by Bob Mould
The tour became demoralizing to me when I realized that my business had gotten away from me. It wasn’t that I was being taken advantage of, but I had lost control of the finances and logistics. I wasn’t writing the checks, I wasn’t monitoring what was happening. And I paid greatly for that in 1991. Everybody I was employing was making more money than I was, and it was starting to piss me off.
After the last show in San Diego, we were staying in a nice hotel, much nicer digs than any of us lived in. I looked around, shook my head, and decided this was it—no more touring like this. Even in the most spartan of days, touring would break even. But this tour had lost money. So this was the end of the Bob Mould Band, version one. Anton went on to the next well-paying gig. Tony went home to Brooklyn. There was no European tour for Black Sheets of Rain.
The thing is, I loved playing with Anton and Tony—I learned so much from playing with them. The main lesson: how to stay in time. In Hüsker Dü the three members were in a constant race—the tempos went faster, and the beat became a blur. But Anton dug in, and if I tried to pull ahead, I would know because he would do something to remind me where the tempo was. And Tony was fixated on Anton’s bass drum. His job was to hit those bass strings at the same time as Anton kicked the bass drum—that’s how tightly they played together. With Anton and Tony, I realized the punch that a rhythm section can create when they’re totally in sync. I heard it, and more importantly, I felt it.
Those lessons resonate to this day; they set me up to be a long-standing player. Still there were lessons left to learn. The final lesson from the Virgin era would be an expensive one. It would bring about yet another change.
CHAPTER 14
Our loft space in Tribeca was across from the loading dock of a New York Times distribution center, so Kevin and I had a built-in 4 AM alarm every morning. I set up my recording studio in the back bedroom. Two windows in the rear area were boarded up; as the weather turned cold, so did the room. It was a dodgy setup, but we worked hard to make it our home.
One night over the Christmas holidays in 1990, the electricity in the entire building blew out. The fireman who responded pointed to an old-fashioned on/off switch—imagine a normal light switch you would flick—and said, “Here’s the breaker for your whole building.”
Most of the electronic devices in the apartment, including some of my studio stuff, were fried by the power surge. Kevin and I went to our landlord and said, “We have to move, it’s not safe here.” He apologized, wrote us a check for $5,000, and in March of 1991, we moved to Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
We signed a lease on a 4,400-square-foot loft on Richardson Street—a former clothing factory, complete with several left-over boxes of Frederick’s of Hollywood–size tags. There were dozens of orange 220-volt electrical cords hanging down from the ceiling to supply power for row after row of sewing machines. The first few months we lived there, women were knocking on the door every day looking for work.
Kind of pioneering, yes. Back in 1991 the only people with blue hair in Williamsburg were the grandmothers who shuffled daily through the pockmarked streets. We shopped mainly at a shabby supermarket over on Metropolitan Avenue—we were living on the cheap. I parked our Omni on the street and the neighborhood Dominican kids repeatedly busted out the windows. After the third time we replaced them, they started to stop and say hello, because they realized they weren’t going to drive us out.
It was a huge place. The living room alone was the size of the entire Tribeca loft. There were windows around two sides facing north to McCarren Park and westward over the industrial landscape of Williamsburg. We built a bathroom and kitchen, and Kevin refinished the floors with an old-fashioned sander; it almost killed him, but it looked beautiful. Again, he was working hard to make a comfortable home for us.
Sometimes we would climb the fire escape to the roof, where we had parties of a hundred people or more, with wonderful views of the entire East Side of Manhattan.
* * *
I’d learned so much about the music industry from running my own affairs for eleven years that my fellow musicians often called me for advice about the business side of things. I was familiar with the folks in Sonic Youth, both as a fan from our SST days and from playing together in Paris in 1987, as well as through mutual friends in New York City. So when they were negotiating the jump to Geffen in 1989, guitarist Thurston Moore called me and grilled me about what to do, what not to do, and how to do it. Like the old days of sharing notebooks, I relayed my experiences, both good and bad; I hope that my conversation with Thurston helped them strike a good deal with Geffen. (Given the amount of time they stayed, and the uncompromising nature of their Geffen output, it seems like it went well.)
