See a Little Light

by Bob Mould

  Everything started to make sense. He met this guy through Al and started seeing him. I confronted Kevin, and he admitted they were romantically involved. His explanation was that this guy wanted to have children and I didn’t, so Kevin thought there was more of a future with him—even though the other guy also had a partner. I was having a hard time processing this situation. I couldn’t understand why Kevin would get involved with someone else without ending our relationship first.

  Christmas was always a crap-shoot holiday for me because of a couple bad ones from my childhood. Sure enough, this holiday season was blowing up right in front of me. The timing couldn’t have been worse. I asked Kevin to leave as quickly as possible. But he just lounged around on the couch for two days until I finally went in and said, “You don’t seem to understand. You need to pack your belongings and leave this house now. I don’t want you here anymore.”

  He finally realized I was actually throwing him out. He packed his books, records, and clothes, took Domino, and moved into a motel-style apartment. Our codependent relationship had come to an end.

  I sat there over the holidays and had a miserable time. The only person offering any real support was Ann Guidry. I met Ann at Little City, a downtown coffee shop I’d been frequenting in the months leading up to this. Ann was a lesbian, soft-spoken yet firm in personality, and also had an artistic temperament. She was able to listen and give measured advice about taking care of my own soul. I always looked forward to spending time with Ann, and she kept me alive over the holidays.

  As 1996 began, I was trying to build a new life, reaching out and meeting a few new people. I was in no rush to have a relationship of substance with anyone, but I was keeping an eye out for new acquaintances and, dare I think it so soon, potential dates. Again, with next to no courtship skills, I was petrified at the thought of dating. My two previous partners were all I really knew.

  I went to both of my labels and explained the situation. It was devastating to tell them that not only is Kevin not working with me but that we’re no longer a couple. They’d always thought of us as “Bob and Kevin,” but that was no more. I was humiliated.

  I was an emotional wreck, but the next album was already on the release schedule. Both labels were very understanding and accommodating. Ryko said they would work with anything I chose to do, including postponing live dates and doing minimal press. Creation figurehead Alan McGee wrote a long, thoughtful, emotional letter to me about family, crisis of confidence, and his own personal struggles. The reactions from both labels made me feel better about myself and restored some of the faith I’d lost in the music business after my management debacle in the spring of 1991, not to mention Kurt Cobain’s suicide in 1994.

  I found another unexpected source of faith in music while mastering the album in New York with engineer Howie Weinberg. Howie could sense that I was preoccupied and upset, so at one point he suggested we take a break and listen to something else. He disappeared for a few minutes, then returned with an album-size box containing a reel of quarter-inch tape. He handed me the box. I read the label and was speechless. It was the US masters for Sgt. Pepper’s, complete with handwritten changes to song titles. We listened to the first side at full volume, wide open with no equalization or compression. I’d never heard music sound so majestic. It was a real pick-me-up to hear the pure version of an album I’d memorized in 1967, at the age of six. It reminded me that music can truly soothe the soul, if only for a precious moment.

  I’d been alone for three weeks, trying to regain my footing to move forward as a single gay man, when out of the blue, Kevin called and said, “I really want to talk with you.” Even with all that had happened, I still thought that we were supposed to be together forever. So without hesitation I said OK, but told him I didn’t want to meet at the house and preferred to meet somewhere neutral. We met at the Botanical Gardens and spent hours walking and talking.

  The upshot of the conversation was Kevin saying, “I don’t know what I was thinking. This guy had a boyfriend, but we both love kids—and I know you’re not big on the idea of having kids. Somehow I thought he might leave his boyfriend, and then he and I could have kids.”

  I had no interest in having children. I didn’t think I had the proper tools to be a good parent. But Kevin wanted to have kids. So I asked, “What are we doing here? What’s going on?” He said, “I’m done with that guy, I’m done with that whole situation and I want to come back.”

