Feedback loop: How punk pioneer Bob Mould keeps cranking out angry anthems after 40 years

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The wrath of Bob Mould is my perennial joy.

That hoarse voice, both sneering and vulnerable. That gnarled guitar style, more akin to a menacing weather pattern than a Fender Stratocaster. His stage act, which I have seen five times, is like watching a mad lumberjack being pursued by hornets. As many times as I have listened to his song Eiffel Tower High, I’ll always wonder why Mould got so vexed with that woman who left the movie theatre to buy a box of Junior Mints? Why such anguish about Junior Mints?

Anger is an energy, John Lydon once sang, but few other godfathers of punk have sustained it with such ferocity as the former front man for the pioneering indie bands Husker Du and Sugar – and with such plaid-shirted panache! No tender balladeer in his rock ’n’ roll dotage, the 58-year-old still cranks the outrage past 10. His lyrics, a little more death obsessed these days, have wizened. His style remains both experimental but identifiable.

The first time I heard Husker Du was in college. It was their swan song studio album, Warehouses: Songs and Stories. My friend Walter played it for me in his burgundy, T-Top Monte Carlo. We had been up all night driving through a bunch of Southern U.S. states, beelining to the 1988 Republican convention in New Orleans (Walter’s idea). I found the impenetrable wall of sound dizzying, almost to the point of nausea. I couldn’t hear the notes, shades of ire. At the time, Jolt Cola kept him going, Huskers his aural equivalent. Because we eagerly traded so much music back then, I owed the band a fairer and fresher ear. As with many musical discoveries, it was as much an act of friendship, one that since has crossed many cities and decades. We still talk about Mould. Many devotees would likely say Warehouses is inferior to the rest. “So polished!” “Too commercial!” “What’s with the double album?” Still, it’s the one that resonates most with me.

Last January, I finally had the excuse to call my hero, who eerily no longer seemed so much older than I. A new album coming up! “Ask him how he got his guitar sound,” Walter suggested. Admittedly I sputtered a bit during the chat, not made any easier by the fact I was on a media conveyor belt. Twenty minutes was all I had. For Bob Mould. Wha--? Is he Cardi B or something? Good for him, I thought. Still has the juice. Not so good for me, though, I was rattled. I once had 20 minutes in the sun with Hillary Clinton and was far more intelligible. And that interview took place in person with a phalanx of security who wouldn’t let me go to the bathroom.

Musical heroes can be like Kryptonite.

I couldn’t summon the courage to ask about the curious case of the Junior Mints incident. Instead we talked about his reading regimen: first hour of the day, mostly books on music, Jimmy Webb, John Lee Hooker. Exposure to news or social media made for the start of a bad day. We also discussed vocal management. On tour, he stays mum day and night. “It’s how I preserve what bits I’ve got left after 40 years of yelling,” he said.

The most rewarding part of the discussion, though, was his response to Walter’s question: how he came upon that signature sound for his guitar, that distant roaring drone you’d hear on almost two dozen albums, beginning with Husker Du’s Everything Falls Apart through his work with Sugar and 13 solo albums – almost two dozen over the span of his career.

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Mould traced his technique back to his days in the Minneapolis punk trio Husker Du, “Playing guitar in a three-piece band, you have to cover a lot of sonic real estate,” he explained. To help achieve that cloud of noise, he doesn’t lean heavily on the chord’s third note – that pivotal note that typically determines the difference between major and minor or, more crudely put, happy and sad. Instead he relies more on the chord’s root and the fifth notes, leaving a listener to grapple with the emotional ambiguity,

Along with that great wall of distortion, Mould added, he is also able to create overtones, harmonics, and ghost notes, notes that you think you hear but don’t exist. “It’s like when low-lying cloud comes in, and you see the different shades of grey and it creates a sense of heaviness and overwhelmingness,” he said.

A few weeks ago, Mould, now a resident of Berlin, came to town to promote his latest album, Sunshine Rock, a commercial and critical success, debuting in February at number 16 on Billboard’s independent album chart, wedged between Mumford and Sons and a Nirvana album he almost produced in the early 1990s, called Nevermind. For me, at least, the standout song is What Do You Want Me To Do, a bouncy pop gem that stays with you longer than a German house guest.

I have to say, I had that visceral, twentysomething fist-pumping urge to hear him bash through that track live. And to do it with a fellow Mouldster. Late last February, I went to see him perform with my old friend Jonathan, who is equally baffled by the Junior Mint incident. He was the one who first actually pointed it out to me – as well as other quirks of the Mould canon,

Arriving to the Phoenix Club, Jonathan and I fit right in at this dudefest, a manscape of male-patterning baldness, a congregation of bobbing pates worshipping the Man In Plaid.

Mould’s paced across the stage with typically relentlessness – all dressing down with no place to go. Like his indie-progeny the Pixies, he played one song right after the other, bang-bang-bang, right up to the satisfying encore of What Do You Want Me to Do? Rarely was the feedback allowed any time to rest. It was only fitting. Why would he treat his amp any different from the way he treats himself? A singer with dromedarian water retention, Mould bawled, screamed and shouted with only occasional sips from a bottle.

For me, the standout tune was Sinners and Their Repentances, originally a gothic acoustic song from his landmark album, Workbook, that included a cello. It is such an unusual song for Mould – meditative, almost religious, lyrics about personal descent, chords structured on a tonal descent. He transformed the track into to a straight-ahead thrasher, and the song still held up. I still heard the cello, years receding, friendships that remain. All those ghost notes, overwhelming, larger than life.