by Bob Mould
One day in August, I was at Andrew’s apartment, hanging out, listening to music. Kevin called in a panic and said, “You have to drop everything you’re doing and get on a plane and go out to New York and finish Vic Chesnutt’s record.” Dave Ayers, who I practically grew up with in Minnesota, was Vic’s A&R person at Capitol. This was to be Vic’s first album for Capitol, About to Choke. I was being drafted into a chaotic situation, but given the people involved—Dave, Vic, and Kevin—I couldn’t really say no.
In the span of eight hours, I drove home, packed a bag, went to the airport, landed at Newark International, and went straight to Waterfront Studios in Hoboken. I spent three days with Vic, ostensibly fashioning a cohesive album from sessions recorded in three studios. As it turned out, I didn’t do any rerecording, editing, or remixing—all I did was sit around and reassure Vic that the album was good. When the record was eventually released, I couldn’t hear a trace of my involvement. But I guess putting out the fires of Vic’s uncertainty was worth giving up three days of my summer vacation.
* * *
Andrew and I did a run of acoustic duo shows in the fall, with me on guitar and Andrew on acoustic bass. Less than a week into the tour, I realized it wasn’t working. One problem was that Andrew stomped loudly when he played; it wasn’t always in time and it was very distracting. Also, personality differences get magnified on the road, and it turned out that Andrew and I weren’t as compatible as I thought.
After a few shows of this, I decided it might be better if I just did the rest by myself. I drew this conclusion in late September, right before we were to play two weekend nights in New York. But his then girlfriend was coming to New York just to see him play, so I sent him home after that weekend.
Andrew didn’t challenge the decision—I think he knew it wasn’t working either. The feeling onstage never recaptured the magic of that show at Tramps two months earlier. He headed back to Austin with his girlfriend, and I spent the next week finishing up the East Coast dates by myself.
One of my major flaws is assuming that people are aware of what I expect. I should have just said, “Andrew, you need to lay off the stomping when we play.” I also wasn’t addressing the sexual tension between the two of us, for fear of losing him as a friend. By failing to address either problem, I cost myself a friendship, one that might have been healthier than the relationship I was trying to repair. The sad part of it is that Andrew was an unconditional friend who was there only to offer support.
After I wrapped up the dates, I returned to Manhattan, where Kevin was waiting for me. We quickly fell back in love with the city we’d left three years before, and within days decided to sell the Austin house. I was done with Texas and Kevin concurred. I made plans to put the house up for sale at the end of an upcoming run of West Coast and Texas dates. We had hopes of a speedy and stress-free sale.
Not only did I leave my house behind, but I left therapy behind as well. Somewhere on the acoustic tour that fall, when I would do therapy sessions on a pay phone at a rest area in, oh, say, central Ohio, I felt my time with Jeff Hudson had run its course. I was ready to walk away and resume my life without therapy. I said to Jeff, “I think I’m done here,” and he said, “No, we have to wind this down in a four-week pattern.” He asked me to stay on for another month in order to learn to say good-bye. That was insightful of him, and I didn’t recognize what he was doing until years later. Now I know there is a healthy way that people can end relationships. Do I always do it? Not always, but I know that it’s there.
But leaving places? Still no looking back. Over the course of three days in November, I filled a huge 20' × 6' × 6' Dumpster in Austin with my former life—a lot of my childhood belongings, boxes and boxes of wrestling magazines from the ’70s, obsolete recording equipment, a ping-pong table, and the bed Kevin made of Brazilian hardwood, none of which would be of any use in Manhattan. I couldn’t believe how many possessions I’d eliminated from my life—a twenty-foot Dumpster worth of memories.
