by Tim Stegall
“Change for the better, change for the worse, changes with the summer and
fall.”
— Sugar, “Changes,” 1992
Actually, I think I’m
gonna end up back up here.”
It’s Bob Mould on the phone. The “up here” he’s referring to is New York
City, from where he’s phoning as he takes a short break from the string of solo
shows he’s been playing since sometime in September. This past summer, he ended
up purchasing a place in the city he’d abandoned three years ago for a quieter
life in Austin, where he’d moved to decompress from Sugar’s busy touring
schedule. In that period, Sugar ended, and now, it seems, so might Mould’s
Austin residency.
“I’ve been up here a fair amount on and off this year,” Mould says across the
phone lines, “and was really enjoying it quite a bit, just enjoying being back
in New York on a semi-regular basis. But it’s been weird, being settled in for
a couple of months up here. Granted, I’ve been on the road, but I dunno. Boy,
I’ve missed this place!
What about that beautiful, historic house in Hyde Park you bought three years
back, with its high ceilings and gleamingly polished black piano purchased with
the money H�sker D� received upon signing to Warner Bros.?
“Well, I bought a place up here, too!” Mould laughs, likely between drags on
the Camels he constantly lights one after another. There’s city noises
filtering through in the background, which suggests he either has open windows
or a terrace he’s possibly sitting on as he chats. There’s also music of some
sort playing, too unintelligible to distinguish from the other faint background
sounds. “I’m gonna try the commute thing for awhile, but I don’t know how
practical it’s gonna be. A lot of stuff I missed up here, and I didn’t know I
missed it until I started getting back up here more often.”
Well, New York City is certainly a good place to go and get a new shot of
energy and some fresh ideas. It just depends on how willing you are to pay a
small fortune in rent each month just to have proximity to egg creams and the
world’s best pizza.
“Well, I lived up here for years, and really enjoyed it. The reason that I got
out of here originally was just being on the road so much. And I don’t really
envision that being a big part of my life as much as it was with Sugar. I
dunno. I’m just gonna wait and see. Just wait and see what happens.”
That’s the only tack the man can take, as one of the few constants in
his life is change. Bob Mould continually doubles back over himself,
telling writers one minute he’s planning a children’s album, or even a country
& western project, then ruing the words the instant they leave his mouth.
As 1996 opened, a scant few advance copies of Mould’s then-forthcoming solo
disc leaked out of the Rykodisc offices, accompanied by a self-penned
monograph, the gist of which would have driven most record companies crazy: “No
tours, no interviews.”
“I wasn’t at all looking forward to talking to the press,” Mould explains, “I
think mostly given what had happened with a lot of the Sugar press, more
specifically some of the national press — more specifically the Spin article. It was just after going through all that stuff and sorta realizing
that, `Okay, if you wanna be a national media figure, to get three pages in the
magazine, you have to have somebody living in your house for three days.’ And I
don’t know if that’s a really fair trade-off or not. And I felt like, `Okay,
maybe I shouldn’t be doing any press. Maybe the record I made isn’t really the
kinda record that needs a lot of press and doesn’t need to be hyped, doesn’t
need to be pushed — it can just be what it is.'” Perhaps some back-
tracking is in order. Sugar, in case anyone’s memory is impaired, was Mould’s
reaction to a year or two spent as a solo troubadour. He’d traveled the world
with just a Yamaha 12-string acoustic playing one-man gigs to pay off debts
incurred mostly by the champagne tastes of sidemen Anton Fier and Tony Maimone
during his tenure as a Virgin Records solo artist. Once those bills were paid,
Mould found himself wanting to play loud, screaming, electric buzzpop again,
much as he did with sugar-n-spite punk kings, H�sker D�, but within a
more contemporary context. He found it with bassist David Barbe and drummer
Malcolm Travis. And yet because the alternative rock boom happened to coincide
with Sugar’s formation, the band quickly found themselves growing into
something beyond the small, club-oriented band they had originally
envisioned.
“It ended up being a payroll: probably a dozen people and all of their
families and their partners and their schedules. Pretty much non-stop for three
years, that’s all I did — attend to the concept known as Sugar and making
sure everybody was happy and amenable and well-paid. That’s really good, but
it’s also pretty taxing. When I realized I wasn’t getting as much satisfaction
out of it as I might just going out with my 12-string, that might’ve been the
time I said, `Well, I wish this would sort of stop.’ I think specifically with
Sugar, in October of ’94 when David made his concerns known about him being
away from his family so much, I was just like, `Phew! Okay! We have a majority
vote here!'” Mould laughs. “`We have a consensus: This is not that much fun
anymore!'”
Johnny Rotten said it about Kurt Cobain’s suicide, but you’ve gotta wonder if
Mould was listening: “If you don’t want to be a pop star any longer, just stop.
