by Bob Mould
Mortality stepped in again when Karin Berg passed away in November of 2006. Julie Panebianco called and said, “We’re doing this memorial service at St. Mark’s Church in the East Village. People are going to speak and perform, and I would like you to do both.” Karin had played a big part in both my career and my life, I was very fond and respectful of her, and without hesitation, I agreed to speak and play.
The service was not only a celebration of Karin’s life and a testament to how many people she had touched, but a sobering moment of introspection and reflection for me. I took a hard look at my life, my work, and the people I’d encountered along the way. Seeing some of those folks together in one room, with faces that had grown older in the intervening years, suddenly forced a real retrospective look at my life. I wasn’t that eighteen-year-old kid fawning over Patti Smith at a Positively 4th Street in-store in Minneapolis, and I wasn’t that twenty-four-year-old drunk refusing to climb through Michael Stipe’s living-room window in Athens—now the three of us were sitting side by side at St. Mark’s Church in New York at a memorial for our friend.
At one point in the service, Julie came to me and said, “Marshall Crenshaw is going to play a song, and then Robert Christgau is going to talk, and then it’s your turn.”
Not attending my grade school friend’s funeral, not being informed by my parents of my grandfather’s death until a month after it happened, and not being able to fully mourn the passing of David Savoy, I had little experience dealing with death, and it was painfully obvious. I felt pretty daunted by the prospect of getting up in front of my friends and peers to deliver my thoughts about Karin. All I could do was solemnly approach the podium, say a few words about Karin being such a good person to me, then play a very somber version of “Makes No Sense at All,” which was one of Karin’s favorite songs.
I did feel a sense of closure about Karin’s passing, but at the same time, the whole incident reminded me of how ill equipped I was to deal with these things. Still, it was a start on understanding the vital process of closure when someone or something, like a relationship, comes to an end.
So one night I was pondering mortality, and the next night I was onstage at a Bob Dylan tribute concert at Avery Fisher Hall in Lincoln Center, as part of a fund-raiser organized by Michael Dorf for the Music for Youth Foundation. Talk about ups and downs. I performed Olivia Newton-John’s version of Bob Dylan’s “If Not for You.” Dylan wasn’t a huge influence on my songwriting, to be honest, but that was a really nice, important thing in my career. Still, the emotional whiplash was kind of intense.
* * *
In November 2006 Death Cab for Cutie was playing a show in DC. I knew those guys from running into them at various Seattle shows over the years, so I went backstage to say hello to the band and their manager, Jordan Kurland.
Besides managing Death Cab, Jordan was one of the founders of a successful indie rock festival in San Francisco called Noise Pop. Jordan had booked me at Noise Pop in 2000 and 2005, so we also had some history. I asked Jordan if I could pick his brain about record labels, as my next album was almost finished and I was considering a label change. Jordan said, “Of course, call any time.” He was a big fan, and I respected his opinions about the business. I called him a few months later, and we hit it off so well that we started working together in early 2007. It was an unexpected move for me. For most of my professional life, I had been a self-managed artist, and the one time I let someone else take the reins, it ended badly. But over the course of the 2000s, I had seen so many changes in the business and thought it might be wise to have someone else on my team. Jordan’s first task as my manager was to find a home for my next album.
I didn’t notice it clearly at the time, but there was some sort of congregation gathering around me. It’s akin to my “hot potato” theory about music: It’s like inspiration is a hot potato you pull out of the oven and then toss to someone else. So we listen, we become fans, we become inspired, we create, and somehow the work we create eventually finds its way back to the ones who inspired us.
Over the years I had crossed paths with Kevin Shields from My Bloody Valentine, Frank Black of the Pixies, and Dave Grohl of Foo Fighters—people who were influenced by me, and influenced my work as well. I also think back to the 1996 solo shows supporting Pete Townshend, the shows he played because he was so impressed that I toured with just a car and a bottle of water. I felt like I lived in a tightly knit little universe of inspirations and connections, and it was only a matter of time before we all met.