During that week of physical (and emotional) purging, I played a solo acoustic show in Houston with Matt Hammon, a local singer-songwriter. The next night, another solo acoustic show—a farewell of sorts—at Austin’s cavernous Liberty Lunch club, where I had played for fifteen years. I invited Andrew Duplantis and Matt to play solo sets as well. It was a great evening of music and a fitting end to the Austin years. Jim Wilson and I then drove a ten-foot box truck, filled with my pared-down possessions, to Forty-Eighth Street in New York.
* * *
Once again Kevin and I were becoming glued at the hip. We had a somewhat hermetic relationship. We had Domino and we had our 4Runner. We bought new furniture, kitchenware, and a bedroom set. We waved the magic wand—or more appropriately, the credit card—and tried to create a whole new life. We were trying to make it work, without truly working on ourselves or on the relationship. Maybe not the healthiest way to live.
But music work came quickly. I met up with my longtime Minneapolis friend Lizz Winstead. She and her creative partner, Madeleine Smithberg, were starting up a satire of TV news for Comedy Central, to be called The Daily Show, and they needed some theme music. I had two songs I’d decided not to put on the “Hubcap” album, so I submitted those. The one they picked was a song Jim Wilson called “Dog on Fire.” (This original guitar-driven version ran on the show for a number of years; the theme has since been rerecorded and is probably my most heard song ever.)
The other outtake from the album would also prove useful and profitable. American Express was about to launch a new credit card in Asia, and a major New York ad agency was looking for signature music for the commercial campaign. They liked my song, but they wanted me to rerecord it. So Jim Wilson and I piled into a taxi with my bass, twelve-string acoustic, electric guitar, and drum machine, and headed seven blocks west to a studio in the Hotel Edison. Two hours later the session was done, and American Express subsequently renewed the rights to use the song two extra times, earning me triple the initial fee. It’s nice to land one of those every few years—it really helps to keep the regular gig afloat.
And in December I was again asked to be a musical contributor to The Daily Show, this time as a caroler of sorts. Craig Kilborn, the show’s original host, and I recreated the Bing Crosby/David Bowie “Little Drummer Boy” skit from Bing’s 1977 Christmas special. Craig wasn’t much of a singer and I wasn’t really feeling the song that much either, but it was a fun piece of business.
In early 1997 I did a series of short solo acoustic tours, which covered virtually the entire country in four months. When I was home, I spent a lot of time riding around the city on a bicycle given to me by Josh Grier, who was an avid cyclist. I started riding every day, sometimes in Central Park, sometimes downtown, mainly by myself.
As summer approached, I spent many of my afternoons journaling at Peter Detmold Park, a sliver of green along the East River underneath FDR Drive, running from Forty-Ninth to Fifty-First Street. I was trying to write myself through this difficult time. I had this relationship with Kevin, but what was it I was really looking for, what was I attracted to, why was I uncomfortable in my own skin, why did I have abandonment issues, why did I cut people off so quickly? On and on. It was the first time that I thought long and hard about the things brought up during the eight months of therapy in 1996; I was on a self-exploration trip.
I created a second life down there. A homeless Israeli guy named Gadi was unofficially taking care of the dog park. He wasn’t sitting in a corner in his own piss or rattling a tin can. He was probably in his midthirties, about the same age as I was, and I was intrigued by him. Eventually we acknowledged each other and started to talk. We spent the better part of three months, at least three times a week, sitting for hours and talking. Some days I would give him a little money, probably about twenty dollars a week.
I asked him, “How do you make it work?” He explained, “I rely on the kindness of others. I do volunteer work at the Catholic church in trade for meals
. I do odds and ends for people. With the cash I gather, I’m able to have a gym membership. I go during the quiet times of the day, pretend I’m doing yoga, and that’s when I can sleep.” Through the work at the church, he had access to a washer/dryer. He had a locker at the gym where he kept his clothes. He had this veneer of credibility, yet he was homeless—and I was fascinated by this. I was in my own state of transition, some uncomfortable in-between, and maybe I was learning something I couldn’t identify or recognize at the time.