I wish things had gone so well for me. I’d given Linda Clark limited power of attorney to sign off on certain business decisions. One decision she made was to sign away my songwriting royalties for both records to Virgin in exchange for tour-support money. She never told me about it; I only found out about it from the label. I knew I was getting tour support but I had thought it was getting charged back to the general artist account, which is separate from the songwriting account.
I found this out at the beginning of solo touring in March 1991. I discovered my mechanical royalties for the two Virgin albums were gone forever. This was especially traumatic for me, given the careful way I’d handled my career myself until 1988. This was the first time I’d trusted someone else to look after my business interests, and this is what happened. Even worse, it triggered my latent paranoia, and the whole thing made me suspicious of ever again allowing anyone else to have power over my finances or major business decisions.
Linda Clark did some good things, but signing away my publishing without consulting me was unforgivable. The only thing a songwriter has, in the end, is the publishing. To sign that away, to get tour support that they could then commission, was terrible. I was furious. I got on a plane to Burbank, showed up at the office, and said, “How dare you do this to me? You’re all fired. What in the fuck were you thinking? Where are my boxes? Give me that roll of tape. I’m boxing this stuff up and shipping it UPS to New York City. You’re done.” Next stop, Alan Mintz. “Sorry, Alan, you did a great job as my lawyer, but you’re fired.” Next stop, the accountants. “Any money left in the account? Give it to me right now. Oh, and you’re fired.” I get back on the plane and go home. It took two afternoons to fire the entire lot.
After this it was time to reckon with the label. By now Virgin was unsure of what to do with me, and I was equally unsure as to how to proceed with them. I went back home and talked with Steve Fallon, who said, “I don’t want to get involved in your business, but here’s somebody you should call: Josh Grier.”
Josh was a young lawyer, just up to New York from North Carolina, where he’d been the general manager of the indie label Dolphin Records, working with Let’s Active, Tommy Keene, and Corrosion of Conformity. Now he was building up his music-law practice. I liked Josh right away. I explained my situation. His recommendation: Walk away. Management screwed up your mechanicals, you’re in debt to the label on the artist side, and you’ll never see any money. They’ll write off the losses and you can start over. Walk away, play some shows, do something. I thought about it for a moment, and quickly realized Josh was right: walk away and don’t look back. It was an easy decision, it felt right, and it was time to move forward.
I called my agents, Frank Riley and Paul Boswell, and asked them to continue booking solo acoustic and electric shows all over the world. I did a run of solo dates in March and loved it—it was a good way to work out new material, and the low overhead was a joy after the Black Sheets tour. I ended up being on the road for close to nine months in 1991, winding around the States a couple times, driving a rental car an average of three hundred miles each day. I’d show up in a town, play long sets, then find a cheap motel to lay it down for the evening. All I brought was my guitars, a bag of clothes, and a jug of water. I was netting five to seve
n thousand dollars a week, building up funds to bankroll the next project.
One of the more memorable shows of the year was in March at the annual South by Southwest music conference in Austin. I played a brief and energetic set in a small, sweaty room called the Cannibal Club. The mix of older material and works in progress was typical, but this was one of those special nights: I had an enthusiastic crowd, I was in a particularly good mood, and I had the great fortune of working with a sound person named Jim Wilson, who would resurface a few years later as a creative collaborator.
It was also on this trip that I was introduced to Vic Chesnutt, a gifted singer-songwriter from Georgia. Vic and Kevin were old friends from Athens. Vic was promoting his Michael Stipe–produced debut album, Little, as well as readying the follow-up, West of Rome. We played dozens of shows together in 1991, including three shows over two nights, March 30 and 31 at 7th Street Entry in Minneapolis—a dozen years, to the day, since the first Hüsker Dü shows in St. Paul.
