Bob Mould: Addendum

Still haven't picked up Bob's record. And he's playing in my manor next week too - sold out, happily, though I rather wish I could be there - but then that in itself isn't 'true fan' talk anyway, is it?
Scouting around today I read this Spin magazine interview snippet from last year:
SPIN: Both you and Grant Hart were gay, but no one ever spoke about that while Hüsker Dü were active. Looking back, do you wish you had been more open? Would that have even been possible?
MOULD: We never talked about it that much. As an artist, writing at the time gender-neutral songs, I wanted everyone to be included, and had the band been labeled as 'gay music', no one would have listened. Fast-forward a few years to 1994: Spin sends Dennis Cooper to spend two days with me in Austin, saying that if I didn't come out, they were going to out me. So I capitulated, and now everything's good, but I came from a very small town and they had to deal with that. One of my friends from high school who was also gay went away and then got killed when he came back. At this point in my life, I feel assured and centered and whole, but to get here? Jesus.
It was only a few years after Husker Du split that I figured out Bob was homosexual, and this in the pre-internet days (c. 1989-90?) when news travelled a little slower, after someone or other in the music press remarked (perhaps indiscreetly) that 'they'd never heard a gay man make music like that.' (Hardcore rock 'n' roll music, to be precise.) But Mould's comments are illuminating, and prove how much dogged thought has to go into all of this when an artist wants a real career - 'gender neutral' songs, indeed. Listening to Warehouse: Songs and Stories back in 1987 I absolutely felt like he was writing and singing about me and how I felt about the Girl down the street, or up on Heaven Hill or wherever. But then that's artistry for you.

Bob Mould: Life and Times now in stores

As every couple of years in this particular passage of life, the question comes round: should I buy Bob's new one? My story on this score is only much the same as that of a million other hardcore rock adherents. For the adolescent me, Husker Du were unquestionably the most vital contemporary band in Christendom c. 1985-87 (when they threw out about 3 albums a year, some of them doubles, unlike Bob's more stately output these days, at the age of 47...) The Fraught First Solo Period (Workbook, Black Sheets of Rain) was in time for my late-teenage 'transition' moment; then The Sugar Years were more or less contemporary with my College Years; and I was around for the start of the Second Solo Stint, but this was also the point where I stopped going into shops and buying music...
Bob's previous, District Line, I was given as a gift, and I've been playing it today while writing. And looking round the web (as above) there are some stirring glimpses of the new material. So, yeah... I think I'll get myself to a record shop next week and buy me Life and Times. Not Woolworths anymore, sad to say etc, as I did for my last purchase, the mighty Chinese Democracy (see passim). But then Woolies never stocked Bob's stuff anyhow, I'm fairly sure.
I hear Bob is even writing his autobiography now, for the editor Michael Pietsch at Little, Brown, NY, a guy I met once in very fraught circumstances and liked a great deal. Maybe I can persuade him to send me a free copy down the line. Le Crunch, bien sur...