by Bob Mould
“Celebrated Summer” was my first truly effective use of melancholy, a sentiment that was to become a core element of my future songwriting. “I Apologize” chronicles a suspicion-filled and explosive relationship, describing how something as seemingly minor as forgetting to take out the trash can highlight how easily a relationship can go silent. I still play those two songs in most every show.
And if Zen Arcade was the “gram of crystal meth in the first pot of coffee album,” then New Day Rising was my drinking album. That’s surely why the sessions don’t stand out big for me. I’d been drinking heavily for a while, and you don’t have to listen too hard to hear my inebriated state. “Perfect Example” was the sound of me sitting alone in front of an open microphone, a wee bit too drunk, muttering through a series of doubts, fears, and regrets. The words tumbled in free verse, and I don’t think I listened to it after it was done. Then there’s the mindless hardcore blast of “Whatcha Drinkin’”: “I don’t care what they say / I’ll be drinking today.”
New Day Rising was a little more delicate, the emotional palette a little deeper. I was almost twenty-four, more aware of time in general, and beginning to reflect on getting older. The music was slowing down and I was growing up. And I’d started writing some songs on my acoustic twelve-string guitar. I was becoming a little bit mellower. And what I didn’t realize as I was writing was that the audience was getting older with me, as well as growing in number and becoming more diverse. It wasn’t just a group of pissed-off guys in black leather jackets—we were beginning to see more women in the crowds, as well as the bookish music aficionados.
There was one song that didn’t make the recording sessions. Until now, when songs needed to be cut, mine were always the first to go. I was more prolific than Grant and was fine with letting songs fall by the wayside. But for the first time, I questioned one of Grant’s songs.
At one rehearsal Grant submitted a song, we played through it a couple of times, and after a moment, I said, “Grant, I don’t know about this one. It’s the same riff and melody as a Dream Syndicate song that’s out right now.” The song was called “2541.” Later I realized it was probably about a failed relationship he’d had, that it carried a lot of emotional weight for him at the time, and that it was one of the best songs he’d ever written. But at the time, I just wasn’t putting it together. I only meant to point out something. I think it really hurt him, and I think he viewed me as an adversary from then on. Years later I felt bad about it, and I often wondered if it might have been the beginning of the end.
Flash back to the summer of 1980 when Grant Hart quit Hüsker Dü. We played a show at a small theater near the University of Minnesota. The show was pretty bad, and both Greg and I were upset at Grant’s performance. We were playing on borrowed gear, so that may have been a factor. I suspected some sort of overindulgence. Regardless, when we confronted him about it, he didn’t apologize or defend himself—he just quit. We were astonished.
The next day Greg and I went to Grant and asked him if he really wanted to quit. He decided he didn’t really want to, so we patched things up and moved forward.
Grant quitting in 1980 was a power move, asserting his ability to destroy the band. I think the “2541” incident changed our quiet peace, broke that four-year truce, and ignited a passive-aggressive conflict between us.
There was also some friction because I was literally running the show: booking tours, coordinating activities with SST, and generally acting as band manager. In the earliest days of the band, Greg did the booking; when I realized we could be doing so much better, I took that task away from him. I didn’t ask Greg; I just said, “I can do better.” I only wanted to make sure we were getting paid what we were worth.
I had an aptitude for this kind of thing. I had the adding machine brain, and later, I’d studied under Steve McClellan, learning the ins and outs of the concert business. No one in the band complained when lots more money started coming in.
As time went on, the business got complicated, and there were moments when I was the only one who really knew what was going on. I explained everything to Grant and Greg though, and we always moved forward in consensus.
But there were also implications to this arrangement. Doing all that stuff put me in a position where I had more sway over things. To me, it wasn’t about needing to have power. I wanted to steer everything, but everything was Hüsker Dü and the fate of Hüsker Dü. It was taking what we had and making sure it was presented properly. I wanted the band to be as successful as possible, and every day I fought for that success. Even though I deserved it, I never asked for a management fee—I enjoyed the work.
