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New Day Rising? Hüsker Dü launch website, reveal ‘ongoing communication between the three of us’


We won’t say the “R” word, but there’s sudden movement in the world of Hüsker Dü.

The long-gone Minnesota punk band, which broke up in 1988, have created an official shopping website, designed to sell the band’s merchandise. As the Minneapolis Star Tribune notes, six different t-shirt designs are for sale, priced at $25 each. The publication calls it the “first thaw in a glacial ice pack” that began after the band’s demise. And now an official Facebook page and other online presences are in the works.

Other sites, like DyingScene, have jumped all in, putting things like “might be reuniting,” in their headlines.

Bassist Greg Norton seemed to leave things open-ended in his comments to the Star Tribune. The future of the site could lead to obvious Hüsker Dü items, like re-issues, live recordings, gig posters, film footage, and more personalized merchandise items, as well as a more chronicled look back at the band’s impact in the ’80s. But what else?

“There are more moving parts than we’d like to deal with, but we’ll see what happens,” Norton tells the Star Tribune, adding this little nugget that’s sure to be over-analyzed: “The main thing is, there’s ongoing communication between the three of us now.”

Here’s more on the merch site from the Tribune:

Per Norton, the three long-feuding band members finally came together and agreed to recruit Dennis Pelowski, Minneapolis-based manager of the Meat Puppets, to “help us figure out how to get a foothold back in the business.” Pelowski and the Puppets already have experience dealing with SST Records, the label run by Black Flag guitarist and one of punk’s most maligned businessmen Greg Ginn, which issued five of Hüsker Dü’s earliest albums.

Among the new developments so far, the band sorted out licensing issues with SST, which helped lead to the 1984 classic “Pink Turns to Blue” being featured in a recent episode of the AMC TV series “Halt and Catch Fire.” Next up, an official Facebook page is likely to go online soon, replacing several fan-run pages out there.

Norton said there also could be some posters and other artwork on the merchandise page soon, much of which features designs done by singer/drummer Grant Hart. T-shirts and posters have been available here and there over the years, but a lot of that product was unauthorized. The official shirt designs available now include artwork from the band’s “Everything Falls Apart” and “Land Speed Record” albums and their 1981 debut single “Amusement.”

In the nostalgia-mad world of 2015, this all makes sense.