See a Little Light: The Trail of Rage and Melody
by Bob Mould with Michael Azerrad
Cleis Press. 403 pages, $16.95
SINGERS AND SONGWRITERS have a unique opportunity to shape popular culture. If they’re good enough, their songs become part of a generation’s soundtrack, anthems for an era; think Sinatra, Elvis, Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Springsteen, Elton John, and Madonna. For people of a certain age and musical bent, Bob Mould, one of the founders of the seminal 1980s band Hüsker Dü, has a place of prominence. He doesn’t have the name recognition that other performers enjoy, but his work has stood the test of time and earned a loyal following. His memoir will be of interest to those who have admired his music.
See a Little Light, titled after one of Bob Mould’s best-known songs, is not only an account of a particular time in musical history and one man’s career; it’s a coming-out story as well. And it has its fair share of drama. Born in 1960 and raised in the Upper Midwest, Mould recounts a troubled childhood with an alcoholic and abusive father, a litany of romantic relationships-gone-wrong, a steady history of substance abuse, and on-the-road brushes with death and calamity—sometimes harrowing, sometimes comical, and sometimes downright strange.
Despite those difficulties, though, it’s fair to say that Mould has had a pretty good run. He informs us early on that he was a gifted child, blessed with an IQ of 175. At the age of three, he amazed customers of the general store his parents ran, performing like a human adding machine by tallying what customers owed in his head as his mother called out prices to him. At ten, he was ringing up customers by himself. By the time he was a teenager, the small town he called home felt insular and boring, but his childhood there wasn’t altogether unpleasant. Mould is at his best in the early chapters, when he describes what it was like to grow up gay in a small town, and in a family lorded over by a father who didn’t hesitate to dole out psychological and physical abuse. In addition to his intellectual gifts, Mould was also physically imposing as a young man, big for his age and athletically inclined. His sports activities gave him plenty of opportunities in locker rooms and showers to enjoy close physical proximity with guys and time to admire their bodies. Because his work in the family store gave him easy access to alcohol, and because his size enabled him to drink large amounts of it but still function with some semblance of control and coherence, Mould began drinking at an early age and kept at it well into adulthood. He soon moved from alcohol to drugs, and it’s hardly surprising that his musical career afforded him ample opportunities to indulge in many varieties of substance abuse. He was sexually precocious and possessed a remarkable level of self-awareness and self-control. He realized his same-sex attraction at the age of five and was sexually active through puberty, starting with girls but soon moving on to boys, knowing all the while that he would have to work diligently to keep his true nature a secret. It was hard work, and, along with so many other gay people, the stresses of growing up gay engendered a unique brand of insecurity. “I often had trouble parsing my feelings for other males,” he writes. “Am I drawn to this boy because we have a shared interest in hockey or because I’m drawn to his smell, his physical being, and his features? This distinction can still be stormy for me; as with all dynamic forces of nature, that cloudiness usually rolls in when I least expect it.” See a Little Light contains a running account of his relationships, and his growth as a gay man, and there are memorable episodes of enlightenment along the way. Some are painful, like his awkward public coming out at the hands of writer Dennis Cooper and his failed attempt at a three-way “marriage.” Others are emblematic of the comforts that gay solidarity can offer, like his initiation into gym culture and his eventual discovery of, and attraction to, the bear community. But the bulk of this book is devoted to Mould’s musical career. We get the soup-to-nuts, warts-and-all history of his hardcore punk band Hüsker Dü as well as Mould’s subsequent musical projects. There’s even a strange career change late in the book, when Mould becomes a creative contributor to World Championship Wrestling, the outfit that gave the world the likes of Hulk Hogan (who makes a brief appearance in the book). The story drags a bit when Mould describes the work of touring (perhaps this is intentional, an attempt to convey the drudgery of it all). He also has a tendency to lapse into the “and-then-this-happened” style of narrative, and he frequently provides song-by-song rundowns of his albums. These sections sometimes flirt with tedium. This might have been a stronger book if Mould had devoted more attention to noteworthy events and encounters that get only brief mention. In his first chapter, there’s a wonderfully haunting description of how Mould helped his mother care for a woman who had been struck by lightning. “The woman was essentially paralyzed in situ,” he remembers, “fingers gnarled like animal claws and a facial expression that was apparently frozen at the moment she was hit.” Mould can recognize the remarkable and provide vivid and poetic descriptions of these episodes, but there are others that he might have explored in more detail. These include his abrupt, chance encounter with Boy George, his friendship with William Burroughs, and his work on the soundtrack for the film version of Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Still, there’s little doubt that Mould’s fans, and fans of the music of his era, will find much here to enjoy. Jim Nawrocki is a writer based in San Francisco.
