The first time Bob Mould heard My Bloody Valentine's Loveless, he was touring the UK as a solo act in late 1991. He'd walked out on a Virgin contract that had paid for two very good solo albums, and booted a management team that had, unbeknownst to him, traded his publishing rights for tour support money. While in the UK, he'd played some new demos for Alan McGee, who'd loved Mould's prior band Hüsker Dü since first hearing their blistering speed-punk cover of "Eight Miles High" about six years earlier. McGee ran Creation Records, which had just released Loveless. Abbo, the tour manager of Mould's opening act, played it for Mould while driving between gigs in a rental car. "I couldn't believe what I was hearing. This was the record I thought was never going to be made," Mould remembers. "I was still wet from performing, we were racing to get back to London, and the whole thing was a religious experience. No one spoke a word for the entirety of the record."
Loveless reimagined the sort of fearsome, sustain-heavy guitar squall that Mould had plumbed from the depths of his righteous soul with Hüsker Dü. Suddenly, ear-splitting walls of guitar were cool again, and Mould quickly formed a new band (bassist David Barbe and drummer Malcolm Travis), and found himself with a record deal. Creation put out Copper Blue in September 1992 (Ryko handled the U.S. release) to great sales and universal acclaim. NME (who along with Melody Maker had started calling the music of MBV's myriad spawn "shoegazing") voted it their album of the year. It finished seventh in that year's Pazz & Jop poll, on its way to selling 300,000 copies.
It makes sense that it would take something as game-changing as Loveless to push Mould back into the three-piece DIY-punk lane. With his first band, he'd helped invent the American stuff that was eventually labeled "alternative." The difference in rock music between 1987 and 1992 might have seemed infinitely vast at the time, but Mould was one of several solid links between the two moments. Punk had "broken" in 1991 (Mould is in the documentary, and was in the running to produce Nevermind), and "Smells Like Teen Spirit", made by a band whose drummer worshipped Hüsker Dü, had more or less invented the Modern Rock radio format that Sugar would soon slot into. One branch down on the family tree is the Copper track "A Good Idea", which Mould calls "an unconscious homage" to the Pixies' "Debaser". The Pixies, whose "Gouge Away" provided the template for "Teen Spirit", and who had in 1984 recruited its own bassist by running an ad for someone whose influences combined "Hüsker Dü and Peter Paul & Mary." It was as if Mould had never left. He was right in the thick of the musical legacy he'd helped build, dialoguing with his peer/descendents not by virtue of the instant nostalgia model of current vintage, but because one of the most prolific songwriters of his generation had a bunch of new ideas.
They were very good ideas. Copper is as impressive as any post-Zen Arcade Hüsker Dü album, adapting the approach he took with "Makes No Sense at All", "I Don't Know For Sure", and "Could You Be the One?" for the Alternative Nation, many of whom (myself at 15 included) were completely unaware of his prior band. (I remember a Hüsker/Sugar version of the classic "did you know Paul McCartney was in a band before Wings?" joke going around at the time.) A ferocious power-pop record, Copper is guided by Mould's unerring ear for melody and unrivaled nasal yelp that gives his lyrics an extra bit of acidic punch. The purest Sugar comes here via "The Act We Act" and "Helpless", two huge pop-rock anthems in the mold of Cheap Trick's "Surrender", but slowed down a beat, drenched in murky grunge fury, and bathed in a hiss of sustain and ride cymbal. "Helpless" rides its giddily ascending verse melody without need for a chorus, and "Act" opens the album with an impossibly dark riff that wouldn't have sounded out of place on an early Sub Pop compilation.
