by Bob Mould
In late July we made our first appearance in the UK. We debuted with a Virgin Megastore in-store, played a few songs, and blew the power out. That night we played the Clapham Grand. The following day we recorded a handful of songs for Mark Goodier’s show, which aired on BBC radio. Following those sessions, we played a show at University of London Union. And this is all in one weekend.
The set was strictly Sugar material—and people are going bonkers. Part of the PA system fell into the crowd at the ULU show, but once we realized that no one had been struck by the heavy speakers, we kept right on going. There was a communal energy, there was stage diving, and the rest of the night bordered on the edge of a beautiful insanity. Sugar didn’t have to provoke people into that state of frenzy; they were already waiting to let it go. Same with the band. It wasn’t the “we’re going to fuck you with this thing until you fight back” approach of the underground punk scene in the ’80s. It was more of a celebration.
And this was my payoff. This was my receipt for everything. The crowds had seen Nirvana’s cheerleader video and they knew where it came from. And then I was right there, with the right record at the right time. I didn’t have to provoke; I just arrived with a smile. All the fighting had been done, Nirvana had won the war, and I showed up to rightfully claim some of the spoils.
After we got through those tough sessions, everything fell into place for Sugar. We would go to London for two weeks at a time and Creation would rent us a three-bedroom apartment. Laurence Verfaillie and Andy Saunders, our publicists at Creation, were great at whipping up attention for the band. We would sit in that apartment seven days a week, twelve hours a day. They would parade the journalists in, we’d talk, they’d leave—over and over again for days. Kevin and Kle Boutis, our day-to-day liaison at the label, would go down to the corner to get us sandwiches; we’d eat and then get right back to work. It was hard work, and we didn’t stop.
Friday afternoons the music journalists would all come ’round the pub near Creation’s office, and the bands would show up as well. We would sit and drink with Keith Cameron, Steve Lamacq, Dave Cavanaugh, Everett True; these guys were the major music writers. Everyone (except me) would enjoy a pint, and the stories would begin: which band is in which studio, who is dating whom, what really happened backstage at this or that show. As the afternoons turned into early evening, the boundaries of public and private stories would slowly blur. People would break away and head to either play shows or see bands. There was camaraderie between the musicians and writers—it was a great British rock tradition. I’d come a long way from sitting on the radiator cover at Oar Folk.
* * *
It makes sense that the resulting album, Copper Blue, is one of my sunniest. After all, it was inspired by music I loved. “Helpless,” with its straightforward sixteenth-note snare fills, recalls Cheap Trick’s “Surrender”—it’s that power-Ringo, power-pop feel, without any of the heaviness of Black Sheets. “Hoover Dam” came to me fully formed in a dream. From the Beach Boys–informed organ intro to the Left Banke–inspired baroque harpsichord solo to the backward guitar swirls straight from the Byrds’ “Thoughts and Words,” it incorporated several touchstones of my days as a student of ’60s pop music. (“Brasilia Crossed with Trenton,” from Workbook, was another fully realized dream song—I sang the first version of it into a portable recorder while I was in the shower.) There was an unconscious homage too: I didn’t realize the similarities between “A Good Idea” and the Pixies’ “Debaser” until Sugar was riding around America during the summer 1992 dates. I simultaneously laughed and gasped at the horror of having accidentally pilfered Kim Deal’s bass line.
The only real dark moment on Copper Blue was “The Slim”: a song in 6/8 time written from the perspective of a survivor, a person remembering and wondering when he will meet his deceased mate—a mate who died of AIDS.
* * *
Copper Blue came out in early September and went top ten in the UK national charts. We did two weeks of touring and the responses were getting stronger, as were the demands on our time and energy. We came back to the States and toured heavily there. The Boo Radleys, another Creation band, came along as special support act. We were the headliners but they had the tour bus. I wanted the first date of the tour to be in a smaller city so we could run the full show before taking it to the bigger stages in Minneapolis and Chicago; Columbia, Missouri, fit the bill perfectly. And, of course, there was my history with the Blue Note there—it was the same club where Hüsker Dü played its final performance. In October 1992 Sugar more than made up for that dreadful swan song in December 1987.
