Bob Mould
Since Mould delivered his proclamation, fans and critics alike have been dropping rose petals at his feet, lamenting the roaring guitar pop he pioneered in the 80s with Husker Du and refined in the 90s with Sugar. But Mould has been doing this Hamlet routine for four years now, coincident with three of his weakest records. Sugar’s slick final album, File Under: Easy Listening (1994), was ushered in with the endlessly repeated story of how Mould had hated the original masters, impulsively erased them, and made the band start over. The forgettable Bob Mould (1996) included the song “I Hate Alternative Rock,” a declaration of disgust for a genre he’d helped create a decade earlier. Like Groucho Marx, Mould doesn’t want to belong to any club that would have him for a member–the flip side of low self-esteem is often an irrational arrogance. The adulation that’s become Mould’s postpunk inheritance has muffled the grave self-doubt that once fired his music, and the new The Last Dog and Pony Show is an uninspired sampler of the polished alternapop Mould can turn out in his sleep.
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The same crowd turned out for Mould’s last dog and pony show, a 90-minute set of interchangeable tunes from his last two records. His sidemen were solid but uninspired; if any of them did more than glance at him during the set, I missed it. For his part Mould gave it the old college try, galloping around and balancing on one foot like a cow from The Far Side, but the sparks mostly failed to fly. By the second encore the show had devolved into prepackaged angst: after a lugubrious version of Black Sheets of Rain’s “Hanging Tree,” Mould grabbed the microphone and doubled over, howling like a damaged child as the band left the stage. The crowd roared. Mould trudged off, releasing a final howl into his guitarist’s microphone, and stood alone in the wings, his bowed head silhouetted by a single backstage light as he gripped a stairway railing for support, his private pain so thoroughly staged it would have embarrassed Judy Garland.