Thing is, I'd estimate about half of Sugar's fan base would argue that Copper's best two songs-- "Hoover Dam" and "If I Can't Change Your Mind"-- haven't even been mentioned yet. With its jangly chords and lyrics devoted to attempting to get inside someone else's head, "Change" could've fit fine on Rubber Soul with only a few slight alterations. On the expansive "Hoover", Mould pays reverence to the pristine 60s pop of the Beach Boys and the Left Banke, and the studio trickery of Revolver, with a lyric that begins by considering the vastness of the universe, and ends with him spinning down to the center of the earth, which he admits "keeps me feeling warm at night." The recorded version is built with synths and harpsichords, but the song sounds just as good as pure punk, evidenced by two fierce versions on the 1992 and 1994 live sets included in the reissue package.
During the recording sessions for Copper, Mould kept some songs aside, labeling these darker, unfinished cuts "B" songs to Copper's pop-driven "A" material. They would become the Beaster EP, released seven months after Copper to capitalize on what had become a groundswell of hype around Sugar, abetted by MTV playing "Mind" in semi-regular rotation. Far from leftovers, these tracks were more like transmissions from Mould's id rather than his ego. Or, as Mould said: "I was out of my fucking mind with white-hate-light-energy-noise." Uniformly gloomy, even grim at points, Beaster marks Mould's return to his Black Sheets of Rain approach, with a fierceness he'd not shown since New Day Rising. The album is bookended by the woozy, MBV-influenced "Come Around" and "Walking Away", and peaks with the titanic 12-minute midsection punch of "Judas Cradle" and "JC Auto". Those last two rank with anything on In Utero in terms of sheer force-- Travis' opening drums for "Auto" sound like nothing less than Bill Rieflin's booming trapwork for Ministry-- and of course sacrilegious content (the album was titled as a nod to Easter and released to coincide with the holiday. No one's ever accused Mould of not having a sense of humor). Beaster is the one recording that the fantastic Merge remasters do the most justice-- it's louder, deeper, and better than ever.
By early 1994, Sugar was the most successful band Mould had ever been involved with: "two or three times bigger than the highest points of Husker Du," he estimates. Copper was selling like crazy, and the band had just finished an exhausting world tour. The band was now subject to hype, and the recording, release, and publicity for FU:EL were a tumultuous process, to put it lightly. Mould remembers watching coverage of Kurt Cobain's suicide on CNN during the initial sessions. Depressed and unable to get the right sound, he scrapped everything and started over. On top of this, leading up to the release of the album, Spin ran a feature on Mould centered around his homosexuality-- something that had been an open secret since his early Hüsker days, but which now gave him entirely new sets of questions to answer.
With "Gift", "Gee Angel", and "Your Favorite Thing", FU:EL contains three of Sugar's best songs. "Favorite" in particular is as wonderfully evocative of modern rock radio in 1994 as R.E.M.'s "What's the Frequency, Kenneth?", Liz Phair's "Supernova", or Pavement's "Cut Your Hair". (Though at the other end of the spectrum, the album's retro-kitsch cover art is redolent of that period's unfortunate postmodern pastiche fashion trends.) On the whole, though, FU:EL sounds a bit tired, if not grumpy. "Panama City Motel" is a weary tour narrative (which bites its acoustic chord progression straight from "Jane Says"), and "Granny Cool" is just plain bitchy. The band wouldn't make it through the subsequent tour in one piece.
In his biography, Mould confesses that his life and health were rejuvenated in the early 2000s through his public immersion in San Fransisco's "bear" subculture, and DJing Blowoff-- "this sexy gay dance party"-- in his adopted hometown of Washington, D.C. In the broader scope of his career, however, it's one of a few such moments when Mould's artistic muse, impulsiveness, and pride took him in a productive new direction. The acrimonious break from Hüsker Dü was the first, and leaving Virgin to form Sugar was second. There have been few more critically and commercially successful relaunches than Mould's. The Merge reissues of Copper, Beaster, and FU:EL (which contain two live sets and all B-sides from the era, plus oral histories of all three releases) gain a little extra shine in this context. They're a wonderfully presented document of a punk legend, starting over creatively and emotionally in a brief window he helped open, and succeeding beyond his and anyone's expectations.
