by Bob Mould
* * *
The healthy competition had finally turned against us and reared up when neither of us wanted to cut songs from the album. I was always more prolific, but my songs always got cut first and I was tired of that. I felt like Grant was throwing stuff together just to see how much he could get on the record. That could have been fallout from the “2541” incident; maybe it had something to do with publishing money. Wisely, Karin wouldn’t get involved. It was out of David’s league as well. There was no producer. There were no parents. It was all coming to a head.
If we’d only cut some songs, it might have been a decent single record. Looking back, Warehouse: Songs and Stories was no Zen Arcade. It was a less-than-stellar finish to our recorded output.
“Could You Be the One?” was written specifically to be a single—there was no heavy meaning to the words. “Bed of Nails” was a study in how I react when I perceive lies and betrayals around me (not well), and it set the stage for my future explorations into religious imagery. “No Reservations” is a nice series of lyrical images, like a handful of found antique postcards. The song is like a soundtrack for driving cross-country—the birds on a line, the broken-down shack. Sometimes the things we notice in passing are as important as the big thoughts we remember so clearly. “Never changes the things I feel inside / Sit by a lake and cry”—things might not get any better, and maybe they won’t get any worse either.
We were feeling some pressure from Warner to shine up the production so we could sell more records. Sometimes Warner would hint that if you guys can’t shine it up, maybe we’ll get someone else to do it for you. It wasn’t overt, but you could feel it. Karin would just say little things here and there. So we did it ourselves and Warner was more than patient with us. We spent a lot of time on the sounds. For instance, we recorded the cymbals separately, which is totally weird. We recorded on one two-inch twenty-four-track and then we would reequalize everything and send it to another machine, sort of premixing. Production values had gotten pretty high by that point, and we were trying to hang in there.
We turn in the record and Warner is not thrilled with the idea of trying to sell a double album to mainstream music fans. The only way they’ll do it is if they pay us as if it were a single record. Grant and I agreed to the reduced royalty, and our attorney, George Regis, negotiated this arrangement with the label. Even with deals like this, we still made more money with Warner. They gave us advances and cut us a more generous deal than SST did, and we got paid on time.
The cover of Warehouse was as fun to make as it is to look at. Inside a classical setting of stairs and pillars, Grant assembled several bunches of twigs and branches that had been sprayed with fluorescent paint. A camera was set on long exposure, and we illuminated the darkened set with flashlights and black lights, effectively painting in the ultravivid colors.
We appeared on the back cover, making Warehouse only the second record to feature a photo of the band. How we looked was never a key part of our aesthetic—our image was in our music and the artwork. Despite all that, this anti-image wound up being part of what we were about—the barefoot hippie drummer, the gas station attendant guitarist, the bass player who looked like he might be gay. The proof is that people always talked about it.
Daniel Corrigan took that back cover photo of us in the garden of Lakewood Cemetery—very fitting with the front cover, which, in retrospect, looks like a psychedelic funeral parlor.
* * *
By the fall of 1986, the mainstream was flirting so much with underground music that the USA Network staged a “New Music Awards” show at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. I presented the best new band award to Big Audio Dynamite, and a fully intoxicated Joe Strummer came to the podium to accept the award on behalf of his former Clash bandmate, BAD leader Mick Jones. The part that was not obvious on TV: I was standing behind Strummer, as instructed, with my right hand holding him upright so he wouldn’t topple over.
By this time Frank Riley of Venture Booking in New York was on board as our new booking agent. Frank was great to work with and totally understood where we were coming from. When it came time to do a tour, Frank and I would get together on the phone, route it out in less than an hour, and say go. He booked the dates, getting us more money than ever before, with the routing exactly as we wanted it.
Very few bands ran this tight an operation. We came from nothing, worked hard for years to build our brand, and, along the way, we didn’t waste a lot of time or money. We learned how to succeed without a bankroll behind us; now that we had one (Warner), we were careful not to become too beholden to the bank. I knew the worth of money. And through years of doing it, we knew that touring was our bread and butter.
