It was early 1983, probably, after the “Everything Falls Apart” EP presaged Hüsker Dü’s departure from hard-core punk and before the “Metal Circus” EP made it official. Just a gig at a crummy club near CBGB, and late — after 1. There weren’t a dozen onlookers, but Hüsker Dü’s two early records were knockouts, and that Minneapolis trio never came east, so there we were. From our booth in back the music sounded terrific: headlong and enormous, the guitar unfashionably full, expressive and unending, with two raving vocalists alternating leads on songs whose words were hard to understand and whose tunes weren’t. Another half-dozen curious fans drifted in. And then, halfway through, the guitarist passed into some other dimension. When he stepped yowling off the low stage, most of us gravitated closer, glancing around and shaking our heads.

The climax was the band’s now legendary cover of “Eight Miles High,” which transformed the Byrds’ gentle paean to the ­chemical-technological sublime into a roller coaster lifted screaming off its tracks — bruising and exhilarating, leaving the rider both very and barely alive. Three dec­ades later I still feel lucky to have experienced that transmutation of wrath into flight. Not only did Hüsker Dü generate an impressive recorded legacy during their eight years on earth, they were ferocious live — as memorable onstage as Nirvana or the Rolling Stones. They deserve one great book, not these two mediocre ones.

The memoirist Bob Mould was Hüsker Dü’s guitarist and power source, and he has mixed feelings about it. He’s led an eventful life, and most of his adulthood postdates his first band’s permanently acrimonious breakup in January 1988. It must have hurt him to give his estranged mates the 125 pages he manages in “See a Little Light.” But even with editorial advice from Michael Azerrad, whose 2001 indie-rock history, “Our Band Could Be Your Life,” looms admonishingly over both books, the many subsequent projects he details don’t generate much pull, and neither does the Memphis-based journalist Andrew ­Earles’s story of Hüsker Dü proper. Earles plods usefully through the band’s catalog and chronicles the trail they blazed on the nascent indie circuit in shows he’s too young to have witnessed. But plod he does, and without any access to the guitarist with his own book in the works.

This is not to blame Mould, exactly. He did have a tale to sell, and though the Hüsker Dü angle couldn’t have hurt his advance, the core audience for his book is Bob Mould fans, who do very much exist as such. Unlike the Hüsker Dü bassist, Greg Norton, now thriving as a restaurateur in Minnesota, or the band’s drummer and co-leader, Grant Hart, still scuffling in the Twin Cities, however valiantly Earles praises his negligible solo music, Mould, at 50, remains a modestly prominent musician. Starting with the 175 I.Q. he confesses to on Page 6, he wants to explain how that happened in his own words.