See a Little Light

by Bob Mould

  At this point in my life, I was euphoric. Copper Blue had been named NME’s 1992 Album of the Year, and Sugar was playing in front of thousands of people every night all over the world. And now I’m presented with this nonsense. I called Josh Grier and said, “What is going on?”

  Josh asked me, “What’s it worth to you?” He then offered the same advice he originally gave me in 1991 about dealing with Linda Clark and the Virgin publishing debacle: walk away. And I reacted the same way as before—I didn’t give it any further thought, and simply walked away.

  So Myren went back and redid the books. Now all future royalty money would go to Greg until the new set of books reflected parity between the three of us. Myren proceeded to look for loose money in the field and arranged for the release of a live album on Warner Brothers, culled from the recordings of Hüsker Dü’s October 1987 tour. He called me, asking if I had any ideas for a title. I said, “Yeah, why don’t we call it Seventy-Five Thousand Dollar Advance?” They ended up calling it The Living End.

  With those financial shenanigans behind me, Sugar headed to Europe to begin what was to be our most successful tour to date. We all convened in Stockholm for our first festival show, performing on rented gear and no sleep. It was a bumpy start, but we powered through. We then traveled to Helsinki and caught a commuter flight to Vaasa, a northern Finnish town inside the Arctic Circle, where we played the Seinäjoki festival. The accommodations for the festival were in a former mental asylum. The buildings were beautiful, but difficult to navigate since the hallways were laid out in such a way as to confuse the patients. It also worked well for confusing a touring musician operating for sixty hours without sleep—I kept getting turned around in the hallways. It was difficult to sleep there anyway because the sun barely sets in the summer and it was light outside at midnight. Another interesting component was the Finns’ nonstop drinking. I saw an inebriated local approach one of the festival agents and, mistaking him for a tree, begin to urinate on his leg.

  Third day of the tour, we had an afternoon show at Finsbury Park in London with Green Day and the Cure. Robert Smith sent an emissary over to our dressing room, asking if I would play “Purple Haze” with the Cure. On no sleep for seventy-two hours now, I politely declined the invitation. Then we walked out onstage in front of thirty thousand people—and my amps didn’t work. People were yelling and cursing at us while Dewitt feverishly tried to fix the problem. I walked to the microphone and let loose with twenty seconds of foul language, which only made the crowd hotter. Objects rained down on the stage: drink containers, sandwiches filled with stones, and bags filled with (I think) mud. It continued through the better part of the set, with me egging it on. I would be in the middle of a song and see an object heading toward me. Being that high up over the crowd, I had time to react, so I either caught the objects, or blithely spun to the side to avoid being hit. I loved it.

  On to Amsterdam. We traveled by sleeper coach from London to Dover, then a ferry to Calais, France. Upon our landing there, customs took it upon themselves to thoroughly search our stuff, presumably for illegal drugs. Bill Rahmy was our tour manager/sound engineer, and his wife Vanessa was carrying jars of unmarked nutritional supplements. Customs ran them through an assay test, possibly looking for ecstasy. They dismantled some of our musical gear. After they found nothing, the night manager woke from his nap and started yelling at the agent who had ordered the dismantling. I understood enough French to know what he said: “You stupid fuck, they’re going to the Netherlands, not coming from the Netherlands!”

  Once we arrived in Amsterdam, Kevin, David, and I made up for it and spent all evening and a fair part of the next day walking the streets, smoking hashish. The show at Paradiso, a beautifully converted old church, was much better than our stoned-as-fuck sound check earlier in the day. It was one of the rare occasions since 1986 that I went onstage in even a slightly altered state.

  After Paris we played large clubs in Germany, as well as festivals in Ireland, Denmark, and Belgium. I was playing in front of the largest audiences of my life—crowds of up to seventy-five thousand people.

  At festivals we’d often play in the middle of the day. We’d usually have no sound check, which meant that the first time we’d see the stage was when we started playing. When that happened, the first song was spent just trying to sort out the onstage sound—while we were trying to make our case to tens of thousands of people. I’ve always kept in mind that to present an effective show, you find the last row and sing to them. But how do you do that when the last row is a quarter of a mile away?