We only had a couple of real differences of opinion with Warner. The first was Karin telling us we needed a “real” booking agent. She set up a meeting with one of the really big agencies. I went, and they were not the nicest people I had ever met. I came back and told Karin no way. Karin replied, “Frank comes over to this record company with a backpack on. You need a real booking agent.” I said, “Sorry, we’re not budging on this. We’re staying with Frank Riley.” Time has proved me right—Frank has long been one of the most prestigious agents in the business, and he and I have a great working relationship that continues to this day.
The second was Karin saying, “We all love David Savoy, but you need a real manager.” At that time, record companies were averse to doing business with artists or the artists’ handpicked mouthpieces. (A classic example would be Peter Jesperson’s experience with Sire, after the Replacements signed with the label.) Admittedly, David could be a little flighty. Besides being inexperienced, he was bipolar and was on medication. Sometimes he stopped taking it, which exacerbated his problems. One day in the summer of 1986, he disappeared for a week, then called me and said something like, “I’m in San Francisco, in a halfway house, sweeping floors.” When David returned, the four of us never addressed or resolved the episode.
Nor would we ever properly address or resolve the final time David disappeared.
CHAPTER 10
Grant and I were in a pattern of passive-aggressive, noncommunicative behavior. As usual, Greg stayed neutral. Karin Berg and Warner were still questioning David’s abilities as a manager. The label was on us to replace him, and had suggested Cliff Burnstein of Q Prime Management. Cliff was a nice enough guy, and a fan of the band (as were his main clients, Metallica), but we didn’t like the idea of anyone coming from the outside to run the show.
Under this cloud of dysfunction, we booked the most ambitious tour we’d ever attempted: a trip of nearly fifty shows around North America to begin a few weeks after the release of Warehouse. For the first time, we took a full production—PA, lights, and staging. We planned to perform the twenty-song, seventy-minute double album start to finish, then encore with the hits—“Makes No Sense at All,” “Pink Turns to Blue,” “New Day Rising.” It might have been a lot to ask of the audience, but that’s what we chose to do.
Big rock bands made tour programs, so we did too. Ours was in an 11" × 17" format, printed on glossy heavy card stock. It had tons of great live photos, spin art, and images we created by hand painting small glass slides. We all kicked in text to accompany the images—short stories, prose, and parables, similar to the liner notes for Warehouse—although I wrote the lion’s share of it. With little communication between the band members, there was no quality control, and yet the program ended up a fairly attractive package, though maybe out of tune with our original punk aesthetic.
A bit ironically, after Grant’s blowup, Warner chose one of my songs as the first single. For the video for “Could You Be the One?” we took the color slides from the tour program art and projected them behind us on a large curved wall, painted with 3M road paint, made with tiny glass beads, which made the projected images glow even brighter.
* * *
The day before leaving for the first show of the Warehouse tour, Grant, Greg, Mike, and I we
re hanging out at my place. I was waiting for Pete Fleming, a local guitar tech, to stop by with my refurbished Flying V. David still hadn’t shown up.
Then the telephone rings. I answer and the voice on the other end says, “It’s David Savoy’s mother. My son is dead.” Right at that moment, Fleming walks in with my guitar. I get out my wallet, take a twenty-dollar bill and hand it to him, point to the door and wave good-bye, and continue the phone call. She continues. They found his body on the Mississippi River; he’d thrown himself off the Lake Street Bridge. It was winter and the river was frozen solid. A jogger found his body. She’d called the coroner and was going to have the body sent back to Concord. She was just trying to get a picture of what things were like in David’s life, because she really didn’t know.
I flashed back to that time in third grade, when one of my classmates suddenly fell ill and left school. I never learned what was wrong, and then he’d died. I didn’t attend the funeral. That left me with no sense of closure. When my dad’s father died in 1984, my parents didn’t tell me for almost a month because they didn’t want to upset me while I was on tour. I’d never had to deal directly with death and was completely unequipped to comprehend the pain or offer proper consolation to his family. All of this has resurfaced and haunted me many times later in life.
