The return of an alt-rock force

IT’S a familiar story: The leader of a popular group, who split with his bandmates ages ago, stubbornly refuses to play their old songs in his own concerts for years, much to the distress of his audiences.

Mainstream rock fans will probably plug Creedence Clearwater Revival’s John Fogerty into that scenario -- after all, it took the singer more than two decades to return the Creedence hits to his set list.

For longtime followers of post-punk and indie rock, though, the name that comes to mind is Bob Mould, who has conducted a busy and varied 15-year solo career without tapping into the songbook of Husker Du, the seminal band he led in the 1980s.

Until now.

On his current U.S. tour (which includes a show Saturday at the El Rey Theatre) the singer-guitarist and his band have been performing such Husker Du staples as “Chartered Trips,” “I Apologize,” “Celebrated Summer” and “Could You Be the One,” mixing them in with songs from Mould’s ‘90s band Sugar and his various solo incarnations, right up to his new album, “Body of Song.”

“I think enough time had passed,” Mould, 45, says of his decision. “I sort of got right with the idea of taking ownership of those songs, as opposed to leaving them where they were....

“I just think time does that. I’m sort of reconciling the past a little bit, dealing with the Husker stuff and the Sugar stuff and looking forward to playing that stuff in a live setting. I’ve always been one to sort of look forward, but I think it’s nice to frame this new record with the old stuff for once.”

For Mould’s earliest fans, the gesture means more than just a chance to hear some long-dormant favorites. It’s also a salute to an era when the Minneapolis-based Husker Du and some other hardy young bands -- including the Replacements, Dinosaur Jr. and the Minutemen -- crisscrossed the country on low-budget tours, building on punk’s foundations to create the infrastructure for the alternative and indie rock that would dominate the ‘90s.

Mould enjoyed watching it unfold after he split with his bandmates Grant Hart and Greg Norton in 1988. Two solo albums were followed by two more by his band Sugar, but late in the decade he soured on an alt-rock scene that was losing its creative momentum.

He proceeded to confuse the loyal fan base he had built, releasing an uneven farewell-to-rock album called “The Last Dog and Pony Show” and then leaving music entirely for seven months to help run the show for Time Warner’s World Championship Wrestling league.

He returned to music in 2002 with a couple of curveballs: the tuneful but heavily electronic album “Modulate” (if only that had come out after the Postal Service’s success, he half-jokingly laments) and a more hard-core electronic work called “Long Playing Grooves” under the name LoudBomb. At the same time he was assembling “Body of Song” as a companion piece, but it turned out he was confusing himself as well as his fans.

“That was where I got myself in trouble three years ago,” Mould says, “when I was trying to create all these divisions and categories for everything, where LoudBomb was strictly electronic, and ‘Body of Song’ was going to be very organic, and ‘Modulate’ was this sort of hybrid electronic-guitar record.

“Now in ’04 and ’05 what I’ve realized is a good song is a good song and I should probably just let people hear it. When I get a group of good songs, I’ll make an album and that’s what it will be.”

“Body of Song,” with its loops and samples and swirling atmospheres, isn’t the full-on “return to rock” that some were anticipating, but the guitar and voice are reasserting themselves in a way that evokes some of Mould’s longtime signatures -- a trembling, snarling singing style and austere melodies that suggest a state of wintry emotional isolation.

Mould, who lives in Washington, D.C., is over his disillusionment with rock. He finds the current scene vital and creative, and between his own music-making and keeping up his blog (modulate.blogspot.com), he finds it hard to keep up with all the new sounds. He says it reminds him a bit of the old days, with MP3 blogs filling the role that fanzines once played.

Among his ‘80s peers who pioneered indie rock, perhaps only L.A.’s Mike Watt, from the Minutemen, has remained as consistently active. For Mould, it’s no mystery.

“I get up in the morning I’m thinking about music.... I either write stuff for my blog or I write words for future use or I write music. That’s pretty much what I do the first three hours of my day every day.

“It’s the greatest job in the world.... That’s what my life is about and that’s what it will continue to be about beyond this record. I don’t know. It’s just what I do.”

*

Bob Mould Band

Who: Bob Mould Band, with Shiny Toy Guns

Where: El Rey Theatre, 5515 Wilshire Blvd., L.A.

When: 8 p.m. Saturday

Price: $21

Info: (323) 936-4790