See a Little Light

by Bob Mould

  We played The Today Show on May 20. For that week, the show was touring the country, with a local musical guest at each stop. In Pittsburgh it was George Benson. Our show was in downtown Minneapolis, and we were to play several songs, one of which would air live on NBC. We hired a Jimmy Jingle truck to come to the site and provide coffee and donuts to our fans. Bryant Gumbel briefly interviewed us, then we performed “Could You Be the One?” There were several “grips,” or technical crew, holding small portable heaters below Gumbel to keep him warm, even though it wasn’t that cold. (By the end of the day, a few of the grips had serious burns on their hands and were taken to the emergency room.) We again played under the end credits, and onward through a short set of favorites to an appreciative and chill-swept crowd.

  * * *

  By now I was seeing the band in a different light. For one thing, I had lost respect for Greg. Despite our differences, Grant and I were the ones who were making this thing go and we knew it. We really didn’t listen to Greg. So I just thought, let’s keep him out of this. He’d check in maybe once a week, but Grant and I discouraged him from even doing that much—“Go play golf, go do your thing.” It was just easier to move forward without his input.

  It was like any office environment: if three people are working together and one day someone doesn’t show up but the work-day goes as expected, well, maybe that third person isn’t essential. I don’t know how or when this dynamic with Greg started, but it did. The dynamic shifted, the balance tipped, and before we knew it, everything was different. But the audience never saw this. They only saw the excitement of the live show—and everything was fine onstage with Hüsker Dü.

  Because Grant and I were partners in the studio, the more recording time we racked up, the less money it was for Greg. With songwriting, it was clear: Grant and I were the writers, and we deserved more money. Without the songs, there would have been nothing. Sadly, it also contributed to the race to write as many songs as possible on Warehouse. But beyond that it wasn’t quite so easy to determine who should get what. Grant deserved to be compensated for doing the most of the band’s artwork. I should have taken a 15 percent management fee and a 10 percent booking fee. Do we start paying Greg by the mile for driving? Where do you draw the line?

  Things between me and Grant were strained, but we both knew it was in our financial interest to keep the band on track. That wasn’t the purest of motives for making music, but after years of struggling to make ends meet, we all wanted to make money, and Grant and I had tapped into a steady stream of cash. Despite our different philosophies, or what we did with our shares of the money once we made it, the financial compensation became the main motive for keeping the band intact. Hüsker Dü had become a job.

  And a big part of that job was touring. We began a European leg in June 1987, hitting clubs and a few large outdoor festivals, sharing the bill with the likes of New Order, Robert Cray, and Elvis Costello. It was a bus tour, and for the first time we had the luxury of bringing our significant others on the road. I brought Mike and Grant brought Ivan, but Greg did not bring Jeri. Lou Giordano was still house engineer; we had a friendly yet no-nonsense British tour manager named Zop, and his workmate Mick Brown was our stage technician. I still work with Mick on occasion; he’s a great guy.

  The double-decker bus was large enough that one could avoid the others if necessary. There was the main lounge, and then, down the back stairs, there was a second smaller lounge. This is where I spent most of my time, alone, writing short stories on my typewriter. Mike would come down to visit, but by this point, all I wanted was to get away. I was tired, I was depressed, and I wanted to be alone. I was slowly cutting myself off from my band, my workmates, and even my partner.

  This tour was also where I saw my first major fracture with Mike. He disappeared for the better part of a day at the massive Glastonbury Festival, then turned up later with some guy; he was sloppy drunk and they’d swapped T-shirts, so it was pretty clear that something had happened. I was very upset, but I was in the middle of a tour so I tried my best to block it out and let it go. Funny, I suppose—I’m the rock star, I bring my boyfriend along, and then he starts fucking around. That kind of tension is impossible to hide. What else could I do? Piss, moan, cry, or throw someone out the window of the bus? I was at work. I just wanted to finish the tour.