It’s the simplest thing in the world: Just stop.” Travis, for instance,
immediately went from Sugar into ex-Mission of Burma/Volcano Suns drummer Peter
Prescott’s Kustomized, and is now in the Flower Tamers in addition to doing
some production work, and possibly even starting up his own label. Barbe,
meantime, is “the happiest I’ve ever heard him or heard from him in a long
time. He’s simply in Athens, doing a lot of engineering and producing. I think
he’s getting ready to put a commercial studio together.
“It was nice. Nobody was left high and dry. Everybody just went back to their
lives and left the monolithic Sugar concept behind,” says Mould. “It just got
to be really consuming! It got to be very frustrating when we were on the road.
So little of the day was about the show. Everything was about going to radio
stations, everything was about doing in-stores, everything was about
meet-and-greets, and it was sort of a coincidence that we happened to be
playing a show! I think this is what happens to bands when they get to the
brink of that kind of success, where all of a sudden, the single-mindedness of
selling records, it starts to get into you. And it got into my blood.
And it’s hard. You’re like, `Man! I just wanted to play music.’
“That’s the nice thing about this record and just going out playing and doing
local press. It’s really been enjoyable. It reminds me of what things used to
be like before the notoriety, before it started to spin out of control. And
Sugar wasn’t out of control like a Nirvana or a Pearl Jam. It just seemed like
the tendency was for it to head in that direction. Or like Smashing Pumpkins.
God forbid! I didn’t want to end up with that kind of predicament on my hands.
That’s weird! I dunno, all the money you could make? That doesn’t wash away all
that other stuff.”
Mould was already chafing against the pop star machine in what turned out to
be his final series of Sugar interviews (one of which ran in the
Chronicle in September of ’94: Vol XIV, No. 2), for the sarcastically
titled File Under Easy Listening. At that juncture, Mould had begun
worrying aloud whether Sugar was growing into something he cound no longer
manage — something that the national media was only too hungry for.
“When a national magazine sends somebody with an agenda to spend X number of
days sort of in your face and in your home, it’s like, `Ugh! God! I thought you
could read the lyrics and glean what kind of person I am.’ Or I thought my
explanations over four hours or six hours would be enough. But it’s a real
competitive situation right now in the national media. There’s so much of it,
they’re all looking for a special angle, something that makes it unique.”
And it was fairly obvious that when author Dennis Cooper came to Austin to do
a piece on Mould for Spin (Oct. ’94), the editors were looking for Bob
— who has never been one to make an issue of sexual orientation — to bring
himself out of any closets, real or imagined.
“It was no big secret!” says Mould of his homosexuality. “And to Dennis
Cooper’s credit, I thought he was okay. We spent two days, and we talked about
a lot of things. He had a really good piece, and I gotta believe it was
editorial that hacked it. That was where the whole thing crumbled. I talked
with Dennis, and I’ve been friends with him. I talked about my family, about my
upbringing, about a lot of different things that I’d never really gotten into
before. It could have really been a sort of definitive piece. It ended up just
being this outing piece, and that was, I guess, the agenda. I was like, `Oh,
God! Well, that was only 15 minutes of what we talked about!'”
In a weird way, though, it kinda settled the issue, didn’t it? You haven’t had
to deal with it since, have you?
“No. I just put myself in a position where I didn’t have to deal with big
pieces. I did a big interview with one of the people from Out magazine,
and it hasn’t run yet [Ed note: Actually, it just hit the stands], but
that was very specific. That was the topic, and that was a good piece for me to
do, because if it ever runs, and the gist of what I was saying comes across,
it’s like, `Okay, look. I thought this was no secret.’
“Maybe I’m awkward. Maybe I stumbled out. Maybe I didn’t rehearse this
for years, and I didn’t like fall into favor with the gay community
immediately. Maybe I have trouble with parts of it. I have trouble with lots of
things. It’s not just that community. It’s the music community, it’s the
community at large. There’s a lot of things I don’t like. Get used to it. I’m
learning. I’ve learned like everybody else. My agenda is not that clear.”
Well, maybe it is. Judging by the nature of Bob Mould, the album, and
his recent actions, Mould’s agenda seems to be: scale down. Do what’s right for
Bob Mould, not everybody else. The results? A nakedly personal record, written
by Bob Mould, produced by Bob Mould, and played by Bob Mould — with a
dedication that reads, “This one is for me.”
“They’re always [like that] after a band splits,” he cracks. “It’s funny how
that happens. All of a sudden, I realize, `Hey! They’re not gonna ask any other
people what these songs are about! So I guess I get to write about whatever I
want!'” Mould laughs again, as he does often. That he can laugh is amazing. Anytime a band splits up, it’s traumatic. Imagine being married to two
or three or four people simultaneously. Now imagine going through a three- or
four-way divorce.
“Yeah, it’s a big adjustment,” Mould agrees. “Anytime, whether it was
H�skers or Sugar, or even with Tony and Anton to a degree, you leave a
little bit behind. You leave something behind, and you try to go forward and
find what’s gonna make you happy next. You do miss it and you grow from it and
you learn from it. I think a lot of where I’m at right now is just sort of
recovering, even two years later, from the whirlwind that was Sugar; just the
amount of work and demands that were put on everybody in the band. Just trying
to think, `Well, what would I like to do?’ I obviously made this most
recent record by myself because that’s how I was hearing it.
