Remembering Hüsker Dü's Grant Hart

When Grant Hart died in September of liver cancer at the age of 56, modern music lost one of its humblest titans. As the drummer, co–lead singer, and co-songwriter of Hüsker Dü from 1979 to the band’s dissolution in 1988, Hart was responsible for a body of songs that resequenced the DNA of punk—and of rock ’n’ roll. Along with his friends and contemporaries in The Replacements and R.E.M., he paved the way for the alt-rock wave of the ’90s and beyond. Although groups such as Nirvana, My Bloody Valentine, Green Day, and Foo Fighters have cited Hüsker Dü as an influence, Hart never enjoyed the post-breakup success of his erstwhile songwriting partner, Bob Mould. But even throughout Hart’s patchy career in the years since Hüsker Dü split, he brought iconoclastic beauty and idiosyncratic brilliance to his forceful, fragile songs.

Hart was never the stereotypical punk. When Mould met him in 1978, the drummer “was a pudgy, hippie-ish guy, barefoot. He might have been wearing something tie-dyed,” Mould remembered. An aspiring singer-guitarist, Mould started jamming with Hart and the bassist Greg Norton. Still teenagers, they practiced in Hart’s mom’s basement in suburban St. Paul, Minnesota. His older brother Tom, whom Hart viewed as his hero, was killed by a drunk driver when Hart was 10; from Tom, Hart inherited the drum kit with which he’d launch Hüsker Dü. In Erin Osmon’s liner notes to , a boxed set of the band’s early work due out next month, Hart said he was “playing the drums and fulfilling this love of my dead brother.”