by Bob Mould
We were back in New York for a show at Gerde’s Folk City, the place where Bob Dylan had first made his mark. With assistance from New York Rocker writer and future Yo La Tengo singer-guitarist Ira Kaplan, Michael Hill booked newer bands at Folk City for a series he dubbed Music for Dozens. We played a quieter-than-normal set due to the club’s sound restrictions. Then, after finishing our normal repertoire, we stretched out with a bunch of covers, including “Look Through Any Window” (the Hollies), “Don’t Fear the Reaper” (Blue Öyster Cult), “Paint It Black” (the Rolling Stones), “Blue Wind” (Jeff Beck), and “Train Kept A-Rollin’” (Aerosmith style). The show was in stark contrast to the primal scream of Gildersleeves only ten days prior—perhaps a first glimpse into the band’s next stage of looking back to the classic rock and pop I’d grown up on, while still moving relentlessly forward.
After the Folk City show, we headed home to await the October release of Metal Circus, which had been recorded in December 1982. This break also gave us time to work on our respective relationships, as well as planting the seeds for the music that would eventually become Zen Arcade.
Mike wanted out of his current relationship, so I urged him to move up to Minneapolis. Within a couple of months, he got accepted at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. So in late summer, before school started, I drove down in the rusted orange van and gathered his stuff out of his Richmond apartment. Then we drove to his family’s farm in South Boston, in Halifax County, Virginia.
I met his mother, who perhaps didn’t fully grasp what was happening. For a Baptist woman like her, it was probably more than enough to see her son go to school in Richmond; now, out of nowhere, this wild-eyed guy comes and sweeps him and all of his stuff away to Minnesota. Mike and I pile his possessions, his mannequin, and his dog, Coco, into the van and drive 1,100 miles to Minneapolis. That was the beginning of our six-plus-year relationship.
I was proud, I was happy—I had a boyfriend.
We arrived at the apartment in Minneapolis, where I was renting a bedroom. When my roommate (who held the lease) came home that night, he saw Coco and said there was no way Mike and the dog could crash at the apartment. Mike and I scrambled for an alternative. Mike stayed in a ratty downtown flophouse for three weeks until we folded in together in a basement apartment in South Minneapolis. Mike was very outgoing and made friends pretty quickly. Some of our friends were gay and some were straight; they were mostly painters and sculptors and musicians and filmmakers. We didn’t have a gay life, we just had our life. One guy’s in a punk rock band, the other one’s an artist. You could guess they’re probably gay, or at least I would have thought so. But it wasn’t a case of “It’s Friday night, let’s go to the gay bar and see our other gay friends.” Everybody knew we were a couple, but even then, in the depths of the Reagan years, it wasn’t that big of a deal. We didn’t hide anything, but we didn’t advertise it either.
I was in a group of people who were first ignored by the government and then demonized by the public because of ignorance. People were dying of AIDS, and in those days, they were dying fast. That scared the hell out of me. Even as a gay man, I didn’t understand what was happening. I wasn’t living in the Castro or the West Village, I didn’t go to Fire Island—a lot of what I was hearing wasn’t coming from the gay community, it was from distorted and perverse representations in the media. I was uneducated and misinformed because I wasn’t an out gay man, I wasn’t integrated, and I didn’t live what most people would consider a gay life. I didn’t have anybody who could tell me what was accurate and what was not.
So for a gay man in 1983, there was a bit of calm to be found in being faithful. For the three years I was at Macalester, I didn’t act out sexually for fear of being found out. Now that I had a boyfriend, did I feel any better about being a gay man in the Reagan era? No. But I had a boyfriend, a partner, and a safe sexual framework. At the time, that meant a lot to me. Later I came to learn that those aren’t the most important things to having a full life. But back then it seemed pretty good.
