People were saying, Oh, come on, you could do Zoom concerts, he says.
And Im like, No, you dont understand.
Thats not what performing music is.
Hüsker Dü, 1980Steven P. Hengstler
Performing music is when people get together in a room and create a community.
The idea of doing Zoom from my work room was frightening.
And last week, when he called intoRolling Stone, Mould still wasnt much of a Zoom guy.
After expecting to have an audio exchange, he good-naturedly agrees to flip on his camera.
No worries, he says.
Youre more modern than I am.
Im pretty content with life, says Mould, who married his partner, Don Fisher, in 2023.
And Mould is now dealing with a rattling post-election world that could easily target same-sex marriages like his.
Its been sort of crazy lately, he says.
But, you know, just trying to stay busy.
Tim Walz seems like a super-decent guy.
Minnesota has been such a leader in progressive ideas.
Seemed like a good fit.
Too bad things didnt go better in the election for all of us.
Did you get any MAGA blowback?No, I think Im off their radar.
I dont know how we get out of this.
Ive seen a lot.
I dont even know where to start.
Somebodys going to lose their job.
Somebodys going to lose their house.
People are going to lose their lives.
Some people are going to lose their rights.
Listen to the Chorus'
I dont want to hear about buyers remorse.
I dont want to hear, Oh, youre just exaggerating.
I dont want to hear any of that anymore.
This is beyond a five-alarm fire.
Im going to be probably okay to really bummed out; thats sort of my range.
A fair amount of my annual income goes to the best possible healthcare I can buy.
I dont think mylifeis in danger, but I feel like my rights are.
For people who only get interested in politics every four years, well see what you get.
It really hit me last September and October, when I did a solo electric tour.
I played Orlando on a Saturday, then had a 650-mile drive to North Carolina.
In the rental car, I had TuneIn.
They can geo-locate my movements, so the ads were targeted for my location.
I just laid out my case in five to seven minutes.
And then I would play Too Far Down fromCandy Apple Grey.
Im going into places that are less than friendly.
I donthaveto, but I choose to include this monologue in these shows.
In Atlanta, people were hooting and hollering, like Fuck, yeah!
Jackson and Baton Rouge, not so much.
It ranges from confusion to do we really have to do this during a rock show?
to fuck those guys.
In a couple places, it tipped more to the conservative side.
And Im a guest, right?
I dont want to start haranguing people.
But I needed to show them who I am and what I do and why were here.
Hopefully, a few people got it.
That record was very political.
So Blue Hearts, three years into Trump, was me revisiting that idea.
So that was protest.
The inner sleeve was my homage to Phil Ochs with the gun.
But what is the purpose of art?
I can only speak for myself.
Im getting old, but I walked seven and a half miles yesterday.
So if theres a protest, I should be able to make it.
[Laughs]
Husker Du hit its stride during the Reagan presidency.
It was horrifying then.
So its not without precedent.
And Reagan made room for them at the table.
And that is not unlike whats happening now.
The biggest difference, two generations later is, is communication.
In the Eighties, communication was one way.
You wrote an article and it was broadcast and people read it.
Radio was for the most part one-way.
Thats the biggest reason we dont recognize the world even compared to the Reagan years.
We all clicked the EULA box, and they took it all, and they have it all.
Which part of this are people not understanding?
It takes no time to destroy everything.
Now you have an album calledHere We Go Crazy.
Here We Go Crazy was the song that brought everything together.
Its a very LGBTQ-friendly environment.
It feels safe for now.
Theres a good community there.
I have a lot of quiet so I can do my work.
In that song, Im trying to convey the vastness of it, the sparseness of it.
As you sing in Sharp Little Pieces, The misery makes me feel alive.Yeah, of course.
[Laughs] Fortunately, I have a husband who understands this.
What fueled Neanderthal?With that drum intro, I just started thinking, This is so dumb.
This is so primal.
I use Neanderthal as shorthand for knucklehead.
Im in my 60s!
[Laughs] Im just poking fun at my early self and my current self.
The first four or five songs, theres a lot of uncertainty.
The top of side two is Lost or Stolen, a really dark song.
Lost or Stolen is heavy, a lot of old-school addiction, a lot of modern addiction.
Addiction is weird these days.
When I was growing up, my father was an alcoholic.
I was an alcoholic.
I started drinking every day when I was 13.
The black piece of glass [holds up his cell phone] is the worst addiction.
Its a dopamine machine for all of us.
Thinking of an album like an LP, with sides one and two, is very old school.
You still conceive album sequences that way?Absolutely.
To me, the construction of a record is when the tent pole appears.
I didnt invent it.
But I still use it.
Im a creature of the way Ive always done it.
But this record is sort of give the people what they want.
[Laughs] After everything weve been through recently, its like, Heres a nice, warm blanket.
You know these songs already.
From my perspective as a player, the less people involved, the easier it becomes to improvise.
And when I say improvise, I dont mean free jazz.
Or if we want to change a set list on the fly.
So theres a functional purpose to three-piece as well.
And its also about playing lead and rhythm together, that Townshend kind of playing.
