OCTOBER, 1983:

"No. Absolutely not." Bob Mould leaned against the green painted brick studio walls and sighed. Not this again, he thought. "Turn On The News' not gonna be on the album, and that's final."

"Look, it fits into the story. The kid wakes up from a night of bad dreams and turns back on to reality." Grant Hart was sitting crosslegged on top of the secretary's desk, chipping away at its peeling varnish. A floor lamp was sitting next to him, dust motes floating around in its beam. "Your bad dreams, for the most part."

"It's still gonna be seen as a preachy piece of shit, like the stuff we used to put out. You wanna play in front of mohawked D-students the rest of your life? Why are you so much in love with that song, anyway? There's no dead women in it."

"I've got Diane, Pink Turns To Blue, and a coupla other songs like that, and you've got a couple thousand 'I'm miserable, and life sucks, and I'm gonna slit my wrists tomorrow' type of songs." He paused, and pictured Bob dangling from the side of the Capitol Records building, attached to the wall by a candy-striped flagpole up his considerable rear end. "Becides, we need some kinda real song on the fourth side, not just Reoccuring Dreams, or Dez'll think that..."

"Speaking of which, why don't you two kiss and make up so that we can get it on tape?" Spot, their producer, stuck his head into the room. Sighing, Bob and Grant followed him out and into the live room. Greg Norton was waiting for them inside, tapping his fingers impatiently on the body of his bass. At a signal from Spot, Bob coaxed a quiet feedback squeal from his guitar: the beginning of Reoccuring Dreams. For the next fourteen minutes, he surrounded Grant's supple drumming with a force field of harsh guitar riffs, while Grant responded by laying a blanket of rhythms around and under Bob's guitar. Meanwhile, Greg anchored them with the melody, keeping them from floating too far away from Earth. Afterward, Bob stood in the center of the floor, feeling the sweat dry on his body, trying to remember what he had been arguing about with Grant.

"I still want Turn On on the record." Bob's skin prickled as he felt Grant lean closer in to him from a few inches behind.

"I've said this sixty-nine thousand times before and I'll say it sixty-nine thousand more if I have to: No."

"You're not the boss of the band, we all are. I say it's in."

"I'm gonna go have a smoke." By the time that Greg had finished saying that, he had unplugged his bass, pulled out his lighter, and left the room. Spot had also taken off, leaving the door to the control room swinging violently on its hinges. Bob slowly turned around until he was face-to-face with Grant.

"Look, Greg hates it, and so do I."

"That's not what he said last time we talked about it with him, and you know it."

"Well, it looks like you need to clean out your ears just as much as Spot needs to clean out his. I heard Greg say he hated it."

"Liar."

"I'm not gonna listen to you anymore." Bob pointed to the control room and the reel-to-reel tape deck inside, with the album's master tape on it. "You know, I could go in there with a pair of scissors and a pail of water and fix it so that you wouldn't have any songs on the record."

"Cocksucker." Grant stumbled over that word as he said it, and he stood stock still afterwards with a stricken look on his face. Bob grabbed the collar of Grant's shirt, and Grant then whirled him around, shoving him hard against the nearest wall and pinning him there.

"Do you wanna fight, Bob? Get into it, right here? 'Cause if we do, I'm getting on a plane for home first thing tomorrow."

"That was just like calling a black guy a nigger." Bob didn't struggle at all to get out of Grant's grasp, but remained still.

"I know. I'm sorry. My tongue has a mind of its own sometimes. I shouldn't have said what I did, and you shouldn't have did what you did. Peace?"

"Peace. Just don't do it again."

They stood there against the wall for a while. Slowly, Bob became aware that the front of Grant's jeans, with Grant's cock inside, was pressed flat against the back of his pants; and furthermore, that cock was getting hard. His own cock responded, Pavlov-like, by rising in unison with Grant's. He wondered if Grant's cock had begun to harden while he was shoving him against the wall or afterwards. "Er, what's that?"

"Dunno where it came from, but my zipper's gonna split open if it continues." Grant reached between the two of them to adjust his crotch, which made Bob shiver for a bit as he visualized Grant wrapping his strong arms around his waist and rubbing his... Why should I be having this reaction to Grant, of all people?, he thought.