Onstage at the Birchmere last week, Bob Mould set down his sky-blue Stratocaster and picked up a book.
It was the story of a teen who flees an abusive home, starts a band, hits the road, gets hooked, gets sober, goes solo, comes out of the closet, detours into electronic music, works a stint in pro wrestling, reinvents himself as a DJ and finally decides to write it all down.
It was his autobiography.
Performing songs and reading from his book for the first time ever, the 50-year-old punk legend punctuated his recollections with overwhelmed sighs. “It’s very reminiscent of May of 1989 all of a sudden,” Mould said from the stage, nervously pushing his glasses up his nose.
He was referring to his solo debut after the implosion of Husker Du, the hair-on-fire hard-core punk trio Mould formed in Minneapolis in 1979. Triangulating indelible extremes in melody, volume and speed, the band’s breakneck sound would ripple across the ’90s and beyond, influencing Nirvana, Foo Fighters and every band since that’s ever tried to coax an angry barre chord from an electric guitar.
Mould’s book — “See a Little Light: The Trail of Rage and Melody,” out Wednesday — captures Husker Du’s sonic gravity and its notorious infighting in fine detail. But it also recounts the traumatic childhood that came before and the fascinating career that came after — one in which Mould would leap from project to project with a fearlessness that belies the anxieties that mutated out of his struggles with his family, his addictions and his sexuality.
Reading it isn’t a struggle. Across 400-odd pages, Mould’s tone is purposefully even. He burns and mends bridges in the same clear, economical voice. At the Birchmere, it was hard to tell when he was reading and when he was riffing.
“I don’t want to bum everybody out,” he said at one point. “Lemme skip 10 pages.”
‘I knew it was all there’
The morning before the Birchmere gig, Mould is sweating outside a coffee shop in Dupont Circle, calmly reciting his credit card number into his iPhone. He’s ordering extra copies of his book for a tour that will visit six cities coast to coast.
Inside, iced coffee is served. Mould sips and explains why writing his life story was the most difficult project he’s ever tackled. “I wish it would have been as easy as just a week of talking about how cool I was and then having someone write it for me,” he says.
Co-author Michael Azerrad first met Mould while interviewing him for 2001’s “Our Band Could Be Your Life,” which has since become the definitive indie rock history book. “I kind of call myself a literary personal trainer,” says Azerrad of his recent collaboration with Mould. “ ‘C’mon, Bob! One more! One more insight!’ ”
Mould says that without that push, the book wouldn’t have explored his turbulent childhood in Upstate New York and how it shaped his life and work.
“I came into this project really wanting to know why his music, especially his early music, was so angry,” Azerrad says. “I knew that it wasn’t some sort of empty artistic pose. . . . I think gradually he came to see that the book would be so much more meaningful if he gave more of himself.”
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