  After those shows David and I would look at each other and say, “What happened?” We were never quite sure. I just hoped we’d held it together. Did playing to those massive crowds make me feel all-powerful? Not quite, not like Bono—especially when ducking all the shit people were throwing at me.

  Of course, some of my colleagues did embrace a certain amount of grandeur. Metallica had two identical sets of full staging (including washer/dryers with their own flight cases), and would fly the entire production from show to show, one planeload of equipment leapfrogging the other. Lenny Kravitz had a six-by-twelve-foot tent completely dedicated to wardrobe. The brothers Robinson of Black Crowes fame had a chill-out tent, complete with Persian rugs, a big ’70S-style home stereo, and a large hookah. At one festival Iggy Pop decided he didn’t want anyone seeing him walk from the dressing room to the stage, so he had the crew build him a sheltered walkway out of large black garbage bags.

  These were levels of excess I had never seen before, and I found it amusing and ridiculous. I wasn’t like that. Sugar lived on the tour bus, eating off the hospitality rider and playing Strat-O-Matic fantasy baseball; our only real indulgence was daytime marijuana to help ease the boredom of life on the bus.

  At some point on the tour, a tape of the Hüsker Dü live album showed up for my approval. I said to our guitar tech, Dewitt Burton, “Damned if I’m going to listen to this thing. D, you know Hüsker, right?”

  Dewitt said, “I love Hüsker.”

  “Would you listen to this and tell me what you think?”

  So he took the tape and listened a couple times and said, “It fucking rocks.”

  If Dewitt liked it, it was good enough for me. I looked at Kevin and said, “Tell them it’s approved.” I still haven’t heard it to this day.

  * * *

  The tour was almost over, and I was exhausted on all fronts. The combination of the nonstop schedule, the physicality of playing on larger stages, and the emotional content of Beaster had worn me out. I thought back to 1990, when I sang on a track for Anton Fier’s band the Golden Palominos called “Dying from the Inside Out.” I only wanted to sing those harrowing words once, so I gave it my all. I screamed so hard that I popped some blood vessels and gave myself black eyes.

  So why do I write these words? I couldn’t help it. By the last show, headlining Brixton Academy in London, I had sung Beaster twenty-seven times. I was sick of it. My head pounded all day. I was so beat up I was taking ten Advil a day. I had become rather irritable, and had lost my ability to suffer fools as gladly as I usually would.

  Out of nowhere Greg Norton shows up at the Brixton sound check. He’s in London, studying at a culinary school to become a chef and restaurateur. In a voice reminiscent of Batman’s Penguin, he says to me, “Well, I just want to do a little bit of business.” He’s got this stack of papers in his hand, shaking them toward me. “This is the contract for the Hüsker Dü live record. I need you to sign this, I need you to sign this now.”

  Have you ever seen the Brian De Palma movie Phantom of the Paradise (1974), with Paul Williams as Swan, the evil record producer? I was reminded of the scene when he’s got the deformed composer Winslow Leach (wearing the Daft Punk–looking helmet) boxed up in the control room, writing his cantata, and Swan is yelling, “Sign this! Sign this in blood!”

  I looked at Norton and said, “Send that to my lawyer and get out of here. Enjoy the show. Wh
at are you thinking?”

  We take the stage at Brixton. There’s over five thousand people stuffed into the room, and the energy is sky-high. We get into Beaster and the energy goes over the top. The floor is shaking and the whole room seems ready to collapse. The meltdown that precipitated the writing of Beaster, the triumph of will to make this band succeed, and the knowledge that this was the final reading of Beaster en suite meant I held nothing back. It was raw, visceral, and—dare I use the word—cathartic. It put Great Gildersleeves 1983 in the rubbish bin for good.

  In the middle of “JC Auto,” I’m out of my skull and I lock eyes with Norton, who is standing in the sea of humanity. Everything in the world is coming unglued except for him, standing there with his mouth open. I was like, Yep, that’s what it feels like. Send that contract to my lawyer and leave me alone. After the show I asked David, “Did you see him out there?”

  He asks, “Who?”

  “Norton,” I said. “He was standing there like he pissed his pants.”

  David laughed.

