Snowball's chance in hell

I'll admit it: I was one of them proto-emo kids, scrunching my eyes tight & pressing the headphones in, extracting every last gluon of angst from the guitar solo in Hüsker Dü's "Celebrated Summer" during the horrible summer of 1987. I even made a mystical wish that I could see the band perform it live before my eyes, at double speed! With a guitar solo that makes chubby Bob Mould fall over in his finger-blistery anguish!

Well, after years of storing away this wish as "permanently futile", it came true on Friday night, with an almost totally queer audience and a sign language interpreter onstage! Grizzled & buff Bob Mould ended his solo set at the BLB Pride Block Party with a rousing version of my most favorite Hüsker Dü song (alas without the guitar solo, but still..) and yea verily I felt an old knot unslipped inside me. My tears evaporated on the wind as I explained to Sarah why this surprise moment caught me off guard. I'm still not sure why Bob played the song without any changes in lyrics (it is still a spot-on anti-summer song to these ears) but everyone seemed very elevated anyway, even the big circle of deaf people near stage left.

And the answer to your inevitable question: no, Bob Mould did not play the Zen Arcade classic "Pride" at the Pride Block Party (though that would've been, y'know... breathtaking and tremendous).

Here's some photos from howwastheshow's flickr stream. Bob seems like a very happy, put-together man now, which probably means he won't be recording any essential music for a while. He always seemed at his best, artistically, when he was a closeted, chemically dependent noisemaker.