growls Bob Mould slapping his empty pack of Camel cigarettes against the wooden slats of the outdoor table.

"Man, what fucking take is this?"

His look of disgust is priceless and, needless to say, alarming. Luckily, for the sake of music journalism, interviewers don't often provoke the ire of their rock deity interviewees. But myself, albeit inadvertently, I can enjoy a few hornets' nests from time to time. My heart hadn't raced so hard since I was accosted by a gang of toughs in the Lower Haight in 1992. The adventure was on.

My meeting with probably the most influential songwriter of post-punkdom was rapidly becoming more than just a question and answer session over Camels and Iced Latte at his favorite Austin dive. It was transmogrifying into an episode of a new PBS documentary called "The Record Business is Evil," hosted and directed by yours truly.

Although his words of irritation are clearly aimed at your friendly interviewer/host who sprawls sideways in perfect mode de slaque in a wobbly chair on the other side of the table, Mould points his signature brooding visage and intimidating hawk-like features to the ground at his side the entire time he's venting his frustration. I casually look in the direction of his glare to see if perhaps some pesky Texas fire ant is on the ground ranting and raving about Grant Hart's battle against smack addiction. There's nothing at the end of his line of sight but an untreated wooden deck, some dust, a few dead leaves and a little bit of cigarette ash.

What has finally gotten Mr. Mould's goat is the last in a series of questions about his falling out with his management, Clark and Associates of Los Angeles, in 1990 and the generally turbulent time he endured as a solo artist on Virgin Records after the break-up of the legendary Husker Du in the late '80s.

Of course, a question about how the members of Sugar almost parted ways during the recording of their latest LP, File Under: Easy Listening, was no small dosage of fuel on the fire either.

"Who told you that?" Mould queried with a perturbed look of puzzlement.

"That's what the Puncture people said," I innocently replied.

"Tell the Puncture people they're full of shit."

The particular question that has set him off a bit; the final straw on the camel's back (or should that be the last cig from the Camel's pack?)so to speak; is not really a question at all. It's more a probe into the sordid details of the final days of the break-up with Virgin, a label with whom Mould said his entire relationship was "a real love affair that went totally sour."

After Mould has finished his quips and taken a deep breath, I timidly inquire, "Is everybody asking this?"

"No," he says, "this is just a particular sidebar that hasn't come up in awhile."

A Cracker song comes over the restaurant speaker system.

"Here's a Virgin artist," Mould laughs, enjoying the strange synchronicity taking place. He then begins to recount the messy parting of ways with the big major, an unpleasant event that would eventually shake-up his whole outlook on the music business and transform his whole career for the better.

"In late 1990, I put out the record (Blacksheets of Rain , the second and last solo LP for Virgin) and went out on the road. About a week into the tour, I started noticing that all the co-op advertising and all the promotion was getting pulled-back.

"I still had six more weeks of the tour to do and I started thinking, 'Hmmm, this is curious. Looks like I'm getting ready to be dropped.'

"I went through the cycle. I started pointing my finger at management asking 'why don't I have money? What happened to the balance of the advances that I was given for this record?'

"They were saying, 'That was our tour support and, by the way, we signed away all your mechanical royalties on your publishing as well.'

"I said, 'Fuck you, you're fired. Burn in hell.'"

"I went to the record company and said 'well, what about the next record.' They said, 'We want you to stay, but we want to rearrange your contract.'

"I said, 'Okay.' They said, ' we'd like to cut the advance for your next record in half. I said, 'that's fine. Just keep me on for two more firm.'

"Offers went back and forth. I got a new attorney. Lo and behold on a Friday afternoon, across my FAX comes a 'drop notice' that I'm supposed to sign-off on as an extension to stay on the label. They're like, 'we have to get you to sign this today to extend the contract under our terms.'

"Drop notice? Do you mean drop the previous contract?" I ask in a fit of record biz ignorance.

