by Bob Mould
I got that SG copy guitar as much for lip-syncing on the Kiss float as I did for actually playing it. But I picked it up pretty quickly, just like I had with the piano. I mostly learned by ear—I checked out the famous Mel Bay chord book for a little bit, but soon discovered how to move my fingers around and make chords on my own. It happened fast. I taught myself some Kiss and Ted Nugent songs, but I hadn’t figured out how to play leads yet so I stuck with rhythm guitar. Steve Bessette and I eventually wrote songs, mostly rudimentary copies of heavy-metal anthems, nothing of any great note. By now I had graduated to recording and overdubbing those song ideas with two eight-track tape machines.
Female-fronted mainstream ’70s rock albums like Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours and Heart’s Dreamboat Annie were big with my friends around this time, but they didn’t speak to me. Being into a band was like being in a gang, and I didn’t know if I wanted to be in a gang with women. Stuff like that was the soundtrack to my high school social life, but only by default. Nothing had the same impact as my treasured ’60s singles collection. Kiss and all that stuff was just spectacle, not an epiphany.
My musical transformation came from Rock Scene magazine. It was out of New York City, published by now legendary downtown New York rock scene insiders Richard and Lisa Robinson, Danny Fields, and photographer Bob Gruen. Looking back on it, I think they conspired to make that scene look bigger and better than it really was. Originally, I bought that magazine to follow the star bands they featured on the cover each month: big-time hard rockers like Aerosmith, Kiss, and Ted Nugent. But Rock Scene would also do photo features on arty underground bands like Television, Patti Smith, the Ramones, New York Dolls, and Suicide, and they started catching my eye.
Each issue of Rock Scene would also focus on local scenes such as Cleveland, which had bands like Rocket from the Tombs and outrageous characters like Crocus Behemoth, Peter Laughner, and Stiv Bators. One issue of Rock Scene featured photographs of a handful of acts from Minneapolis–St. Paul, another frigid place 1,200 miles from Malone, and a world removed from my perception of bohemian New York City. I recall a picture of a band called the Suicide Commandos. There was nothing particularly remarkable about the photo, but the band’s name stuck with me.
The Ramones, however, really snared my attention—they looked street-smart but innocent. Finally, a gang I’d want to join. Something about them resonated. Was it that they all looked like they had something to prove? They weren’t flamboyant and theatrical like Kiss. With their leather jackets and ripped blue jeans, the Ramones were the complete opposite. I had no idea what they sounded like, but they piqued my curiosity and I got their first album for my sixteenth birthday. My father and I did the hour-plus drive out to Record Town in Plattsburgh just to buy it. On the ride back, I studied that twelve-inch-square album jacket with intensity, as if searching for DNA at a crime scene. As soon as we got home, I raced out of the car, past my mother, and upstairs to my bedroom, where I laid the needle down on the record. That was what did it. That was when the light went on.
CHAPTER 2
The cover of the Ramones’ first album showed these four thugs in leather motorcycle jackets and jeans standing against a brick wall, looking like nothing I had ever seen before in music. And while everyone else’s album covers were colorful and flamboyant—Boston had its spaceships, Aerosmith had its wings, Kiss had its lightning bolts—the cover of the Ramones’ album was in black and white, simple and stark.
And the second I put the needle on the record, the sound came so quick and distorted; it was really electric, this fast, frantic energy. It gave me a rush. Everything before was now slow and plodding. Metal bands might have had a quick song here and there, but this was an album where every single song was so intensely fast—the speed and the simplicity were just a complete shock. It was clearly melodic music, and yet Joey’s nasal, almost deadpan delivery was so unlike the typical rock singer’s. The subject matter was almost completely foreign—I was sixteen and I didn’t know about sniffing glue or hustlers on the corner of Fifty-Third and Third. It was a completely new language. The first side opened up new worlds as it went by in a fourteen-minute blur.
