by Bob Mould
In July I put the farm up for sale and moved back to the Twin Cities. I rented a top-floor loft in the same building as Mike’s space in St. Paul. It was hard to get Mike interested in coming up to spend time with me; we had grown apart. I wasn’t acknowledging or processing this very well. I planned a birthday dinner for Mike and a few of his friends, but he couldn’t be bothered to show up. No one showed up. Someone with more relationship experience might have seen the handwriting on the wall, but I was blind to what was happening.
Early Saturday morning, September 9, 1989, there was a farmer’s market kitty-corner to the building. I bought some cheese and fruit and a cockscomb—a bloodred-burgundy flower with the appearance of rippled paper. I put the cockscomb in a vase and went downstairs. I knocked on his door—there was no answer. For the first time, I used the key Mike had given me to let myself in. I was sitting alone with the cockscomb, waiting. Then I heard someone fidgeting with keys outside the door. In came Mike—in his underwear.
I asked, “What’s going on?”
And he fell apart. It all tumbled out: “You know Tim who lives next door?” he said. “Well, I was over there last night.”
“Are you guys…?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“All right, don’t let me interrupt.”
I went back to my place. I didn’t feel angry about what had just happened. I knew things had been over for a while, but I wasn’t facing up to it. I knew why Mike avoided me when I moved to his building in St. Paul. He wanted the distance for reasons beyond the commute. He had a second life that he didn’t want me to be a part of. Now I had opened the door, faced the situation, and could walk away. I felt sadness, but even more so, a sense of relief.
The decay of my relationship with Mike had been right in front of me, but I was so busy in my own little creative world that I hadn’t even noticed that he’d checked out. I paid no attention to the warning signs. But if I had paid attention to all the signs, my head would have exploded. Sometimes the eraser is your friend.
I had no boyfriend and I had no house. Anton and Tony lived in New York City. Steve Fallon, my best friend through these times, lived across the Hudson River in Hoboken. It hit me then. Why should I stay in Minnesota? There was nothing left there but history.
Once I move I don’t look back. I move forward and away. And that’s what I did. Over the next seven days, I gave away the possessions I didn’t need and put the rest in storage. I packed all of Mike’s remaining possessions in a trunk, took a copy of Workbook, inscribed it “To Mike, thanks for everything. Love, Bob,” placed it on top of his items in the trunk, closed it up, and brought it down to his space. I packed the rest of my belongings in my Subaru wagon and drove eighteen hours straight from St. Paul to Hoboken.
CHAPTER 13
I arrived in Hoboken around 3 AM. I figured I would stay up all night and meet Steve in the morning. I was exhausted and hungry, so I headed to Malibu Diner on Fourteenth and Willow. I walked into the diner and a guy named Mark Zoltak recognized me. Mark was a Maxwell’s regular and quite familiar with the music scene.
“Bob, what are you doing here?” he asked.
I replied, “I just left Minnesota. I think I’m going to move here.”
“Where are you staying?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll probably stay with Steve until I get a place.”
He says, “I’m a realtor—there’s an apartment a block from Maxwell’s on Twelfth and Washington that just opened up. It’s a railroad apartment on the fourth floor of a five-floor walk-up; we can look at it tomorrow. If you like it, you can rent it.”
I said, “I’ll take it.” Sight unseen and serendipitous: an affirmation that I did the right thing by leaving Minnesota.
Bill Batson drove all my possessions out to New Jersey and put them in a storage space in Secaucus. I settled into the Palace Hotel on Tonnelle Avenue in North Bergen for three weeks until the apartment was available.
It was September 1989, and I was rehearsing the band every day at a studio in Weehawken. Anton and Tony were once again the rhythm section, and I hired an old Minneapolis pal of mine named Jim Harry to play second guitar on this tour.
Almost every night after rehearsal, I made the five-minute drive to Maxwell’s to eat dinner. Most of my friends and acquaintances either worked or spent evenings at Maxwell’s: Steve, Nick Hill, bartender John Bruce. I started meeting new people, including this one guy named Ray, who I was really fond of. We spent a little time together. He was a handsome and sweet guy, but any potential romance was soon preempted.
