POLITICIANS AND MOVIE-MAKERS CALL IT A

dog and pony show: going out there and selling what you've got.

Bob Mould, a fond and frequent user of metaphor, found in that one

something fatalistic and pejorative that tickled him. With a slap of finality,

he has called his new album The Last Dog And Pony Show. "That's it

now," he will say, looking to amuse. "I want to go and make rap

records." It has taken Mould almost 38 years of his life - and 18 years

of recording - to reach the point where many of his habits, instincts

and working methods strike him as being no longer appropriate or

even tolerable. In his early twenties he was the big guy in

Husker Du, a figure described by the NME as "half man, half lager",

screaming verses of pain and anger over a power trio attack that sounded

like a frantic Byrds exploding in a room full of bottles. Then there was

the slimmed-down Mould of 1989 whose first solo album Workbook, was one of

the year's most pleasant surprises. Here was a calmer, more studied,

sometimes even gentle musician, even if his words still spoke of a daily

hell. More recently, there was the 32-year-old Mould who came to Europe

with Sugar: a man trying to re-establish his position in a post-Nevermind

climate by composing the blood-curdling work, Beaster, in which he was

crucified like Christ - the album entered the UK album charts at Number 3.

His career has outlasted three major American genres: hardcore punk,

alternative rock and grunge. As each one fell from grace, he remained

exempt from the backlash. He had achieved seniority by the relatively

young age of 26, his influence on modern rock acknowledged ever since.

Even in a personality-led industry like the rock business, Mould, a

clinical depressive, a former alcoholic and a homosexual, remains - in the

best sense - a non-story. He approaches his forties as one of the most

critically acclaimed and respected artists of the 1980s and '90s.

Until this summer, he had not visited Britain in four years. In 1994 the

three members of Sugar met in Atlanta to commence work on their third album

- just as the success of Parklife was threatening to have serious

ramifications in the UK for Mould's brand of intense American rock. As it

happened, Sugar fluffed the recording process, made the album again and,

amid weariness and disappointment, disbanded the following year. Hardly

anyone noticed.

After that came what Mould calls an "episode"; a long depression that

lasted until the summer of 1996. An album emerged that year - titled

simply Bob Mould - that hinted strongly that he had been close to suicide.

It was barely promoted, contained no singles and was sung and played

entirely by Mould himself. "Not the most uplifting of records," he now

admits. "I still don't have a good explanation for it."

The depression prompted one realisation, at least; life could not go on

like that.

A FLOCK OF SEAGULLS, THE STYLISTICS, GLENN MEDEIROS

and the Pixies all have something in common: they have all mixed at least

one of their albums at Carriage House Studios, Stamford, Connecticut.

The setting is secluded - a small suburban building patrolled by an

angry dog - without being isolated. Mould is sharing the premises

with a group of theatre people who are putting on a children's show in

the town; this involves them playing Do Re Mi from The Sound Of Music

on a synthesizer for hours at a stretch. Now would be the time for Bob Mould

to launch into one of his famous screams.

But Mould in person is a quiet, somewhat unassertive character who

resembles a cross between Baloo the Bear and a sprts coach who has the

unexpected ability to sit absolutely still.

"As I get older," he sighs, "I'm realising the maybe I didn't allow myself

to have as much fun as I should. It sucks, but I've still got a lot of

time to fix it."

It is March 1998 and Mould is better now. It dawned on him earlier this

year that he could pinpoint exactly when "it all started to go wrong" -

that is, when the painful journey to the Bob Mould album began. A Village

Voice poll in 1985 listed the 10 best albums of the previous 12 months.

Husker Du, always a prolific band, were placed twice.

"That was the day it all stopped being fun for me," he says gravely. "All

of a sudden - and I don't know why it's taken me 13 years to realise it -

but I felt like I had this obligation to make great records instead of the

records I liked."

Mould makes such a high-minded ambition sound like a life sentence: the

more internal, the more distressed he got, the more popular he became.