"It's either you sign or drop. You sign the amendment or 'we drop you.'"

"Jesus," I blurt.

"I conveniently pretended that the FAX never came through. So Monday morning I was dropped. Thank god. That's what I was trying to get to at that point.

"I got very panicked calls from the label going, 'those were outside attorneys we hired. They fucked up.'

"I'm like, 'Sorry. I'm outta here.'"

But Mould does have one tiny regret about leaving Virgin.

"I felt really bad for Mark Williams, my A&R person who is also Cracker's rep. He really supported me. The label lost interest in me and me in them. He just got stuck in the middle. It was too bad because he's such a cool guy."

Clark and Associates had left Mould thousands of dollars in the hole. In an attempt to recoup as much of his losses as possible, Mould spent a good deal of 1991 out on the road doing several extended acoustic solo tours of the U.S., Europe and Australia. He also began plotting and working toward the next phase of his career.

"Across that entire period, I was writing what is now known as Copper Blue and Beaster, the first two Sugar Records and just speaking to different people in the music industry about 'would you be interested? What do you think about this? What do you think about that?'"

Though there was a remarkable change in the music between Mould's Black Sheets of Rain and the new material that would eventually become the songs for the first two Sugar LPs, the biggest change in Mould's direction was on the business side of things. He decided he would be his own manager in order to avoid the pitfalls of his previous experiences. He also actively sought a label deal that would forge a strong working relationship between artist and label based on actual productivity and sales rather than speculation and monetary advances. But most companies considered this proposed scenario not just highly unorthodox, but absolutely out of the question.

"None of the majors wanted to hear anything from me, mostly because the tact I was taking was 'I don't want to come to this company for half a million dollars which you seem to be wanting to give me. I just want enough to make a record, a modest record. I want no tour support. I want no independent promotion strapped on my back. I just want to earn my keep.'"

But Mould also has an historical perspective on why the majors wouldn't listen to his entrepreneurial advances.

"You gotta bare in mind that in 1991, that was sort of the height of the incestuous end of the music business, where there was a handful of lawyers and a handful of management companies basically controlling all of the signings to major labels. A lot of the attorneys that would go out and find bands also represented the A&R people at these labels. So it was a very curious time in the music industry and it's still going on. Trying to propose a sensible scenario in the middle of 1991 was getting me nowhere. "

Mould actually observes that the situation at the majors has become even worse.

"The monolith is becoming taller and narrower. It's like a lot of the fringe players who were trying to hone in have been eliminated."

But Mould eventually found a couple of labels who were more than willing to play by his plan of "a small advance versus a much higher return." Rykodisc, a unique indie label that started in the early 1980's as a vehicle to put out popular catalogs on the new CD format (a venture that was then deemed highly risky), signed-on in the U.S. Mould is the label's first significant contemporary artist and now can claim the likes of David Bowie, Steve Miller Band and Jerry Jeff Walker ( a country singer who is basically living-off one song he penned many years ago- "Mr. Bojangles") as label mates. Creation in England signed Mould for European distribution.

Mould feels much more comfortable with his present business situation at the two indie labels than at Virgin or any other major.

"There's no indentured situation. (The Major) Companies love that, man. They give you half a million dollars (if you don't know this already, the advances for recording, etc. doled out by labels is 100% recoupable) and all this tour support, then they've got you over the barrel. That's what it's about right now, getting the artist in a compromising position. Why do I need that when I can sell 400,000 copies on an indie? A real indie. It's really cool."

But not everything is hunky dory in indie land. Creation was recently purchased by Sony Music.

"I'm losing my mind over that. What it does is make me realize that we'll just shift the focus of the work onto America this time.

"Sony Belgium doesn't even know that Sugar has a record coming out. The biggest writer in Belgium--this all happened while I was in London last week doing press--- who is a friend of mine, wanted to do an interview. He got the company to pay his way to London for the interview, but Sony didn't even know the album was coming out. He couldn't get an advance copy. He had to call someone in Amsterdam to get the advance copy.

