BOB MOULD
Singer-guitarist/Wrestling fan

BOB MOULD's energetic post-punk, proto-grunge '80s band Hüsker Dü was one of alternative music's most influential and highly regarded groups. His '90s group, Sugar, yielded the infectious Copper Blue , one of the greatest rock albums of that decade. This Thursday, Mould returns to Cleveland for the first time since Sugar's final tour in 1994. Since then, his career has taken some bizarre turns, including a “farewell tour,” a new electronic stylistic approach and professional wrestling. We recently caught up with him by phone to sort it all out.

— Michael David Toth

Um, pro wrestling? Please explain.

I was a fan of professional wrestling ever since I was a kid, and in the early '90s, I managed to befriend some people who worked at what was then called World Championship Wrestling, Ted Turner's wrestling group. We stayed in touch, and then in the fall of 1999, a position came up on the creative team [the people who design the characters and come up with the story lines]. And that's what I did for seven months, along with a lot of heavy production work and trying to keep the show running exactly on time so that we made all the commercial breaks. It was a crazy gig.

Only seven months?

In that business, they change out the creative teams a lot. The ratings were holding steady, but they decided they wanted to try a new creative team. I had an option to stay on in a production role or to leave. I decided to leave and go back to the music business. Within a year that wrestling company got purchased and was out of business.

So, around the time of your Last Dog & Pony Show solo album, were you thinking about leaving music?

That was September 1998. What I was thinking was, I was 37 at the time and toured for the better part of 20 years. I was really getting exhausted, not only with touring, but with doing the format of the loud guitar rock thing for so long and having seen what it had turned into. People have said, “Oh, Hüsker Dü in the '80s influenced all the great music of the early '90s” — Pixies, Nirvana, all that stuff. And all that was great music, but by the mid-'90s, it had become sort of a parody of itself, and I was getting sort of tired of it myself. I just wanted to make one more go-around and be done with it and get on to other forms of expression. I made that bold, sweeping statement, “This is it! I'll never do this again!” And I've pretty much stuck to that.

So where on earth did this electronic keyboard stuff come from?

Being in New York for most of the '90s, and I think being more out in the late '90s, I was just exposed to a lot of electronic music. In New York at that time, there was the Paul Van Dyk, Sasha & Digweed, big, big club, trancey kinda music everywhere. If you went to the gym, the restaurant, the club, the bookstore, it was there and you were inundated with it. I started to hear things that I liked about it, things that reminded me of what I'd always tried to do with music, and it got me thinking. In the beginning of 1999, I started really delving into that after getting off the road. I just sat with that kind of music, the equipment, the manuals and the keyboards, and taught myself how to create with these new tools.

I'm having trouble finding any obvious connection. What were you hearing in electronic music that paralleled what you were aiming for with your guitar-based stuff?

The entry point for me was a song called “Expander” by Sasha. If someone were to go back and listen to that song and then put on the Beaster record by Sugar, the connection's going to be right in front of you: the repetition, the droning, the metallic grind of it. “Expander” was not a disco-diva song; it was 128 bpm layer-upon-layer of texture of sound. It just happened that it wasn't electric guitars. My own first attempt at [electronic music] was Modulate in 2002, which admittedly had mixed results. The [tour for that album] was a big production, playing guitar over rhythm tracks in front of 12-foot video screens with films for every track. I'd also gone back and redone some of the Husker and Sugar stuff electronic.

So, what about this current tour?

I'll be working out some stuff for the next record and playing the greatest hits. Solo acoustic and solo electric guitar, no electronics.

Does “greatest hits” encompass Hüsker Dü, Sugar and solo music?

Yup. And a good amount from Body of Song , the new guitar record that will be out next summer.

(Originally published in The Cleveland Free Times, November 17, 2004)