"When Bob Mould bleeds, it's more fun for everyone else," he says. "But

what does it do to me? When I have to do the same old witch trials every

night?" Hence the outlandish Beaster, with Bob nailed to the cross so that

the grunge kids of the world might mosh more enjoyably

But all this martyr stuff is playing itself out. There are songs on The

Last Dog And Pony Show that hint at optimism - and Mould himself talks of

finding a new balance in his world. For example, he considers 1996 a good

year because he wrote only three songs. That autumn, moreover, he

experienced a revelation in Minneapolis, the city in which Husker Du were

formed. On a night off from touring, he attended two concerts at nearby

venues: Richard Thompson and Neil Young & Crazy Horse.

"I was going back and forth between the two shows, and one of them was

really classy and the other really tired. I love Neil Young, I love seeing

him play acoustic, but [he and Crazy Horse] are up there jamming that same

E chord. It was like, Are you going to buy that amp, Neil, or are you just

trying it out? Richard was doing the thing with Danny [Thompson] and it

was just a lot more tasteful. Richard and Neil Young are two people I

really have a lot of respect for, and I sort of looked at it, like, I don't

want to be 43, 46 years old, up there playing Sugar songs with a big old

stack of amps behind me."

Mould has been playing solo acoustic shows since 1989, in between, and as a

respite from, the raucous electric visits of Sugar and his Bob Mould Band

of the early '90s. He has now decided that this is the best way to go.

Therefore, when his new band has finished touring The Last Dog And Pony

Show in November 1998, Mould will become a full-time unplugged artist,

venturing out as and when he has a window in his personal life.

"I don't want to be on the road when my dog dies," he says surprisingly.

"He's 11. I don't want to make the call home and hear, 'Oh, Domino died.'

It's not like I'm quitting touring because of my dog. But that's one of

many things. When I was away for five weeks in Austin [recording] this

album, the first night I came home I wanted to have some ice-cream before I

went to bed, and I couldn't remember where the bowls were. And that shit

bothers me. What else have I missed?"

The first wave of Husker Du fans are now in their mid to late thirties and

Mould presumes they no longer want to stand in a hall listening to a

deafening racket, any more than he wants to stand on stage creating it.

Whereas the Mould of the Sugar era worried about how to find newer and more

extreme guitar sounds to match those of Sonic Youth, the Pixies and his own

Husker Du, the Bob of today frets about exactitudes of tone and tempo, and

about how The Last Dog And Pony Show will sound through headphones.

Well, actually, it will sound like a compendium of the various Bob Mould

albums since Workbook. "Is this a good album? Sure. Is it my best album?

Nah." The songs are covered in acoustic and electric guitars, with

metronomic snare-drum fills and the sort of agonised vocals that would

sound startling if Mould were a newcomer. But it's his 15th album and

these are places he's taken us to before.

"Sometimes I get so sick of what I do," he scowls. "Two weeks into this

record I was like, I hate this record. Here it is, another high quality,

somewhat introspective, somewhat poppy Bob Mould record - exactly what

people have been expecting since fucking 1985. Why don't I have the nerve

to do something else?

As it happens, the album contains one example of "something else". This is

a track called Megamanic - recorded with heavy use of sampling - the mere

mention of which causes Mould and engineer Wilson to exchange "oops"

grimaces and knowing laughter. Conceived during a break from all the

guitar songs, it's not like anything he has recorded before. A growling,

machine-driven rap with free-associating, Beck-esque lyrics, it features a

James Brown-style guitar lick and a prominent sampled sound very like the

keyboard-simulated ney that meandered through Baby You're A Rich Man.

(Just as Mould feared, however, he lost his nerve a little, rendering the

ney sound almost inaudible in the final mix.)

"It's been cool to get over my machine phobia," he says, basking in the

temporary acclaim for Megamanic. "I feel like I can embrace it a little

bit more. It took a long time for me, because I grew up in [the time of]

'Disco Sucks'."

A CHILDHOOD BEATLES FAN; BOB MOULD PICKED

up his first music-related grudge at the age of nine when he opened

the Daily News in upstate New York to learn that the Fab Four had

split. To his outrage, the last paragraph claimed that a British R&B

group called Led Zeppelin was preparing to fill the gap. Mould has

never liked Zeppelin since.

