Get Cynical

David Bowman talks to Bob Mould about his 'Last Dog and Pony Show'

By David Bowman

Aug 26, 1998 | Bob Mould is the Norman Bates of rock. He psychos-out onstage like nobody else -- some apocalyptic combination of sheer adrenaline and psychosis. Yet in person, he is quite demure. It's easy to imagine Janet Leigh taking the motel key from him.

We rendezvous at a Starbucks in New York -- him lugging a guitar case. He tells me that he lived in Manhattan from 1989 to '93, spent a few years in Austin, Texas, and moved back here in '96. We go and sit on a park bench by FDR Drive and jaw about "The Last Dog and Pony Show," his terrific new album of 10 typically bombastic post-H|sker D| numbers, two of them with Lawrence Welk strings thrown in for good measure, as well as a single hip-hop track that's, uh, a harmless throwaway.

I was nervous about bringing up H|sker D|, but he talked about the band freely. He also mentions his own place in history: He's only 37, yet he already thinks of himself as a middle-aged guy. But at heart, Mould is a real Dagwood Bumstead, content just to fuss around the house with his cello, his dog and his longtime partner.

So word has it that the tour for "Last Dog and Pony Show" will be your last with an electric group.

Yeah, it is. I've been doing this for 20 years and touring is very evasive of my life. I no longer want to take these massive chunks of time out of my life where everything I know gets put on hold. I start to worry about the dog, I start to worry about bills getting paid. I worry about all these little things and I feel like I'm in this weird movie. Also, I'm 37. I don't want to do this when I'm 50. It's not becoming to what kind of historical light I want to be seen in. I don't know if I want to be the guy who is 50 years old acting like he is in a punk rock band.

How do you feel about your elders who are still out there rocking? Are any of them pulling it off?

[Long pause] I thought Neil Young's "Harvest Moon" was a brilliant record. Neil in the acoustic setting is really good. I'm not a big Crazy Horse fan. I know it's all cathartic and everything, but I don't know if I want to do that when I'm his age. I'd much rather do "Harvest Moon."

Does this mean you're going to do more acoustic albums?

No. I think anything is fair game when you're recording. It's just touring -- each time out I feel a little less spritely. And I can't do what the Rolling Stones do. I can't do what Aerosmith does. I can't just want to do it just because it works.

Do you go through agony recording albums like other artists seem to?

I expect making a record is like the last three months of giving birth. You really just want to release this thing out in the world. You know you have to nurture it once it's out and take care of it and direct it, and eventually it will find its own way. But then it's gone. The conception period is when the energy, the mystery, the creative process leads me somewhere. But when it's time to do the documentation, I don't know. Hitchcock talks about it. As he got older, he could visualize the entire film in his head. That was the fun part. Then he had to make the actual movie.

You have the record in your head before you cut it?

As I make more records -- this is, like, 15 or something? -- I know the process. I know the bump in the road. I know that I'm going to run my head into a wall and scream for a couple days. Then it's time to mix it and it's done. Everything is preordained. I collect you on bootleg. Do you ever buy bootlegs?

I used to when I was a bigger fan than I am now. I still have great bootlegs. Early PIL shows. Buzzcocks outtakes. Talking Heads live shows. When I was a real fan-fan before I was making records, I bought bootlegs a lot. I know the value of them. I know what they mean to the fan's attachment to the artist. This is before electronic media, the late '70s and early '80s, when you didn't see pictures of the artists as much. Artist didn't have Web sites. Stuff was more mysterious. You had to create the character more as a fan. So bootlegs were an integral part to a band you never saw live.

Do you have secret tapes of your outtakes?

Yes. There's always secret tapes. That's my insurance policy. I don't have life insurance. I have all that stuff.

Dylan is known for hiding the good stuff.

Yeah. I do that too. Anyone who is in this for the long haul would be foolish not to hold stuff back. I know you don't publish all your good stuff -- you gotta be sitting on 40 pages.

I'm not.

No? You will. You can't give it all. Record companies are just passing acquaintances. They love you while you're there, but sooner or later the deal is over. They're not like lifelong relationships. It would be great if they were.

Yeah, I pulled a handful [of takes] off the last record. There's always overspill that's good but doesn't work on the record as a whole. Sometimes certain components of the creative cycle don't add to the final view. Maybe they'll distract from it or irritate it. I think in magical terms that there's a reason that everything is the way it is. There's a reason that I make the work I make. And a reason that people find it beyond the mechanism. I think there is some higher order to all this, not in a religious sense, but the sense that people find the things they're suppose to find in their life one way or another. We get drawn to the things that we identify with and we create other things that people identify with. The other 20,000 guys, they don't know how to tell a compelling story. So that's the difference. They're going to have a fun Web site, but the content is going to be miserable. People are going to say, "It looks good. They don't have anything to say. They don't have a story."

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