  Things were in rough shape. The band was shaky, I was questioning Mike’s faithfulness, and I was retreating from everything that was familiar. And then in late summer we started rehearsing for the next album. I started playing an Ibanez Artist, a guitar with the same pickups as the Flying V I’d used throughout Hüsker Dü, but a double cutaway body. It sounded the same but looked very different. A theme?

  Historically, we would have torn through and learned a pack of new songs in about a week, then headed right into the studio to start recording. Now, we were struggling to come up with a coherent direction. I’d brought in a number of new songs but wasn’t getting any positive feedback from the others. I suggested using strings and horns, doing bigger arrangements, and Grant and Greg would just shrug. Grant brought in songs, but I didn’t find them interesting or inspiring. So the silent friction between me and Grant escalated.

  Another source of friction was my home recordings. I had bought a drum machine and used it to lay out rudimentary beats for demo versions of my new songs. Grant mocked the demos by emulating the stiffness of the drum machine when we ran through the songs. Drum machines were uncool, and maybe Grant thought I was cutting out his creativity, but they were sketches meant to demonstrate the arrangements. So much for trying to move the sound of the band in a new direction.

  Often we’d work for a half hour, then Grant would become really fidgety and distracted and say, “I gotta go do some stuff… I’ll be right back.” So I’d be left sitting in the room with Greg, twiddling my thumbs, working on logic puzzles, reading the newspaper, anything to keep myself occupied, seeing as I don’t have a lot to say to Greg at this point. Grant’s gone ten, twenty, thirty, forty minutes. Then he’d return in a completely different state of mind from the one he’d been in when he left. He’d leave seeming anxious and would return in a state of bliss. At the time I didn’t recognize why.

  * * *

  Warner had tried to get us to replace our booking agent and failed. Then they tried to get us to replace our management, and they mostly failed there too. Now they wanted us to get a producer. Grant and I had done just fine producing the last three albums and weren’t about to give up that seat without a fight. But we had to at least humor Warner.

  We started at the top: George Martin. Warner came back and said he couldn’t do it, but his former engineer Geoff Emerick was a possibility. Karin Berg suggested Pete Townshend; other names included ex-Feelies drummer Anton Fier, as well as Hugh Jones, who had worked wonders with Modern English. Hugh came over to meet with the band, but there was no chemistry. So the producer discussion was temporarily tabled while we went out to play an event called River City Reunion in Lawrence, Kansas.

  We were one of two bands, the other being the legendary ’60s underground group the Fugs. It was a celebration of Lawrence resident William Burroughs and several writers/performers/artists with a connection to the Beat movement: Allen Ginsberg, John Giorno, Anne Waldman, Peter Orlovsky. Edie Kerouac-Parker, Timothy Leary, Jim Carroll, Keith Haring, and even our longtime friend Jello Biafra were also part of the celebration. The Beats were a huge inspiration and influence for me, and it was an honor to be in the presence of all these great writers, these American outsiders/storytellers.

  A month later, in October 1987, we did a quick run around the East Coast in what’s called a “victory lap”—you do the first tour to draw attention to the record, then another tour to clean up when the record becomes popular. We made good money, around five grand a night. On Sundays we would treat ourselves to something nice, which usually meant a band and crew meal at Red Lobster.

  We’d given up on playing Warehouse in its enti
rety. Compared to trying to get a lukewarm record over to people, playing the hits was a lot easier. It was like hitting the play button on a tape machine. All I had to do was start the riff of “Celebrated Summer” and everyone went berserk. It was much more fun than rehearsing and working on new material.

  In the moment, during the actual sets, it was still fun to look out and see people go crazy for the band. That kind of reaction is never a problem. When all the volume is up and I’m facing the crowd and I don’t have to look at the other two guys and I see the audience immersed in the music, that is still the moment when everything is right. No matter how silent or troubled the daily journey, that noise could make it all go away, even if only for those minutes onstage. To borrow a line, it can take a nothing day and suddenly make it all seem worthwhile.