At school, there were attempts to get him to play the tuba - he was a hefty

lad even then - but he subsequently tired of music altogether, instead

playing basketball and "trying to fit in". By the mid-'70s he found

himself mixing with Kiss and Aerosmith fans. "I grew up in the hell that

was the first Boston album," he reminisces frostily. "Then there was that

group of kids that listened to Foghat all the time. But worst was the guy

I used to buy pot from in high school. Every time I went to his house, I'd

walk in and he'd be sitting there, shaking the stuff through his mom's

spaghetti strainer, with fucking Man On The Silver Mountain from the first

Rainbow album. Dio and Blackmore: two hells in one."

The first Ramones album marked his card as a punk rock fan, and on Sunday

nights he would tune into the radio station in Montreal - it phased in and

out as he listened - and hear songs like Anarchy In The UK. Not yet 18, he

left New York state for college in St. Paul, Minnesota to study

mathematics, with a view towards engineering of some kind, possibly

nuclear. "I went to a [college] that was supposed to be a great liberal

arts school that Humphrey and Mondale taught at. It was the fall of '78

and there were all these people my age dressed up in suits with briefcases,

talking about his guy Reagan who was going to run for President and change

the world. I hated those kids."

"I run into people I went to college with that are really successful now,"

Mould grins. "There's a guy called Peter Berg who's on Chicago Hope, a big

TV star in America. I didn't know him then, but I've talked to him since

and he was like, 'I was terrified of you, man. You had a look in your eye

like you were going to kill somebody.'"

The Young Republicans drove him to the bosom of Grant Hart, a drummer who

worked in a record shop near the college. Bassist Greg Norton worked in

another record shop, and Husker Du were underway. There was a punk scene

in St. Paul/Minneapolis, but it was "sort of arty and suburban. When

Husker Du showed up, being their ugly, speed-freak-looking selves, we were

immediately the outcasts." They snorted up trucker sulphate, claiming to

be the fastest band in America. But there was sensitivity and, in Mould's

case, a reservoir of anger left over from childhood. Their inspiration for

the name Husker Du is a board game that tests the memory. The slogan of

the game is "in which the child can outwit the adult".

When they played London's Camden Palace in May 1985, one reviewer wrote

that Mould's guitar playing "shames every punk player who walked a stage".

Two of the band (songwriter/vocalists Mould and Hart) had proud paunches;

the other sported a handlebar moustache and did amazing leaps on-stage.

The band's 1984 double album Zen Arcade, on the indie label SST, remains a

high watermark in '80s rock: brutal, odd, ambitious and diverse, with 23

songs that ranged in length from less than one minute to almost 14.

That same year, Warner Bros declared an interest. They eventually signed

in 1986 after two further albums for SST, New Day Rising and Flip Your Wig.

"We thought more people would like our music if they could get it,"

reasons Mould. "At the time, the K-Marts and the Woolworths of the world

didn't carry SST records. We thought, We've got to get out of the punk

rock ghetto. We should go for it."

With their major label debut Candy Apple Grey in 1986, a division between

Mould and Hart began to show. They had made four albums in 18 months, one

a double. "I was tired," Mould admits. "I'd stopped drinking in '86,

which changed my outlook on everything. A lot of the people I thought were

my friends dropped away because I wasn't drinking any more." Hart, with

whom Mould is these days back on speaking terms, recalled in 1990: "A lot

of the times in Husker Du you'd end up in a silent van across America. We

often couldn't clear the air."

While Husker Du recorded their next album, R.E.M. were just missing the US

Top 20 with Life's Rich Pageant. Warners had high hopes for the Huskers -

Mould, ever the pragmatist, estimates the band's following at no larger

than 150,000 - but Mould and Hart put an immediate fly in the marketing

department's ointment by demanding another double album. It had to be a

double, because neither of them would back down on their quota of songs.

To the outside world, Husker Du were really clicking into place. In

actuality, the band was falling apart. In February 1987, one week prior to

a scheduled US tour, their 24-year-old manager, David Savoy Jr, committed

suicide by jumping from a bridge in Minneapolis.

"That just sent everybody to their corners," Mould groans. "Nobody knew

how to deal with that. If anything was a fucking sign When things get to

the point where people in your inner circle are killing themselves, it's

usually a good time to stop. I know that now. In '87 I wasn't so smart.

We postponed the tour for a while, but then we went and rode our little

wagon out there."