There were times when I would get frustrated, such as when Grant would want to do side projects while I wanted him to stay focused on the band. If there was personal gain to be had, I thought it could most easily be achieved by making the band bigger. I always had my eye on the prize—that’s the kind of person I’ve always been.
* * *
In October we headed east for a series of dates in support of the now in-stock Zen Arcade. The album had been getting impressive reviews from music journalists around the world, which created more interest than we had ever experienced. While the music world was buzzing about Zen Arcade, here we were with yet another album finished and queued up for release. (After the July debacle, SST had the sense to commit to a prompt January 1985 street date for New Day Rising.) But if that wasn’t enough of a sign of how hard we were working, we were already playing three brand-new songs: “Hate Paper Doll,” “Green Eyes,” and “Divide and Conquer,” material for what would be the next album, the one after New Day Rising. Not only had we lapped SST, but we’d managed to race past ourselves too.
* * *
Around this time I developed some sort of respiratory problem. One day in Minneapolis, I was very short of breath and went to a local emergency room. They put me on oxygen that contained a bronchodilator drug. The doctor who treated me decided that I had asthma and put me on prednisone (side effects: weight gain, facial swelling, depression) and gave me an albuterol inhaler (side effects: nervousness, trouble sleeping), which I soon started taking onstage with me. In the next three months, I gained fifty pounds. Even after this diagnosis, I kept on smoking two packs of cigarettes a day—on top of my substantial drinking.
I would have maybe three, four, five, six drinks a night, every night. Not very much binge drinking. I’d work hard all day, and around 5 PM, I’d have my first drink. I was very productive and had my act together. I was a high-functioning alcoholic.
Nineteen eighty-four saw the release of some classic albums by our peers: the Replacements’ Let It Be, the Meat Puppets’ Meat Puppets II, and the Minutemen’s Double Nickels on the Dime. Sonic Youth was picking up a head of steam as well. And there was such a positive spirit among the bands, everyone playing together, helping each other out while still competing in a healthy way—like in December when we flew out to California for three shows and had the extreme pleasure of being chaperoned up and down the state by D. Boon of the Minutemen. Riding with D. was quite fun. He was always such an upbeat, intelligent, and thoughtful soul, and his demeanor made the time fly by. REM was particularly helpful and supportive of other bands as well.
In my mind it was no longer “I wonder if we’re better than the Replacements.” We were playing shows with REM and I was thinking, “Next?” I started to wonder if we were better than U2. I wondered if we were the best band in the world. Sure, I was cocky then, but for years I knew we were good, and now everyone else could see it too.
We stayed on the road, preaching our stories door-to-door, and those years of sacrifice were paying off—things were really starting to happen for Hüsker Dü. As for me, I’d bounced from Kelly Linehan’s basement, where I slept on a mattress next to the boiler and pissed in the laundry sink, to a roach-infested prostitute haven near Loring Park, to somewhat more civilized digs with Mike. It was a lot of movement and not much constancy, but it was all wort
h it. We were on one hell of a creative roll. So now what to do? The smart thing to do was make another record without blinking.
I’m really glad New Day Rising was done and dusted before Zen Arcade really started to resonate. Can you imagine if we hadn’t had another record ready? We’d have been sitting around with the earth shaking underneath us, trying to get settled and centered enough to make another strong album—but instead we struck while the iron was hot. If we hadn’t have done that, we might have tried to make another Zen Arcade. When people are watching so closely, it’s tempting to stay with the winning formula. After all, that’s what brought us to the party, that’s the work that took us from nowhere to somewhere. So do it again. But really, the best way to survive is to mutate. When you’ve made the fourth most important record in the world at the moment, you ask yourself, what do I do now? If you’re smart, you go with your gut.
And it paid off. We celebrated the release of New Day Rising with two hometown shows at First Avenue on January 30 and 31. Then we headed west, including a Seattle show with openers the Melvins and a new band called Sound Garden, who had yet to condense their name into one word. In early March we headlined “The Tour,” a four-city SST package with the Minutemen and the Meat Puppets. The Los Angeles show, at UCLA’s Ackerman Ballroom, was the night the major labels showed up.