"With things like that, I get really nervous. Sugar had a top 30 LP in the Belgian charts for ten weeks and it wasn't Copper Blue. It was Beaster. Here's a company that doesn't even know what Sugar is.

"These are the things. The little land mines. You don't have any idea what's happening out there. It's really hard to explain sometimes what a day in the life is like."

To add another land mine, Rykodisc is vulnerable to being swallowed-up by one of the gargantuan music and entertainment conglomerates, too.

"Rykodisc was recently being courted by some major record corporations who wanted to buy the whole label just to get Sugar. The last time I checked in a public sense, Ryko's net worth was around 13 million dollars. That's an awful lot of money to spend just to get one band don't you think?" says Mould with a very wry sense of satisfaction.

"Strange things happen. I'm just sitting at home trying to write music and sometimes all this stuff is bombarding me and I'm just baffled. There is no easy way of doing this. For anyone out there who is thinking of managing themselves, be forewarned. It's a little more than sitting at the phone for seven hours a day. It will consume you if you let it."

But, as Mould readily admits, "there would be no music business without the music."

Sugar's (Mould writes 95% of the songs for and controls Sugar in the studio, but let's it become a whole new beast of its own in a live setting) new LP is File Under: Easy Listening, a work whose production sharply contrasts with its wide-release predecessor, Copper Blue. Whereas Copper Blue was big and expansive like a desert landscape with its allusions to the Hoover Dam and the Mississippi River, File emerges from a much smaller and confined space. Mould's allusions and metaphors stay a lot closer to home this time and the sound is much more coarse. Mould isn't relying on sweet pop contagions. He's going for pure riff power.

Of course, this is really Sugar's third release with Rykodisc when counting Beaster, a short form LP of very limited release promotion, that Mould himself refers to as "that thirty-two minute piece of self-indulgence."

But File has just as strong a kinship to Beaster as Copper Blue. As Mould admits, the songwriting on Beaster is weak. Still, the untamed power of the instrumentation is not easily dismissed. Beaster was a very necessary transitional work, a chance for Mould to work out the goings-on in his brain in a public context. Mould was experiencing an internal fury that could not be expunged on Copper Blue. Beaster , in essence, released his irritating demons and allowed Mould to get back to writing the deep and articulate songs that appear on File.

It would be easy to call File a dialectic of Sugars's two previous LP's. It really isn't. The songs on the new LP are better than those on Copper Blue. They just aren't coated with the pop sensibilities that carried Copper Blue listeners off into an ozone of ecstasy and Rykodisc sales into heaven. What Mould is offering here is as close to pure substance as any artist today has dared make and toss upon the marketplace. The regard for the listener is a lot lower than on Copper Blue, but still a little higher than on Beaster.

Still, as strong as it is, this is not Mould's or Sugar's ultimate LP. When Mould finally discovers a way to strike the perfect balance between his writing's needs and his audience's needs, albeit that will probably be a pure accident, listeners will be advised to remove their socks before putting the disc in the player.

Though the rumor about the band almost breaking-up during the recording of File Under: Easy Listening was unfounded, the process of comitting the LP to the recording master got off to a rather inauspicious start.

"We were out in Atlanta for three weeks trying to record this record and it was a complete mess," Mould recalls.

"We were in a very top-flight, world-class studio. We spent three weeks basically banging our heads against the wall. It was a pretty unproductive time."

"So what was wrong in that studio?" I ask.

"Sonically, we weren't getting anywhere. A lot of the sounds weren't right. We were getting hung up on very small details, mostly me anyway, in a production sense.

"I doubt that if had we completed recording the record in that studio, as we were very close to doing, that it would have been a very enjoyable listening experience for anybody. Maybe people wouldn't have noticed, but it was just a lot of stuff that didn't appeal to me.