My brother and sister had moved out by then and I had the whole upstairs of the house to myself, spending most of my time in the partially divided double attic room. I put a speaker in each room, so when “Blitzkrieg Bop” kicked at the beginning of side one, I was stunned: the bass was on one side of the mix, the guitar on the other, and the drums and vocals were down the middle, just like so many of my ’60s singles. And because the guitar was on one side, it was easier to learn how to play their songs.
The usual way of strumming is up and down, but Johnny Ramone’s guitar style was almost all downstrokes, which gave his playing an aggressive energy, like he was punching the strings. There were virtually no guitar solos, which made it easier to concentrate on the rhythm and learn how to accent and anticipate certain beats. I started playing along with that album, and with as much new music as I could get my hands on.
Around this time, NBC ran an exposé of the UK punk scene that featured excerpts from the Sex Pistols’ scandalous appearance on Bill Grundy’s Today show. I taped the audio off the TV so I could capture their controversial first single, “Anarchy in the UK.” I became even more fascinated with this new style of music, and I listened to that cassette over and over and over.
Punk rock was so unlike anything else I’d heard. Metal and hard rock bands were all about excess: groupies, jet planes, and vast arenas. By contrast, the Ramones were just trying to buy a PA at Manny’s Music and stuff it into a van. My friends and I could build a float and pretend to be Kiss, but mimicking those larger-than-life cartoon characters wasn’t punk rock. Punk rock was actually doable. I thought to myself, I could do this. And, after a few weeks, I could play those fourteen songs on their first album. I could stand on the side of the room where the bass guitar was loudest and play along.
Of course, the New York Dolls were from New York, like the Ramones, so I was instantly interested. They were the bridge band between Kiss and the Ramones. They started before the Ramones and had a punk spirit about them, yet their ramshackle androgyny, as I later learned, influenced Kiss’s makeup-wearing ways.
So I’m sixteen, I’m in this remote farm town, and I’m up to my eyeballs in this new music. A few of my friends give the Ramones a listen, but most of them aren’t interested, or are dismissive of “that noise.” I’m trying to convert them. To me, it’s the sound of New York City, four hundred miles away. I’m envisioning the streets of brick and dirt, and musicians and artists mingling at shows and parties. All of this reinforces a simple fact: I need to get out of this place.
Music kept building my resolve. In December 1976, during my junior year in high school, a teacher named Jim Denesha helped a group of us organize a bus trip to Montreal—a cultural visit, a way to use our years of French class. In actuality, the main purpose of the trip was to attend a rock concert at the Montreal Forum.
The headliner was Aerosmith, then at the height of their drug-fueled debauchery. Rush opened; I barely remember them, having found my seat just after vomiting on one of the Forum’s escalators. My friends and I were trashed beyond belief, but I still managed to fire up a joint as Rush wrapped up their set. My only real recollection of Aerosmith was that they sounded terrible and that there was safety netting above the stage, which prevented the band from being hit by flying objects. For some reason, people threw lots of fireworks onto the stage during their set. This was what big-time rock and roll was like in 1976.
In the spring of 1977, I noticed the Ramones were playing at the University of Quebec in Montreal. They were billed as the special support act for Iggy Pop and were promoting their second album, Leave Home. My friend Kevin Heath and I went to the concert, and it reaffirmed everything I suspected. The Ramones took the stage with clear focus: Joey quickly introduced the band, Dee Dee counted off the first song, and away they went. They played the songs even faste
r than the album versions, in unbroken packs of three and four, without speaking to the audience. I made a mental note of this. Iggy, in sharp contrast, appeared to me to be a total disaster. Iggy was supporting The Idiot, an album I got for ten cents as a promotional incentive for joining the Columbia House record club. After the surgical efficiency of the Ramones, Iggy appeared to be completely lost. That night, the Ramones showed me what a rock concert could be.
After months of serious self-application, studying the Mel Bay instructional books and playing along with my new punk rock albums, I realized that I was going to be a guitarist. But the eighty dollar Sears SG copy with the burrs in the saddle, the high action, and the shoddy tuning pegs was holding me back. I asked my father if I could upgrade; he could tell I was serious about the guitar and agreed to let me pick out a new one.