Meanwhile, I’m trying to manage an explanation to David’s mother, having no idea what the right words are. David never spoke of his family much. I didn’t know anything about their relationship, or what they knew of his personal life. I’m having this conversation, the other guys are watching me, and they know that something is up. I’m thinking, Yes, now we are totally fucked. This whole thing is definitely fucked up.
I’m also beginning to realize how little I knew of David’s life outside the hours we worked together. Similar to my personal relationships with Grant and Greg, David and I rarely socialized beyond the office. We worked side by side in a room for eight hours a day, and by the end of the day, I naturally wanted to get away from all of it, no matter how much I liked David. I wished I could have told David’s parents more about his life, but I just didn’t know very much.
The night before David committed suicide, he met up with the road crew and wanted to go out for a ride. According to the crew, David showed no signs whatsoever, no behavior that would lead anyone to think he would throw himself sixty-six feet from a bridge onto the frozen Mississippi only hours later.
Why did he do it? I don’t know. I will never know. I can only speculate. David had a history of emotional issues and had stopped taking his medication. It might have been something personal, perhaps a relationship went off course. It may have been the increasingly toxic environment in which we all worked. It may have been a crisis of confidence, brought on by the label questioning his ability. It was probably a combination of all those things. That’s where I live with it. That’s what gets me through.
I was devastated. I grieved. We didn’t go to the funeral, which was held a week later in Concord, because of a blizzard. I felt terrible that I wasn’t there. Instead we held a memorial service in the live recording room of Studio A at Nicollet Studios. Grant walked around burning sage. Friends shared stories of David. We were trying to keep things as upbeat as possible.
The folks at Warner were great through this. Julie Panebianco and Mary Hyde immediately got on a plane to Minneapolis and stayed for a week; Karin came in as well. Everyone who worked at Twin/Tone and for the band rallied around us and did everything they could to make sure we were OK. Without that help and support, I don’t know what I would have done.
It’s impossible to overstate the effect suicide has on the survivors. It shatters you, it shakes everything around you, it puts a scar on your psyche that never heals. All balance is lost, and the routines of everyday life start tumbling out of sequence—eternally out of order.
We chopped off the first two weeks of the tour and added it to the back end. What happened in those two weeks off? Greg drank like a fish. Grant seemed more distant and preoccupied than usual. As for me, I dived even deeper into the office work. It was as if I was still somehow working alongside David, as I had done for so long in that room. I think David’s death amplified everything that was already happening. I’ve noticed that when people are traumatized, their true nature comes out because they are seeking refuge in what makes them feel most safe. The office work was a great solace for me.
One major change in the tour was my rooming arrangement. For years I had roomed with Grant, and Greg had shared a room with Lou Giordano. I didn’t care to be around Grant any more than necessary, so I chose to room with our stage tech, Josiah McIlheny. Grant roomed with our lighting tech, John Henderson. Greg and Lou continued to room together, and tour manager Casey Macpherson roomed with monitor engineer Bill Batson.
Grant’s personality had changed once he began hanging out with the Westies, although I didn’t yet understand why. His old whimsy began to turn me off. Now his off-the-wall nonsense came with a hint of bitter and a dash of sour. At this point I was sober, pragmatic, and shell-shocked, and just didn’t have time to humor Grant’s increasingly vague behavior. Between shows and sound check and traveling in the van, I had quite enough of Grant. Maybe it was mutual, since Grant didn’t bat an eyelash when I told him that after all these years I wanted a new roommate.
I bought a typewriter for the upcoming tour, for writing short stories and journaling. Warner Brothers was now using a primitive e-mail system called Telex, and since I was once again responsible for day-to-day communications with the label, I also had a Tandy 102 portable computer with these rubber couplers that you’d stick an old-fashioned phone receiver into. I packed both the computer and typewriter into a gold Halliburton case that I carried everywhere.