Mould lost interest in dealing with Hart, who was now taking heroin, and

was bored with Greg Norton, whom he suspected of being too interested in

the money. "I'm sure, in hindsight, that I became a real prick from

quitting drinking and feeling more focused," Mould concedes.

In February 1988, a year after Savoy's death, it was announced that Husker

Du had split. Mould demoed material for Warners, but pleaded to be allowed

a fresh start and was released from contract. He retreated to a farm he

had bought in December 1987, 70 miles outside New York, where he wrote

Workbook and lost a great deal of weight.

"For the first few months I got totally lost in my own little world of

music," he remembers. "I'd feed the chickens every day, and once or twice

a week I'd venture out in my pick-up truck to get some food or some tape.

A very simple life. Bit I lost a lot of social skills. I felt like the

fucking Unabomber."

There was not a lot of rock'n'roll around. If he listened to other

people's music, it was to classical - he found the sound of violins

soothing - or Depression-era Appalachian folk music. With new management

and a new record company (Virgin US), he re-emerged with terrific songs,

strong mid-tempo arrangements, a cello (Jane Scarpantoni) and a rhythm

section of bassist Tony Maimone (ex-Pere Ubu) and drummer Anton Fier

(ex-Feelies, Pere Ubu). Mould would learn much from their playing styles.

"With Huskers, we were learning how to make a more streamlined paper

aeroplane, and to make it fly further and faster. With Anton and Tony, it

was like learning to drive a battletank, a whole different game. The songs

were slower, more dynamic, and Anton was a machine. I'd try and make him

go faster, but he wasn't having any of it."

Everything about Workbook announced maturity. It was pointed out to him

that the album had a touch of the Richard Thompsons about it, which led him

to discover Shoot Out The Lights and become a fan. Crowds made him nervous

after a year alone on the farm, so he started out gingerly, doing club

dates with a band (Fier, Maimone and former dB Chris Stamey). However, by

the end of 1989, with Stamey gone, the band was double-billing with the

Pixies, and "it [had] screaming punk rock hell again". Mould was once

again to be seen rolling around the stage, the portrait of agony.

Black Sheets Of Rain, much of it about a relationship breaking up, was not

the ideal follow-up to Workbook. Recorded at the Power Station (Mould was

now living in New York), it was a return to power chording and sonic

density, but with a stodginess that smacked of overkill. Within six weeks

of its release, Virgin stopped promoting it and gigs began to sell poorly.

At the start of 1991, Mould split the band, sacked his management, and was

freed from his record deal. He spent the rest of the year sorting out his

affairs and hitting the road with one 12-string acoustic and one electric

guitar, doing solo shows in North America, Australia and Europe.

Everybody was wondering what was going on," he recalls. "I was just out

there saying, Hey, I don't have a label deal, I don't have much of

anything. But I've got these songs and I know you'll like them. I'll take

the paycheck and move on to the next town and just try to rebuild slowly."

On the road he wrote new material, including some of what would become

Copper Blue. Restless again, he took David Barbe (bass) from a band in

Georgia called Mercyland and the 39-year-old steamhammer known as Malcolm

Travis from a group called The Zulus, and he called the trio Sugar.

Sugar would see Mould coming back to collect - daytime airplay, chart hits,

all the things denied to Husker Du. In 1992 they recorded a 30-song

session that included two brilliant albums, Copper Blue and Beaster. In

the course of 12 months, the band went from playing to 75 people in

Richmond, Virginia, to entertaining tens of thousands at festivals in

Europe. When they went in to record Beaster's follow-up, there appeared to

be no problems whatsoever. But with Bob Mould, there are never no problems

whatsoever.

IT'S JULY 1998 AND THE DOG AND PONY SHOW HAS

taken Mould to Amsterdam, where he is doing interviews. (The

previous day in Germany he did 13. Sure enough, every journalist

asked him about Megamanic.) He remains as committed as he was

in March to the idea of quitting live electric music. We mull over his

options. Jazz? Stand-up comedy? Acoustic?

"Acoustic would be the most likely thing. But the more I've been thinking

about it, I'm trying to think what else can I do? I'm sort of stumped.

But that's, I think, the beauty of it. Something that's not just a big

rock noise. I love it but I want to let go of it. It's been my calling

card for so long. The only way I'm going to change is if I make myself

change."