"I forgot the instinct and started to think that maybe here's a formula that works. We started to think that Sugar had an agenda and that we had to repeat what we did on Copper Blue. Fortunately I caught myself. Nobody else would have noticed I don't think. Or they would have said, 'this is exactly like Copper Blue, but better songs.' Like that's a consolation? Not to me.

"So we came back here to Austin and worked out in Boerne (a small town in the scenic Texas hill country southwest of Austin). We just banged it out and it went real well.

"The whole thing was a pretty trying experience overall, no doubt about it. When you've spent 24 years of your life writing music and ten years producing your own work, to have something like that happen is not very pleasurable."

Twenty four years is a long time to be in music, especially for Bob Mould who is a scant thirty-three years old. Born in a little town in upstate New York near Lake Placid ("It's not a place you'd want to know," Mould says when asked to reveal the name of the town.), neither of Mould's parents were very musical.

"My dad had a saxaphone," Mould remembers, "but he never played it around me. I think he played while in the Air Force and lost interest when he got out."

Mould's first impressionable encounter with music revolved around records. His dad owned a grocery store with the family living in a house out back, a situation that Mould describes as a "Dobie Gillis thing." His father would work with cigarette vendors who at that time were also responsible for keeping juke boxes in small towns stocked with up-to-date recordings.

"When they pulled the old singles off the Juke Boxes, you could get the records for a penny apiece from the cigarette vendors. So from 1965-on, I was totally surrounded by old Juke Box singles.

"I developed a pretty good working knowledge of music as music and not some part of a TV show. I realized that these are singles that people listen to on Juke Boxes. I understood what popular music was. When you have that ingrained at such an early age, you have no choice but to make music."

When Mould was a sophomore in High School, he decided to go ahead and take his SATs early. He scored impressively high and got an early admission to McCalister College in St. Paul.

"My parents didn't have any money to speak of. Luckily, I filled some kind of quota for a poverty-line gifted student at McCalister. That was the slot I fit into.

"So I ended-up in St. Paul and that's where Husker Du got started."

Along with the big recent changes in Mould's music and his decision to take on an ultimately active role in handling the business side of his music, in June of 1993, he decided to shake-up his life even more by moving to another city. The move landed him in the musical outpost of Austin, Texas where he is presently ensconced in a quaint, unobtrusive neighborhood not too far from the city's downtown area.

"I just wanted to be out of New York," he says wearily of the move, "I was there for almost five years. New York's not much of a place to come home to after five or six months on the road. When I lived in New York, everytime I went home, I never felt like anything really ever stopped. There was no time to gather my thoughts and get refocused. There was always just another conflict of some sort. There isn't much of that here in Austin.

"When people ask me what the hell I'm doing in Texas, I tell them, 'Austin's cool. It's not like the rest of Texas.'

"I'm making payments on the house. I hope to be here for awhile, at least until Austin gets as big as Atlanta."

Though I've never met Mr. Mould before, he does come across as a much more relaxed person than hearsay has indicated. He looks much thinner than I remember him when I saw Husker Du play Austin's Liberty Lunch in the Spring of 1986. He is very sharp-eyed, articulate and quick-witted. Listening to him talk is like being carried away by white water rapids. The rate at which he spills information is often scary. But once you learn to navigate it, interviewing Mr. Mould becomes a lot of fun. Bursts of laughter on both sides often punctuate the interview. As things roll on, the rapids start blasting faster and faster and the turns get trickier and trickier.

I keep wondering how he balances the business side of music with actually writing music. His description is detailed and frank.

"I have a pretty interesting schedule, normally. I have to get up a little earlier now that I'm in the central time zone. I'll get up around 8am to deal with all the Europe stuff, with Creation and anything overseas because they're six hours ahead.