The hot potato came around again in April 2007 at the Coachella Festival. I ran into my old friend Adam Shore, who spearheaded Vice Records, a label that worked with many of the top new electronic acts. Adam and I were talking when he stopped for a moment and said, “There’s someone I want you to meet.” He motioned to a fellow with longish hair and a Night Ranger T-shirt, then said, “Bob, meet Thomas Bangaltar. Thomas, meet Bob Mould.” Thomas is one half of Daft Punk, one of my very favorite bands, but because they always wear helmets in public, I didn’t recognize him. I was momentarily startled, and before I could say anything, Thomas leaned in and said, “I listened to Copper Blue every day for six months straight.” I was completely floored.
A similar thing happened later that year when I played New Hope, Pennsylvania, and was humbled to meet Steve Garvey of the Buzzcocks, who has a studio in town. It was nice to let him know how important the Buzzcocks were to me—fast, short, catchy songs about sexual confusion made a huge impression on me as a fan and as a musician. I reminded him of their great acid-soaked show in Minneapolis in 1980, when Pete Shelley helpfully shouted out the chord changes to me. I was again reminded that I’m simply part of the lineage, part of the continuum: both listener and storyteller, fan and creator.
* * *
I spent the rest of spring 2007 finishing the next album, while playing occasional solo shows. By summer the hunt for a new label was complete, and I eventually signed with Anti-, a small but prestigious label that featured artists like Tom Waits, Merle Haggard, and Mose Allison.
With that squared away, I promptly broke my ankle by falling off the four-foot-high landing in my front yard. I had to cancel a couple of shows—very rare for me, but fortunately, I used the downtime well. Joe Fallon of the Modernista! ad agency was a big fan of mine and had been using “See a Little Light” as place holder music in an ad campaign for TIAA-CREF. The client kept hearing the song go by and soon fell in love with it. Only one hitch: due to the debacle in 1990 with my old management signing away my mechanical royalties, if Joe used the original version from Workbook, all the money would go to Virgin Records. I had to rerecord the track.
I spent two days faithfully reproducing one of my most meaningful songs, knowing full well that someone would give me grief about selling it to an ad agency. Quite frankly, it was a very good payday, and it was for a company that I had no problem endorsing—they service the creative community. It wasn’t Halliburton. In fact, thanks to TIAA-CREF, I have my own small retirement fund. It worked out very well.
By this time the new album, now titled District Line, was complete and waiting for release. As we had done with Body of Song, I recorded everything but drums at home, Brendan drummed along to the tracks at a studio, then I mixed the tracks at home. The songs on District Line were a good synthesis of the electronic flourishes that started in 2002 with Modulate, when I was building songs from loops, grooves, and samples, and the more fully crafted linear pop-rock songs I’d been writing for over twenty years. The emotional content reflected on the summer of 2005—my second summer of being single—and that feeling of freedom showed in the music.
“The Silence Between Us” took about as long to write as it did to play. It’s a transcription of a long walk with a good friend. “Again and Again” is a painting of the end of my relationship with Kevin. I spent months trying to get the right sound and feel for “Who Needs to Dream?” The musical layers were tough to weave, but the words came easily. It�
�s a common refrain: when looking for a partner, do you look for someone to complement you, to complete you, or a combination of the two?
I thought of the epic “Return to Dust” as the centerpiece of the album. The lyrics filled in as soon as the central line came to me: “Growing old, it’s hard to be the angry young man.” Looking back on it, I see the song reveals itself to be the outline of my entire life up to that point. Cute little tip of the hat to Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” in that song too.
My personal favorite is “Shelter Me.” It’s a dance song—a little out of place on that album. Despite the dark lyrical tone, the bouncy groove always put me in a good mood, so it was my “getting ready to go out with the guys” song. I would play it at full volume in my truck every Thursday night on the way to the Green Lantern, a funky two-story downtown gay bar where “shirtless men drink free.”
