my freshman year in college i lived in the dorm room where bob mould tried to hang himself. that was the legend, anyway, although i'm pretty sure the location moved from room to room in bigelow basement at the whim of whoever was the residential assistant that year. even funnier was when someone told me that mould's ghost haunted the residence hall. when i pointed out that would require him to be, you know, dead, i got a blank stare.
you mean bob mould isn't dead?
no, he's not.
i interviewed him my sophomore year at mac, when i was general manager of the radio station. 'mcn was, is, and always will be more a punchline than anything else, although a decent enough opportunity for someone ambitious who wanted a career in radio broadcasting (is there any such person anymore?) to develop some good tapes. god knows, we were perpetually understaffed. see, wmcn falls on the dial at the unfortunate location of 91.7. which, if you're from the cities twin, you know is a mere twitch of a thumb from 91.1, home of minnesota public radio. as one might imagine, we had fairly strict limitations on the strength of our signal as a direct result. a whole whopping ten watts. which meant, on a good day, if you had a great antenna and there were prevailing winds from the east, you might sort of pick up the station in downtown st. paul. this was before the days of internet radio, so our audience was pretty much exclusively the couple square miles that formed the campus community.
mould went to mac for a year, i think. it might be two, but he was miserable and dropped out, which was great for the rest of us because husker du emerged as a direct result. he was in the cities doing some half-assed promotion of bob mould and i was interning for the city pages at the time, and somehow managed to bribe the music editor into passing along my request, which i think amused mould more than anything. we promised not to talk about the husker years, and it was actually one of the more memorable interviews i've ever done. and we didn't talk about that band, but about pretty much everything else. how music was changing, and how the digital format was in some significant ways changing music, making it disposable and consumable and discardable in ways it hadn't been previously. which, now that i think on it, was remarkably prophetic. if you don't believe me, think about how easily you can delete music off your hard drive, as opposed to that mountain of lps your dad still has stored in his garage, and not because he views them as collector's items. and it's not like i'm not as guilty of downloading music as the next person, but it has made music, and the acquisition of such, something of a non-event.
was incredibly gracious and well-spoken and when we went off air he indulged me a bit, let me ask about making that music during a time when punk was still finding a footing, when it hadn't become in its own right a commercial powerhouse. he was genuinely amused when i talked about how much that music had meant to me, given i was all of ten when the last legitimate album came out. he got it, though, that music in the modern era didn't define a time so much as a period, and that most benchmarks aren't cultural so much as personal. it's like, yeah, i can tell you where i was when the berlin wall fell, when the challenger exploded. and i can tell you the first time i heard husker du.
twelve years old, in the loft in our garage, sneaking cigarettes and it was sean's tape but aidan who put it in the cassette player and the sound quality was for shit but i remember hearing the drums kick in during those opening few seconds and it was like a light bulb over my head, like finding something i'd been searching for without knowing it.
which is a long and involved and roundabout way of saying that last night i dreamed in technicolor, with a kicking bass beat and a cadence that made my hands hurt in sympathy and it wasn't 1980 but it was that band, and a cigarette shared with a ghost who still smiles and laughs and watches out of the corner of his eye to make sure i don't get lost in the crowd.
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