NYT Sunday Book Review by ROBERT CHRISTGAU
It was early 1983, probably, after a Everything Falls Apart EP presaged Hsker Ds depart from hard-core punk as well as prior to a Metal Circus EP made it official. Just a gig during a crummy club near CBGB, as well as late after 1. There werent a dozen onlookers, yet Hsker Ds dual early annals were knockouts, as well as which Minneapolis trio never came east, so there you were. From a booth in behind a song sounded terrific: headlong as well as enormous, a guitar unfashionably full, expressive as well as unending, with dual raving vocalists swapping leads upon songs whose words were tough to understand as well as whose tunes werent. Another half-dozen extraordinary fans drifted in. And then, median through, a guitarist passed in to a small other dimension. When he stepped yowling off a low stage, most of us gravitated closer, glancing around as well as jolt a heads.
Lisa Haun/Getty Images
A roller coaster screaming off a tracks: from left, Greg Norton, Grant Hart as well as Bob Mould, circa 1987.
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Excerpt: See a Little Light (Google Books)
Excerpt: Hsker D (Google Books)
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Books of The Times: See a Little Light by Bob Mould (June 15, 2011)
The climax was a bands right away mythological cover of Eight Miles High, which transformed a Byrds peaceful paean to a chemical-technological high in to a roller coaster carried screaming off a tracks bruising as well as exhilarating, leaving a supplement both very as well as barely alive. Three decades after we still feel propitious to have experienced which mutation of rage in to flight. Not usually did Hsker D generate an considerable recorded bequest during their eight years upon earth, they were inhuman live as noted onstage as Nirvana or a Rolling Stones. They merit a single good book, not these dual mediocre ones.
The biographer Bob Mould was Hsker Ds guitarist as well as energy source, as well as he has mixed feelings about it. Hes led an eventful life, as well as most of his adulthood postdates his initial bands permanently acrimonious breakup in Jan 1988. It must have harm him to give his disloyal mates a 125 pages he manages in See a Little Light. But even with editorial advice from Michael Azerrad, whose 2001 indie-rock history, Our Band Could Be Your Life, looms admonishingly over both books, a most successive projects he sum dont generate much pull, as well as conjunction does a Memphis-based journalist Andrew Earless story of Hsker D proper. Earles plods usefully by a bands catalog as well as chronicles a trail they blazed upon a nascent indie circuit in shows hes as well immature to have witnessed. But slave he does, as well as without any access to a guitarist with his own book in a works.
This is not to blame Mould, exactly. He did have a story to sell, as well as yet a Hsker D angle couldnt have harm his advance, a core assembly for his book is Bob Mould fans, who do very much exist as such. Unlike a Hsker D bassist, Greg Norton, right away aboundin! g as a restaurateur in Minnesota, or a bands drummer as well as co-leader, Grant Hart, still scuffling in a Twin Cities, however valiantly Earles praises his negligible solo music, Mould, during 50, remains a modestly prominent musician. Starting with a 175 I.Q. he confesses to upon Page 6, he wants to insist how which happened in his own words.
Even some-more in his discourse than in Earless somewhat reduction certain account, Mould comes opposite as an greatly driven man. As Earles insists, Hart is a talent as well as substantially a nice guy, as well as he wasnt usually Moulds creative partner. He was in most respects also Moulds commercial operation partner, as a dual ran Hsker Ds bustling small tag (Reflex Records), constructed Hsker Ds most annals as well as requisitioned Hsker Ds grueling tours. (Norton drove.) But as Mould walks away from drink as well as speed as well as after steroids; negotiates a labyrinthine ups as well as downs of a record business; relocates from Minnesota to New York to Austin to New York to Washington to San Francisco, with real estate deals each step of a way; spends six months scripting veteran wrestling; as well as D.J.s a parties he promotes in a gay bear subculture where he finally finds a fit for his lifelong homosexuality, theres no disbelief whos a achiever of a two, or who deserves a memoir.
The complaint is which Bob Mould couldnt be a usually entirely shaped tellurian being to have entered Bob Moulds life story, yet solely for his bitterly abusive yet heroically supportive father as well as a single departed lover, he seems to be. For financial reasons he lays out as well as personal ones he leaves indistinct, he cares so small for Hart as well as Norton which they appear similar to repositories of minor vices similar to enervation as well as acquiescence deficiencies Mould feels were some-more destructive in a end than Harts dark heroin habit. His stories about a celebrities whose paths he crosses stay upon a terse surface. An! d his pr olonged dealings with a series of fascinating, not-quite-major figures a down-and-dirty SST Records house producer, Spot; a Warner Brothers A&R enchantress Karin Berg; a drum maestro Anton Fier; Moulds larger-than-life wrestling colleagues destroy to result in a impression sketches such characters deserve. For an amateur, Moulds an efficient stylist. But he possibly leaves his gifts as a raconteur during a dinner table or hasnt matured in to consolation quite as ripely as he thinks.
Robert Christgau writes a record blog Expert Witness for msn.com.
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