It was helpful to have somebody who didn’t know or care who I was or what I did. I didn’t tell Gadi all about my career, not that it would have meant anything to a homeless man—it’s not like he was watching MTV or reading Spin every month. And it was nice to have someone to sit and talk with, without the investment and intensity of a partnership. That’s what people do. People have confidants and people have close friends that are private friends. I rarely confided in anyone beyond my partner, and I was very protective of my true emotions. The only time people got a look at my emotions was through my work. The music was the way I let myself be heard. My time spent talking with this homeless guy was a bold step for me. It was completely a second life.
I kept this up for three months. All of our interactions were in the dog park, or some other neutral public space. Then one day, instead of saying good-bye at the park, Gadi followed me home, and that’s when I stopped meeting him in the park. I didn’t see him until months later. He was working at OMG, a job-lot store that sold the previous season’s clothes, three blocks down Second Avenue from my apartment building. I walked in, we locked eyes, said hello to each other, and I quietly congratulated him. “This is great,” I said. He said, “Yes, it’s good right now.”
* * *
Pete Townshend and I got together again in 1997 for a dinner with Michael Cerveris, Kevin, and Pete’s girlfriend. Pete was in town on business, and his girlfriend came to town to buy a VW Bug—because she wanted to have a vase on her dashboard. It was a great night, and as we ate outside at Restaurant Florent, I realized that Pete had a body shadow positioned one hundred feet away. The bodyguard followed us, at that fixed distance, for the entire evening.
As for me, I could walk down the street in Midtown or ride my bike down Second Avenue without being noticed. But if I went to a rock club in the East Village, I would instantly be recognized, and would feel most everyone in the room pointing and whispering about me.
Notoriety, or recognition, is like a diamond. You start to turn it, and when the light hits it, you see there are all these wild little facets inside. Things start to reflect and distort in unpredictable ways. Am I famous, notorious; do people recognize me? When is it to my advantage? Guys who try to get my attention, are they interested in me because I’m famous, or because they think I’m hot? It’s an interesting yet vexing situation, and at this point in my life, I didn’t have a clue as to what the answer was.
Being a public figure of slight note, but having deep resonance with a small group of people, is an odd position to be in. If you’re a politician, it’s implicit that people like you because they want money and they want the fruits of your power. When you’re a musician, the connections with people are complex. How much do you give? How much do you reveal; when do you give it; when do you allow somebody to penetrate that first layer to even get an e-mail address or, God forbid, a phone number? Never mind about giving someone your home address.
This was the same level of protectiveness I extended across my sexuality. I was so hesitant to speak publicly about my personal life because of my perception of how it would change the work, or what people might think of me, or how it would affect my parents. Compared to other famous people, I’ve hardly come under public scrutiny or fallen victim to media sensation. Nonetheless, the complexities of protecting myself and those around me were exhausting.
I had also been protecting myself from getting in touch with my real emotions, which I’d been suppressing for years. It was coming time to confront and extinguish the nagging agitation I felt after concluding my therapy sessions in 1996. But first I had to put something big behind me. And little did I know how hard that battle would be.
CHAPTER 20
Jeff Hudson had made a big stink about my smoking—a habit I’d undoubtedly picked up from my father. Before our sessions I would smoke furiously, saturating my brain with as much nicotine as possible. He asked me to try not to smoke before coming in, just to see if the sessions would go differently. I tried, and it left me feeling more agitated than normal. It would be eighteen months before I quit.
Quitting smoking is the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life, much more difficult than quitting drinking. The social fallout from going sober was tough, but the physical act of stopping the booze was not so bad. I still can’t believe how hard it was to quit smoking cigarettes.
It was Thanksgiving Day 1997. I woke up, and it was similar to the morning when I saw my dad in the mirror and said to myself, I have to stop drinking. Oddly enough, the tip-off came from my computer. I noticed that the screen appeared slightly warped from the center to the edges. I thought the monitor was going dead, but in fact, it was the screen protector that hung over the top of the monitor—it was covered with a sticky yellow tar from me sitting there and exhaling cigarette smoke onto it. I realized I was in trouble. Look at that, I’m viewing everything through a hazy yellow film, and it needs to stop.
