Bob Mould

“Those songs are mantras,” Mould declares. “Those are the hardest to write, but they’re so great when they come along once or twice a year. Sometimes I feel like a messenger, sitting around waiting for those songs to arrive. Of course, there’s a lot of preparation—all the rehearsing, all the bad songs you have to write—and then all of a sudden there’s the song in 15 minutes, and you go, ‘Oh, that’s what those 10 bad ones were about.’”

From his first solo album, 1989’s Workbook, to his semi-regular solo concerts with an acoustic 12-string guitar, Mould has long tried to create quieter songs in the country-folk vein, that get over on words and melody rather than power. But it’s only with the three Americana tracks on Body of Song that he’s finally mastered the form. “Days of Rain” is built around a twangy, mid-tempo guitar figure, a keening melody, a cello interlude and a frank confession that the jilted singer feels fragile now, even as he hopes for reconciliation. “High Fidelity” uses a pretty, roots-rock guitar arpeggio to ask the broken-hearted question, “Who could live with me in high fidelity?”

“That’s my wedding song,” chuckles Mould, newly single again after a long-term relationship. “It even has bells and organ at the end. I think it’s a primal instinct to want to settle down with one person. A good marriage is like a good band: it’s greater than the sum of its parts. I don’t see how people can use religion as a weapon against other people, to try to deny them the basic right to marry.”

“Gauze of Friendship” begins with just Mould’s voice and acoustic guitar; even when the bass and drums join in, the song still resembles a singer/songwriter number. “I had all these images of people falling in love—tattoos, birds, anchors and spider webs,” Mould explains. “I put them together and there was my Jimmy Webb song for this record. I don’t mean that flippantly at all. He’s been a big influence on me, especially around the Workbook period; I think ‘Wichita Lineman’ is one of the greatest songs ever written. How can people deny his genius? I’ve always tended to go for songs that rock but also for songs that you can whistle when you walk down the street.”

If Webb seems an unlikely source for the Hüsker Dü founder, it’s helpful to remember Mould spent his childhood in New York State’s Adirondack Mountains, near the Canadian border, listening to the Top 40 singles of the mid- and late-’60s; he was especially fond of tune-whistling numbers by The Beatles, Byrds, Kinks, Dave Clark Five and Motown. Musically precocious, Mould was playing along to those 45s on the organ by the time he was six and was writing his own songs by age eight. By the time he turned 15 in 1976, he was a good student but a confused gay teenager and social outcast.

“I was suffering through Foghat and Genesis like everyone else when I first heard The Ramones,” he recalls. “I said, ‘This is it,’ and I dove headfirst into punk rock. But the bands I gravitated towards were those that could write pop songs—The Ramones, Buzzcocks, Dickies and so on. Everyone forgets how melodic The Ramones were. They got me writing, and my first 100 songs sounded like that.”

Mould got a scholarship to Macalester College in St. Paul and spent much of his free time at Cheapo’s, a used-record store near campus. He’d listen to the latest punk records and hang out with Grant Hart, a clerk there. Mould claimed to play guitar; Hart claimed to play drums. Each told the other, “Yeah, right.” Finally, one day, they got together with Greg Norton, a bass-playing clerk at another record store, to see what might happen.

What happened was a new rock ’n’ roll guitar sound. Refining the example of bands like Wire, Crazy Horse, Mission of Burma and The Byrds, Mould found a way to bury melodic figures inside droning modal harmonies. Hart and Norton forced the guitarist to play a lead/rhythm mix at tempos far faster than any of his role models ever had. The result was a sonic signature that dominated American alt-rock for nearly 20 years and was eventually marketed as grunge.

In the early days of punk, The Sex Pistols, The Ramones, The Clash and X used the genre’s staccato chording as an echo of the vocals, an amplification of the anger and swagger in the lyrics. Mould’s genius was to turn this formula inside out. By curdling the guitar sound until it was more oppressive than buoyant, he made the guitars represent the stifling reality he was complaining about in his lyrics.

In other words, the guitars became the antagonist rather than the ally of the voice and thus allowed a richer drama to be acted out within the song. And because Mould had a knack for pop hooks, the conflict between his tuneful voice and those grinding guitars was dramatic indeed. And that led to his other innovation, breaking down rock lyrics into sentence fragments as short and choppy as the musical phrases. These shards of language not only reflected how his peers talked but also allowed Mould to imply far more than he actually said.

The trio called itself Hüsker Dü and soon hit the DIY punk-rock circuit, where they befriended like-minded West Coast bands The Minutemen and Black Flag. Hüsker Dü formed its own label, Reflex Records, and released a single in 1981, soon followed by an album on The Minutemen’s New Alliance label. Land Speed Record lived up to its title by roaring through 17 original songs in 26 minutes. Hüsker Dü released 1982’s Everything Falls Apart on Reflex and 1983’s Metal Circus on SST, the label started by Black Flag’s Greg Ginn.

Meanwhile, Minneapolis was turning into one of the most fertile music scenes in the history of American pop. Working there at the peak of their powers during the mid ’80s were Hüsker Dü, The Replacements, Soul Asylum, Prince, The Time, and Alexander O’Neal. They all played the two rooms in the First Avenue nightclub complex, and Flight Tyme, Twin Tone Records and Hüsker Dü all had studios in a converted vaudeville theater.

“The parallel I always bring up,” Mould suggests, “is Detroit in the ’60s when Motown was there at the same time as the MC5 and The Stooges. Like Detroit, Minneapolis had the luxury of both a white scene and a black scene. Hüsker Dü would be playing the small room at First Avenue, and Prince would be filming Purple Rain in the main room. You were hanging out at the water cooler; you were sharing the same receptionist; you took it for granted. It was only later, when I became a fan of dance music in ’99, that I realized how great that music by Prince and The Time had been.

“There was healthy competition within each community, a healthy competition between communities and also a respect for one another. The Replacements would write a song about Hüsker Dü like ‘Somethin’ To Du,’ and I would write one back at them, like ‘First of the Last Calls.’ When The Minutemen heard we were doing a double album, they went to Ginn and said, ‘We’re doing a double album, too.’ We were always pushing each other to see who could put on a better show, who could make a better record.

“Those were good times; there was a real sense of community, because we had a common enemy: the government and shit commercial radio. When Hüsker Dü went to Chicago, we took along The Replacements for their first gig there. When Hüsker Dü flew to California, D. Boon [of the Minutemen] would be our roadie. I’m a big fan of the rising-tide theory, that one band’s success helps everyone in the scene. If you hit the lottery, the first people you’ll invite to the party will be your friends.”

In 1985, Hüsker Dü released the two best albums of its career, Flip Your Wig and New Day Rising, two SST releases that captured both Mould and Hart at the peak of their songwriting powers. Mould’s guitar signature was still obvious, and Hart and Norton still supplied dizzying momentum, but the songs were full of humor, heartbreak and pleasure, indications that the three musicians were listening to a lot of music that wasn’t punk.

“A lot of hardcore bands were influenced only by other hardcore bands,” Mould points out, “and didn’t have the curiosity or ability to draw from other areas. But all three people in Hüsker Dü were big music fans with wide tastes. If you slow down Land Speed Record, for example, you’ll hear a lot of surf music, because Grant was a big surf fan. As early as ‘Real World’ on Metal Circus, we declared that we were not subscribing to society’s rules or to the rules of punk rock either. We were criticized for some things, but I thought the whole idea was there were no rules.”