Around this time, the Village Voice’s Robert Christgau was the most powerful critic in the country, and when he anointed Zen Arcade—“I get a kick out of the whole fucking thing,” he wrote, giving it an A— rating—a lot of music biz types, critics, and civilians starting coming to the shows. The Ackerman Ballroom concert was the first A&R parade: Mark Williams from A&M, Karin Berg from Warner Brothers, and Anna Statman from Slash. Sure, the major labels were flirting with us, but why would anybody want to leave SST? From the outside, SST looked like the greatest label in the universe. They had the hippest bands, the hottest tours, and the most provocative artwork. It was a great brand.
But we were growing tired of SST, stemming from the distribution problems and the publishing dispute. The major labels had a strong case: they could keep our albums in the stores. There were other pieces of the puzzle that needed to fall in place—creative control and financial compensation, for instance—but the simple fact was that we couldn’t sell records if they didn’t exist.
We recorded our next album at Nicollet Studios in the spring of 1985. The “2541” situation had changed the dynamic between Grant and me but we were lifted up by the fact that Spot was now no longer producing our records. Greg stayed out of the way, Steve Fjelstad was a steady and helpful engineer, and we homed in on the pop sensibility that was my entry point for music, going back to those jukebox singles I had as a child. It’s no coincidence that Flip Your Wig was the best album we ever did.
With Metal Circus we’d distanced ourselves from the sound and dogma of hardcore. Zen Arcade was a sprawling conceptual piece that broke further from established punk conventions. New Day Rising began to emphasize melody over noise. Now we wanted to make a full-on pop record, and we went for it. Flip Your Wig was easily the most melodic record we’d made to date.
Early on we had songs where everybody wrote a line, but from Everything Falls Apart forward, we wrote songs separately. Grant and I had cowritten mainly through jamming, not sitting together and concocting the essence. But we cowrote the title song from Flip Your Wig that way. It was an homage to ’60s pop music—we tried to recreate the feel of the Monkees’ theme song, and the title refers to the old Beatles board game.
Flip Your Wig had plenty of pop songs, like my trusty show-closer “Makes No Sense at All,” “Hate Paper Doll,” and “Games” (a song we never played live, but was amazing). “Green Eyes” and “Every Everything” were two of Grant’s best songs ever.
On the sociopolitical front, “Divide and Conquer” was a Marshall McLuhan–influenced look into the future, but with even more detail and accuracy:
We’ll invent some new computers
Link up the global village
And get AP, UPI, and Reuters
To tell everybody the news
Around this time, Grant and I made a business decision that would have repercussions in the future. We had a standard deal with SST: a 12 percent artist royalty rate. Out of what the band earned through those artist royalties, 25 percent went to the producer, who up to now had been Spot. But when Grant and I decided to produce Flip Your Wig, we agreed to split that sum. I was writing at least 60 percent of the songs, so we split the production money sixty-forty in my favor. In cash terms: if we sold 50,000 records at $10 a pop, we would get paid a $1.20 artist royalty on each unit, which comes out to a total of $60,000. So Grant and I split $15,000 of that: $9,000 to me and $6,000 to Grant. Three thousand bucks difference, which seemed fair and of little consequence. At least that’s what I thought at the time.
Over in California, in SST land, Ray Farrell was our new hope. In April Ray joined on as promotions manager at SST, and he was making things happen with college rock. Ray understood the business and assured us things would run right for Flip Your Wig. Ray was the major reason we stayed at SST for as long as we did.
Then we met David Savoy. David was a Hüsker Dü fan, he was tied into the Boston-area music scene, and he knew a lot of the same people we did. We all took a liking to him—he was a very pleasant guy, well-spoken, and with a nice, easy demeanor—and he promoted two shows of ours in Massachusetts. After the December 1984 show in his hometown of Concord, we went to an all-night restaurant where David pulled a little prank on me. He gave me a Christmas present, this Hawaiian shirt that was way too short so that when I put it on, my gut hung out the bottom. Everyone was laughing, and I thought, This guy’s got a good sense of humor, how dare he do this? I still chuckle at the memory. I thought, He’s someone we want to keep an eye on.