  But at the same time things were changing, and not for the better. My neighborhood in South Minneapolis was quickly deteriorating. The crack cocaine was coming toward me. Then one day I heard fire truck sirens, looked out the window, and saw that someone had set fire to my garage. That was a cue for me to start thinking about moving out of the neighborhood—and maybe even out of town. I didn’t know how bad it would get or how else it might manifest, but I can feel when the juju is fucked, when it’s time to move on. So on three main fronts—the band, Mike, and now my own home—I was starting to disconnect.

  Another major change, one I would have once thought unimaginable, was the hiring of outside management for Hüsker Dü. At the beginning of this October tour, we finally conceded to Warner’s request and brought in Linda Clark, who also managed Los Lobos and Violent Femmes. Linda had been a product manager at Slash Records, a Warner subsidiary that specialized in punk rock, so she was a known entity inside the Warner machine. Linda’s assistant, Rick Bates, was a supernice guy. He rode with us in the van for a couple of dates, and I showed him how we did our business.

  I was a little uneasy about no longer driving the Hüsker Dü train, but I wasn’t getting paid extra for the amount of time and effort I was putting into keeping the train on the tracks. Grant appeared to be oblivious to the situation that was clearly unfolding in front of him. The train was changing tracks at a rapid clip, and not everyone was on board for the next destination.

  CHAPTER 11

  Right before a short Midwest tour in December—the Christmas Money Tour, as it was referred to on the inside—I made a big life change. Mike and I had talked about doing something different with our lives, and our neighborhood was starting to go downhill, crack and fires and all. It was time to leave South Minneapolis. We both grew up in rural settings, so we packed up and moved to a farm town.

  Mike and I found this beautiful two-story brick farmhouse just outside rural Pine City, Minnesota, about an hour’s drive due north of the Twin Cities on Highway 61, the old main road that ran from the Twin Cities north to Duluth. The place was nearly one hundred years old, on ten acres of land, with three bedrooms up top.

  I bought the house in late November from a schoolteacher who had lived there with her now ex-husband, an African-American man; for rural Minnesota, I’m sure that was quite unusual. The one thing that was strange about this beautiful house was that the heavy wood doors upstairs were all split in the same spot, looking very much like they’d been punched through, hit with a fist.

  One of the upstairs bedrooms was quite similar to my old upstairs bedroom in Malone, where I spent most of my high school years, hearing the Ramones for the first time and learning to play guitar. That became my studio room. The main outbuilding was a two-story granary that was once used to cure hops for making beer, and that became Mike’s painting studio. Between the traces of violence, the similarity of the bedrooms, and the granary, there was a lot of symmetry between my childhood home and this farm.

  Grant came up once to look at the place right after I bought it. He seemed a little anxious when he arrived, but, just as he did at rehearsals, he dismissed himself, walked the grounds by himself for half an hour, and returned in a much better mood. I didn’t think anything of it at the time. Later that night, when checking on the large outbuilding, I found a leather belt that looked quite familiar lying on a haystack.

  * * *

  This short tour felt different from October—there was an unidentifiable tension and uncertainty. Everyone seemed on pins and needles, as if there were something secretive going on; I just didn’t know what it was. In Champaign, Illinois, Grant stormed off the stage, claiming someone had thrown an ashtray at him. Eventually we went back out and finished the show, but I suspected that perhaps nothing had been thrown and that something else was eating at Grant.

  The next day was St. Louis, Missouri. We had a night off before our show at the Mississippi Nights club, and we were staying at an Embassy Suites near downtown. We were spread out across this hotel, with its interior courtyards, all doing our own thing. At one point in the evening, I spotted Grant outside his hotel room door with a stereotypical druggie hippie chick—she had a shaman-lady vibe, like Stevie Nicks or the Dance of the Seven Veils. It struck me as bizarre—people who looked like that were rarely around our entourage.