Looking back, I can see that the truly upsetting part of this period was that, as more of an aggressive masculine figure, I had very little time for the effeminate gay stereotype. For better or worse, that was my ignorant and sheltered rural upbringing. I had no role models and no exposure to gay culture. So when I was confronted with certain variants of gay life, it made me hate the fact that I was gay—not the act of gay sex, but the image that the media would hype up, or the one I kept in my head, of what a gay man was: queer, effeminate, camp. That was so far removed from how I perceived myself. But I was terribly ignorant of the diversity in the gay community. All I had was me and the media stereotype of what gay was, and the two were so far apart, I felt no connection.
* * *
Right around the release of Metal Circus was the beginning of a lot of changes, both for me and for the development of the band. In the studio I’d started using the unreliable and glitchy Eventide H910 Harmonizer on my guitar to shimmer the sound and take up more stereo space. The warbled pitching effect of the Eventide had a very crystalline edge, and the amphetamines I’d now used for three years probably had something to do with why I liked the sound.
The Flying V had a P-90 style pickup, which makes an overdriven rock sound. The Flying V shape is a visual representation of the sound, that rocketing whoosh. A lot of the Hüsker Dü guitar sound was just me trying to cover two guitar parts at once—holding a note, droning, doing chord progressions around a single note—combined with the little yellow box, the MXR Distortion + pedal. That’s where the tone comes from, that box. Guitars have come and gone in my arsenal, but that box is still there. I always use it. That’s the body and soul of the tone.
It was also the beginning of an introspective time for me. I was doing a lot of thinking and growing, and the songs on Metal Circus started to reflect this. The kinship I felt for hardcore was beginning to wane, and I was feeling repelled by its dogmatic ways. Maybe it’s no coincidence that my songwriting also shifted from commentary about politics toward more personal topics. I talked about it a lot in interviews, and with the song “Real World” I put my music where my mouth was. “Real World” was a statement of intent: We are not a strict political punk band. We are now a band. We are musicians now. Don’t tell me about anarchy. I never thought anarchy could work as a social concept—the “scorched earth” theory, where you level everything and wait to see what rises from the ashes. That is an extreme social view. In music, however—as an idea that moves you—it is entirely plausible.
“First of the Last Calls” was a shout-out to the Replacements, based loosely on their song “Kids Don’t Follow.” “Diane” is one of Grant’s finest songs ever and has been covered many times. “Out on a Limb,” the exploratory closer, had angular and ringing guitars coming from all directions, disintegrating into layers of noise.
We were starting to slow things down so you could discern the melody. We weren’t concerned how it would play in the hardcore world—it sounded right to us. We were beginning to march to our own unique beat and could only hope that the more enlightened fans might follow along.
CHAPTER 7
The basement apartment that Mike and I shared was as good as it had ever been for me: painted cement floors, a large rent-to-own console TV, and a worn-out padded black-vinyl rocking swivel chair. There was a sickly yellow kitchen, a bedroom with a mattress on the floor and clothes piled in boxes, one bathroom, and a couple of windows that looked out to the sidewalk.
I was still enjoying my drinking—as heavily as ever. Mike liked to drink as well, and we’d also smoke pot on occasion, but I’d gotten on a cheap wine kick and drank the better part of a five-liter box every day. After polishing off a box, I’d remove the shiny plastic liner and blow it up, then put it in a hammock that hung above the dining room table. The hammock was filled with dozens of blown-up shiny silver bags.
I was nearing the end of my speed phase though. I’d been using regularly
for years, and it was starting to take a toll on me. Speed sent my energy level through the roof and made my thought processes incredibly intense, but it also lowered my libido. Now, with a boyfriend, speed wasn’t my drug of choice.
I must say, amphetamines made me a pretty good interview subject. “Things can be changed by just making a few people wake up,” I proclaimed to my old college roommate Phil Sudo for the Macalester student paper. “One way to do that is to kick ’em in the face, like we try to do with our music. If they feel threatened enough, they’ll respond. The only way modern politics keeps forging ahead is by groups threatening the established order.” That was the speed talking.
