By: Nancy Jane Meyer
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Bob Mould - Photo by Steve Cohen (click for larger version)
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Bob Mould played at First Avenue last night, in case you missed one of the four million articles that have appeared in the Strib, Pioneer Press, the Onion, MSNBC.com, all the gay pubs, my great aunt’s knitting circle pamphlet, and numerous other national media etc etc. I believe this particular tour was actually referenced in the New Testament Book of Revelations as one of the seven harbingers of the apocalypse, for those Hüsker Dü religious types keeping score at home. Since there has been so much information disseminated over the last two weeks about this “return to rock form” tour, I won’t pain you with more of how this was the first time he’s played Hüsker songs with a band oh my god that’s gonna be so friggin awesome!! since their last gig in Chicago more than fifteen years ago. But truth be told, in the Minneapolis music scene, there are few things that matter to freaks like us more than this. We’re not simply nostalgic. We’re simply getting older, and trying to get by, and we need some help reclaiming our cold, snow ridden, pioneering musical past. Oh, the glory of the ‘80’s, and for me, Hüsker Dü was the penultimate band. Everyone in Minnesota has their first Bob. For so many here, it’s Dylan, the eccentric, folksy, cosmic connection. (For our parents, it was Newhart, a pallid phenomenon I will never understand.) For the rest of us, it’s Mould, as real and as necessary as downtown street pavement.
As a performer, typically, you give Bob some love, and he gives back. I’ve seen more Bob shows than I can shake a stick at, and that’s how it’s always been. He likes to narrate, to tell stories, have a bit of banter back and forth with the crowd. And he can dish it out: when he came to First Avenue for the Workbook tour, he turned around to Anton Fier at one point and said, “So that’s what it’s like to play with a real drummer.” For the most part, he’s a sensitive, responsive guy, though this was not really the case last night, in my view. He seemed comfortable, but a bit removed from place and circumstance.
By contrast, The Taste of Minnesota show in July featured a gregarious Bob, asking us what our favorite crappy TofM food item was, and requesting that someone bring him a delicious pork-on-a-stick. He apologized for his blue language to the folks there with children under five, saying that he kept forgetting it was a family show, and mentioned how much he looked forward to playing the club downtown Minneapolis in September. It felt like we were in Bob’s backyard, frolicking and playing croquet and drinking mint juleps, a fun little late afternoon in St. Paul with a charismatic artist who was having a good time playing the old great Workbook songs, and prefacing the new ones with blithe yet charming introductions. (It reminded me of my most memorable Bob show, at the Knitting Factory in New York years ago on a hot summer eve, when Bob saw that I, seemingly the only female creature in the room under 5’5”, was getting smothered next to a stack of amps, and stopped the performance to ask the men standing next to me to hoist me up on top of the large Peavey, out of harm’s way. You can see why I adore him so very much.)
July’s show was more spontaneous and engaging than last night’s outing, as Bob didn’t say anything much past “How do we sound, Minneapolis?!” The show opened, predictably, if you’ve read any of the interviews with him lately, with Sugar: “The Act We Act,” “Good Idea” and “Changes.” Bob rocket-hurtled around the stage, frequently turning his back on us to distortion-serenade his amp. He was in fine shape, body and voice, the new band solid and rousing, with Fugazi drummer Brendan Canty, Liz Phair collaborator/former singer/ songwriter of the band Verbow Jason Narducy, and underground electronica phenom Richard Morel, with whom Bob has been collaborating as a DJ and in recordings in D.C. Then came a couple of songs off the new album, with which I’m not that familiar (I kind of lost track of Bob around the Last Dog and Pony Show and Modulate and haven’t really caught up). They sounded very post-Sugar, as in same style but afterwards refined and a bit more deconstructively introspective. One was a slow dance number, which was at best roller rink romantic, at worst reminiscent of Patrick Swayze’s “She’s Like the Wind,” I’m saddened to say. And then there was the odd new First Avenue stage backdrop, a demented monocolor montage—a kind of Scooby Doo Sherwood Forest where a deranged, intoxicated Harold and the Purple Crayon spent happy hour coloring the set. Very weird, and quite distracting when one focused entirely on its lack of artistic merit for any length of time. Just wasn’t helping things along.
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Bob Mould at First Avenue - Photo by Steve Cohen
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Anyway, the crowd was only mildy enthusiastic, surprisingly, when the first Hüsker song finally emerged forth like a pined after musical Holy Grail--nobody seemed to even recognize “Hardly Getting Over It” until half way through. That was when I left my companion, Vamp Music Source’s ubiquitous Everyman Craig Grossman, to go outside for some fresh air, where I nearly barreled headlong into the displaced-from-Hurricane-Katrina Dave Pirner, and had a nice chat with the Pioneer Press’s music columnist Ross Raihala, who commented that he was glad he wasn’t the only one who was “nonplussed” by this new Bob Mould Band. Outside I heard echoes of “Celebrated Summer” and when I went back in, “Helpless“ followed by an encore of “If I Can’t Change Your Mind” played at the speed of light. The tempos of the most of the Sugar songs, in particular “Hoover Dam,” during the set were all too fast for my absurdly refined taste, especially when contrasted against the slow motion Hüsker Dü selections. It was as if Bob didn’t want us to miss that he was playing them for us, but these lanquid notational reincarnations just didn’t thrill me, and regrettably so.
Postscript: What did “my first Bob” mean to me?
I was sixteen years old when I became obsessed with Hüsker Dü. In response, my first-ring suburban parents determined that I must be doing drugs. Ironically, they pulled me out of 1st period (it was 1986) just-say-no health class and forced me to see a bespectacled therapist with a face like a walrus and a voice like Gomer Pyle. They ransacked my room looking for the evidence: paraphernalia, residue, colorful pills, needles, small vials of murky liquid, anything. All they found was Hüsker vinyl on a lo-fi record player. It only had one speaker that I put on an overturned metal garbage can so that Zen Arcade could echo and vibrate furiously. I can only imagine how it sounded through the floor down into my parents’ bedroom at 3 a.m.—the acid harshness of Bob Mould’s guitar, the tinny thumping of Grant Hart’s high hat, the relentless prison block of sound. To Mary and Don Meyer, Flip Your Wig portended ecstasy-fueled devil worship. I thought it was splendorous transcendence, the band that took me out of myself, out of my sterile suburban incarceration--the infuriating, confining stockyard of high school girlhood. What did a brainy teenage female misfit classical violinist living in Roseville have in common with Bob Mould? Not a goddamn thing, but it was still fucking lovely.
And quite honestly, given the predictable feel of the show last night, that’s the way I’d prefer to remember my Bob, overturned on a metal garbage can in my bedroom. In a world where everything seems staged and easily fast-forwarded through, I was looking to this show for far more than I got. Maybe that was my mistake, or maybe not. Bob Mould just didn’t seem to take much joy in being back on the 7th Street pavement where, as he put it in a recent interview, he grew up as a performer and artist.
Location Info:
First Avenue
Artist Info: Bob Mould
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