I started smoking a pack a day at the beginning of college, and by the end, I was up to three packs a day. Smoking had become both the centerpiece and timepiece of my life. Every cigarette was six minutes long, and I could practically mark out the whole day with smoking, like a sundial. Six minutes on, nine minutes off. Repeat sixty times a day. It was like playing Scrabble: when it’s your turn, you turn over the egg timer and start thinking. I have an innate sense of time, but smoking was this additional timekeeper, like a wristwatch.
For me, there was no patch, no acupuncture, no therapy, no group hug, nothing. I maintain that nicotine is a much harder drug than heroin to quit. An ex-junkie once told me that very same thing, and I believed him. My dad smoked for fifty years before he finally quit.
I quit cold turkey. I had willpower, so not lighting up wasn’t the problem. But it turned out that nicotine had suppressed my emotions. I could make it through the first ten hours of the day, but then I would turn into an angry baby. All this rage, frustration, and pain would come flying out of my body. At 6 PM of my first day without cigarettes, I said to Kevin, “I have to get out of here, I feel like I’m going to explode, I have to get out of this house.” I walked up Second Avenue to around Eighty-Sixth Street, about two miles, turned left, walked the half mile to Central Park, and back down to Forty-Eighth Street. This is right after Thanksgiving, so the evenings are brisk.
I did that every day for at least three months, until I finally regained control of my system. The walk would last for an hour, give or take the amount of time I would spend buying a cup of coffee. Those six-mile walks kept me sane and also kept me fit. I didn’t have the weight-gain problem that most people suffer from when quitting. It was the only thing I could do to stop from snapping at Kevin or killing myself. Cigarette smoking had been suppressing all that rage. Here I was, making this gut-wrenching music, brimming with anger, but still suppressing a lot of my emotions by smoking. Now I had to reassess how much rage was really in there.
In the 1960s and 1970s, before pop psychology became a more pronounced part of our social fabric, men (like my father) were not encouraged to be “in touch with their feelings.” Men were to be tough, not show emotions, and dominate the family structure. Women (like my mother) were subordinate and demure, yet held great power over the family dynamic. Lots of kids (like me) were brought up in violent homes, and we weren’t any the wiser. I was a child of my environment, and in adulthood I could have easily become that male figure of the 1960s.
My parents are still together, so whatever works for them is what counts. But now I
was learning to identify the impression my childhood left on me, and that was the source of a lot of the anger I felt.
When I was a kid, I didn’t think I was having a horrible childhood. For one thing, just about everyone I knew came from some kind of dysfunctional family—one with alcoholism, domestic violence, incest. But still I knew things were not right. Almost every weekend was the same drill: the calm before the storm, then the violence, then back to school on Monday morning. Growing up like that, week in and week out, established a cycle that never seemed to stop. More than twenty years later, I recognized it and slowly began attempting to correct it. It wasn’t going to be easy, and it wasn’t going to change overnight.
My father was a heavy smoker, and by quitting I was eliminating yet another piece of me that emulated the worst aspects of his behavior. To get there, I needed more than my long walks. I needed a new routine.
After finishing the “Hubcap” album in November 1995, I had stopped writing music. And since leaving Austin in October 1996, I had no home studio. Even if I had wanted to, I didn’t have a place to write music. So in late 1997 Jim Wilson came to Manhattan and spent two weeks assembling an awesome little recording studio for me at a rented workspace in Soho. The room wasn’t soundproofed and there were other businesses surrounding me, so I had to work at night, which I actually liked. After months of journaling, I had a wellspring of ideas waiting to be tapped. I wrote what would become The Last Dog and Pony Show in less than a month.