  For the life of me, I don’t recall this, but two people who were on that tour say they came to me that night and explained the situation: Grant was addicted to heroin. The hippie chick had been flown in, presumably by Grant, to bring him methadone so he could get through the rest of the tour. The story makes sense: it’s highly unlikely that Grant, in the midst of a tour, would have had time to locate a drug clinic, go there, register, and get methadone.

  But all of that is beside the point: Grant was a junkie. It might sound ridiculous that I can’t remember being told this; it’s actually kind of embarrassing. The only explanation I can come up with is that I was so shell-shocked by the news that I buried how it was delivered, just pushed it aside. We still had a tour to finish and I just couldn’t deal with it yet. The following night’s show at Mississippi Nights ran without incident, and it wasn’t until a week or so later that I was fully able to process the information. That, I remember.

  The next show was Columbia, Missouri, December 11, 1987. Grant was jonesing or trashed on booze—or both—but either way, he was all messed up. We were trying to get through the set but were stinking up the joint. Bill Batson was running monitors by the side of the stage, yelling at Grant to stay awake. Lou Giordano was at the front-of-house position, practically hiding under the soundboard in embarrassment. I was doing my best to distract the audience, but it was an intimate room so there was no way to hide what was happening. Hüsker Dü didn’t play bad shows. But this was a terrible show, simply awful.

  At the end of the set, I headed back to the dressing room. I was livid. What the fuck was going on? Then it all started to fall out. Grant said he was sick—dope sick. He was a wreck, and needed methadone. I said, “We’ve got one more show in Omaha, what are we gonna do?”

  Grant said, “I can do it, I can do it.”

  Greg then informed me he’d known for months but said nothing. I thought, Greg Norton, you would knowingly let Grant dig this trench in his life just to keep the band together? That’s just excellent. Lou was in the room with us, shaking his head, saying, “I can’t fucking believe this is happening.”

  That was it. I wasn’t about to roll this shit out one more time in front of an audience. We didn’t need to do any more damage to ourselves. Let’s go home. I canceled the following evening’s show in Omaha, and we drove eight bleak hours straight back to Minnesota.

  Grant was a wreck—irritable, sweating then freezing. We kept changing the temperature in the van to try to satisfy him. At one point he said, “I’m hot, I’m cold, get me ten candy bars,” so we pulled over to a gas station. Beyond this, there was nothing but total silence for the entire five-hundred-mile drive. I’d never been in a funeral procession, but this sure seemed like one. It was death. It felt like the end.

  Everyone went their separate ways when we got back. I retreated to the farm, confused and dis
gusted. As the days went by, all the pieces started falling into place. Grant’s distant and erratic behavior of the last eighteen months, the time spent away from the band hanging out with Run Westy Run and Ivan Daniel—now it all made sense. Between maintaining my sobriety, David’s suicide, moving to Pine City, and trying to salvage my relationship with Mike, I’d been so preoccupied I didn’t even notice what had happened to Grant.

  You can’t kick yourself for not realizing someone’s a junkie. Junkies hide it really well. Even people close to them might not see what’s happening. It’s not like all junkies are scabby messes—many function at a high level for years, before they eventually unravel and reveal themselves. I’m not kicking myself for being oblivious.

  And now that I knew, what could I do? My assumption was that Grant and Ivan were using together. But since the beginning of the band, I tried to keep a respectful distance from Grant’s personal life. Now I was in no position to say anything about that, without appearing to be meddling. The professional friction had added yet another dimension of distance between us. I didn’t know how to repair or address any of this. And I wasn’t even sure how much I cared about the future of Hüsker Dü anyway—by this time I had lost a lot of interest in the band.

  All of us have been in relationships or situations that have slowly turned toxic. We know they’ll end sooner or later, but we stay, partly out of habit, partly out of fear of change, and partly through false hope, that things might change somehow for the better. Our gut tells us it won’t get any better, but we hold on anyway. Then that one single incident happens, the one that shows you the open door, the one that gives you clearance to walk away.