  We wanted to fix the relationship, knowing we were supposed to be together. We tabled the kid issue, kissed and made up, and he moved back in. I made two concessions. One was that I would go into therapy. I guess he felt he didn’t need to go. Still, I was thirty-five years old and a loud, emotional person—this screaming hulk on stage—and I was supposed to sit down with a therapist and talk calmly about my feelings? I couldn’t quite see it.

  Secondly, Kevin wanted a large chunk of money for a separate bank account. I didn’t care; it was only money. If these two concessions would help heal the relationship, so be it. Kevin was asking a lot of me, and I stepped up to his requests. In hindsight, I probably didn’t get the good end of this deal.

  CHAPTER 19

  My therapist, Jeff Hudson, ran a gay-friendly practice. Not that the breakup and the issues involved with it were exclusively gay, but I figured a gay-friendly therapist might understand the whole thing a little better. The work we did together is called regression therapy, which deals with early memories and family issues.

  It was during the third session that Jeff posed a question to me—one that rattled everything I thought I knew about myself. Out of nowhere, Jeff paused for a moment, looked me squarely in the eye, and asked, “Do you have any knowledge of having been sexually abused as a child?” I was speechless. How could he ask such a thing? I told him I didn’t think so, but still I was reeling from his suggestion. He went on to explain that, given the information I had shared about myself, it was not out of the question. He suggested that I ask my parents if they knew of any sexual abuse. I had given him the dots—he was simply connecting them.

  I drove home, numb and confused. I had no reason to think that anything had happened to me, but I was trying to make sense of my life, so I called my parents and asked them if this was so. My father fell silent. Only my mother spoke.

  In early 1962 I was sixteen months old. My mother was both working full-time at the phone company and tending to us three kids. Before leaving for work, she would call the local cab company, a taxi would arrive, my mother would put us in the car, and it would take us to a babysitter’s house nearby. Once my mother finished work, a taxi would return us to the apartment on Main Street.

  One day my mother went to change me and noticed black-and-blue marks on the inside of my upper thighs. She didn’t know what to do and she didn’t know if it happened to any other children, but that was the last time I was sent to that babysitter.

  By the end of this story, my mother was sobbing and distraught. She blamed herself for allowing this to happen. I quickly assured her that it wasn’t her fault, and that there was no way she could have foreseen what happened. My father remained silent. I’m not even sure he was still on the line.

  The following week, I took this story to my therapist. Jeff looked sad at hearing the news, but not surprised. We began digging deeper into my childhood. I had stayed home from school to protect my mother. I had abandonment issues. I had intimacy issues. The list of what I perceived as defects kept growing. For weeks I was ashamed, confused, and uncertain of how much to share with Kevin.

  But this information began to shed some new light on my childhood. Not only had my parents lost their eldest son right after I was born, but now, their youngest son had been violated by a babysitter. Perhaps this helped to explain why I’d been treated as the “golden child.”

  My parents had moved from Malone to north-central Florida in the early 1990s. My brother and sister had visited them and told me of the conditions in which they lived—a
trailer park with no paved roads or streetlights. It wasn’t the nicest neighborhood. I visited them in 1995 and saw it for myself. Clearly something had to be done. I was in a position to help and it would have only a minor effect on my bank account, so I offered to buy them a new house, as long as it was reasonably priced.

  I was able to put aside all the difficult childhood memories—the paranoia and passive-aggression, the shame in bringing friends over, the weekends of violence—to make sure my parents were safe. They’d put me through college and supported me financially through my first few years in Minnesota. My dad had even driven two band vans out to St. Paul. Alongside all the unhappiness, they had always done the best they could, and I was glad to pay it back. When they found a modular home in a much safer community along the St. Johns River, it made me feel good about myself. It was a step toward personal happiness, but I still had plenty of work to do.

