Bob the Builder

It’s time to play a punk rock variation on the ancient What’s My Line quiz show, where you guess the musician and his new career direction. Here are the clues:
bobby21.jpg• Suppose your guitar playing and threadbare singing carry such coruscating intensity that concertgoers can hear their ears ringing days later—and this is after your solo acoustic shows.
• Suppose you were the grittier part of a songwriting team often described as punk’s Lennon and McCartney.
• Suppose Nirvana, the Pixies, My Bloody Valentine, Green Day, the Hold Steady, and much other “alternative rock” couldn’t have existed without you, and yet none of your offspring matched the melding of noise and melody, and the sheer adrenaline rush, that spills out of your best work.
• Suppose a British website theorizes that you and Bobby Hill of King of the Hill are, in fact, the same person.

The mystery guest is Bob Mould, former leader of the umlaut-worthy Twin Cities power trio Hüsker Dü, and later the potent and more refined Sugar. And his new career direction? As I discovered on a recent trip to Washington, D.C., Mould–who has been a dedicated blogger, electronica DJ and man-about-town in the district for several years–is the new advice columnist for an alternative weekly, the Washington City Paper. In his Ask Bob column, Mould invites readers to ask him questions about “music, cooking, travel, politics, religion, neighborhoods, and sociology.”

You could snicker, but I think that’s a good idea. Mould has always come off as a cerebral everyman. In an era of self-absorbed pundits with inflated egos, who better to dispense advice than the singer who used to scream “everybody’s an authority/ in a free land”? And who could offer better travel tips than the driving force behind Hüsker Dü’s “Chartered Trips” from 1984’s epic Zen Arcade, one of the most gorgeous and unsettling songs ever written about the urge to get away?

While I bet Mould has some interesting opinions about paella, Buddhism and the Supreme Court, I’d really like to get him talking about architecture. In late 1982, when Hüsker Dü started making their great leap forward, punk rock was still mostly about tearing down old spaces rather than building new ones, and it was starting to get stale. The exhilarating joyride that was first-generation punk started fragmenting into a dozen hyphenated subgenres (like cowpunk, jazz-punk, and funk-punk) that offered memorable moments without a coherent sense of direction. Meanwhile, the hardcore scene that spawned the Hüskers had started getting just as doctrinaire and predictable as the Seventies dinosaur rock punk had once replaced.

When it comes to building, flaunting hatred or chaos as your “own creation” reduces pretty quickly into tedious nihilist chic. In his excellent book Global City Blues, architect Daniel Solomon compares the hyper-modernist architecture of Rem Koolhaas, and Koolhaas’ celebration of slum chaos in places like Lagos, Nigeria, to that of a “blood-soaked punk band” engaging in “audacious, half-ironic manipulations of media culture.” The problem is, the shock of the new soon loses its ability to shock, and these ironic manipulations have no resonance with the way that people—even punks—actually live. Solomon contrasts Koolhaas’ work with that of Chinese architecture professor Wu Liangyong, who searched for a fresh context for ancient Chinese walls and structures within modern Beijing. While recognizing that radical change was essential, Dr. Wu refused to accept “the idea that change necessarily carried with it the eradication of history.”

hd1.gifHüsker Dü would have been hopeless as purveyors of nihilist chic, since they looked like the most unhip bunch of misfits ever to label themselves a punk band. Mould goes to gyms and seems much healthier these days, but at the time he resembled a paunchy accountant who had spent too many all-nighters studying tax returns. Longhaired, barefoot drummer Grant Hart, the wilder and poppier songwriter, lumbered around like he had shown up for the Sixties two decades late. Lean bassist Greg Norton, with his handlebar mustache, appeared to be just one construction worker’s helmet away from being a member of the Village People. Their lack of punk appearance was, in its own way, completely punk. So was their cryptic name, taken from a children’s memory game (Hüsker Dü is Danish for “do you remember?”)

Musically, the band took on a rebuilding project not unlike Dr. Wu’s, in which a sense of history and place were no longer the enemies of radical change. Bob Mould didn’t come off as crazy or high; he was just an ordinary guy, radically reshaping classic rock from Beatles and Who through the Ramones without turning himself into just a shadow of the bands that he once knew. His approach came off as more blunt and personal than that of perhaps his closest musical peers, Boston’s Mission of Burma, who sounded (and still sound, in their fascinating new reincarnation) more like art students using punk as their canvas. And if the Hüskers’ music was less funky and overtly political than that of their swinging California comrades and SST labelmates the Minutemen, it was even more intense and relentless.

