Makeup For The Silence

Sugar - Frustration (Live)

After two decades as a PC devotee (going back to my first computer, a clunky ugly Tandy 1000EX with MS-DOS 2.11 that my family bought when I was five), I finally made the jump to Mac about four years ago, and haven’t looked back.  Or at least hadn’t until about a month ago, when I ran into some issues with the Mac App Store.  The details are unimportant; what’s relevant is that, after two weeks of back and forth troubleshooting, Apple has just completely stopped responding to my emails.  It’s absolutely exasperating; I just wanna install Lion like all the other cool kids!

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Sugar are primarily known as Bob Mould’s post-Hüsker Dü alt-rock vehicle, but just like with the Hüskers, Bob wasn’t the only songwriter in this band.  Bassist David Barbe wrote and sang a number of Sugar songs; only one (“Company Book,” arguably the worst of the lot) made it to a proper album, but a number of others exist as b-sides.  (It’s a real shame, that; “In The Eyes Of My Friends” and “Anyone” and “Where Diamonds Are Halos” are some of my favorite Sugar tracks, and are easily just as good as much of what ended up making the official albums). Many of his songs, but not all, can be found on the posthumous Besides compilation (clever, eh? ok maybe not). When Besides was released, it was accompanied by a live album colloquially titled The Joke Is Always On Us, Sometimes after the phrase that appeared printed on the disc.  That’s where this version of “Frustration” comes from.

While Joke was intended to be a bonus disc, somewhere along the way there was a goof in the production line, and a number of Besides CDs intended for distribution via Columbia House’s CD club were produced with ONLY the live disc; moreover, the disc was screened with the artwork for the main Besides disc, so it was only when you put the CD into your player that the error would become apparent.  And so 14 year old me, having dug the couple Sugar tracks I knew from 120 Minutes and needing to order a couple CDs from Columbia House to pay off the 12-for-a-penny offer I’d taken advantage of the year before, was inadvertently introduced to most of Sugar’s catalog via this live album.  That’s ok — I was sold from the opening chords; it’s been a 15 year love affair ever since.

(An aside — weird to think that the kids now will never know Columbia House, in all its scammy glory!)

The studio version is a studied impersonation of My Bloody Valentine (I don’t know David’s thoughts on MBV, but Bob was very much in their thrall at the time he produced this; for more on the ties between Mould and MBV, look up the story behind the Sugar track “Gift”).  Live, with the amps cranked way way up (Sugar had a reputation for painfully loud performances) and Barbe’s voice unleashed, it becomes a blistering blast of proto-emo, late 90’s style emo, a good half-decade ahead of it’s time.  (Maybe it’s just my personal musical background and my taste biases, but I hear a lot more of this track in bands like Braid and Mineral and Static Prevails-era Jimmy Eat World than I hear Rites Of Spring and such).  It’s one of my favorite songs, and one of my all-time favorite live recordings.

(You can find the studio version on this mix CD I posted here a little while back…)

Barbe (who was in a handful of bands prior to Sugar) went on to record a couple solo albums, but has primarily made his bones as a producer/engineer, and is functionally a studio member of the Drive By Truckers.  But, at least to me, his work with Sugar remains his high water mark as a songwriter.