“I wanted people to see how I write songs, how I hear things in my head. Now
playing it has been an odd thing. Andrew Duplantis was out playing bass with
me, and musically, that was really neat. But we’re not working together anymore
in the duo setting. That was another thing, just something that I tried that I
thought might be interesting. And it was, but maybe it wasn’t appropriate for
where I’m at right now.”
The thing is, does Mould know where he’s at right now? The recent album
seems very much a summary of everywhere he’s been in the past: There’s the
raging electric stuff, there’s stuff that’s similar to both Sugar and
H�sker D�, there’s stuff more similar to Workbook. He’s been
all these places before, but with a difference.
“A couple of things on the record I think are unique. `Hair Stew’ is really
different from anything I’ve done before. `Thumbtack’ is about as sparse as it
ever got. I can’t remember a song I’ve ever done where it was just acoustic
guitar and voice. There’s some departures and some things that are sort of
familiar-sounding.” Mould sighs. “But, yeah, they’re probably gonna stay real
personal for awhile, the records.”
Is this because the Bob Mould Travelling Misery Show is back down to the Man
and His Acoustic Guitar?
“Mmm-hmm! And the trip’s been really fun. The dates with Andrew were
cool. It was really interesting. It complemented what I normally do with the
solo shows. But there was a part of it that reminded me of what a band was
like, and I couldn’t shake that feeling. And it was sorta weird. I kept
thinking, `God, if there was a drummer up here, it would all be good.’ Or, `If
I was up here by myself, it would be good.'” He laughs. “Or I would feel like I
knew what I was doing. There was a sort of a weird in-between that I have no
way of knowing what would have happened.”
Cool. But what happened to “No touring, no interviews?” Apparently, Pete
Townshend is what happened. Mr. Let’s-Smash-A-Rickenbacker, apparently a
long-time Mould fan, asked Bob to open a handful of solo dates this past
summer, a move Mould himself had apparently inspired.
“Doing the shows with Townshend got me thinking about playing again. And I
didn’t realize that when he saw me last spring, that that’s what got
him thinking about playing again! He’d mentioned that, and I was sorta
weirded out. In a good way! But I was just like, `Oh! Strange!’ He’d actually
said something from the stage both of the nights that we did the shows together
in New York in May.
“But that got me to thinking about playing again. Then, I dunno, I just felt
like talking to people again! Y’know, I’m not doing any big national press,
which is nice. I’m just doing stuff locally, sorta picking people that I know
understand what I do and seem to understand the record without an explanation.
It’s a pretty short list, and we’ve been getting a lot of requests. And it’s
like, `Y’know, Ryko and I are not going out looking to get articles.’ It’s not
that kinda record. This record is what it is.”
And now the road is leading Mould back to his adopted home, for a solitary
night at Liberty Lunch, which is surely thankful he doesn’t have Sugar around
to help him blow up the P.A. system. (“Although they did get a good P.A. out of
it!” Mould jokes.) Preceding Mould will be short sets by Matt Hammond, Jacob
Schulze, and even Mould’s erstwhile partner, Andrew Duplantis. (“An amazing
player,” Mould says. “God, if I was going to put a band together or do
something more full, Andrew would be an incredible asset.”) What then?
“The Austin show is actually the last date of the year, and I think after
that, I’ve got a couple of different options: I can either continue to address
my New York living situation, or I can take a writing break, just do some
writing. I don’t know how it’s going to go. I think just getting back to
writing after these shows will be the best thing for me. Playing the acoustic
every day and revisiting all the old songs on a regular basis, it’s good for
me. It gets me recharged.
“I look back, and then I can look ahead. It’s almost like I’m cleaning out the
closet. I can just move on. And that’s one of the things about the acoustic
shows, too: Just being out there by myself, all day on the road, it really
gives me a lot of time to think. Unencumbered thinking time! Nobody can get at
me, I don’t have any obligations other than to get there for soundcheck. I
didn’t realize that was such an important part of why I did the solo shows
until it wasn’t there. And that, I think, is another part of it, as well. I
just really enjoyed that time out there. I’m not on any schedule, I don’t have
any obligations other than to just put on a good show. It’s really relaxing.
It’s the best of all possible worlds.
“Yeah,” Mould summarizes with another one of his scratchy, throaty smoker’s
laughs, “there’s been a lotta upheaval, a lot of looking for the magic formula.
Looking for the place in life that’s really gonna make me happy with what I’m
trying to do.” Sadly, that place might be New York City, a city which doesn’t
even know how to pronounce “Houston.” But who knows? Mould, after all, hasn’t
made that children’s record yet, either. n
Bob Mould plays Liberty Lunch, Saturday, November 9.
This article appears in November 1 • 1996 and November 1 • 1996 (Cover).