From late February through early May, we did a cloudy, grey tour of North America. It was a routine trip, save a few moments. One night we sold a couple thousand dollars’ worth of merchandise at a show in the Northeast. Afterward our stage tech, Josiah McIlheny, went back to the venue’s office and asked the promoter why the money wasn’t accounted for in the settlement. The promoter slowly opened the top drawer of his desk, revealing a pistol, and said, “I don’t recall any merch money, do you?” This kind of thing was common in those days—thankfully it seems to have faded away.
Then there was an episode before a show in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I was sweating and shaking uncontrollably as if I had a terrible flu. I thought I was having a nervous breakdown, but looking back on it, I guess I had a clinical anxiety attack. I’ve rarely had such a massive crisis of confidence. I’ve had stretches of self-doubt, but it doesn’t usually get to the point where I feel like, “Oh, my God, I’m paralyzed, I can’t move or think or do anything.” It was one of the first shows after the cancellations, and I was feeling so much stress about virtually everything: David’s suicide, trying to get back out and do it, grief mixed with guilt—not to mention internal band tensions. Should I even be doing this, after everything that’s happened?
I asked myself that again on Easter Sunday when we played a show in Lubbock, Texas. At the after party, the local metal kids made a videotape of a live rabbit being fed to a giant python. And sometimes on this tour there was a little comic relief. In Denver local music publication Westword came up with a brilliant idea—introduce the members of Hüsker Dü (the band) to the designer of Hüsker Dü (the board game). That afternoon we all played a round of the game against the inventor, and were soundly trounced.
Another funny thing happened the first night that opening band Christmas played. We had these big white columns and wooden stairs onstage, which mimicked the album cover. At one point in the show, Christmas singer-guitarist Michael Cudahy was running around and accidentally knocked over one of the columns, which weren’t properly secured. It was funny, but in retrospect, those rickety pillars were sadly symbolic.
* * *
Despite the increasingly obvious internal band tensions and the concerns Warner had about s
elling a double album to the masses, more and more the mainstream media was paying attention to us. The first exposure that prime-time network TV–watching Americans had to Hüsker Dü was on April 27, on The Late Show Starring Joan Rivers, which was broadcast on the brand-new Fox TV network as an ill-fated competitor to The Tonight Show. We were to perform the single, “Could You Be the One?” then be interviewed by the brash, sassy hostess, and finally close out the show with a second song as the end credits rolled.
We arrived on the set in the early afternoon to find the stage area decorated almost identically to the Warehouse album cover. This made the three of us very happy. Soon Ms. Rivers appeared, we all introduced ourselves, and she promptly put us at ease about being on live television. She asked a few humorous questions, then moved on to the other guests: actor Ian McKellen and an eighty-five-year-old marathon winner.
Eventually showtime rolled around, Ms. Rivers introduced our song as “You Could Be the One,” and we kicked in. Looking back on the footage now, my singing is tentative but, for once, I nailed the guitar solo on that song; I looked back at Grant and we shared a laugh about it.
After the song we walked over to the interview area. All three of us appeared a bit nervous at first, and as the two-minute interview crawled along, we started to loosen up a little. “You used to be much more of an underground group, much more radical,” Rivers said to us. (So it wasn’t Maximumrocknroll we had to worry about, it was Joan Rivers.) “As you get older,” I answered, “your emotional spectrum becomes a little wider and it’s not just screaming about how messed up the government is and how much you hate your parents.” Rivers wanted to know who was the calming one and who was the wild one. I volunteered that I was “the calm one” (yeah, right). True to form, Greg took the neutral stance (“I’m sort of halfway in between the calming influence and the wild influence”), and Grant, Rivers presumed, was “the wild boy.” The segment was done, and we were free to leave the set, return to the stage area, and play as much of “She’s a Woman” as the credit roll allowed. We’d made our national TV debut with no grievous errors. How far we had come—and how far we were falling.