Thats my thing, and it just feels right for me.
I do not sit onstage.
I run around and I am soaking wet after 10 minutes.
The hard part is the recovery.
The voice is the hardest thing.
When Im on tour, I do not talk.
I might say Starbucks or bathroom.
At the after-show, Im not going to talk to everybody for an hour and a half.
If I do that, the tour is over.
Im going to get a lanyard that says, Cant talk.
Are there certain songs you dont do anymore as a result?JC Auto offBeaster?
If I do that, Im fucked for the rest of the tour.
I hope people understand Im trying.
Im doing the best I can with it.
Ive got to be ready.
I dont eat any rich food ever on tour.
Because you get older, you get reflux.
Its really a full-time job to have a go at stay in shape for work.
I never thought of it that way.
Old habits are tough to shake.
You cant go wrong with that, especially in pop music.
They invented this language.
And they keep it and are keeping that language alive as long as possible.
Your genres collective language was different from blues-based classic rock, for sure.Yeah, it was.
It was against all of that.
It was against the excess, against the exclusivity, against private jets and cocaine and groupies.
All of those things seemed unattainable.
But when I heard the first Ramones album, its like, I think I can dothat.
And so many of us found our way in through that.
Kim Gordon just got a Grammy nomination.Theres a fair amount of people left.
The hardest working of all of us is Mike Watt.
His sheer passion for communicating on a daily basis with music in a new city is mind-blowing.
Jello Biafra is still out DJing and guest performing.
He still puts out Guantanamo School of Medicine records.
Hes got Alternative Tentacles the label.
And Thurston [Moore] and Kim, and Steve Shelleys new band, Winged Wheel.
Theres still a lot of folks doing it.
We lostSteve Albinilast year.Yeah.
The last time I saw him was during basic tracking at Electrical Audio in January 2024.
Wed been working on and off at Steves place for a decade at least.
Big, big, big, big loss.
I knew no one like him before I met him.
We disagreed on a lot of stuff too, which always made it fun.
Nobody had a plan.
Not to drag it back to politics, but I know anarchy, right?
In the Eighties, we saw no way into pop music.
It seemed like there were barriers to entry to AOR radio.
In return for sheltering and feeding a band when you got to their town, they usually would reciprocate.
And thats before the internet, before cell phones, before GPS, before any of that.
You roll into a town and, Oh, I see a skater kid.
Lets follow the skater.
Oh, theres the skate shop.
Its next to the vegan restaurant.
Oh, and theres the indie record store!
Now we can maybe put 20 singles on consignment and get gas money to get to the next town.
That literally was the way we did this thing.
And none of it existed before we showed up, and none of us knew we were building it.
Now were making the roads really smooth.
And then you get to, like, August of 1991 and Teen Spirit.
[Laughs] For a while.
I dont know if we were meant to be the next generation of a previous generation.
I think were okay to be our generation for as long as were here.
I didnt expect to inherit anything.
Thats what Husker Du was about to me.
It wasnt about we inheritQuadrophenia or something.
Did the industry expect that, though?
You were all signed to major labels.The Eighties was a weird time.
Husker Du, we were fucking oblivious to it.
You look at us anytime on MTV and think, Whoarethose guys?
They are so weird looking.
They were an important band to all of us.
so I never really found a reason to like the Smiths.
I had a lot of respect for them, but I never was a Smiths person.
I mean, it was great.
Me, Jon and Jason played the same Riot Fest that was also the first Replacements show.
Grant Hart was, of course, still with us then.
The band blew apart, pretty seriously.
When it exploded, it exploded.
Grant and I stayed in touch over the years.
Neither of us ever talked about putting Husker Du back together.
I was content with my own work.
Pretty sure Grant was content with his own work post-Husker.
I got no problem with nostalgia or reunions or any of that.
I think whatever anybody wants to do is awesome as long as theyre having a good time.
I didnt want to take a chance on being less than what people remembered.
We justpublished a pieceabout the new generation of hardcore bands like Turnstile.
Do you keep up with those?Turnstile, Narrow Head, a lot of that, yeah.
Its an art-noise collective, multiple members, six, seven people.
They do a lot of amazing videos and the sound is really over the top.
Theyve started to go into almost an Eighties goth lane as well.
They are putting out some of the best Western pop music.
What about guilty music pleasures?Im an unabashed pop fan, so Dua Lipa.
I mean, everybody loves her work.
I just love her voice.
I love the retro house/disco vibe ofFuture Nostalgia, such a cool record.
Im trying to get into Chappell Roan.
Her message is strong and great.
Cher onSNL 50, I was like, Good God, I love Cher so much.
I loved her as a child and watched the TV show.
I had all the singles.
So to see her still standing and killing it every time was just great.
They would say, We have to find somebody who can beat him.
And I just looked up and said, How about Dwayne Johnson?
And theyre like, Who?
I said, The Rock, the pro wrestler who understands this kind of entertainment.
You learn that the more explosions you give people, the more excited they get.
And thats what these guys are doing now, with chainsaws, sexual abuse, fireworks.
Its the same blueprint.
And now Linda McMahon is running the education department.