The next night was Lawrence, Kansas, and as always, we stopped by to smoke pot and throw knives with William Burroughs and James Grauerholz. I celebrated my thirty-second birthday by playing the Riviera Theatre in Chicago, a key city for me. We barreled through the Midwest and East Coast, ran through Texas, and on to Las Vegas. We were deep in the land of vice. The Boo Radleys enjoyed Vegas on one level, but at the same time, their singer, Sice, was complaining about how decadent and perverse it was. I agreed completely, and suggested they get more free drinks. We ran into Sonic Youth at Binion’s Horseshoe that evening. They had a night off and were playing roulette. I was playing blackjack, and David and Dewitt Burton, our stage tech, were on mushrooms.
By the time we hit the West Coast, the Ryko campaign was finally beginning to match Creation in terms of gathering press and radio support. They were really enthusiastic—no label had ever gone three singles deep on a record of mine before. The fourth single would be the upbeat and catchy “If I Can’t Change Your Mind.”
We toured Japan for the first time in early 1993. As is customary, our first night in Tokyo we went out to eat with a group of people from the Japanese record company, Nippon Columbia. We were seated on mats, enjoying the meal, when suddenly the building began to shake. I’d been in a few earthquakes in Southern California, but being in a very foreign country on no sleep, we were all a bit rattled. Everything soon settled down, but it was quite the welcome to Japan.
Our hosts enjoyed watching us try exotic food. I figured it was some sort of cultural test, and since I have an iron stomach, I was game for it. They did a live sushi presentation: the restaurant had a tank filled with live fish; they catch a fish, bring it to the table, the fish still flopping around, and place it on a wooden board. Then they whack the head off with a sushi knife, flip it over, slice the body in half, skin it back, and chop it into pieces of sashimi. The disconnected fish head is tipped upright, mouth still gurgling, eyes still darting. They pick up a piece of sashimi with chopsticks, and proceed to try to feed the fish to itself. They’re laughing and the fish is still dying. It’s so fucked up. This is only the first night of the trip.
I was expecting the Japanese audiences to be reserved. I had this vision of finishing a song and looking out to see hundreds of people standing still, giving me the golf clap. I was very wrong—the Japanese audiences were very attentive, cheered as loudly as any Western audience, and were physical, even crowd surfing. But for all their boisterousness, the crowds at the end of the shows would file out in an orderly manner, gathering work possessions from the wall of lockers at each venue.
We returned home, and I arranged for the making of the video for “If I Can’t Change Your Mind.” After two previous videos, it was our first big shoot with 35mm film, a real stage set, lighting directors, and craft service. And at $35,000, it was a much larger investment for me, but I sensed the time was right to take the financial plunge.
The whole point of the video was this: all relationships are valid. “If I Can’t Change Your Mind” spoke about relationships and incorporated all different kinds of couples: a man and a woman, two women, two men, some with children. There was a quick shot toward the end where I’m holding up a Polaroid of Kevin and myself, and when I flip the Polaroid over, the writing on the other side says, “This is not your parents’ world.”
I had teased with outing myself during
the Kevin Kerslake–directed “It’s Too Late” video in 1990, where I was tied to a barbed-wire fence with the American flag, had my hands set on fire by the LA County fire department, and was framed by a spray-painted “Silence=Death” message on the wall. And once again I played with outing myself in the new video. I thought most people knew I was gay, and this was a “wink, wink, yes, I am gay” action, without having to specifically identify myself as a gay artist. This was the constant struggle at the intersection of my work and my sexuality, the same struggle that led to the gender-neutrality of my previous relationship-based songs. I never defined them as being about a man dealing with another man; they were always presented in a universal, non-gender-specific way. They could mean something to everyone, straight or gay.