These stretches of time on the road were both lonely and inspiring. Driving for hours every day, I had plenty of time for reflection; consequently, I was writing a lot of songs. I’d come home for a week at a time and head straight for my studio. My studio room was right next to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, and lots of dirt, fumes, and noise came through the solitary window. A large section of the floor was covered with sheet metal, while the walls were brick, which made for a very reflective sound. Despite these less-than-ideal conditions, I did some of my best work in that room.
I was trying out the new material during the solo shows, and people loved the songs. It created a great feedback loop where the positive response to the music would inspire even more songs. I’d write “A Good Idea” one day, “If I Can’t Change Your Mind” the next. I was getting back on track. I’d come home with all this good energy and record elaborate demos with bigger production touches. The simpler home recordings that started in 1986 with the four-track were now eight-track recordings, and were approaching album quality. I was in my most fertile period to date.
Kevin came along for the Australian dates, then we went to Europe for a month. That was when the documentary The Year Punk Broke was filmed. In one fleeting shot, you can find me smiling like the Mona Lisa. Maybe I knew something was about to happen? The tour started with a week of club shows in Holland, opening for Dinosaur Jr. The shows were held in community centers. During the day senior citizens ate their government lunch; at night the space turned into a rock club. The crowds were mostly stoned squatter kids, and they were right up in my face yelling, “You suck, get off the stage. We want Dinosaur!” There was a certain irony in that, considering Dinosaur was one of several key bands who had followed in the footsteps of Hüsker Dü. It was a little unsettling at first, but by the end of the week, I’d gotten used to the banter from the crusties and, as a parting gift, dialed up the distortion boxes and cranked out waves of noise, both to torture them and to drown them out. The crowd reactions got better as the weeks went on, particularly at the festivals with Sonic Youth and Nirvana.
At one show in Germany, an afternoon outdoor festival in front of 7,000 people, Nirvana played their set and then trashed the joint. That was the way they were the entire summer: ripping drunk, trashing things, all building up to the release of Nevermind that September. Having to follow them, pounding away on a twelve-string acoustic by myself at an outdoor festival in the middle of the afternoon, was no easy feat. Nirvana destroys the stage, then it’s me carrying on like Richie Havens at Woodstock, then Sonic Youth comes out with their army of guitars. It was a lot of work, but great fun, and it was the constant challenge of capturing a festival crowd’s attention with only my guitar and my voice that made me a better player in the long run.
There was something in the air; we all knew something big was about to happen in the world of music. Boswell was smart to book me on those shows, and it was the right place to be. The year had started so poorly, but after the summer dates in Europe, I felt hopeful. Seeing bands who may well have been influenced by my earlier work, watching them flourish, gave me a sense of pride and accomplishment. Now I had a bunch of great new songs, and the stage could not have been set more perfectly for me.
I went back around the States by myself in October. I played the Trees club in Dallas, a warehouse building in the Deep Ellum section. That night there was a big thunderstorm—heat lightning and a torrential downpour. Behind the stage, the huge roll-up garage doors were raised so the crowd could see the raging storm hitting the street. Appropriately enough, I was playing lots of songs from Black Sheets of Rain, and with the combination of the lyrics and the elements outside, people still talk about that gig.
Again, I was following Nirvana’s stage-trashing act. Those guys were a day ahead of me in some towns, and they’d played Trees the night before. When I walked in, the monitor board was trashed. I’m like, “What happened?” “This fucking band Nirvana was in here last night, and the bastard singer tomahawked the board with his guitar.” I understood why the whole crew at the club was upset at Nirvana. But I also know what it meant in the greater scheme. Nirvana was turning things upside down. They were going to be huge, and things were going to change in a big way.
And it’s funny—well before playing those shows that summer, I’d heard the demos for Nevermind, courtesy of Gary Gersh, their A&R person at Geffen. According to Linda Clark, I was in consideration for the production job, which went to Butch Vig. When I heard Nevermind, I knew they’d made the right choice. I highly doubt I would have gotten the job, and if I had, their album wouldn’t have sounded as crisp and concise as what was released. But that’s all right, another door was about to open.
