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BOB MOULD Continued from page 12 and knowing how your material is going to affect people. You know, how you run key changes together, how you run tempos together. We traditionally come out for about 25-30 minutes of solid blasting, where it's really loud and pretty uptempo and pretty aggressive. We'll take it down for about 15-20 to give people just a little bit of a breather. We never used to give people a breather before. We used to play 45 minutes straight, just as fast as we could. Some nights my hands are just so tired that I cannot bend a note a whole third. I can't do it. And some nights the acoustics in the room just don't allow your playing to come across as well as it should. Those nights you fall back into your per the record playing. But the good nights are real good. Sometimes I think it's the best we ever played and people come up to us and go, 'wow, that was weird.'" Starting from the bottom, the Hüsker Dü sound is powered by two Marshall cabinets with 12 volt Celestions, two Yamaha 100 watt heads, a Fender Concert and a British Fender Twin Junior on top. "So I'm using a combination of a lot of solid state stuff to get a real heavy low end out of it and then I'm using tube amps on the top to get a really screaming high end," Mould explained. "I've got three Ibanez 1975 Flying Vs. I got one about nine years ago, and then I got a second one. Then I found another '75 Ibanez. Somebody had pulled the stock pickup out of the lead position and put a PAF in there. Ibanez had the super 70's pickup on the Artist's Series, sort of like a jazz sounding pickup, real microphonic but real clean. Then I run all that stuff through an old MXR distortion. So it's really cool cause you still have some of the original bite left after the wash and the noise." A homemade band from the get-go, Hüsker Dü has left behind the basement days— in an East St. Paul church— but Bob Mould won't soon forget his earnest beginnings. "It's just a matter of taking all the money that your band makes and keepiong it for the band and not spending it on beer and pizza after the show. When we did our first single we pressed up 2,750 copies and thought it would be reasonable. |
It turned out to be way too many for the first outing. We only sold 1000
or so. We got loans and kept deferring them to rent a truck to do a tour.
Zen Arcade was the big turning point for the band. We started adding
a lot of things to the mix— acoustics, keyboards, doing a lot of
backwards stuff. Everybody thinks we did a lot of tape looping, but it was
all straight backwards playing. We never use loops. We did that double
record in 80 hours. It cost $4000." Their new release, Warehouse: Songs
and Stories, also a double album, took nine weeks to record, but they
brought it in for $30,000, still a pittance by today's standards. "We spend
more now because we have the luxury of making sure that the drums sound
exactly the way they should, so that we don't have to mess around later on,"
Mould explained. "It was also material we hadn't worked out live before we
went in, so we needed time for sonic explorations. As far as production goes,
it's just a matter of quality control, trying to improve on your sound."
Back in humbler times, such niceties seemed as far away as Hüsker Dü's first trip West. "We spent about four months practicing and writing two sets of material; after that it took almost a year and a half before we played out of town, because we were getting our chops together. Then we put out a single and then we hit the road, started touring, started living on a wing and a prayer. We just got in a truck and went," Mould said. "We had some friends along the way who had some contacts with promoters and we tried to get on shows for $10, $20, $30— anythng we could do. We learned a lot about life. We were sleeping on people's floors until last spring. Living on three dollars a day is not a lot of fun. Then the critics in the bigger papers started going, 'Look, I don't like this kind of music, but these guys have an edge and an energy and a way with a crowd that nobody else has.' And it just started filtering back and a buzz got started and once it gets started, then you can do real well. And then the buzz gets real big, and that's when they set you up for the backlash, which is inevitable. "You've got to have a tough skin," Mould concluded. "If you're a musician, you've got to be calloused all over." |