  Jeff Hudson started me on a path that was key, and as life goes on it’s become a mantra to me. It’s that you’re born into a family, your family of origin, and you’re stuck with it. Once I recognized that, it freed me up to have a different kind of family: a family of choice. The people I surround myself with, spend holidays with, look to for support and comfort and validation—that’s my family of choice. It’s by no means a situation that’s unique to gay men, but often there’s the extra layer of not being able to comfortably share your life with your family of origin. I was bound up in those old family constructs and used so much of that dysfunction as the guideline for all kinds of relationships that I had. But Jeff didn’t open the door, he just showed me where the door was. It’s taken years—and it will continue to take years—to get through that door. But at least I’m on my way.

  Therapy or not, Kevin and I soon lapsed into our old routine of spending our days in separate parts of the house. The only difference was, we’d now chosen different rooms—me on the ground floor of the garage apartment, still on the computer, and Kevin in the one-bedroom apartment above me. At night we reconvened in the main house to have dinner and try to resume our relationship. But the next morning we went right back to our new hideouts. Things were better, but not by much.

  * * *

  Running parallel to all this personal upheaval were the recording sessions for the first Verbow record. I’d originally met the band’s leader, Jason Narducy, in the fall of 1990 at the 9:30 Club in Washington, DC. The following year, he came to a sound check at Metro in Chicago, reintroduced himself, and gave me clippings from the past few years of my Chicago press. There’s also a video of a young Jason covering “Wishing Well” while wearing a Who T-shirt—what else can I say?

  Jason formed Verbow with cellist Alison Chesley, expanded the lineup, and signed a rather huge deal with Sony 550 Music, becoming one of the many beneficiaries of the alternative rock gold rush then sweeping the music industry. I was pretty happy that all that grunt work I’d done in the ’80s had, in an indirect way, helped get them the deal, and perhaps happier still that I was going to produce their album.

  A few days after I’d caught Kevin with that other guy, I was in the studio with Jim Wilson, trying to produce the Verbow record. But I was useless—my mind and heart were consumed by my personal crisis. On the third day, I stepped back and the sessions were postponed. We reconvened in Austin in March 1996, just as my next solo album was about to come out. This time we were much more productive.

  While finishing the Verbow album, I got a phone call from Ryko. They said, “We know you don’t want to tour on this record, but we just got a call from Pete Townshend’s management. Pete wants you to play two shows with him in New York at the Supper Club. He wants you to do a solo opening set each night. His shows are booked for May third and fourth.”

  I mentioned the request to Jason, adding that I had no intention of playing live any time soon and that I wasn’t going to accept Townshend’s offer. Jason said, “Bob, you absolutely have to do those shows. Are you nuts?” I thought for a moment and said, “Yeah, I guess you’re right. I have to do the shows.”

  Bob Mould was released in April 1996. The album cover was a digital scan of a hubcap I’d found, ironically, while walking around Austin with Dennis Cooper in 1994. The album became informally known as the “Hubcap” album. The release was met with a moderate amount of fanfare in the States, less-than-normal interest in Europe, and a fairly scathing letter from Malcolm Travis. He mocked my use of the drum machine and laid into me about how I both publicly and privately mishandled the end of Sugar. I deserved it, but wrote him back to respectfully disagree with his album review. I don’t have any lingering resentment toward Malcolm: he’s a good guy, a fine drummer, and a proud parent.

  That weekend, I went to New York for the two shows with Pete Townshend. The Supper Club was a great venue that was on two levels, with table seating around the perimeter of the main floor. The room was rather ornate, almost formal, yet had the feel of a well-worn nightclub. Given the setting, I blazed away as best I could. The first night, after his third song, Pete stopped to chat with the crowd and said, “I went to see Bob Mould at the Academy last year, and I couldn’t believe it. Just a man and his guitar, a bottle of water, and a rental car. I thought to myself, I’ve got to do that.” Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would get Pete Townshend off his ass to do some solo shows.