This was the grunge era, the three years where MTV took a chance on indie guitar music. I had hosted MTV’s popular and influential alternative rock show 120 Minutes a number of times, and the show regularly featured the videos for “Helpless” and “Changes.” But now “If I Can’t Change Your Mind” was in regular MTV rotation, and the music was being exposed to a mainstream audience.
Back then MTV’s programming choices informed the programming choices of Los Angeles’s KROQ, at the time the most influential alternative radio station in the country. Only thing is, KROQ wasn’t playing my record. So 120 Minutes host Lewis Largent went to bat for my work. Lewis told Gene Sandbloom, the assistant program director at KROQ, that the station was missing the band and that KROQ needed to get on it. Soon, “If I Can’t Change Your Mind” was getting the push at both MTV and KROQ, and the floodgates finally opened in America.
It was the perfect storm—quite unlike the one in January 1988 that washed away Hüsker Dü. Sales jumped from 30,000 to 100,000 to 300,000—the most copies of any record I’d ever made. It doubled the sales of the best-selling Hüsker Dü album, Zen Arcade. Ryko was pushing the band hard and had the distribution juice and the marketing dollars to keep it going. Ryko deserved a lot of credit for capitalizing on the popularity of the song and video.
All the while, though, those other songs were burning a hole in my back pocket. I was anxious to have the six-song suite, now formally titled Beaster, released to coincide with Easter. Alan McGee agreed wholeheartedly. We’d already gone through four singles and had NME’s Album of the Year—what could be more interesting than putting out a six-song follow-up three months later? That was classic British music business thinking, as opposed to ’90s US major label music business practice, where you milk it for two years. The rapid-fire approach was the old-school ’60s Britpop and ’70s punk rock way. Keep hammering it, and when you’re on fire, throw more petrol on it. It was time to do it.
Creation released Beaster on Monday, April 6, the week before Easter, and Ryko released it the following day. Sure enough, Beaster entered at number three in the UK charts, my highest national chart position ever. This brutally dark piece of work was the third most popular record in the United Kingdom. I was amazed.
In late April of 1993, we began a four-week US tour in support of Beaster, covering the whole country as quickly as possible. We’d be hitting venues with capacities of 2,500 to 6,000, the level right before the jump to arenas: the Aragon Ballroom in Chicago, the Roseland Ballroom in New York City, the International Ballroom in Atlanta, the Warfield in San Francisco, and the Palladium in Hollywood. Many of these were ballrooms that David’s parents had played when they were big-band musicians in the 1950s.
We convened at Minneapolis–St. Paul International Airport the evening before the first show. We headed to the dimly lit garage and piled into our rented Lincoln Town Car. Four hours and three hundred miles later, it was time to stop in rural Iowa and gas up. We pulled into a Pump ’n’ Munch and, under bright fluorescent lighting, piled out of the car. Simultaneously, we gasped and stared at our car. One of America’s hottest rock bands was touring the country in an iridescent-lavender Mary Kay Cosmetics car.
At each venue we’d play forty-five minutes of upbeat songs, then break it down to an acoustic setting—me sitting with the twelve-string, David on acoustic bass, and Malcolm playing percussion. We finished the shows with Beaster en suite. Spiritually, those final thirty minutes were a loose approximation of Hell. Every time I played Beaster, I relived the writing of the material and, in a smaller sense, the events that inspired those songs. Consequently, playing those songs every night really fucked with my head and wore me down faster than a normal show. I didn’t see that coming when I wrote them.
Jeff Rougvie, the band’s A&R person at Ryko, told me a story about the local theater group in Salem who, every day during summer months, reenacted the Salem witch trials for tourists. The actors portraying the witch and her accuser were actually mother and daughter in real life. After the experience of playing Beaster every night, and how it made me feel, I wondered if, after weeks of portraying their scene, the daughter actually began to believe her mother was a witch.
