Do Look Back: Sugar’s Besides album (3 Nights of First Avenue shows starting tonight!)
Artist: Sugar
As a teenager in the 90s with a limited budget hunting for deals and a growing appetite for new music, greatest hits and especially live albums always caught my eye first. Besides caught my eye first as a newer release compilation but also included the Sugar song that caught my ear on the radio: “If I Can’t Change Your Mind”. The CD said “solo mix” (which really just turned out to be the song with the drums missing) but that was fine because it had the song so it seemed like a logical entry point. I didn’t know that soon Sugar (and Bob Mould’s solo work after) would become a massive pillar of what shaped my musical taste in that era. Husker Du was still years off for me, as BMG Music Club (the source of most of my CDs) only had Warehouse which came off extremely underwhelming to my teenage tastes.
Despite being a simple power trio, Sugar’s studio work was a deeply layered affair. Persistent acoustic guitars always seemed mixed under the layers of thick electric guitars created . The opener “Needle Hits E” is a clear showcase of how well it could work: it’s a great rocker made of stacked guitars that I still think about every time I pull in to a gas station. In revisiting the album I had forgotten how many of the songs were live tracks, which probably explains the surprisingly small amount of dead weight on it. It’s incredibly good for a collection of b-sides, there’s very little throwaway material here. “Mind Is An Island” is a great example of a track relegated to b-side despite being a better song than some of the material of the era that made it to File Under:Easy Listening. “Frustration” hits that controlled My Bloody Valentine inspired guitar shoegaze that they touched on with “Gift” from FU:EL. The studio production bothers me less than it did a few years ago on the studio cuts but the live band absolutely rips, especially through “Where Diamonds Are Halos” and a ferocious version of “JC Auto”. There’s only a couple of moments that the b-side comp nature of the album shows, not as much in songs but in some details like the transition from that live track to the sensitive acoustic “Believe What You’re Saying”. The closing trio of live songs is particularly inspiring, the ferocious and emotional run of “After All The Roads Have Led To Nowhere”, “Explode And Make Up” and the closing “The Slim”.
I never got to see Sugar as they broke up in 1995 and I didn’t see my first concert until 1996. Growing up in a smaller town, I only attended a handful of live music until college. What I did get was a Mould solo acoustic (and a couple songs electric at the end) at the Barrymore Theater in Madison just a week before my 17th birthday. It’s possible I was the youngest person there. Bob played a few of my Sugar favorites, “Needle Hits E” and “Hoover Dam” both showed up early and “If I Can’t Change Your Mind” made it later in the set. Somewhere down the road I tracked down a cassette bootleg of the show which I still have.
Sometime after buying Besides, I joined an internet listserv mailing list dedicated to Mould. This was pre-forums and probably the source of a lot of music discoveries of the era (I probably first heard about Guided By Voices here which is an obsession for another time). Being rather new to the internet in the mid-90s (we all were), It took a few weeks to discover there was a mode to make digest versions of the list that didn’t flood the family inbox with 100s for emails. Shortly after joining the list, I came home after a weekend away to find a stack of printed out emails that my dad had printed for me after the discussions flooded our inbox for me to read. The group also did a compilation of Mould covers, naturally called “A Good Idea” after the Sugar song that was duped into a few dozen cassettes and “maybe two CDs”. It’s somewhere in my basement but I couldn’t find it for this piece. My friend Skot, my younger brother and I chose “Clownmaster” from Besides as it was the one song without vocals as none of us were ready to sing or had the gear to record it. Our single mic bedroom jam of the song made the cassette and marked my first music release almost 30 years ago. It got a one line review from someone on the list “Sugar goes garage – viva los early sixties!”. I wasn’t totally sure what that meant at the time but seems like a compliment. It’s the only reference on the internet I can find to the compilation.
Sugar is back now, with new music and new tours in a well deserved victory lap 30+ years later. They’re playing a mostly sold out run of three shows at First Avenue. Hope you have tickets. I’ll see you there Saturday if you do.
– Adam
Sugar plays First Avenue Thursday, September 10th, Friday, September 11th, and Saturday, September 12th, with J. Robbins of Jawbox opening. Friday night is sold out.
Artists
Adam Bubolz is a co-founder, writer, and photographer at Reviler, covering the Minneapolis/St. Paul music scene since 2009. His concert photography has appeared throughout the site’s coverage of local and touring acts.
