New Grey Rising

By David Pyndus

A 24-year-old guitarist in a punk band whose sound is a cross between the Cramps and the Rat Pack asked me “whom” I wanted to hear at the ACL Fest. “Bob Mould” came to mind (then we spoke of the crappy sound of Husker Du’s SST records and ridiculed Coldplay as a matter of course). Even when Mould lived in Austin, as he did a decade ago during the recording of his 1996 self-titled (the “hub cap”) album, he was not someone who played locally.

Sometimes I thought I caught a glimpse of him at a club, but it’s hard to know in the darkness. It was known that Mould ate at a certain vegetarian restaurant near downtown, and when my sometimes-vegetarian girlfriend and I would go there to eat noodles, I’d scan the room. At the time, he fronted a power trio called Sugar, which many indie fans thought the best American rock band of the early 1990s.

Mould appeared at an "anti-South by Southwest" concert hosted by Lubbock expatriate Jimmie Dale Gilmore that had a folkie cowboy flavor. Though his first post-Husker release was the songwriterish Workbook, Mould seemed out of place at this gig with acoustic activists like Michelle Shocked. I can’t remember what he sang that night, or even if he did sing, I just have a hazy memory of him standing up next to a wooden stool looking like he could use a shot of whiskey. It was a far cry from the two-night stand Sugar played at the city’s fabled (now demolished) Liberty Lunch club a couple of years earlier during the Copper Blue tour, when Mould and company unleashed a wall of sound so unrelenting that it was hard to hear any of his words over the melodic cacophony.

Sugar followed up Copper Blue with a fury-fueled mini-CD called Beaster and then broke up after its second full-length File Under Easy Listening failed to boost excitement levels. His next album was simply called Bob Mould, and he played all the instruments himself. The “hub cap” album as it became known was filled with beautifully sad songs, and even a lament about the former scene passing him by in “I Hate Alternative Rock” where he wryly noted: “The Twentieth Century has not been particularly kind to me.” He was learning to relax about life a bit with deadpan humor and finding his voice as a singer. I heard he also gave up his nicotine habit.

Only two years later, he said he was getting too old for the game, possibly losing his hearing (what?), and expressed boredom at the repetitive grind. The Last Dog and Pony Show came out in 1998, accompanied by a worldwide tour with a full band, and then he was going to hang up his electric guitar. I was primed to see him in this last burst of glory, but Mould had moved to Manhattan and the Dog and Pony tour did not come anywhere near Texas. I listened to “New #1," “Vaporub” and “Reflecting Pool” over and over and hated the experimental track “Megamanic,” which was a poor hint of things to come. My girlfriend moved away.

Mould began playing solo shows with a variety of acoustic guitars. He returned to Austin’s Liberty Lunch for one more gig, the night before the club shuttered its doors for good in summer 1999 when the property was to be redeveloped to build a high-tech company. He was at ease in shorts and a T-shirt, sitting on a chair amid guitars and pedals and played songs dating back to Husker days, a late acceptance of his early history in Minneapolis. He looked fit and appeared to have lost weight. He made a joke about Madonna’s music (“Ray Of Light”) finally sounding good. Then he strangely took a job consulting for and traveling with the World Championship Wrestling group.

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