"I'll get that done then deal with the East Coast. I'll then deal with the West coast and try to get things wrapped up at about 3 or 4 in the afternoon. Usually, I'll just have some lunch, read for awhile, then sleep. I'll go to bed at about five in the afternoon and get up at about eight at night. Usually, after 3 hours of sleep, I don't wake up thinking about the business stuff. I usually just wake up and start writing music.

"Then I'll stay up until 2 or 3 in the morning then get another four or five hours of sleep. I try to have two days everyday. It works really well. "

"Is this Monday through Friday only?" I ask

"Boy, I'd love it to be everyday if I could. I think a siesta or nap in the afternoon is the best thing you can do for yourself. I have to do that. I can't switch from just doing press or business stuff right to writing. It's impossible. I have to just shut down for three hours and it's usually a very fitful sleep."

"So you don't have nightmares about Rykodisc being bought by Sony or anything?"

"No, not while I'm sleeping. I don't think I have record company nightmares. I have music nightmares, but I don't have record company nightmares. I usually deal with all that stuff during the day."

"Once you wake up at 8pm, what's the process like?"

"I get up, put on a pot of coffee, get into the room and start working."

"What's the room?"

"Studio room."

"What kind of equipment do you have?"

"I've got a pretty elaborate home studio set-up, all the guitars, keyboards, piano, basses, all kinds of stuff- hammer dulcimer, cello, mandolins. I just sit there and play. Some days I'll play for a couple of hours, realize I'm not gonna get anywhere and stop. Some days something interesting pops up and I'll work on it. Sometimes I'll wake up with a full song in my head and I'll sit in there for 16 to 18 hours and make it happen. The next business day'll be gone, but tough shit.

"Sometimes I just sit. I usually write. Sometimes prose, short stories, gather up notes. I try to sort things out. I'm just looking for a new way to say the same old thing."

"What is the same old thing you've been saying?"

"Life sucks. I don't trust anybody. Sometime's it's fun. You all think I'm nuts. You're wrong."

We both laugh.

"Simple things," Mould says, "Simples things that everyone can relate to.

"Seriously. It's fun. The process of writing is easily the most important thing in my life. "

"I assume it's also the most natural thing in your life, too," I interject.

"Yeah. Sometimes it's a fight. Sometimes I don't have all the gifts and all the tools, yet. I just have the tools that I've learned over the past 28 years of remembering music and 24 years of writing music. I only have a limited amount of tools that I can access. There are just some things that I cannot do with my voice. There are just some things that I cannot do with my hands that I hear in my head and that's a real struggle."

"Do you ever have times or periods of however long when there is nothing coming to you in your head?"

"Hmmm? No. I don't allow that to happen. There are times when I feel like I'm having trouble emptying thoughts out. I know that there's stuff in my head, but it hasn't gotten sharp enough to get out. It's just a lot of dull ideas. I mean dull as opposed to sharp. Not dull as in mundane. Just thoughts that I can't seem to find a way to get out. When those periods come up, I'll just force myself to do things. I'll force myself just to relearn theory on the keyboards or something. It'll be like 'okay, now I'm gonna spend two hours playing the cello as opposed to the half hour when I'm inspired and having fun with it.' I'll sit with it for two hours and try to get better instead of just hacking away at it and trying to get sound out of it.

"It's those kind of things. You can find things to replace the muse or the essence. You can work on mechanics if you're stuck trying to get ideas out of your head."

"Does that make it flow after a certain period of time?"

"It comes when it comes. There's no set time. It's when I least expect it. I said something to the dog the other day and it was a brilliant idea. I wrote it down. I can't remember what it is now. I just wrote it down and just left it. It'll be something nice next month to come back to.

"What's the longest time it has taken some thoughts to 'sharpen?'"

"Some things, I get a thought and the whole thing is done in ten minutes. The whole song is written. "Your Favorite Thing" on the new album is like that. Just bang. It's so simple, I can't think about it. I just let it happen.