At their peak, Hüsker Dü created a new sort of landscape architecture within a rock song. In the remarkably prolific stretch between 1983’s relentless Metal Circus EP and 1985’s pop-punk masterpiece Flip Your Wig, the band took direct aim at the false “anarchy” and romanticized chaos that punk had often become (Metal Circus’ opening salvo, Mould’s “Real World,” skewers the hardcore ethos even as it borrows and surpasses its warp-speed velocity). But beyond those lyrical concerns, they flat-out obliterated hardcore’s rigid strictures on the use of space within songs. The best example is Hüsker Dü ‘s version of the Byrds’ “Eight Miles High,” which 23 years after its release remains my favorite cover song ever.

“Eight Miles High” seems like a particularly un-punk song to cover, given its association with the psychedelic Sixties and musical complexity. The song’s signature four-note cluster and ringing guitar sound came right from the modal explorations of John Coltrane’s “India,” which the Byrds’ Roger McGuinn ingeniously transcribed for his twelve-string Rickenbacker (legend had it that the only tape in the van on a Byrds tour had Coltrane’s 1961 Village Vanguard sessions on one side, and Ravi Shankar on the other).

A typical punk cover would simply have steamrolled over the original, celebrating its noise potential while mocking its naivete—think here of the Circle Jerks doing “Wild in the Streets,” the Dickies’ version of “Nights in White Satin,” or the boatloads of middling So Cal frat-punk that have emerged since then. One of the Eighties’ jangly Paisley Underground bands, like Rain Parade or the Three O’Clock, would have treated the original like a museum piece. But Bob Mould had different ideas. While no jazzbo, he seemed to have an instinctive grasp for the Coltrane-inspired nuances of the original. Yet he took its flight metaphor in a deeper, darker direction that completely nailed, and transcended, the original’s ominous mood of danger and desperate yearning.

zen.jpgAfter “Eight Miles High” came Zen Arcade, an overreaching double-album mini-opera chronicling a teenager’s journey in and out of an urban wasteland. Completed in a single 85-hour marathon out of financial necessity, it’s not exactly an audiophile recording; Spot’s production sounds like it came out of the men’s bathroom at a sports arena, and Mould sounds like he has been gargling Drano. When Hüskers fan John Zorn played the record for Ornette Coleman, Ornette instinctively understood the band’s creative use of compressed space, but he thought the lead singer couldn’t possibly be a native English speaker.

You can forgive the record its small transgressions, though, because Zen Arcade did so much so astonishingly well. The record (and it still sounds best on vinyl) rips through gonzo teenage depression tunes, sped-up acoustic folk, definitive songs about escape and indecision, and an off-the-wall reworking of the Bo Diddley rhythm called “Hare Krsna”—and that’s just side one of four. Side Two segues from ear-blasting hardcore to a nautical dirge. Side three has the most memorable riffs and melodies, and side four offers an old-fashioned rock anthem and 14 minutes of screeching psychedelic feedback. I make no pretensions of objectivity about Zen Arcade, because it’s the record that virtually built my adulthood.

Mould’s hardscrabble realism was too dour for many tastes, including mine sometimes, but it helped him stand out during the brief period in the Eighties when Minneapolis seemed like the center of the musical universe. If the Replacements’ Paul Westerberg was the perpetually underachieving class clown who secretly wrote great stories, and Prince was the exotic transfer student, Bob was the bookish, introspective guy in the back of the room who didn’t buy that it was morning in America and was determined to fight his way through shades of grey. As one of those bookish, introspective guys, I instinctively identified with Mould’s work ethic, and still do. This wasn’t rock for self-styled bad boys who could count on their moms, wives and groupies to clean up their messes; it was fierce, dense, uncompromising music for the rest of us who had to live in the real world, get to work, and get there fast.

maryhat1.jpegIn downtown Minneapolis, a statue now commemorates the spot where the city’s most celebrated working person, the fictional Mary Richards of the Mary Tyler Moore show, famously threw her hat in the air. The statue made me remember that Hüsker Dü once covered the show’s theme song, “Love is All Around,” which was written by the same Sonny Curtis who wrote “I Fought the Law.” Bob Mould never turned the world on with his smile, but if I had my way, his likeness would be right there next to the Mary statue, with his Ibanez Flying V pointed to the skies and his feet planted firmly on the ground. Bob, I suspect, would hate having a statue. All he really wants to do is answer a few of your questions.

About Roger Moore

rocklobster3.JPGRoger Moore is a writer and musical obsessive who plays percussion instruments from around the world with an equal lack of dexterity. An environmental lawyer in his unplugged moments, he has written on subjects ranging from sustainable development practices to human rights and voting rights, as well as many music reviews. A native Chicagoan, Roger lives in Oakland, California with his wife Paula, who shares his Paul Weller fixation, and two young children, Amelia and Matthew, who enjoy dancing in circles to his Serge Gainsbourg records and falling asleep to his John Coltrane records.