I’d been going around to prospective labels with my portable digital audiotape (DAT) machine, playing five songs, and then leaving. People were interested but also a bit hesitant, likely due to the limited success of Black Sheets of Rain. My longtime friend Julie Panebianco liked the demos, and in November she made a suggestion—one that would have a lasting effect on my career. I was about to play some UK gigs, and she urged me to meet with a fellow named Alan McGee while I was there. “Alan runs this label called Creation Records and is a huge fan of yours,” she said. “Take the demos over, see if you can meet with him, and see what he thinks of your songs.”
Kevin and I headed to the Creation offices in Hackney, in East London. Alan’s Scottish accent was so thick I could barely understand what he was saying. Hüsker Dü was “the fookin’ best,” he said. “The Jesus and Mary Chain and my band wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for you.” He was an intense character, clearly in love with music. He had a passion in his eyes when he spoke.
“Are you going to play me some fookin’ music?”
I played him a five song demo—he thought it was genius and wanted to put it out right away. “What do we need to do?” he said. “Look around this office. Creation is a small label, we don’t have a lot of money.” The vibe of the office reminded me of the good times at SST, but Creation was a bigger operation with grander ambitions. Signing with them immediately felt like the right thing to do. It was one of those moments, like falling in love or winning the lottery—you might not see it coming, but when it happens, instinct tells you to go with it. I asked for time to go home and speak with my attorney, but I knew Creation was the place for me.
The second major event on this trip happened one night after a show. Neither Kevin nor I liked driving in the UK, so we traveled with the support act, Heather Frith, and her manager, Abbo, who’d started a British label called Big Cat Records. Abbo also managed a few artists of note, including EMF and Jeff Buckley. Abbo was driving when he looked back at me and said, “Have you ever heard this band My Bloody Valentine?”
I said, “The name is familiar, but no. Why?”
He said, “They’re on Creation, they just put out this record called Loveless, and you really should hear it.”
We had a nice rental car—it could top out at 110 mph at least and h
ad a great stereo system. Abbo put the CD in and cranked it as we blazed down the motorway in the dark of night. I was astonished. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. This was the record I thought was never going to be made. From the opening notes of “Only Shallow,” it sounded less like music and more like a herd of wild elephants stampeding through the rental car. The slightly warped feel of the music, created by the gauzy combination of Belinda Butcher’s oft-whispered vocals and Kevin Shields’s pitch-shifting tremolo effect on his guitar, was unlike anything I’d heard in popular music. By the last hypnotic swoons of “Soon,” I was hooked. I was still wet from performing, we were racing to get back to London, and the whole thing was a religious experience. No one spoke a word for the entirety of the record. When it was done, I was both exhausted and exhilarated. Loveless had a profound effect on me.
* * *
The US label that showed the most serious interest in my new demos was the prominent independent label Rykodisc, which had enjoyed success with reissues of the David Bowie and Frank Zappa catalogs. Jeff Rougvie was the A&R person at Ryko; he was a longtime fan and an easy person to spend time with. Jeff really liked the demos and arranged for further meetings with other key Ryko personnel. I asked marketing head John Hammond to make up a plan, and he came back with pages and pages of detail, way more than I ever saw from Virgin.
Josh Grier and I constructed parallel deals with Creation and Ryko. For instance, if we did a single with one label, the other had to follow suit. That way they would naturally compete, but also benefit, as long as they kept up with each other in terms of setting up tour dates, press, and other promotions. It was a really smart move. We negotiated small advances since I didn’t really need the money to get up and running. By now I’d done a year’s worth of solo shows and socked away enough to make a couple of records without any loans from the record label. By asking for less money in advance, I was able to do licensing deals for the albums, meaning I retained ownership of the master tapes. Win, win, and win.