"Other things, like "Hoover Dam," took three months of chipping away at it to build it up to the big landscape that it ended up being. You know, I sat there on the acoustic guitar and the vocals and the words got written then I went, 'ahh, I can do this with the keyboards' and then two weeks later another counter melody pops in and you go, 'okay, I'll add that, too.' Then all of sudden, before you know it, you've got this huge sprawling cacophony going on.

"So, it can go on anywhere from ten minutes to a year. Hoover Dam was a hard one because I think it was one that may have been written fully at one time in my head in a dream. I had this happen before. "Wishing Well" was like that. You hear it in your sleep, but you can't get it out. You have to pull little parts of it out. That happened again last night and it was sort of scary because I thought it was something really bad. I thought it was like a Meat Loaf song or something so I'm not sure if I want to spend two months trying to dig it out. I mean, that's part of that process, too. Things that are really repressed that happen in your dreams will just sit in there and it's really hard to get at them sometimes. Other songs are like 'hey I've got a catchy phrase, yeah. This one's easy. Five chords, a couple of sections, three and a half minutes it's over. ' Those always end up being the singles.

"But the bigger , not the epics, but the sprawling pieces- "Brasillia Crossed the Trenton" was a dream song. I had the whole friggin' scenario happenin my sleep. I remember taking the little tape recorder into the shower and singing the whole thing just doing dummy words to it. By the end of the day it was done. The core of the song was finished.

"They come in strange ways. I don't even ask anymore."

"Is music all subconscious?"

"It's all psychobabble. It's all about just having too many thoughts in your head and then some just pop out. When it's happening, I don't know what it is. You just go with it. A lot of times you just have a phrase and dummy words as I call it. Sometimes you're hearing a cymbal crash in your head. I hear full arrangements on some stuff and I'll be hearing this while I'm playing guitar - strings and basses and other vocals and things and hearing cymbals crashing and stuff.

"A lot of times when I'm just playing acoustic guitar into a little tape recorder similar to this one (he points to my micro cassette recorder, whirring away on the table), you just get the germ on tape. If I don't have the phrasing down, I'll just put "s's" where the cymbals are supposed to go and more often than not when I get back to do the words, the words are structured to carry that cymbal crash, to carry that consonance and cadence.

"It's not just about noun, verb, adverb. It's a pretty wild process and there are so many different ways to get the end result. When I talk about the tools what I mean is--- the difference of what a major and minor chord can do; what a walk up or walk down can do; what contrapuntal versus parallel movement can do. I mean those things are tried and true to create emotions. If I get the germ out and it's developing and it's turning into an essence and turning into a song, then when you fine tune it. You can apply those techniques later on.

"You can look at the work and say "ah, here's the money line. Here's the one that gives it all the irony. Here's the one that gives it the twist that makes it unique. Here's where I put the tools on it. Here's where I get out the hammer and the saw and I can build a house that people are gonna finally see.'

"That's what the process is like. I'm not doing it justice. There's so much of it. I don't even know what's happening when it's going down. Those kinds of tools-- theory, how to make emotions move, how to make time compress and expand to enhance a story. Those are the things you can do after the essence is available. Strange stuff. It's fun.

"You're not just building the house, you're chopping down the trees and making the lumber," I say.

"Yeah. It's a lot of things. It's a lot of cool things. It's an amazing ability."

"Expanding a compressing time-- is that literally, metaphorically?"

"I basically mean the "pacing" of a phrase, the dynamics and cadence of a phrase, how you pace it across music. Whether you use 6/8 or whatever. Like "Brasillia" conjures up a Celtic feel or being adrift at sea because it's kind of a sea chanty type riff. "Can't Help you Anymore" (from the new LP) is in 4/4 but it's in 3 bar sets rather than 4 bar sets.

"So what happens is it makes everything seem more compressed. You don't notice it as a casual listener, but I notice people get anxious when they hear the song. It's not moving in even bars. It's against the rhythm of the body. It's making the body move faster.