We wound up at Bronan’s Music in Potsdam, where there were some decent music stores. I would have preferred a Les Paul, but that was out of our price range, so I settled on an Ibanez Rocket Roll Flying V, the same guitar Syl Sylvain played with the New York Dolls. The guitar and its V-shaped case cost $250.
When we got home, I plugged it into my Electro-Harmonix Mike Matthews Dirt Road Special, a relatively simple amplifier: one channel, solid state, one twelve-inch Celestion speaker, and a built-in Small Stone Phaser. The sound was close to what I was hearing in my head, but it needed a more overdriven feel. The last step: the MXR Distortion +, a small yellow pedal with two knobs (output and distortion), originally designed in the ’70s. Turning up the distortion knob cuts some bass from the signal, exaggerating the graininess of the high-frequency harmonics. Imagine the sound of someone starting up a chain saw in preparation for clearing a parcel of overgrown land.
In July of 1977, I took another concert trip to Montreal, this time to see Cheap Trick open for Kiss—and completely blow them off the stage. Cheap Trick’s sound, heavily influenced by ’60s Britpop, was familiar to me from my early childhood singles collection, and it would play a big part in informing my own songwriting many years later. For me, Cheap Trick’s set was one of the final nails in the hard rock/heavy metal coffin.
Visits to A&A Records in Montreal opened my ears to great Canadian punk bands like the Viletones and the Diodes. There was Record Town in Plattsburgh, but they had little beyond the major label releases. But in the spring of 1978, it was in Burlington where I found the Suicide Commandos’ Make a Record. In their Rock Scene photo, the Commandos had been this unassuming-looking three-piece: singer-guitarist Chris Osgood with his bookish glasses, singer-bassist Steve Almaas with his Kewpie doll look, and drummer Dave Ahl—this tall, Nordic-looking fellow with a big grin on his face. These guys looked different from the New York street punks and the nihilistic Cleveland bands; they exuded an endearing Midwestern wholesomeness, but who knew what they’d sound like?
Turns out I liked the Commandos’ music—it had elements of first-wave American punk and ’70s hard rock. There were melodic vocal harmonies, modest guitar solos, and tinges of ’60s garage rock. I grew up listening to all those things, and could relate to their sound.
* * *
Getting out of town, for me, was attending Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, with the intention of earning a master’s in engineering. Macalester had a reputation as one of the nation’s foremost hotbeds of liberalism, but I didn’t go there for its politics. I went because I qualified for an underprivileged scholarship package. My parents would pay only $300 a year for a school that cost well over $5,000. In 1978, $5,000 was a lot of money for most families. But even $300 was a lot for my parents.
It was the typical scene: a parent driving his teenage kid to college. My dad and I did the two-day, 1,200-mile drive in a car filled with oversize stereo speakers, my Ibanez Flying V guitar, my amplifier, and a bag of clothes. For me, it signaled the end of a turbulent and sometimes confusing childhood. But as the two-day journey rolled by, my feeling of liberation gave way to concern over whether my mom would be OK during those spells when the darker side of my dad’s personality made its appearance.
One of the first things I do once I move into my dorm room is get the free weekly paper. I see an ad for the Longhorn Bar—and the Suicide Commandos are playing. I find out the drinking age in Minnesota is nineteen, and when I pick up my student ID, I give the wrong birth date so I can go see them.
The first time I walked into the Longhorn, the Commandos were onstage, and it felt just like what I’d read about in Rock Scene. There were probably five hundred people there. We all knew the words to every song, and after a few minutes of surveying the situation, I threw myself into the excitement. All of us, standing on the battered floor of this ramshackle steak house, gathered up and unified in the moment unfolding before us.