* * *
A place called the Church, in East St. Paul, played a prominent part in the development of Hüsker Dü in 1983. A couple of Grant’s friends had bought a former church, and he ingratiated himself into it, living in a tent he’d pitched in the middle of the basement. The band rehearsed at the Church for free—a real sweetheart deal. It was a place where a lot of people lived and did LSD, and people were coming and going all the time, looking for a place to get their kicks: loners, kids with little or no money. Sometimes we had gigs there, but more often than not, the police would show up and it would endanger the somewhat illegal arrangement.
The Church was the place where we put together many of the musical ideas for Zen Arcade. There was a lot of improvisation, jamming, and switching instruments. Grant and Greg had a history of taking acid and mushrooms. I never had a desire to do acid; it seemed like speed plus color, and that didn’t appeal to me. But I quickly realized that if I was around a bunch of people who were tripping, I didn’t really need to take acid anyway. After a while, I felt a contact high—I could see it in the air. I felt a bit left out, socially speaking, but it was my choice. Outside of rehearsals I was spending most of my time with Mike and not socializing much with Grant and Greg beyond the work. At that point, we were listening to a lot of psychedelic music, garage music, music from the early Minneapolis scene, the fiery ’60s Minneapolis garage band the Litter, in particular. I was starting to really dig into classic albums by the Byrds, as well as obscure bands like Fifty Foot Hose, Michelangelo, and H. P. Lovecraft.
I had strong feelings about the ’60s counterculture, but they cut both ways. “We’re doing the same thing that the peace movement did in the ’60s, but the way they did it didn’t work,” I told Mike Hoeger of City Pages. “They sat in the park and sang with folk guitars. We take electric guitars and blast the shit out of them over and over again until the message sinks in. We’re saying the same thing they did, that you’re not going to screw us around, you’re not sending me to war to fight for Dow Chemical or some outrageous reason. We’re not going to be passive. We’ll fight back our own way. We don’t want to preach, we just want to pose questions and get people to think for themselves by reading and not watching the tube.”
By openly acknowledging my ’60s musical predecessors, and through deeper examination of their large-scale works (Quadrophenia, Tommy, Sgt. Pepper), I began to contemplate the idea of a concept album. Remember, I was twenty-two, and I was drinking, smoking, and still speeding. There was a lot going around in my head about trying to make a bigger statement, something of lasting value. And I went on record with these grand notions during an interview with Steve Albini for Matter magazine:
Right now we’re at a stage where we have to think things through in a big way. We’re going to try to do something bigger than anything like rock and roll and the whole puny band touring idea. I don’t know what it’s going to be, we have to work that out, but it’s going to go beyond the whole idea of “punk rock” or whatever.
We were not digging the punk rock rules and regulations. What better way to rebel than to make a double album? That would be a grand statement for us to make at a pivotal moment in the development of the band. We were ambitious—we’d done a single, a live album, an EP, an album, and then a long EP. We were seasoned and we were ready. The critical acclaim was starting to roll in. It was time to put up or shut up.
* * *
But we hadn’t had a lot of time to sit around and conceptualize the next album. We just rehearsed, toured, and recorded. We might talk about it at the bar or over the occasional lunch. Mostly things would work themselves out during breaks at practice; we’d stop playing, start chatting, and ideas would develop. We would socialize under the guise of rehearsing. We were together almost all the time on tour. A lot of ideas came to me while traveling.
Album titles fall out of the sky. They come from non sequiturs, riffing and spilling words alongside the other two guys, word association, the freedom of thinking out loud. It’s a neutral, communal way of conceptualizing things. Word association is absurdist, a noncommittal dialogue, but when an idea begins to resonate, it becomes part of the shared vernacular. When an idea works for everyone, becomes something that all three people feel comfortable saying, it sticks. For one thing, that’s how we got the name of the band.
We would compose songs alone and come together later to learn how to play them. We’d learn the music and then the words would be revealed later, either late in the rehearsal stage, at the recording sessions, or even as late as the first public performance of the song. There were times we would do a tour and I wouldn’t even know what Grant’s songs were about. I really had no idea. It was almost as if the emotional content of the songs was a secret.