One of the guys milling about Maxwell’s late one night was Rick Phelps, who was a painter/visual artist. He was an acquaintance of Steve’s, originally from Georgia, and he moved to New York City to work on his art. There was also this younger blond-haired, tall, skinny fellow; we started looking at each other. His name was Kevin O’Neill. He was with Rick. We introduced ourselves and made some small talk. Right away, it was obvious that there was a mutual attraction.
A few nights later, just days before I left for tour, Kevin and I reconvened at Maxwell’s for dinner. We sat at a small table for two, ordered food, and observed each other’s behavior. He asked, “When did you move here?”
“Earlier this month.”
“You were in Minneapolis, and you had a boyfriend there, right?”
I said, “Yeah, well, that’s over now. I’m here and I want to start over.”
“Yeah, I just moved to New York a month ago myself. I just broke up with my boyfriend of four years.”
I asked him, “Where did you move from?”
“I grew up in Athens, Georgia.” Then he paused a moment and added, “I know who you are. I worked at Wuxtry Records with Pete Buck. I grew up around Jim Herbert and the B-52s, I was in Inside/Out,” and on and on, making his case. I’m thinking to myself, this guy is interesting.
“I’m so happy to be single,” I said. “I don’t think I would ever want a boyfriend again, I’m so sick of relationships.” And Kevin’s echoing my thoughts, telling me, “Yeah, me too, never again.”
The conversation continued for less than an hour before we were together in bed at the Palace Hotel.
Right away people were commenting on us. Kevin was six foot three, full head of blond hair, sparkling blue eyes, and a winning smile. He had charmed me and could do the same to anyone with whom he came into contact. I was no shrinking violet either. The two of us together made an impression on people. We couldn’t help but be noticed.
Steve Fallon didn’t approve at first. Less than a year before we met, Kevin had a brief run-in with heroin while spending a season in Amsterdam; now he was sharing a studio apartment in the East Village and working at a Kinko’s. Steve was being protective of me, and I appreciated that.
Kevin remembered seeing me around Athens in 1985, when Mike and I visited for a week. We stayed with Michael Stipe for a handful of days, and it was a bit odd at times. For instance, Stipe requested that certain friends enter through a window instead of the fully functional back door. Maybe it was an art project. Who knows? (I used the door—I don’t do windows.) After a few days, we moved over to Pete Buck’s place. Kevin said he had noticed me around town and steered clear. I was drinking a lot on that trip and making a bit of a scene. Kevin also claimed he was the one boy in Athens that Michael Stipe pursued but never “got.”
Both Kevin and I were of the “still waters run deep” disposition. Whereas Mike had been a happy-go-lucky type who may have grown tired of my emotional cross, Kevin not only understood, but seemed ready to tolerate—and even facilitate—my sometimes heavy soul.
In one month I had closed up a six-year relationship, left the town where I’d lived for eleven years, and fallen in love with a beautiful young man. It was now October, and I had to go on tour just as the apartment became open. While I was away, Kevin moved in all of my stuff, set up the apartment, and started spending time there.
Three weeks into the tour, Kevin j
oined me in San Francisco. He had been around musicians for years and fit right into the tour. Kevin enjoyed smoking marijuana at the time, as did Anton, so they got on wonderfully. It worked out well—I would go do press, Kevin and Anton could hang out and have fun, the band would play the show, and everybody got along.
I played a handful of gigs with the Pixies right as the Bay Area earthquakes happened. I had a few conversations with Charles (aka Black Francis) from the Pixies. We treated each other as equals, a very cordial interaction. Kim was a touch eccentric, but always charming. At the time, I wasn’t fully aware of the influence I’d had on the Pixies. I hadn’t yet heard about the legendary 1986 want ad placed by Charles in a Massachusetts music paper: “Bassist wanted for rock band. Influences: Hüsker Dü and Peter, Paul and Mary.” All I knew was there was an artistic kinship. I enjoyed their music and thought they were a solid live band.
