See a Little Light

by Bob Mould

  Now I had to put together a rhythm section. I remembered drummer Malcolm Travis from producing the Zulus back in ’88. Malcolm was a sweet guy, easy to work with, and an excellent player. And the Zulus had just broken up, which meant he might be available. I called and asked if he was interested. He was. That filled one spot.

  Kevin knew David Barbe from the Athens band Mercyland. He and Kevin had been friends since attending journalism school at the University of Georgia. In the summer of 1991, Kevin visited his family in Georgia and David drove him back to the Amtrak station. Kevin took it upon himself to cue up “Hoover Dam” on a Walkman and play it for David. David loved the Beatles as much as I did, Kevin knew that, and so he had picked the most Beatlesesque song to play for him. The song finished, he took the headphones from David, boarded the train that had just pulled into the station, and disappeared down the tracks. A few months later, Mercyland was over, and David and I had serious discussions about the future. He signed on for the job and became the first person beyond Kevin to receive copies of the demos I’d been working on.

  The majority of the new material was pop songs, simpler in structure than the material from the solo albums, with a more driving beat. Loveless had left a big impression, but the other album that informed this group of songs was Cheap Trick’s In Color, a favorite of mine from my high school days in 1977. I wanted Malcolm to approach the drums with the undeniable power and economy of Bun E. Carlos.

  I knew that Lou Giordano was a hard worker, a quality engineer, and would be perfect for the job of helping me make a record, so I asked him. Lou wanted full producer credit, to which I said, “Come on, Lou, you know better.” The songs were fully formed, and I was just looking for technical expertise and a valued outside opinion about the quality of the performances. We agreed to coproduction and coengineering credits.

  We packed up and went to Athens. Kevin, Malcolm, and I set up camp at a motel on the edge of downtown. We worked in this ramshackle storage space David found, with a couple of power cords and a crap-ass PA, a chewing-gum-and-duct-tape type of setup. John Bruce, who I knew from Maxwell’s in Hoboken, came down to film the rehearsals and daily goings-on. I was putting us through the paces—we had thirty songs to learn in a few short weeks. We threw ourselves into this new relationship, with nothing guiding us but a notebook full of songs I’d written trying to make sense of yet another turbulent period in my life. I’d taken back control of my career; now all I hoped for was a decent third solo album.

  CHAPTER 15

  There were lots of reasons it ended up being a band called Sugar. Right away I had the sense that these guys were willing to do what it took to make things work. I wanted them to be paid well, but I could also tell they weren’t going to make unreasonable requests. David had done van tours practically his whole life. Malcolm was looking for a gig since the Zulus were over. We were all in this spot, and we gave in to it.

  I also realized that the average indie rock fan in 1992 didn’t want some guy’s name on the T-shirt—they wanted a shirt emblazoned with a band name. These days many solo projects have a band name because it sells more T-shirts. But more important than the marketing, it just felt like a band. David and Malcolm were not hired guns, we were in this together, building this project in a very punk rock manner.

  Still, I was the band leader, the main songwriter, and the guy who directed the traffic. There wasn’t a lot of room initially for David and Malcolm to steer the creativity. Their job was to interpret my ideas as powerfully and concisely as possible. But as the rehearsals went on, everyone started to add small personal creative touches, while staying true to the blueprint. Shuffling a drum fill, adding an additional bass run while turning the corner on the end of a verse, realigning an anticipatory beat—it was a lot of small, small touches, but over the course of learning thirty songs, they defined the overall sound.

  While rehearsing in Athens, 40 Watt Club owner Barrie Green asked us to play a show, so now we had to come up with a name. The four of us usually met for breakfast at Waffle House. One morning I noticed a sugar packet on the table and thought, That’s as good a name as any.