This was also a by-product of playing on stages with lousy monitor systems. If we learned the songs without relying on lyrical cues, we wouldn’t get lost when we couldn’t hear the vocals. Same with the harmonizing—Grant and I would rarely work those out. It was a very natural thing, the way we sang together. When recording, the lead vocal would go down and then the other singer would take shots at different backing vocals. Performances and ideas would be met with approval or indifference—we’d never come right out and say we didn’t like something. Once we made our choices, we’d balance the layers of vocals and sit them back a little bit in the mix. It made the music seem louder, and, hopefully, the listener would spend more time with the lyric sheet.
Touring so much, we’d figured out various strategies for staying sane and on good terms with each other. Amid the noise and stink and chaos of the road, the van was our only sanctuary. Once we got out of the van, punk rock was all around us. So we kept the van very clean, for one thing. And while we drove from town to town, there was very little talking for hours on end. We barely even played music in the van. It was a time to recharge and rest. Greg drove while Grant and I often slept, just to save our voices.
The dynamic in the van was very respectful. We all smoked, so that wasn’t a problem for anyone. And if someone saw something on the side of the road, some goofy roadside attraction, we’d always pull over and take a look, no questions asked. We had no money so we took our kicks where we found them.
Now and then we’d turn on the radio, which was very regional: in the Midwest you’d hear news about grain prices, in the South it was gospel music and obituaries. You got a sense of the way people lived, not just through the radio, but from everything on the road. Driving through the Northwest, you’d smell freshly cut wood. All that stuff is disappearing now.
Early in the October 1983 tour, we were driving through a winding mountain pass on 1-84 on the way to Arcata, California. A major snowstorm had just blown through the area, and we were traveling behind a large slow-moving truck that was clearing the accumulation of snow and slush in front and throwing salt behind. Not being the most patient crew, we decided to overtake the plow. Greg signaled and accelerated, heading the van toward the apparent opening ahead of the plow. As we went by the truck, the flying snow landed with a thud on our van, covering the windshield with wet, heavy slush. The wipers stopped working. So now we’re on a winding mountain road and we can’t see a thing.
I was riding shotgun, and Grant was seated behind Greg. Instead of panicking, the three of us came together to overcome this dire situation. I
could barely see where we were headed, but I was trying to describe the road ahead to Greg. Grant locked Greg’s door and climbed out the driver’s side window, clearing slush from the windshield. Greg clutched the wheel, and through this group effort, we somehow avoided skidding off the winding mountain pass. That may have been the band’s finest moment—keeping that van on the road.
* * *
Zen Arcade started like all albums do: a few songs here, a few general ideas there. But at some point we realized that it could be so much more and ambition kicked in. We didn’t sit down and say, “Let’s write a semiautobiographical opera; let’s amalgamate the fact that Greg’s parents are divorced, Grant’s situation is this, and Bob’s conundrum is that, and weave it all together.” There wasn’t a conscious effort to construct a composite character, but that seems to be the end result of the writing for Zen Arcade.
The early ’80s marked the beginning of video game culture, and we used that as the jumping-off point for the album’s loose plot: a bright kid leaves his broken home and heads to Silicon Valley to design a computer game called “Search.” We started writing songs and loosely creating characters: the kid who designed the video game, his girlfriend, Pinkie, his cigar-smoking boss. It built from late 1982 through most of 1983. Once we saw what was happening with the narrative, the flow of the album became clear, and it became easier to put things in order.
We recorded Zen Arcade with Spot at Total Access at the end of October 1983. Throughout the sessions I was operating in a blur of alcohol and a last dance with speed, but I know we spent forty-five hours for setup, basic tracks, overdubs, and vocals. The three of us were in the live room at Total Access, which felt like a big garage. One of the first things we did was brew a pot of coffee. For this first pot, we added a gram of crystal meth to the coffee grounds, for a little extra kick. After a cup or two, I was more than perked up and quite ready to get to work.