My job was to go out and make sure people knew I was dead serious about my presentation. During my performances on that leg of the tour, I went out there and gave blood, screaming and stomping across the stage. I was breaking all the unwritten rules of the support act—you should not do this, do that; less production, lower volume. I was trying to steal the show. It had nothing to do with them, personally; it could have been anybody. It was having the crowd in front of me, I wanted to get my point across. And, yes, I wanted to show off, just a little, for my new boyfriend. During the cathartic album (and set) closer, “Whichever Way the Wind Blows,” I’d fall backward off the stage, over the barricade, into the crowd with the guitar and microphone, screaming bloody murder.
After the San Francisco show, Kevin and I rented a car and drove together up the coast to Arcata, where we stopped to walk the magnificent craggy cliffs. North to Eureka, through the Redwood Forest, and on to Portland and Seattle. It was a very romantic week, tour activities notwithstanding. I kept wondering to myself: How did I end up with this incredibly handsome guy?
I finished the six-week tour with two well-received (and sold-out) headlining shows at First Avenue. I made my name in Minneapolis, and to this day, am still thought of as a native son. With these shows, I wanted everyone to know I was tearing it up more than ever and at the top of my game.
After Minneapolis I stopped home in Hoboken for nine days before the European leg of the tour began in Cardiff, Wales. When I walked into my apartment, I saw it was set up perfectly. I was touched and thrilled at what Kevin had done with the place. After this I was in a hurry to tear through the Europe dates so I could get home and spend time with Kevin.
Not that the tour didn’t have its moments. As the band and crew tried to enter an after-hours nightclub in Copenhagen after our show there, my second guitarist Jim Harry got sprayed with mace. People were getting kicked, punched, and pushed, so the security guards grabbed us and skirted us into this upstairs room. We get there, the room was very quiet and still, and there, sitting quietly in a chair, is none other than Boy George. He’s like, “Hello.” Two minutes ago people were kung fu fighting and getting sprayed with mace, and now I’m sitting in a quiet room with Boy George. I’m like, “Hey, George, what’s up?”
* * *
After returning from Europe in December, I finished the writing for Black Sheets of Rain. Half the album had been written in Minnesota before the breakup with Mike and the second half was written in Hoboken. I would sit in my little room and work, and Kevin would be next door in the bedroom watching TV.
Black Sheets of Rain was a dark record. The first group of songs (including “Hear Me Calling,” “Out of Your Life,” and “The Last Night”) made up the “write it and it shall be so” part, the self-fulfilling prophecies, and the remainder of the album was “yeah, and that’s what happened.” So the album ended up a combination of the prescient and the pensive.
February 1990: it was time to make the record. I wanted Anton to be happy with the drum sounds, so I asked him where he wanted to record and he suggested the Power Station, a place on West Fifty-Third Street in Manhattan in a former Con Edison power plant. It was one of the most famous studios in the world, and people like John Lennon and Neil Young had recorded there. Tony was excited at the prospect of working there too. We worked with house engineer Steve Boyer and, sure enough, Anton loved the drum sounds right away. Everything was sounding big—that was the nature of the main tracking room.
This was the biggest-budget record I ever made. I had a quarter-million 1990 dollars to work with, and I spent three months and $125,000 of my advance making that record. It was rock and roll fantasy land, unlike anything I’d known before. This was not working at Total Access from 11 PM to 9 AM, recording on used tape. Not even the experience at Paisley Park could match these sessions. The Power Station was a world-class studio, with some of the best gear in the history of recording.
Whitney Houston was working upstairs for much of the time. Even though she appeared to weigh about ninety pounds and seemingly never ate a morsel, Ms. Houston had an extensive hospitality rider with fresh fruit and deli trays every day. After she left, our second engineer would go upstairs to retrieve the leftovers. We dined like royalty on the scraps of the then reigning queen of pop.