Roger Moore’s Musical Timeline

1966. Dropped upside down on patio after oldest sister listened to “She Loves You” on the Beatles’ Saturday cartoon show. Ears have rung with the words “yeah, yeah, yeah” ever since.

1973. Memorized all 932 verses to Don McLean’s “American Pie.”

1975. Unsuccessfully lobbied to have “Louie Louie” named the official song of his grade school class. The teacher altered the lyrics of the winner, the Carpenters’ “I Won’t Last a Day Without You,” so that they referred to Jesus.

1977. After a trip to New Orleans, frequently broke drumheads attempting to mimic the style of the Meters’ Zigaboo Modeliste.

1979. In order to see Muddy Waters perform in Chicago, borrowed the birth certificate of a 27 year-old truck driver named Rocco.

1982. Published first music review, a glowing account of the Jam’s three-encore performance for the Chicago Reader. Reading the original, unedited piece would have taken longer than the concert itself.

1982. Spat on just before seeing the Who on the first of their 23 farewell tours, after giving applause to the previous band, the Clash.

1984. Mom: “This sounds perky. What’s it called?” Roger: “ It’s ‘That’s When I Reach for My Revolver’ by Mission of Burma.”

1985. Wrote first review of an African recording, King Sunny Ade’s Synchro System. A reader induced to buy the album by this review wrote a letter to the editor, noting that “anyone wishing a copy of this record, played only once” should contact him.

1985. At a Replacements show in Boston, helped redirect a bewildered Bob Stinson to the stage, which Bob had temporarily confused with the ladies’ bathroom.

1986. Walked forty blocks through a near-hurricane wearing a garbage bag because the Feelies were playing a show at Washington, D.C.’s 9:30 Club.

1987. Foolishly asked Alex Chilton why he had just performed “Volare.” Answer: “Because I can.”

1988. Moved to Northern California and, at a large outdoor reggae festival, discovered what Bob Marley songs sound like when sung by naked hippies.

1991. Attempted to explain to Flavor-Flav of Public Enemy that the clock hanging from his neck was at least two hours fast.

1992. Under the pseudonym Dr. Smudge, produced and performed for the Underwear of the Gods anthology, recorded live at the North Oakland Rest Home for the Bewildered. Local earplug sales skyrocketed.

1993. Attended first-ever fashion show in Chicago because Liz Phair was the opening act. Declined the complimentary bottles of cologne and moisturizer.

1997. Almost missed appointment with eventual wedding band because Sleater-Kinney performed earlier at Berkeley’s 924 Gilman Street. Recovered hearing days later.

1997. After sharing a romantic evening with Paula listening to Caetano Veloso at San Francisco’s Masonic Auditorium, purchased a Portuguese phrasebook that remains unread.

1998. Learned why you do not yell “Free Bird” at Whiskeytown's Ryan Adams in a crowded theater.

1999. During an intense bout of flu, made guttural noises bearing an uncanny resemblance to the Throat Singers of Tuva.

2000. Compiled a retrospective of music in the nineties as a fellow at the Coolwater Center for Strategic Studies and Barbecue Hut.

2001. Listened as Kahil El’Zabar, in the middle of a harrowing and funny duet show with Billy Bang, lowered his voice and spoke of the need to think of the children, whom he was concerned might grow up “unhip.”

2002. During a performance of Wilco’s “Ashes of American Flags,” barely dodged ashes of Jeff Tweedy’s cigarette.

2002. Arrived at the Alta Bates maternity ward in Berkeley with a world trance anthology specially designed to soothe Paula during Amelia’s birth, filled with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Ali Akbar Khan, and assorted other Khans. The project proved to be irrelevant to the actual process of labor.

2003. Emceed a memorable memorial concert for our friend Matthew Sperry at San Francisco’s Victoria Theater featuring a lineup of his former collaborators, including improvised music all-stars Orchesperry, Pauline Oliveros, Red Hot Tchotchkes, the cast of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and Tom Waits.

2003. Failed to persuade Ted Leo to seek the Democratic nomination for President.

2005. Prevented two-year old daughter Amelia from diving off the balcony during a performance of Pierre Dorge’s New Jungle Orchestra at the Copenhagen Jazz Festival.

2006. On a family camping trip in the Sierra Nevadas, experienced the advanced stage of psychosis that comes from listening to the thirtieth rendition of Raffi’s “Bananaphone” on the same road trip.