  The first Sugar show was on February 20, 1992. The Athens music community turned out in full force to see the band, and the show was even covered by a writer from Spin magazine. In just those few weeks of rehearsal, we had constructed a formidable set of songs, and we blasted through the new material in an hour. We opened with what would become the first three songs off the first album, then played a few more upbeat pop songs, then a four-song suite that was a work in progress, then four cover songs that included the Monkees’ “The Door into Summer” and the Who’s “Armenia City in the Sky,” and finally an original closer. We clicked well as a unit. It felt natural to all three of us. The crowd cheered loudly as we left the sweat-soaked stage with a successful debut gig under our collective belt. It was time to pack up the gear and leave the temperate Georgia climate behind.

  We trekked northward to snowy Massachusetts to begin the recording sessions for the album with Lou Giordano. We set up shop at the Outpost, a modest studio built in a barn-like garage in suburban Stoughton. Lou and I were very demanding of David and Malcolm. We were constructing the basic tracks in a very methodical and unorthodox way. We laid down a click track, David put down some guide tracks on bass, then Malcolm played the drum parts without hearing guitar and vocals. He did a great job, although it took considerable time. Once the drums were finished, it was time to put down the “keeper” bass tracks. David had done a magnificent job of studying for the sessions, but his bass itself was another story. The intonation was off, and when I started adding guitars to the tracks, some of the bass parts were out of tune. We would address this problem later.

  This wasn’t the Power Station and we weren’t staying at hotels. I’d learned, $125,000 later, that if the songs are there, money shouldn’t matter. And I just wanted to get back to a simpler way of doing things. David and I slept in sleeping bags in the attic of the studio. Malcolm typically went back to Boston, but occasionally slept in the lounge on a couch. Lou lived not far from the studio and drove home each night. There was a supermarket on the other side of the fence—we took one of the boards off the fence so we wouldn’t have to walk all the way around the block in the freezing cold. We had a hot plate, a coffee maker, a microwave, and a dormitory refrigerator. We were a long way from Whitney Houston’s deli tray.

  After two weeks it was finally go time for me. I dug through the thirty completed rhythm tracks, discarded a few songs that weren’t feeling right, and focused on the remaining twenty-two. Once the guitars were done, I moved on to day after day of recording vocal after vocal. Once I had the lead vocal I liked, the process would begin: making double, triple, sometimes even sextuple layers, then I’d start on the harmony vocals. This was before Pro Tools, so I’d do it over and over until it was perfect. If there were a couple of esses that didn’t land together, I did it again. It’s tricky business.

  I had put those guys through it, and now I was putting myself through it. The stacked vocal arrangements became larger than ever, but after several long days of heavy singing, my voice was wrecked. All I could do was sit in the control room and play solitaire on the computer, waiting for my voice to come back. Those were frustrating days: I was still on the clock, paying for the studio. Lou would find things to do with the recorded tracks, but if I had no voice, we couldn’t make much progress. After several weeks of waking up, drinking coffee, working very intensely for fourteen hours, then crashing and doing it all over again the next day, I was physically exhausted and questioning the whole project.

  I didn’t know it going in, but we were actually making two very distinct records at the same time. I was plowing through the songs and the fluff was starting to fall to the side. I relegated a half-dozen songs to B-side or outtake status, leaving me with a ten-song pop album and a six-song suite that had a heavier feel. Those six songs had very few words, but I had a sense of what they were all goin
g to be about—a religious theme, questioning religion. The religious references first surfaced in Workbook, and even Mike Covington had, without any prompting from me, included religious artifacts in the memory box for the Workbook cover.

  My Catholic roots crop up from time to time in my music, like on “Sacrifice/Let There Be Peace,” the last song on Black Sheets of Rain, with its images of self-flagellation, martyrdom, heresy; the struggles between right and wrong, blessing and blasphemy, and sinner and saint. I assume the role of a character wandering through the fire, trying to both find my way into the hottest core of Hell and an exit to Heaven, for which I might be rewarded with oxygen.

  At the time of the Sugar sessions, I was not religiously observant. But if there was an earthquake and the only building left standing was a church, don’t you think a lot of people would go back there? I didn’t have an earthquake, but I could sense something coming. It was nothing that I could particularly identify; it was just instinct, like animals that sense the ground shifting before humans do, or the way car alarms sound in the distance moments before the first tremor arrives.

