart isn’t a guitar player on the level of his former partner-in-crime Bob Mould as evidenced by his rudimentary version of “The Girl Who Lives On Heaven Hill,” but “Terms of Physic Warfare” retained its Dylan-esque sneer and undeniable melody. Hart initially balked at performing “Books About UFOs,” dismissing it as a “corny old song” that people ought not want to hear. Still, Hart played it with spirit and then tried trumping it for silliness. First he covered “Wild Thing” and stopped halfway through when it was no longer amusing. Finally he settled on Mark Dinning’s teenage car crash smaltz classic “Teen Angel” and seemed sated.

There was some mystery pre-show as to what the performance would be. A full rock band? Intimate acoustic performance? Hart went for middle ground, plugging in his electric guitar to a borrowed amp and playing solo. At times he worked the audience with his witty exchanges and casual philosophizing, other times he seemed to go into his own world and ignore the audience completely. He’d occasionally chat with incoming friends between songs. His new album Hot Waxx was well-represented, as he opened with “You Are the Reflection of the Moon on the Water” and then managed to ably sprinkle the newer stuff between the Husker Du favorites. To reward his fans further, Hart played songs from the more obscure chapters of his career; “2541” and “All of My Senses” from the 1988 and 1990 EPs of the same names, ditto for Nova Mob’s “Last Days of Pompeii,” a $2 classic if there ever was one. Call-outs for sensitive topic songs like Husker Du’s “Diane” and early solo song “The Main” (a rather harrowing account of drug addiction) were understandably ignored.

The audience was somewhat a reflection of Hart himself; skinny dudes in skull caps (Hart had a nice bright red one) and gay men. Virtually a boys club for Bostonians who own a lot of old SST catalog. Mike Gent of The Figgs preceded Hart with an acoustic set. As these things will go, the crowd was there to see Hart and thus they didn’t know any of his songs, though they were treated with great respect and received a fair amount of applause. Gent, however, was well aware of this fact and treated the crowd to a rousing cover of The Who’s “Happy Jack” and a pair of Beatles covers, “Glass Onion” and “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill” from The White Album. Sadly, his proposal of a duet with Hart on the Husker Du classic “She Floated Away” did not occur for some unknown reason. It should be noted that Gent looks a bit like Bill Paxton and wore a shirt akin to Josh Brolin’s in No Country For Old Men.

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