  * * *

  That was the end of the tour, and everyone went home for a much-needed break. Kevin and I headed back to Austin. Kevin’s involvement with my career was increasing. In two years he’d learned a lot about the business and was handling a fair amount of the day-to-day coordination of schedules, tour logistics, and record company activities. I was directing traffic, but Kevin did a lot of the heavy lifting.

  But now that we were on break, we were having an idyllic time, eating fish tacos and smoking weed, doing the Austin thing. It was Slacker 1993, quite a change from Brooklyn. We started calling the house the Compound. I bought a couple of cars—you have to have cars in Texas.

  I began my working relationship with Jim Wilson, who became my engineer and go-to guy in Austin. He did sound for me at that great South by Southwest show I played in 1991, and we had hit it off right away. He was super peaceful, a high-intellect guy, and a great person. He was a staff engineer at Cedar Creek Recording, a small but well-equipped studio in a ramshackle South Austin house.

  Years before we met, Jim’s brother committed suicide at his parents’ house in Dallas. Once you are touched by suicide, you can sense others who have gone through the ordeal. You have a kinship, even if you don’t know why. Jim and I shared that, as well as a love of music and sound and numbers, and it made for this real bond—we had that hypervigilant thing in common. We had a good working relationship from the start.

  In August 1993 Jim and I recorded the second album by Magnapop, a smart punk-pop band from Athens, Georgia. Magnapop came out to Texas and we worked at Pedernales Studio, Willie Nelson’s place. Tracking the album was a chore, and although Jim and I had a few trying times while mixing at Bobby Brown’s studio in Atlanta, the band wound up with a pretty good record. It was trial by fire, but it showed that Jim and I worked well together.

  The rest of 1993 was a series of small acoustic shows, a big contrast from those vast European festivals. I was trying out new material for the upcoming Sugar album and just reconnecting with the core fan base, not to mention picking up some extra money for the holidays.

  Christmas brought Kevin and me an unexpected gift. In December our next-door neighbors had twins, at the same time that their dog began escaping the fenced-in yard and showing up at our front door. He was an intense dog, physically strong, but with severe coat problems. We began paying attention to him, eventually bringing him inside and trying to nurse him back to health. Within a few weeks, the neighbor suggested that if we wanted, we could adopt the dog, and we took him up on it. He brought over the dog’s registration papers and bed, and we were now the proud owners of a full-blooded Australian cattle dog named Domino Deemo Dingo Dundee. Kevin and I were getting on fine, and Domino brought us even closer together. Domino was a great addition to the family.

  After a February 1994 solo acoustic tour of Japan, it was time to record the follow-up to Copper Blue and Beaster. I’d outfitted one of the bedrooms in the house with a greatly expanded home studio and was writing songs between tours. David came to Austin to demo three songs as well. These high-quality demos were essentially finished works.

  In March I gave the keynote address at South by Southwest. I showed up with a forty-eight-ounce travel coffee mug and delivered a “welcome to Austin, get trashed and see bands” speech. Kevin and I hosted a large party at the Compound and most everyone who did business with the band was there. During the party I played the demos for both Ryko and Creation, and everyone from both labels seemed pleased with what they heard.

  Shortly after SXSW the band began the sessions for what would eventually be titled File Under: Easy Listening (FU:EL) at Triclops Studio in Atlanta, where Smashing Pumpkins had recorded Siamese Dream and Hole had done Live Through This. I was producing and David was engineering. That was a lot for us to bite off.

  On paper it was a great studio, but we struggled to find a sound. The drum room was a big open industrial space, and it was so loud in there that Malcolm couldn’t hear himself, the click track, or anything else. We built him a set of isolating headphones, using shells from the noise protection muffs that airport runway workers use, and he still couldn’t hear. We spent two months trying to get basic tracks, and an undue amount of time searching for the guitar sound. They had tons of guitar amps and loads of vintage equipment, every doodad known to mankind. I tried every amp with every pedal—to the point where I was so confused I didn’t know what anything sounded like. I had totally fucked myself.

  Triclops had a weird energy. David and I were struggling—we were in this dark hole, not making headway. Nothing we did worked. Then, one day, we were watching CNN and heard that Kurt Cobain had killed himself. A lot of people would have thought, Wow, that’s really awful, and moved on. But a lot of people didn’t. I was really upset for days.