  Afterward, Richard Butler from the Psychedelic Furs stopped by to say hello and had very complimentary things to say about both my work with Sugar and my ability to reinvent myself. Jason was also there to witness a great moment: Joey Ramone showed up with a big stack of Who records, headed straight for Pete, and started the “I’m not worthy” routine. Pete tousled Joey’s hair a little, gave him an affirming nod, and started signing the pile of records.

  That was truly adorable, but it was also a beautiful collision of many important things in my musical world. Playing these shows with Pete Townshend and witnessing that touching moment between Pete and Joey, two people who had such a profound and lasting impact on my life and work, got me really excited about playing music in front of people again.

  It reset and mended my freshly damaged and distorted view of life, and made me recognize that this thing we call music, this primal expression that we reshape and refine and define ourselves with, is the gift I was given. The ability to communicate what others feel but cannot fully express, the passing down and around of songs and stories, from Pete Townshend to Joey Ramone to me, to the audiences who take the time and effort to support our work and give us a way to support ourselves—I’m thinking this is what I am supposed to be doing.

  * * *

  The video for “Egøverride,” the first single from the album, clearly illustrated the emotional roller coaster I’d been riding. The video debuted on 120 Minutes. I cohosted the show alongside Matt Pinfield, who is not only the most knowledgeable music fan I have ever met, but also one of the nicest guys in the business, as well as one of my biggest supporters. People remarked on how thin I looked—not as rail-thin as in 1989, but I had definitely dropped the extra forty pounds caused by those late-night burritos in 1994. I trimmed down on a home exercise bike, although the stress of my relationship problems with Kevin certainly had something to do with the weight loss too.

  The video featured me walking and riding a single-gear bike around Manhattan. The experience rekindled my love of New York City. Maybe I was unconsciously mapping out a new life. If I know anything, it’s the therapeutic nature of both pedaling away from what’s behind you and toward what’s in front of you.

  Mentally and emotionally, I was beginning to fade away from Austin. The fracture had cast a shadow on the house. Austin was a good town, but it was a small town and everyone there knew what had happened. I thought it might be easier for us to put things back together in different surroundings.

  So I started to think seriously about getting a pied-à-terre in Manhattan, and when I mentioned it to Kevin, he liked the idea. We loved Josh Grier’s apartment on the east side of Manhatt
an, near the UN. It wasn’t the hippest neighborhood, but it offered easy access to LaGuardia Airport, which would make it easy to get back and forth from Texas. So I looked to buy something similar in that area. And later in August, after looking at dozens of apartments, I finally found a 1,000-square-foot place in a nondescript apartment building at the corner of Forty-Eighth Street and Second Avenue. Eleven floors up, the place had a pleasant but uninspiring view of Midtown and overlooked the backyard of Stephen Sondheim’s building.

  But back in Austin I had made a new friend, a musician named Andrew Duplantis. Andrew was a sweet guy, very charming, and we immediately started spending a lot of time together. We both smoked cigarettes, and he also enjoyed marijuana, so I joined in on occasion. We would sit in my office, killing time by getting stoned and laughing at each other’s corny jokes. In a way, this mirrored the relationship Kevin had with his Austin friends. Andrew had a boyish radiance that was attractive to me on many levels, and he was a wonderful distraction from the process of healing the relationship with Kevin.

  Andrew was straight, but our time together was fraught with oddly tense moments. We would be talking about something innocuous, and if it had any undertone of sexuality, we would pause and look at each other as if to say, Yeah, and now what? Beyond those curious moments, it was a tight bonding, more of a big brother–little brother relationship.

  We started to play music together, mostly my songs, and I thought it might be interesting to try performing material from my songbook as an acoustic duo. We had promotional photographs taken of us, and people commented on how similar we looked. I had deep feelings for Andrew, but there was little chance of anything physical happening between us—except music. Those feelings manifested themselves in a show we played together that July at Tramps in New York: the entire set was a barreling ball of energy. It was a public display of our private chemistry, and by the end of the set we were all drenched with sweat—Andrew, me, and even the audience.