Sugar - JC Auto
It took me a few months to get a copy of Beaster, even though I wanted one badly. That’s how it was back in high school, you know? Never had any money. Anyway, the first time I heard “JC Auto,” it was when it got played on the local college radio station. I never heard the DJ announce what it was, but I recognized Bob Mould’s voice, of course, so I wrote it down on the dub I made of the radio show as a Husker Du song. I couldn’t imagine that Bob Mould still had this sort of angry fire in him. His vocals sounded harsher and more intense than they had on anything he’d done since New Day Rising. After three progressively more mellow Husker Du albums, two acoustically-inclined solo records, and an extremely melodic Sugar debut, I figured Mould’s yelling days were over. It didn’t bother me to think that; after all, he was getting older, and his newer records were still good. I just didn’t think I’d ever see him do another song like “Real World” or “I Apologize.”
Well, of course I was wrong about that one, and I found out about my mistake in due course. I also found out that all of Beaster was similarly dark, and if not fired-up and angry, it explored moodier, more melancholy textures. Morose-sounding synth washes showed up on parts of the album, and minor-chord acoustic guitars as well. But the centerpiece of the record was the six-plus minute “JC Auto,” on which keyboards and acoustic guitars were nowhere to be found. Instead, Mould raged from one end of the track to the other, slamming distorted chords from the guts of his guitar and howling overtop of it. Drummer Malcolm Travis’s signature snare-heavy beats propelled him along, and bassist David Barbe pulled at his strings and harmonized vocally throughout the choruses, but this was Mould’s show.
“JC Auto” begins with Travis hammering on his kick drum and snare, in a choppy pattern that leaves a lot of beats out. Mould comes in after a second, first with unstructured guitar noise, then a stop-start guitar part that mostly just bends a single chord. After a few repetitions of this, the band finally locks into a solid rhythm and begins to play the first verse. There’s a lot of emotion in Mould’s vocals throughout, but it’s not always clear exactly what he’s singing about. However, just in this first verse, there are lines that stand out. “I’m writing a book on you, born on a holiday in the December snow,” he sings. “I’m wasting my time away.” It’s already clear who he’s directing his words to, and what he’s trying to say, but by the end of the song, this will seem subtle.
The chorus is the only overtly melodic part of the entire song, and even as distorted as it is, it’s incredibly catchy. Mould harmonizes with both Barbe and a second track of himself, laying down a backing vocal track on which he echoes his own lines. “Somewhere in this song, a little clue to something,” he sings, and the backup track responds, “Clue to something.” Later in the chorus, he sings, “You expect a real solution,” but then sings, “I’ve got to go with what I know, and take it on holiday.” At this point, it’s unclear just in whose voice Mould is singing the song. Who is telling us this story? We’ll get an answer eventually, but not just yet.
On the second verse, it appears to be Mould singing as himself, as he launches into a confession of sorts. “I’ve done my share of drugs,” he admits. “I’ve done my share of speed.” His second vocal track is still along for the ride here, and instead of merely echoing, it now offers responses that expand on the lines the primary vocal is singing. In response to “I’ve done my share of drugs,” the second vocal sings, “They drag me down.” Then, in response to the speed line, “It kept me up.” The third line of the verse is, “I’ve had the strangest love,” and the second vocal responds, “It’s all I need.” This could be a reference to Mould’s homosexuality, with the use of the word “strangest” reflecting a religious person’s attitude towards it, but there’s no way to know for sure. As on all past Mould albums, he never makes overt reference here to any gay-related issues. “I’ve had the things I need” is the final line, and with that, we plunge into another chorus.
“Everything seems wrong, I need to look to something,” he sings, and here, he seems to be taking the role of people who feel lost in life, who often turn to the church for some sort of reassurance. “People outside, inside, staying out for nothing,” he continues. “And if you’re in, I can’t let go, short of the long holiday.” This is vague, and it’s a stretch to come up with any particular interpretation here, but I at least tentatively would offer that Mould is condemning religious orders for drawing a line in the sand, between the “chosen” and the rejected, for only offering salvation to those who fit a certain profile. “I think you know what I’ve been saying,” he sings as the chorus ends, and maybe we do, but I can’t quite be sure.
The second vocal track has returned, during the chorus, to echoing the lines sung by the main vocal, but on the bridge after the second chorus, it strikes out on its own. It’s still Mould’s voice, but it’s far lower in the mix, almost buried under tracks of roaring guitar. And where the main vocal track is still being pretty vague, the backing vocal’s verse makes everything quite clear. “Passing judgement on my life, you never really got it right,” Mould sings under the roar, “I can’t believe in anything, I don’t believe in anything. Do you believe in anything? Do you believe me now?”
The response, musically, is for the band to return to that two-chord stop-start riff that started the song off. When they played it originally, it just seemed like something to mess around with before getting into the meat of the song. Now, though, it’s a raging powerhouse of a riff, and over it, Mould’s primary vocal track comes back in, responding to the questioning second-vocal bridge with howling anger. “I look like Jesus Christ. I act like Jesus Christ. Here’s your Jesus Christ,” he screams, punctuating these declarations by repeating, “I know, I know, I know,” over and over. Here, on the main vocal track, Mould has taken the role of the judgemental, unhelpful God, unwilling to offer any sort of reassurance to a flawed human like Mould himself. This pounding two-chord interlude drags on for several repetitions, and it’s so clear that this is the riff the song will fade out with that it’s almost surprising when it stops in favor of a third verse.
On this third verse, Mould’s primary vocal continues on in the role of Jesus, as he screams, “Bleeding to death again. Stuck in the heart again.” Underneath this, the backing vocal track sings, “My bleeding heart goes out to you.” Is this sarcasm, or a continued desire, despite everything, to be accepted? To be saved? Who knows? “Somebody nail my hands,” Mould yells on the primary vocal track, as the backing vocal chimes in, “I needed pain.” And now, we get one more chorus, and it begins with the line that, out of everything here, stands out the most. “I knew it all along, and now we’re screwed forever,” Mould howls at the top of his lungs. “Shake these demons off my back, and we can make it better, but I can’t go on knowing I am permanent.” This chorus, standing as it does as the last burst of overt melody in a song slowly drowning in angry noise, seems almost overwhelmed by the fury in Mould’s vocals, which no longer have any real melody to them. Despite everything, though, it still manages to be catchy, and to hear Mould screaming these indelible lines overtop of it really makes an impression.
There’s one last bridge, again with the less-audible backing vocal track taking the lead vocal. Mould’s words here are expressions of self-hatred and despair, as he sings, “I became the big disgrace. I know that I’m the ugly face.” As he ends the bridge by singing, “I need some time to heal a while,” his vocal, already low in the mix, threatens to disappear completely. And then the big angry two-chord piledriver riff returns, and the primary vocal track is back to let us know that “Here’s your Jesus Christ.” As Mould yells, “I know, I know,” over and over, the band’s monotonous changes between two chords over and over pound into your brain, in a manner too intense for it to become boring, no matter how many times it’s repeated. And it gets repeated a lot. When the final bridge ends, we’re only a few seconds past the four-minute mark, but the goes well past six minutes in length. As Travis pounds his drum kit furiously and Barbe’s bassline drives the song’s main chords into your head like a jackhammer, Mould’s screaming vocals and guitar distortion roll over you like waves, going on until he wears his rhythm section out and they stagger to a stop, with only the guitar still roaring away into oblivion. Only after at least 10 more seconds of this does the whole thing finally come to a merciful end.