  I had first met Kurt at the HUB Ballroom in Seattle in 1986; I remembered Courtney Love’s short stint in Minneapolis in 1987–88; I had heard the demos for Nevermind and was in the running for producing the album; I had shared a bill with Nirvana in Europe in the summer of 1991. And there was no doubt that Kurt’s music follows the lineage of my work. So I felt very close to this. And now I was sitting in the lounge of the studio where Courtney Love’s album Live Through This had been recorded, watching the first news reports about Kurt’s death.

  Maybe I was overpersonalizing it, but Kurt’s suicide made me start questioning a lot of things about the business. I’d been struggling with these sessions, then this terrible news just amplified things—not only the frustration with the work at hand, but my concerns about one of the darker sides of the business.

  It almost seems like the more you show of yourself, the more people want. People gravitate to the artist, wanting to see deeper pain, higher joy, brighter light. And once you become successful, the business won’t let you stop to catch your breath. I experienced a small taste of it with Beaster, going out and performing that music every night.

  I knew there was a record to be made, one way or the other. I knew that Ryko had expanded partly as a result of the success of the two Sugar records. And after Copper Blue and Beaster, the labels were looking at me to deliver something even more successful. But I was having big problems getting this record to work, and I didn’t think the industry machine would have the patience for me to sort it out.

  We spent two months filling up a two-inch tape with music, and none of it was satisfying to me. One day I abruptly said, “The session is over. I’m taking all this stuff back to Texas and I don’t know what I’m going to do with it.”

  I went back to Austin, completely deflated. I felt bad that David and I couldn’t get a sound together. I think there were just too many options and I lost my ability to make clear decisions. Seeing as David and I were in the band together and were good friends as well, perhaps it would have been better to have an outside voice, like the role Lou Giordano played in 1992. It was hard for me to be critical of the job David was doing, and I wasn’t b
eing a very good captain of the ship.

  Both labels had laid grand plans for this release, and Ryko in particular was betting big on it. There was a schedule already in place on both continents, and I needed to keep this project on track so that the entire marketing plan wouldn’t have to be recalculated.

  But the misstep in Atlanta was a major problem—the sessions were useless. I wasn’t sure how to proceed. I called up Jim Wilson and asked him if he could help me out of this predicament. He cleared his schedule, and we got to our first order of business: erasing the Atlanta masters, reel by reel. Everything we’d done in Atlanta for two months, more than an album’s worth of music, gone forever.

  Jim suggested constructing the album the other way around, similar to how I’d been working at home: start with a drum machine; then add bass, guitars, and vocals; and save live drums for last. We were starting to get close to our deadline, so we needed to find a studio and get working quickly.

  Our first choice for the new sessions was Cedar Creek, but studio owner Fred Remmert had already booked the room. Luckily, Fred’s brother Travy had a multimillion-dollar home studio called Meridian in nearby Boerne. This place had all the bells and whistles. And there was no regular clientele because it wasn’t a commercial studio, so Jim and I could have the run of the place. We started the new recordings there.

  I went in with the drum machine and programmed and recorded the patterns for those same sixteen songs. Then I spent a few weeks recording guitars and vocals to the drum machine tracks. Jim and I worked long hours each day, usually without taking breaks for food—we were running on nicotine and caffeine, and not much else. At the end of each night, Jim and I would go to a Taco Cabana drive-through, the only restaurant that was open at 2 AM. I would order four large bean-and-cheese burritos, scarf them down, then fall into a food coma for eight hours. Then we’d get up and do exactly the same thing the next day.

  After the majority of my part was done, I called up David and said, “It’s your turn, come to Texas.” It took David two days to do all the bass and his vocals, including recording for three of his own compositions: “Company Book,” “Frustration,” and “In the Eyes of My Friends.” I hadn’t finished the vocals for “Explode and Make Up,” the album closer, so once David was done, I took another shot at the song. The performance was harrowing; Jim recalled the stunned silence in the control room after I finished my caterwauling. I said something to the effect of “I hate the person who wrote that song,” then went into the kitchen area to sit alone for two hours.