"I'm talkin' shit. But these are the things I think about when writing. It's not about whether it's gonna sell lots of records. It's like what is the end result gonna be. Do the words and the music merge? Is the frame as large as I can make it. Is the canvass as flat as it can be so I can build on it as I want. It's an incredibly enjoyable thing. It can be frustrating when you hit the wall and when you can't do something with your hands or you can't do something with your voice. You have to settle for an approximation because of your physical limitations, but generally it's an amazing process.

"It seems like there is something inside you that keeps pushing you to do more."

"Yeah, it's just trying to find new tools. You get lucky along the way. When "Wishing Well" was written it was 'wow a whole new set of tools. A whole new language. Now I can use this.'

"When you break through with different songs, it doesn't happen but maybe every couple of years. It's not like every couple of months you make a breakthrough. I'm not anyway. I'm not moving that fast. But when you make that breakthrough and get another set of tools, it's really amazing. When you start merging all the different tools, you start coming up with some really fun things. A lot of it's really self-indulgent and I don't want people to hear that part. Except for Beaster, of course. Other than that one, usually I'm a pretty good judge of what's gonna fly and what's not. If it doesn't speak to me over three or four months or if it starts to wear thin on me, I don't want other people to hear it.

"Having all the different tools and all the different things you can do with it, that's a blast. One good song makes up for 20 Sony/Belgiums. Believe me. Because they can't do that. They can try to sell it or ignore it, but they can't do that. That's something they can't have. They can have an interpretation or a documentation of it, but they can't have it."

"Really, the only person who can have it is Bob Mould?"

"Yeah. It's a very selfish process."

"Hey I like it. Lot's of others like it."

"It's selfish. It's weird to give it up. It's very vexing. It's very weird to put out records in a way. It's such a weird approximation of a moment in time. That's why I love Lou Barlow's stuff or what Guided by Voices are doing. It just seems like it's pure instinct. It's like there's absolutely no regard for the listener. I love that.

"That's the thing we ran into in Atlanta with this record. It was just over thinking. Too much on detail and not enough on the essence of the overall effect. Sometimes you just get lost in the details."

To get back to the business end of things, I mentioned the Maximum Rock and Roll theme issue from June of this year on facade indies propped up by majors and asked his opinion of the situation.

"The fake indie thing is sick. I mean they've rationalized it in all these different ways. 'Oh, we're just helping this label find new bands.' Right.

"It's like Smashing Pumpkins, their A&R person again was my old A&R person (Mark Williams) and Cracker's at Virgin. I heard the whole rap about, 'we've got 'em on Caroline, but they've really signed to Virgin.' This was way back in 1990. There was no indie. They just put it on an indie. It was like their whole thing was, 'we want to put it on Caroline, we want to sell 100-150,000 copies, build a fan base, then we want to bring it over to Virgin and make it explode." I mean, this thing, this Pumpkins thing didn't happen because they are a great band. Man, it was preordained. It was laid out. It was a plan. This is just the end of the five year plan.

"No knock on it. It worked. But along the way people have gotten wise to the Carolines and the like. I felt really weird when Matador became an underwritten part of Atlantic. I feel really weird when I hear Bob Lawton, a booking agent out of New York at Twin Towers which is now part of ICM. Bob's rational is ' all my bands were leaving me when they got too big or were being stolen away so I had to do something.'

"Well, yes and no Bob. It's like Matador who sort of had a chip called in and they had get a deal together or they would have gone out of business. Man, it's like the whole Creation thing I'm dealing with right now"

Before Mould rushes back home for another phone interview he has scheduled in fifteen minutes, I get in one more question.

"Are you ready for a new LP?"

"I need a break. We've done 3 records with some real commonalities. Now over 92', 93', 94' I see the alleged influence my work has on what's happening now and it makes me feel like I'm standing still.

"I keep thinking, shouldn't I be trying to reinvent the wheel again? I don't like it when time catches up with me."