Bob Mould’s See a Little Light: From Angry Young Man to Wise Elder Statesman of Rock

Bob Mould’s See a Little Light may seem like a modest contribution to the genre of rock-and-roll memoir. It’s not the most high-flying account you’ll read (Mould’s fame was relatively modest); nor the most tragic (no band mates succumb to overdoses); nor is it the most debauched (no trashed hotel rooms). But it’s also far better than many of the books that outperform it in those categories. Mould’s smart and crisp account of his career as a rock pioneer-hero (co-written with rock journalist Michael Azerrad) is less about the familiar foibles of the performing life and more a touching tale of self-discovery and finding middle-aged happiness in the wake of a tormented youth.

Mould’s name will be instantly familiar to fans of his seminal 1980s punk rock band Hüsker Dü and his ’90s alternative rock outfit Sugar. His guitar style — with chainsaw chords producing bright melodies — helped to define the postpunk sound, influencing everyone from the Pixies to Green Day to Nirvana. Kurt Cobain was a devout Hüsker fan.

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While often catchy, much of Mould’s music has a tormented quality, with wailing, funereal lyrics; his most bitter songs evoke a man frantically trying to claw his way out of a dark box. (Titles include “Poison Years,” “Too Far Down” and “Helpless.”) See a Little Light explains why. One reason appears in the book’s opening pages, which describe the miserable upstate New York home in which Mould grew up. His “monstrous” father was an abusive alcoholic who would berate Mould’s obese sister for her weight, and even hid a tape recorder in the living room to eavesdrop on the family when he was out.

That grim childhood planted the seeds of anger and misery that would grow into Mould’s high-velocity, ear-splitting guitar playing and vocals (which at first were mostly shouting). His vehicle was Hüsker Dü, a trio founded in 1979 when he was in college in Minneapolis. Although the band would mature toward a more melodic, even poppy songwriting style, initially the Hüskers made their name through full-frontal assault, fueled by Mould’s pill-popping and alcoholism (though he later quit drinking in his mid 20s for fear of replicating his father’s tragic life). Hüsker Dü shows became the stuff of legend, including one infamous 1984 gig in Norman, Oklahoma, during which the band played a nearly hour-long version of a two-minute song, “just for the hell of it.” (“The last forty-five minutes, I played one E chord on my guitar,” Mould writes, leaving the crowd “just plain stunned.”)

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Something else was behind this rage and frustration: Mould was a gay man concealing that fact in a macho punk rock scene where he feared his sexuality wasn’t welcome. Having grown up in a rural town and then a Midwestern city, Mould wasn’t sure how to live a gay life: “I had no role models and no exposure to gay culture.” The stereotype of a campy effeminate gay man “made me hate the fact that I was gay,” he writes. Thus Mould wrote all his lyrics in gender-neutral terms — not only for fear of alienating his largely male audience, but also to avoid shocking his traditional Catholic parents back home.

Despite the angst, the Hüsker years were also filled with fun and travel: pot-smoking sessions with William S. Burroughs, a weird appearance on Joan Rivers’ late-night talk show, a stay at Michael Stipe’s Athens, Georgia, home (where Stipe curiously insisted that certain guests come and go only through the window). But just after graduating from indie cult-sensation status to a major-label deal with Warner Bros., the band fell apart in 1987 when Mould, fed up with the drug use and general goofiness of his chief collaborator Grant Hart, called it quits.

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Mould’s life after Hüsker Dü becomes a personal and professional liberation. His first solo album wins wide acclaim, and Sugar becomes a money-making darling of the mid-1990s “alternative rock” scene. During this time Mould (who confesses that Hüsker Dü’s legacy doesn’t interest him nearly as much as it does his fans) seems to hit his fullest creative potential. “My imagination was on fire,” he says of one song-writing session that follows a tempestuous fight with a longtime boyfriend. “I was out of my f—ing mind with white-hate-light-energy-noise.” The result is the thrillingly maniacal Sugar EP, Beaster.

But perhaps nothing is more important than the 1995 interview Mould grants to Spin magazine finally admitting his sexuality in public. It’s a cathartic event, and one that helps allow Mould to start living the openly gay lifestyle he had repressed for so long. (So does a startling trauma from his childhood that he later unearths through therapy.) He recounts timidly scoping out a local gay coffee shop after his 1998 move to New York City: “I would duck in, grab a cup of coffee, then sit slightly away from the building, watching and observing how everyone carried themselves…I could command an audience of sixty thousand people, but I wasn’t sure how to act at a gay coffee shop.” (Although Mould discussed it directly with his parents, he says that to this day his father refuses to acknowledge his homosexuality.)

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As Mould integrated into this world, his musical taste trended towards the electronica that he encountered in gay bars and clubs — a sound he wanted to emulate in his own work. It was a far cry from the punk scene of, say, Boston’s grungy old Rathskeller club. But, Mould concluded, “I wanted to be a gay man with a gay identity,” something that required “abandoning the professional identity I’d built over the past two decades.” Well, not entirely. Mould was wounded when a 2002 album dabbling in electronica was a commercial and critical dud that left his fans perplexed. So he found a middle path. Now living in San Francisco, Mould continues to tour with his guitar and still cranks out solid (if lately unspectacular) rock albums for a balding hetero fan base. But he seems to care more about deejaying Blowoff, the large-scale gay dance parties he initiated while living in Washington, D.C., a few years ago.

And unlike his younger self, Mould is finally living an honest and happy life. Sure, there are rough patches, as when his relationship with one longtime partner recently became a “thruple” with a third man, then (surprise, surprise) fell apart. Then there’s the rampage of promiscuity whose details (“military porn”; an escort at a Ramada Inn; “getting freaky with some hot leather motorcycle guy in a bathroom stall in a Hamburg fetish club”) might unnerve readers with more tender sensibilities.

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Mould knows that some of his longtime fans will react that way. But he really doesn’t care. “People think Blowoff is funny — ha-ha, Bob is DJing with his shirt off, how silly. They have no idea how much it means to me,” he writes. “Now that I’ve integrated who I am and what I do, I finally feel whole…I’m finally able to enjoy life.” For someone who started out as a self-hating alcoholic rocker screaming out his cryptic angst, that’s not just a happy ending — that’s an amazing plot twist few other rock memoirs can deliver.

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