“Walls in Time” was a song left over from the 1988 Workbook era, and was the perfect closer for District Line. Not only was it an old favorite of mine, but it also foreshadowed the direction I was heading, which was even more rooted in my traditional singer-songwriter style. So even with District Line freshly in the can, I’d already started on the next group of songs. Summer 2007 was a productive time; it’s amazing how much work you can get done when you’re cooped up in the house with a broken ankle for six weeks. Like so many of my best creative periods, I took good advantage of some meditative downtime.
In October, when I was back on my feet, I did a solo tour of intimate rooms in select markets to promote the Circle of Friends live DVD. Each evening consisted of a forty-five-minute Q&A, a forty-five-minute acoustic set, and a screening of the DVD. Afterward I’d go to the lobby and sell DVDs directly to the fans. On one level it was a nice, low-key tour; on another it was surprisingly eventful.
One of the highlights of the DVD tour happened on my forty-seventh birthday at Herbst Theatre in San Francisco. Michael Azerrad was the interviewer that night, and our public discussion put me into the frame of mind to write this book. It was an energetic exchange, and it rekindled our relationship, which had started with an earlier interview for his book Our Band Could Be Your Life. In the weeks following the San Francisco interview, I reconsidered an offer Michael Pietsch from Little, Brown and Company had made to me in 2001 to write my life story. I called Michael Azerrad and said, “Maybe it’s time to write the book now.” With age, I was beginning to forget the things I wanted to remember, which is quite different from remembering the things I’d rather forget.
* * *
After months of delays and preparation, District Line was released in February 2008, on Anti-in North America and Beggars Banquet in Europe, to solidly positive reviews. Brendan put together an electronic press kit, which featured video clips from throughout my career, a current interview with me, and testimonials from various musical luminaries like Stephen Malkmus and Ben Gibbard. Renowned visual artist Shepard Fairey created a poster of my likeness for his ongoing “icon series”—a limited run of five hundred silk-screen prints that I sold at shows. It was nice to have that happen the same year as the 2008 presidential election, which featured Fairey’s iconic blue-and-red image of Barack Obama. The head shots for District Line were taken by Peter Ross at the Bunker, with me sitting in one of the same orange chairs that I sat in during my 1985 meeting with William Burroughs.
Once again the rock band was ready to hit the road, but there was a last-minute wrinkle. Brendan couldn’t tour because he was about to become a dad for the fourth time. We had to find another drummer. Rich Morel suggested a drummer from DC named Rob Black. Rob was familiar with my songbook and also played with Rich. I had seen Rob play with Rich before and thought he was a pretty good drummer. Rehearsals went well, but the live stage is a different beast.
After only two shows, it was clear that things were not going well. Jason was all banged up from throwing himself around onstage, and I was blowing out my voice. We were overplaying to make up for the energy that was missing behind us. And it was killing us. I was getting more upset as the tour went on, and it finally came to a head after the DC show. I gathered the band in the dressing room, closed the door, and let loose on Rob. Then Jason and Rich joined in. For weeks Rob had been listening, but not hearing, the directions we were giving him. Even something as simple as asking my bandmates to join me in wearing black T-shirts onstage—Rob would ask, “Is dark–navy blue OK?”
The next day Jason came to me with an idea. Superchunk’s drummer, Jon Wurster, was about to finish up a tour with the Mountain Goats, and maybe we could get him to join us and replace Rob. Actually, Jon was one of the two drummers I’d originally approached for this tour—the other was Sam Fogarino of Interpol. Jason reached out to Jon Wurster. Good thing.
We had a night off in Denver before the show in Boulder. Rob came to me and said he knew we had European dates coming up but that he really wanted to go see Pet Shop Boys or Depeche Mode or somebody like that when they played DC. He said, “Do you think those Europe dates are going to stay confirmed?” He was testing me. I looked at him and said, “You know what, Rob, I think you should go ahead and get those concert tickets.”