I was the new kid in the room, so I was looking around the club, trying to see who was doing what, who I needed to meet, who I needed to know, and how to get close to those people. I did a little asking around and learned that a guy named Peter Jesperson was the DJ, Chris Osgood’s then girlfriend Linda Hultquist was doing lights, and a fellow named Terry Katzman was running around, looking after the band.
I figured out a way to belong at college too. Physical proximity is the mother of all acquaintances, and my initial friendships at Macalester weren’t formed around music, but on the sheer randomness of dorm room assignments. My first roommate was a Japanese-American fellow named Phil Sudo. Phil was a quiet, soft-spoken guy, which was in sharp contrast to my wilder, punkier demeanor, but we became great friends and wound up rooming together for two years. Next door, there was Ken McGrew, a buttoned-down kid from the Chicago suburbs. Ken’s roommate was Geoff Klaverkamp, a tall, lanky, cheerful fellow who’d lived in Japan. I’d grown up in an all-white farm town, and as one might expect, I was raised on racial slurs. All this cultural diversity required a lot of adjusting on my part. But the four of us got along well and started to run in a small pack.
One night my freshman year, a whole bunch of us piled into a car and went to a multiplex to see Quadrophenia, the film based on the Who’s 1973 rock opera. We were drunk, crazy, and pilled up, just like the guys in the movie, which centers around a gigantic riot between two rival youth gangs in mid-’60s Britain, the Mods and the Rockers. On the drive back, another car cuts us off—and we’re pissed. We chase their car up a narrow hill and finally force them to pull over. We all pile out and start this huge fistfight in the middle of the road. We’re living it.
Some guy took a swing and whacked me upside the head, a really good shot. I reeled back for a second, then started laughing at him, then lunged at him. I’m shit-faced, and I don’t feel a thing. Geoff is throwing martial arts kicks, clocking people left and right. Ken is getting pounded, so we run over and pull a guy off and backhand him. Finally, the other guys tucked tail, got in their car, and left. We got back into our car, a little beat-up and bloody, and went back to the dorm.
Still jacked sky-high on adrenaline, we cracked another case of beer and listened to punk rock, then went into the hallway and smashed all the bottles. It was nuts. It was like Animal House but with punk rock as the sound track. I remember people looking at me as if I were John Belushi, like I had that kind of craziness. No one was stopping me; they may have been scared shitless. We ended up playing hockey in the hallway with a case of empty beer bottles. The broken glass slid under the doors, so the next morning, some of the guys in the dorm were walking around with bloody feet. So then you have a hallway full of blood. It was fucked up.
A healthier (and more civilized) way of finding community was by immersing myself in new music. Oar Folkjokeopus (Oar Folk) was the Twin Cities’ preeminent record store. They had all the latest import singles, the UK music magazines and weeklies like NME, Melody Maker, and Sounds, as well as free local papers and flyers for shows. I’d pick up a copy of each paper, park myself on one of the seats over the radiator next to the window, and go through the papers cover to cover. Then I’d return the papers to the rack and riffle through th
e import singles bins to find a couple to buy, based on what I’d just read in the weeklies. Then I’d get back on the bus and do the hour-long ride back to school, excited to gather up my friends, buy a case of cheap beer, and listen to the new purchases. Rain or shine, it didn’t matter—that was my ritual. I was constantly reading about music: the Oi stuff, the Manchester scene, Irish bands like the Undertones and Stiff Little Fingers. Every week there was the chance to discover a new band that might end up being the best new band in the world.
At the time, punk came in a lot of flavors. There was a fashion component to it. There was the studious bohemian look of Television and Talking Heads, with their white polo shirts and khakis. There was the New York street punk look of the Ramones and the Dictators, with their leather jackets, jeans, and high-tops. There was the high-fashion Malcolm McLaren look, with bondage gear, safety pins, and stenciled letters on clothing—the way the Clash or Siouxsie Sioux looked. There was Oi, there was ska, all the various subfactions. These distinctions were very important to me as a seventeen-year-old looking for an identity. Being into a certain type of music was like belonging to a gang. And I eventually found my gang in St. Paul.