I piled on so many layers of electric guitars that it felt almost claustrophobic. Then in the final mix stage, Steve Boyer and I enhanced the drums—already thick and huge from recording in Studio A, a cavernous wooden room with a churchlike peaked ceiling—with samples that made them sound colossal. Every part of the sound spectrum was saturated to maximum capacity.
I turned in the record in late April, and the label became concerned about how to market such a dark album. This thing was beyond the “wall of sound”—listening to it felt like being trapped in a large factory that was quickly filling with motor oil. What can I say? I wrote the songs during a troubled time and the record reflected that. It was that and having all the technology at my disposal—the loud room we recorded in, combined with equipment that could layer and bolster every aspect of the sound. And we’d just come off a year’s worth of very loud, very physical performances. It had altered my perception of the quieter songs, and not necessarily in the best way.
I wish I’d done some things differently. The demos for Black Sheets were more delicate; the album versions were sheer bombast. “Hear Me Calling” was intended to be a tempered plea for revisiting a failing relationship, but the album version turned somewhat bellicose. “Stand Guard” had worked fine without all the layers of distortion, but these snapshots of a dissolving life, conceived as elegiac, suddenly became a constant chorus of pile drivers leveling everything in sight. The only song that escaped relatively close to the original vision was “The Last Night,” which held true to its compositional tone of resignation.
The lyrics of the title track are torturous and relentless:
Is there an upside to every downside?
Keep it inside, it’s a downward slide of broken glass, it keeps building in piles
And I don’t know if the sun ever smiles
It’s the black sheets of rain, following me again
Everywhere I go, everywhere I’ve been, following me again
The song was partially inspired by a trip Mike and I had taken in 1987 while on tour in Europe. We had a day off between Munich and Vienna, and I wanted to visit Dachau. Dachau was one of the first Nazi concentration camps, and besides Jews, the prisoner population included political dissidents, Catholic clergy, and homosexuals. We entered under a large archway emblazoned with the infamous words “Arbeit Macht Frei” (“work makes you free”). The sun was beating down and there was little shelter to be found. One image that sticks in my mind was the sight of a group of Carmelite nuns, praying and worshipping in the middle of the barren work field.
As far as dealing with David’s suicide, “Hardly Getting Over It” forms a matched pair with “Hanging Tree.” The former was about how I perceived death and the latter was about how I actually dealt with it. When I sing “Another bridge I cannot bear to cross alone,
” that’s about David. But that song is also about a lot of other stuff that was going on in my mind at the time. “And above my head, all that’s left are footsteps of some kid too young, too far away from home,” that’s Mike. And “I’ve been on the mend, I’ve been getting ready to change my name again,” that’s me.
* * *
Sandra-Lee Phipps was a photographer/documenter of REM and the Athens scene who was living in the New York City area. She took the album cover photograph of the door of a rusted-out, abandoned car over on the Brooklyn waterfront. Less than ten minutes after Sandy got the shot, the car was towed away. The remainder of the package was photos she had taken on a trip to South America and included shots of Anton, Tony, and me on the back cover.
Kevin and I left Hoboken in June 1990 due to a problem with the neighboring apartment. One morning I heard a commotion in the hallway. I stepped out and saw the father—drunk, yelling, and waving a pistol at his kids. I called up Kevin and said, “We have to get out of here.” We moved to a 1,600-square-foot loft in Tribeca, a somewhat unsafe neighborhood at the time. Kevin got mugged one night while I was on the road. I felt helpless—but at least the thieves let him keep the cheap sterling ring I had given him.
Black Sheets of Rain was released in August 1990 to mixed reviews. It didn’t sell as well as Workbook and wasn’t getting much support at commercial radio. Still, I didn’t let it get to me. I had a job to do: go out and play the shows and beat myself up every night, hands and throat bleeding, head ringing all the time.
We were down to a trio for this album’s tour. Jim Harry was a good player on the fall 1989 tour, but his presence inadvertently helped me make an important realization: most fans don’t want to hear a second guitarist competing for the same sonic range and tone as my guitar.