The Spin Interview: Bob Mould

Bob Mould / Photo by Richard Kern

After your 1998 solo album, The Last Dog and Pony Show, you announced that you were done doing big rock tours. Why did you feel the need to make that announcement, especially since you've done rock tours since?
After almost 20 years of doing it, I was 37 and wanted to have a different life. I wanted to spend more time living in New York City as a gay man, rather than being in a band playing rock'n'roll. It was more spiritual than just not wanting to play loud anymore. And there is a part of me that fears getting older and being a shadow of myself, getting up onstage and not looking like the person who used to do the second side of Zen Arcade. Because that's a lot of crazy energy, a lot of anger and aggression. Do I want to be the guy who looks like he shouldn't be doing this anymore?

But you had already quit drinking at that point, right?
I actually got sober in the middle of '86, toward the end of Hüsker Dü -- that's hard enough to do while in any band, but while in that band…[Laughs] The first thing I did when I got off the road in '99 was start going to the gym regularly. I've got a lot of work to do, because I'm starting to slip again.

Hüsker Dü are considered the first punk band to have signed to a major label, and I was just watching this clip of you guys on Joan Rivers' late-night talk show in 1987. After you finish playing "Could You Be the One?" you sit down for an interview, and even she starts giving you shit about selling out.
That was pretty cool, actually.

Having gone through all that blowback, as well as having formed your own labels, do you feel like you have a unique vantage point when it comes to the current state of the industry?
I still own all the Sugar stuff. I've always tried to protect my work as much as possible, but at the end of the day, this is the entertainment business. I think of music as the highest art form there is, but not everyone involved with promoting a record may feel that way. It's not the Guggenheim. I'm the type of person who still has the seven-inches I had when I was five years old. The music is sacred and so is the ritual, the backstory that takes you to the song that changes your life. The Internet is wonderful for getting music going and for keeping people connected, but the ISPs became the labels years ago. The labels did it to themselves -- there was no artist development; they took advantage of the audience and thought people would buy CDs forever and replenish the catalogs. New bands today have nothing but what they can sell at their shows. And how they get people to those shows, God only knows. Don't quit your day job. Try to hold on to your publishing and pray.

You've released your own material in the past. What's the benefit of being on a label at all at this point?
The promotional muscle -- I get the audience Anti- has built from being a known brand, selling similar artists to that audience.

Do you think bands today suffer from not having local rivalries the way you guys had with the Replacements? That sense of competition?
Oh, you mean like Fiddy and Kanye? What a circus. That was the best they could come up with all year? That was the Super Bowl? That was so pro wrestling. That was a loser-retires match.

Speaking of which, you wrote scripts for World Championship Wrestling in the '90s. Do you miss that at all?
I don't miss it. That was a hard job. It was like writing a Broadway show every night, and there's no off-season.

How did that even come about?
I grew up watching wrestling and went to matches at the Montreal Forum. It was huge in the Twin Cities, too. I got to know people in the business, like Jesse Ventura, and eventually weaseled my way into hanging around it. Once I knew how it worked, I became a real student. I'm a quick learner. I had friends at WCW in Atlanta who used to ask me for ideas, and in the fall of '99, they asked me to take a job.

Having witnessed both drug use in rock and steroid use in wrestling firsthand, do you think there's a double standard in society? They're both forms of entertainment, but with one, the drugs are commonly accepted as part of the lifestyle, while in the other, people react with such outrage.
I knew Chris Benoit [the wrestler who killed himself, his wife, and their seven-year-old son in June 2007] really well, so that was a lot for me to take. But let's look at it for a minute: With wrestling, people like to use the word "fake," but those guys are the toughest human beings on earth. You fall eight feet flat on your back, you think that doesn't hurt? Of course the fights are predetermined, but "fake" is a strange word. The biggest problem with all the deaths in wrestling, though, isn't the steroids; it's the painkillers. The government is barking up the wrong tree with these investigations. But it is very similar to rock -- we want to see people thrown from 12 feet and show up the next day for work.

Was it ever weird being openly gay in pro wrestling, a form of entertainment where so many of the fans seem ignorant of the homoerotic tendencies?
Oh, how could anyone miss the homoerotic tendencies?

Today you regularly update a blog in which you talk about your everyday life. That sort of transparency would have been unthinkable years ago. I remember being scared of you when you were in Hüsker Dü -- you were just this imposing, gruff figure.
Everyone was scared of me. But 20 years ago, you had good reason to be. It was the Reagan years, our culture was bad, and I was a young, confused homosexual living in a country that refused to acknowledge me as a human. That will make you angry. Culture progresses with the technology -- it's not like the first time you saw Alice Cooper and thought he was out of his mind. You might see pictures of a band or see a show [back then], but you'd have to fill in the rest yourself.

Both you and Grant Hart were gay, but no one ever spoke about that while Hüsker Dü were active. Looking back, do you wish you had been more open? Would that have even been possible?
We never talked about it that much. As an artist, writing at the time gender-neutral songs, I wanted everyone to be included, and had the band been labeled as gay music, no one would have listened. Fast-forward a few years to 1994: Spin sends Dennis Cooper to spend two days with me in Austin, saying that if I didn't come out, they were going to out me. So I capitulated, and now everything's good, but I came from a very small town and they had to deal with that. One of my friends from high school who was also gay went away and then got killed when he came back. At this point in my life, I feel assured and centered and whole, but to get here? Jesus.

Hüsker Dü may have had the most contentious breakup of any band in recent history. Did any of the wounds heal after you and Grant played together in 2004 at the benefit for Soul Asylum's Karl Mueller?
Grant got ahold of my lawyer, who gave him my number for some reason, and he asked if he could play a song with me at the show. At the moment, given the gravity of Karl's situation, I tried for the final time to put all that away and just said sure. [Editor's note: Mueller succumbed to cancer in 2005.] We did two songs, we talked for five or ten minutes, and someone destroyed my dressing room by vomiting all over it. I figured, clearly, someone's trying to tell me something. So I packed up my stuff. Grant wanted to hang out a little more, but I'd had enough. I mean, it wasn't him, but this is why…it's not even about the two of us. There's been a number of times over the past 20 years that we've tried to come together professionally to sort out business matters, and it's always difficult. I'm difficult, Grant's difficult. That's why I walked away from it and don't go back, for my own health and sanity. Grant was really nice at the benefit; we were both being careful and respectful, and then afterward I read somewhere that he was sticking it to me again. I just don't have time for that.