A couple hours later Jason told me Wurster could start a few days later in San Diego. The following night, before we went onstage in Boulder, we pulled Rob aside in the dressing room and told him we were letting him go and that he would be paid in full. We also asked if we could rent the drum kit he’d bought for the tour. I felt bad about what was happening, but this was business. Rob went home after the Boulder show. Nice guy, but it didn’t work out.
Jon Wurster showed up a few days later in San Diego. I had only met him briefly a few times, so I had no idea what kind of disposition I was getting into or how it was going to change things. At 4 PM we head to the venue, the Belly Up Tavern, meeting each other for the first time as bandmates. We got onstage for sound check/rehearsal with not enough time to run the whole set. I said to Jon and the guys, “How about we run the first three songs, then look through the song list? Jon, if you have any questions about beginnings and endings of certain songs, let me know and we’ll do them.” Jason said, “Jon, I’ll monitor you: I’ll give you the sword when we’re going to finish.” I added, “Watch my right foot, that’s the cue to finish if we’re improv’ing. If I stomp my right foot three times, that’s our out.” Jon is nodding, making notes on his song list, saying “OK… got it… got it… got it.” We’re starting the show with the first three songs from Copper Blue: “The Act We Act,” “A Good Idea,” and “Changes.” We all take a deep breath and prepare to start, and Jon asks, “Do you want me to count it off?” I say, “No, I start it with the guitar riff, and I’ll do a ‘one, two, three, four’ on the microphone, and off we go.” I was straddle-legged playing the intro riff, and when I get to the end of the eight bars, I walk up to the microphone and shout “one, two, three, four” to mark the eighth and final bar of the intro.
Out of nowhere, the fireworks start coming off the kit. The drum are three times louder than they’ve been all year. All this heat is coming off of the cymbals. I get to the guitar solo and look around the stage. Wurster is like a kid in a candy store, swinging his drumsticks around. Jason is grinning ear to ear, and Rich is just mesmerized by the whole thing. We get through the first three songs and I’m like, What the hell was that? Every bit of doubt and uncertainty was instantly lifted from the tour. Jon had walked in, sat down on Rob’s kit, and changed the tour completely.
We tore through the show in San Diego like a band that had been playing together for years. It was ridiculous how good we were as a band, after only one night. Our spirits had lifted, my voice came back strong, and Jason healed up instantly. I can’t emphasize enough how quickly and strongly Jon’s presence elevated the tour. No real rehearsal time, yet he nailed the whole set. The five West Coast shows were effortless.
We began a run of ten European dates on May 23. We played sparsely attended shows in Glasgow, Manchester, and Birmingham. In Londo
n we performed at Koko, which was formerly Camden Palace—where Hüsker Dü taped the Live from London concert in 1985. It was nice to revisit some of the older songs with a new lineup. Three days later we headlined a secondary stage at Primavera Sound Festival in Barcelona, playing a badass forty-five-minute punk rock show.
After the show we were eating dinner, and as usual at festivals, the mess hall was where one runs into all the other musicians: J. Mascis and Lou Barlow of Dinosaur Jr., Roger Miller from Mission of Burma—it was like old home week. This young guy, walking gingerly with a cane, came up to me and said, “You’re Bob Mould. I’m Dean Spunt. I play drums in a band called No Age. I screwed up my leg in Germany, but I hobbled down the hill and saw the last half of your set. It was amazing.” I knew their music and let him know I was a fan. I met guitarist Randy Randall, and we got to talking about music.
It was great to find young musicians who were into the music scene I was part of in the 1980s. People had told me about No Age, and when I heard the first minute of their song “Miner,” I could hear their influences. When I started to learn more about them, that they have their own community-oriented label, it was so reminiscent of what Hüsker Dü had done in Minneapolis. It made me feel good. I did this thing in the ’80s, then in the ’90s a bunch of people copied certain pieces of it for all the wrong reasons, and now in 2008 there were people who were influenced by not only the music but the mentality and the aesthetic. I guess this was the second wave of legacy, which made me a grandfather. Ouch. It’s both good and bad. Either way, I can neither run nor hide from it.