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get it across," he elaborated. "And then when it starts to falter, you come
back to reality. It happens little by little. People accepting your music
helps. You get to the other side, to where it becomes second nature.
Sometimes I start tryng to explain the way I play. But it's like, how do you
tell people to put the palm of your hand on the 3rd fret here, and then just
start whacking strings at the 15th fret with your other hand while you're
faced at a 45 degree angle ... a lot of it is just winging it. Sometimes I'll
get off on a tangent where I can't come back. I just go blank. I get so
wrapped up in it all. I just try to completely remove myself from reality
and not think consciously about anything that anybody else is doing, not even
think about what I'm doing, just whatever sounds come out is what it is.
"I had hit a point where I wasn't getting any better and then all of a sudden I got a lot better," Mould said. "It wasn't a mastery of the instrument, but just a better understanding of how to work with it. A lot of it comes out of sheer frustration. You've got your barre chords and your suspended chords and you learn your little bit of jazz thing, you know, your 13ths. And then you're like, 'oh yeah, I can play fake lounge chords.' And then all of a sudden you just go 'wait a minute, what would happen if I decided to take the idea of hammer-ons and twist it around backwards so that I'm not using vibrato?' I have to think ahead. If I want to do a bend, I can hammer on 7th fret, 9th fret, and start by jacking the string with my hand behind the foundation note instead of doing it up there. Or doing things like trying to put the pickups at the top of the neck. A lot of how I started experimenting on my original discipline was trying to learn how to play everything backwards, and that opens up a whole new school. I had a nice period where I started finding out the value of real obnoxious feedback, and working different grooves with it. A lot of it is just breaking convention and really not listening to what other people are playing. I was never a flashy lead player, and I don't consider myself a good lead player now. But it's like you have to learn the rules before you realize there's none." Now that Warner Brothers has gotten into the act with a major league record contract, don't expect the Hüsker Dü machine to suddenly turn into the Big Red Machine. "When they signed us they knew what they were gettng," said Mould. "They were getting a band that had been set in their ways for nearly seven years and they weren't going to be very open to major change. They wanted Hüsker Dü for the band that it is, not the band they think it should be. They don't affect our creativity whatsoever." |
Still, they were not about to return the advance money. "We invested in
recording equipment," Mould allowed. "We keep our overhead really low. We
do a lot of investigating our options as far as whether it's cheaper to bring
our own or rent full PA monitors and tack it onto your guarantee. We found
the best thing is to go with a proven sound company in a certain city, bring
in your own monitor system, bring in your vital microphones, your vocal mikes
and DR lines, and just go with a good rented system. We rent lights; we don't
need to bring 150 lights with us. We just need a PA that will kick out 120
clean at the board." Roots guy that he is, bedrock individualist, Mould is
also Hüsker Dü's manager.
"I think the business has changed to where it's not enough just to be a guitar player in a band and write songs. It's nice to know what's going on and which radio stations in which cities are playing you, who's doing the interviews, what time of day, which radio stations are the ones to talk to right away, and which ones you do a phone interview with later, and how's the record selling here, and who's the local person who's going to come out to see you, and what's the guarantee, what's the break point? How much did the PA really cost? You have to play the right venue for the market you're dealing with. If you're getting a lot of commercial play you want to make sure you do a bigger show. You try to translate record sales and press and radio play into what knd of show you're going to do; not what you're going to play on stage, but what promoter, what night of the week. We were always doing New York on Wednesday just because we thought it was more valuable for us to get into Philadelphia on a weekend, or get into Baltimore or Washington on weekends. Now we do Washington on Sunday night; you always do Boston on Sunday afternoon; you always do Cleveland ob Friday night. You always do Madison Friday, Milwaukee Saturday, Chicago Sunday afternoon. "We usually do a 75 minute set. We don't write a set, we work in blocks of three or four songs that fit well together, usually taken right off the records in that order because that's why they're in that order in the first place, 'cause they work well together. We'll jump from maybe half of side one of one album to side two of another album, and then interchange a lot of songs depending on the mood, depending on what the crowd's like and depending on how we're feeling. If somebody blew their voice out, we try to avoid a song where there's a lot of high notes. We try to cover for each other. It's a matter of pacing, knowing your material Continued on page 106
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