After our run of theaters, we performed the first of two nights at First Avenue in Minneapolis. Returning to the Twin Cities was always bittersweet and familiar, but this time there was an extra twist. Grant Hart showed up, trying to be congenial, as if nothing had happened. This was the first time I’d seen him since the discussion at his parents’ kitchen table. I let him into the dressing room, he sat down, and I sat in the room not facing him—listening, nodding, and talking occasionally. I was being cool—not cold, but cool. I was suspicious because I always felt Grant was the kind of person who, if he saw the smallest opening, would try to take a mile’s worth of road. After a few minutes of cautious interaction, mostly small talk about the Beaster tour and Grant’s projects, I asked him to leave our dressing room. It was getting closer to showtime, and I needed to be with my band.
After the show, as we’re driving to the hotel, David said in a mix of hilarity and incredulity, “What the fuck is up with Grant Hart?” I asked what happened and David said, “He was hitting on me. You know I don’t have a problem with that, but I told him no and he wouldn’t stop.” I started laughing and told David to forget about it.
Later that evening, my laughter turned into deeper reflection. I’d heard stories about Grant having affections for my ex, Mike Covington, back when I was leaving Minnesota. And now he’s coming on to my bass player? This was a continuation of a pattern of behavior I had recognized at the beginning of the Hüsker Dü days, and to me, that behavior was inappropriate. So by the end of that evening after the First Avenue show, I resigned myself to building a thick wall between Grant Hart and me. I wasn’t going to let him anywhere near my life again. I didn’t see him, nor speak with him, for many years.
CHAPTER 16
Living in Brooklyn was great, but I was on the road so much now and it started to dawn on me: Why am I paying all this money basically just to store my things in New York? But there was another reason to move. At some point I’m done with a place, spiritually and creatively, and I have to move. I’m sure that sounds crazy to people who have families and worry about school systems and are stationary and taking care of relatives. But Brooklyn wasn’t buzzing for me anymore. I’d done a lot of great work in Brooklyn, but I wanted to try something different. Even though we could have purchased the entire 15,000-square-foot Williamsburg complex for $150,000—which would have been a heck of an investment—the vibe just wasn’t there anymore.
We were making good money at the time, but the taxes were killing us. Texas, on the other hand, was income tax free. Kevin and I both had a long-standing connection in Austin. We both knew Butthole Surfers drummer King Coffey from our past lives: Kevin from the Butthole Surfers’ six-month stay in Athens, and me from the early punk days in Dallas–Fort Worth. And I always enjoyed Austin; it was a player’s town, so it was easy to plug in. It made sense to move there, so we took a weekend trip to look for a new home.
Our realtor showed us a beautiful house in the tree-lined Hyde Park neighborhood, ten minutes from the airport. It was a Craftsman bungalow th
at had been greatly expanded and encased in brick, then fitted out with big stone-arched porches. King lived a few blocks away, other friends lived a little bit farther, and the whole town felt like hipster central. We immediately made an offer on the house, which was accepted. Between the American and European tours in May of that year, we packed up everything in the Brooklyn loft, threw it into a big truck, and went off to Austin. We didn’t look back.
But life has a way of catching up with you, and this was also when Minnesota attorney Doug Myren got involved with Grant Hart and his Nova Mob project, and then wanted to handle the Hüsker Dü estate as well. Myren had gotten the financial books from Greg, who had been grousing about the production money. After talking with Greg and Grant, Myren called me and proposed redoing the books. Those three had reached a consensus: the sixty-forty production split that Grant and I had agreed upon back in 1985 wasn’t fair, and they wanted to redistribute the production money equally among the three band members.
This was the moment when it became clear I was the odd man out. The business and legacy of Hüsker Dü was now firmly in the hands of a small-town attorney and two disgruntled ex-bandmates.
To break it down: When we sold 200,000 albums for Warner, the band grossed $300,000. A quarter of that, $75,000, went to the producer—that is, Grant and me. With a sixty-forty production split, I would get $45,000 and Grant would get $30,000. But once Myren redid the books, all three members would split the $75,000 equally—$25,000 each. So I’m out $20,000, Grant is out $5,000, and Greg gets $25,000 for doing virtually nothing on the two Warner albums.