  Then one evening I had a phone call with Kevin, and the conversation went poorly. Somebody said something, which led to something else; nothing major happened, nothing to call it quits about, but it flipped a switch and everything in my brain got turned upside down. I went into a self-destructive rage. I sent Lou home, and I stayed in the studio’s attic by myself for a day and a half, writing and writing and writing. My imagination was on fire; I was out of my fucking mind with white-hate-light-energy-noise. I was trying to purge the frustration with Kevin, the exhaustion, and the self-doubt by writing. I was spilling it all out, trying to boil it down to an essence.

  One song to come from that time was “JC Auto,” which was (up till then) the ultimate in self-destruction and desecration. As a way to humor myself, I placed an acrostic, a hidden reference to its predecessor, “Poison Years,” in the second bridge: “Parts Of It Seem Over Now / You Expect A Real Solution.” “Feeling Better” attempts to re-create a mind that’s carrying fragments of many personalities—the call-and-answer game in all corners of the mix, themes refraining, fractured pieces of the song recombining and mutating. It was the musical equivalent of the sound of throwing a box of glass off the roof of a house, running downstairs to spread out the pieces on the pavement, and trying to glue them back together.

  “Walking Away,” the song that would become the closer of this heavy suite of songs, was clearly influenced by Loveless—the warbled synthesizers, the slow tremolo pitching that Kevin Shields popularized. There were layers of keyboards, particularly the D-50 synthesizer (the Van Halen “Jump” sound) run through distortion boxes. It resembled the sound of someone rising from sleep, someone fading away in the morning fog, or someone regaining consciousness in a hospital after being pounded for hours with bare knuckles.

  I like to close the darker albums leaving the listener wondering if I’m all right. A strange analogy would be the Batman TV series. If the story stretched out over two episodes, we would always see the hero in peril at the end of the first installment. Imagine Robin, hog-tied by the villainous force du jour, dangling over a boiling vat, waiting, hoping, praying for Batman to come and save him. The suspense was intended to make the viewer come back for more, to see how it ended.

  One would think, with everything going so well in my personal life, that I wouldn’t be experiencing this questioning, this doubting, this insanity. Was it self-sabotage? Not really. Was it an unpredictable blend of religious doubt and a perceived loss of a companion, mixed in with thoughts of suicide, both by others and myself? Maybe. Once the questioning starts, it spirals in all directions. All these emotions, doubts, and fears start colliding and piling on top of each other, and I want to destroy everything around me. The eighteen-year-old kid, the nihilist who dragged a rusty blade across his wrist in front of his dorm mates, he never went away.

  Growing up in a violent house makes you hypervigilant—you do everything in your life to make sure the egg doesn’t break. The vigilance, along with the depression and the demons I battle, it all mixes together and shows up in my work. I beat myself up when things get out of control. I was supposed to be watching over it. Even more disturbing is the realization that I alone can create an utterly hopeless catastrophe. The only way to control it is to create it. Write it and it shall be so—the prescient thought. People don’t fully understand or appreciate the power of the mind, the power of thought, and the power of the word as self-fulfilling prophecy. We can all create the catastrophe, but we can’t control the outcome, even if we imagine the scenario from start to finish.

  Sometimes I can misconstrue and amplify the simplest thing, and that can set it off. It can be as simple as a lack of perception, or as complex as a complete miscommunication. It’s like going into the woods, surrounded by dry brush, with a lit cigarette. You thought you stomped it out, but you actually flicked it into the brush. Suddenly half the state is ablaze. Maybe there was a lot of dry brush that wasn’t necessarily visible to the eye. Maybe it was waiting to burn. Maybe the phone call with Kevin was perfectly normal.