In 1985, when the business workload became too heavy, I told Grant and Greg that we needed to bring someone in to help. I suggested David, and they were fine with that. David moved to Minneapolis in April of 1985 and promptly found himself smack-dab in the middle of the storm known as Hüsker Dü. He was thrust into the role of parent, peacemaker, and messenger. And he was only twenty-one.
We rented two office spaces in the Nicollet complex. Grant had his space, with his mysterious safe in the corner to do artwork for Hüsker Dü and other Twin Cities bands. David and I worked side by side in an adjacent office, addressing the more mundane tasks: monitoring record company activities, balancing the books, and—my favorite—routing and booking tours. Get out the calendar, check the mileage wheel, route the dates. What towns need to be weekends for us and which ones can be weekdays? How much ground can we cover? Logistics is not artistic work, but there is an art to it and I enjoyed mastering the skill. I still do the same tasks with my current agents and management.
In addition to writing, recording, and touring, I was in the office eight to ten hours a day. Chris Osgood, who at that time worked at Twin/Tone, told me how David was energized by being around me and excited by watching the business grow. I didn’t realize that at the time—we were simply plowing through ever-growing piles of work. In addition, I was producing Soul Asylum’s Made to Be Broken album, and Grant was producing a record by Otto’s Chemical Lounge. Everything was rolling.
We kept touring, moving, giving back, and continuing that sense of community from when we were sharing our notebooks and our couches. We kept helping new bands with Reflex Records, releasing the Barefoot & Pregnant and Kitten compilations, as well as albums by Twin Cities bands Man Sized Action, Rifle Sport, and Ground Zero. We also worked with Midwest bands Mecht Mensch, Tar Babies, and Articles of Faith. That new blood helped keep the whole scene fresh—a rising tide lifts all boats. It was good energy, our way of countering and complementing Twin/Tone’s influence over the Minneapolis scene. Minneapolis was the “it” city, and the buzz was deafening. South side, you had Hüsker Dü, the Replacements, and Soul Asylum. North side, there was Prince, Jimmy Ja
m and Terry Lewis, Alexander O’Neal, and Morris Day.
* * *
In 1984 we had scrapped a run of European dates opening for Black Flag. In hindsight it was a wise move. Playing in the shadow of Black Flag might have cast Hüsker Dü as a second-tier SST band, especially since Black Flag’s 1984 lineup was not its best. But eventually we made it across the big pond.
In the middle of the May 1985 East Coast tour to support New Day Rising, we canceled a show in Raleigh, North Carolina, and made a big detour. We had been invited to play an afternoon show at the Camden Palace in London, for a taping of the popular Live from London television series. It was our first trip to the UK, not to mention my first trip overseas.
We played Washington, DC, on May 12, then flew to London for the May 14 gig. The London show went well, despite the fact that we played on rented equipment: we had no work papers, so bringing instruments would have drawn attention to us at immigration. The UK music press, which I had grown up reading and following word for word, finally got their look at Hüsker Dü, and they liked what they saw. The NME’s Richard Cook wrote, “This bitter metal howl is a sound that seems to literally pour over our ears, a glittering river of savage harmony.” In the wake of such glowing praise, we made plans with Paul Boswell, our new European booking agent, for a headlining tour in September. (Paul and I have worked together ever since.)
The day after the London show, we flew back to the States, played a ferocious show that night in Cleveland, and finished up the tour as originally planned.
Far from the grey fog of London (or Cleveland, for that matter), we flew later that month to our first shows in Florida. This was a high point in the cocaine era of Anita Bryant’s Sunshine State, and we brushed up against the drug a few times. After one show we witnessed a domestic squabble in the middle of a busy street—a coked-up guy bashing his girlfriend’s head into the hood of a Camaro Z28 and then embracing her. It was perfect, in a perverse way, so Miami Vice.