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The group that became Hüsker Dü formed when Bob Mould, Grant Hart, Greg Norton and keyboardist Charlie Pine began playing together in 1979. At the time, Mould was a freshman at Macalester College, and frequented Cheapo Discs a St Paul record store where Hart was a sales clerk. Hart and Norton had originally met while applying for the same job, which Norton eventually got. Hart and Mould bonded over a shared love of the Ramones, and soon after enlisted Norton and Pine to form a band. They were soon gigging, playing mostly cover songs, some classic rock, and frequent Ramones tunes. Unbeknownst to Pine, the remaining bandmembers disliked their sound and began practicing without him, writing a few originals.
They owed their new name to a rather sloppy rehearsal of the Talking Heads' "Psycho Killer". Unable to recall the French portions sung in the original ("qu'est-ce que c'est"), they began shouting any foreign-language terms they could remember, when someone said "Husker Du?" (Greg has described the complete utterance as "Psycho Blender--Husker Du"), a board game that had been popular in the 1970s. (The name is a Norwegian and Danish phrase that means "do you remember?"). In Norwegian and Danish the letters are not accented (it is written "Husker du"), but the macron on a lowercase U is sometimes used in handwriting, as in the Sutterlin script. The group added Heavy metal umlauts and had their new name. Mould reports that they liked "Hüsker Dü"'s somewhat mysterious qualities, which set them apart from other hardcore punk groups with names like "Social Red Youth Dynasty Brigade Distortion". Mould also reported that while Hüsker Dü enjoyed much hardcore punk in general, they never thought of themselves as exclusively a hardcore group, and that their name was an attempt to avoid being pigeonholed. Hart, Mould, and Norton fired Pine during their first official performance, on March 30, 1979, and continued as a trio.
By 1980 the band was performing regularly in Minneapolis, and their music evolved into a fast, ferocious, primal sound, making them one of the original hardcore punk bands. Through heavy touring they soon caught the attention of punk trailblazers like Black Flag and the Dead Kennedys' Jello Biafra, which helped introduce Hüsker Dü to new fans. Black Flag guitarist/songwriter Greg Ginn later signed the band to his label, SST Records.