  So I’m screaming all of that into the songs. As they were happening, I felt gigantic, bigger than the room, like I was ten feet tall. The speakers felt like they were the size of the earth, and I’m listening, not believing I created it. If other people get it, great, but at that moment, what does it matter? Making a living and getting your validation is really important, and it all needs to be attended to later on, but at the moment you make the work, you’re sitting there and taking it all in. Who cares what happens? Who considers the fallout? I guess I don’t, not always. I feel untouchable, I feel invincible. It doesn’t happen that many times in your life, where the sound is coming out of the speakers and it’s as big as life gets. That’s when it’s like religion: you give yourself over, you take the journey, and you take the pain with the joy. Very few of us get that many chances to make that big a statement.

  * * *

  When we started up again, David came back to Stoughton to rerecord his parts with a new bass. He was doing quite well, but a few songs, “Feeling Better” in particular, were eluding him. One day there was a lot of tension in the air, and I sensed that David might be ready to walk away from the project. I calmly said to him, “I can tell you’re getting really frustrated with doing this, and I think you’re about ready to just want to go home. And if you do, I understand, and there’s a train that leaves here later today.” But David didn’t give up—he stuck it out. Lou was very helpful in building David back up, assuring him that he was the man for the job and that he could rise to the occasion. And he did.

  Lou and I spent four weeks mixing the finished songs at Carriage House, a rural estate on the outskirts of Stamford, Connecticut. We stayed in a large apartment above the studio, and there were long stretches, sometimes five days, when Lou and I didn’t leave the property. Once the two albums were mixed and assembled, we headed to New York City for a long, loud, exhausting mastering session with Howie Weinberg, with whom I’d worked since Flip Your Wig.

  When we were done, I went home to Williamsburg. I was in bed for three weeks. I didn’t leave the house and barely even left the bed. I was wrecked. I had a rash all over my hands and arms and blisters popping on my hands. I thought I was dying. I’d completely fallen apart. The months of nonstop creativity and intense emotional purging had caught up with me. It was psychosomatic, and it manifested itself in physical form on my body, like stigmata.

  It was early June, the weather was beautiful, but I wouldn’t even open the window for fresh air—the walls were closing in—and Kevin finally said, “You have to go see a dermatologist. And you’re not going to die.” I agreed, and when the doctor examined me, she said, “You have a stress rash running along your nerve lines. Have you been under a lot of pressure lately?”

  A little ointment took care of the rashes in a few days. But that just treated the symptoms. I still had to
deal with the underlying problem. I had to learn how to relax. With the emotional state I had worked myself into, that seemed nearly impossible.

  The word that always dogs me is catharsis, and in the most classical sense. People often use it to describe my work, and it’s probably apt, though I’m not the one to ask. It’s not necessarily that I feel better after creating or performing, but simply that I feel. Either way, it’s not necessarily a fun word to drag around. What am I supposed to do with it? When do I get to be happy? Maybe someone can adapt this book for Broadway: CATHARSIS! starring Bob Mould. The hit play with no ending.

  Finally the albums are done and both labels are thrilled. David and Malcolm are happy with the results. We run through a two-week warm-up tour in July 1992, hitting clubs in the South, Northeast, and Midwest with just the three band members, Kevin in a car, and stage tech Barry Duryea and tour manager Bill Rahmy dragging the gear around in a van—doing it old-school. In Morgantown, West Virginia, there was barely a stage to play on, so we used our flight cases to extend the stage.

  John Bruce, who had been documenting the early rehearsals, produced two inexpensive videos. The first, “Changes,” was a fairly primitive collage of rehearsal footage. The second, “Helpless,” was a blend of lip-sync footage shot atop the Puck Building in Soho and slow-focus portraiture vignettes filmed both on the streets of Soho and in the meat-packing district of Manhattan.

  UK journalist Keith Cameron, who was one of my biggest supporters, came over to join the tour. He rode in the car with us for a few days, including an afternoon visit to Heritage USA, Jim and Tammy Bakker’s religious theme park. I picked up a couple of T-shirts in the gift store; one was something about “Jesus, Saint or Sinner, Repent.” We listened to the six-song suite at earsplitting volume in the car, with me driving, Keith riding shotgun, and the other three in the backseat. His stunned-silent response was not dissimilar to the one Peter Buck would display months later after hearing the same tracks at the Williamsburg loft.