BAND PEOPLE: Peter Hughes

I’m using the opportunity of this newsletter to highlight expanded versions of selected interviews from my research for “Band People: Life and Work in Popular Music” (University of Texas Press); previously Nels Cline, Josh Freese, and Janet Weiss. I spoke to Peter Hughes in 2016; he left The Mountain Goats in 2024.

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My name is Peter Hughes. I’m 46 years old and I play bass most of the time. Probably since 2003–04, that was when it turned the corner—there was that moment where you realize, “I’m making more money doing this than doing my nominal job.”

I’m totally self-taught pop/rock—taught by friends, basically. I went to the University of California at Irvine and got a BA in English, which the only job I have ever actually physically needed my degree for was one that paid $7.65 an hour. I did a little bit of editing at one time. But after I finished school I just kind of immediately plunged myself into music and did whatever—worked in coffee shops; I was a substitute teacher for a long time; just doing whatever jobs would allow me to tour and accompany my musical ambition. At a point in my late twenties when it kind of seemed like things weren’t really going to happen, I took a job as a graphic designer. I basically just taught myself a bunch of Quark and Photoshop and Illustrator and all that stuff. I guess I was self-taught in a lot of disciplines, and music worked out eventually.

It’s funny that it worked out in this circuitous way, because when I was in high school and college I knew that playing music was what I wanted to do. To me—this sounds kind of hokey, but to me Sonic Youth was the model. I was into lots of different kinds of music and lots of different types of bands, but even in the late ’80s and early ’90s I saw the way they had grown as a band, slowly and organically and in a kind of natural way; and when they went to a major label it wasn’t like a huge sellout thing. It was just like continuing on their trajectory.

I grew up as a suburban kid, and I could see they were making this really—what seemed to me extreme music; and they were in this milieu that was even more extreme music; Swans and whoever else. But at the same time, they seemed like really normal people living normal lives, at least in a way that I could see myself doing it. To me, if I thought about my dream career, it would have been something like that: a band that just kind of grows in a natural gradual way and it is successful on its own terms, maybe never getting hugely successful but just being able to have a career; being able to play music and live a reasonably comfortable life.

And it took me a while to get there, but really the Mountain Goats is kind of that band. Just over two-plus decades now, it’s exactly that model; and I don’t think it was any particular design of John’s, it just worked out that way because of that slow gradual growth. We are in a position now where we have this pretty solid fan base that isn’t going to go away, and it means we can go out and tour a couple times a year. We can take a couple years off if we need to and come back to it and that base is always going to be there. We are kind of in that “perfect sweet spot,” famous enough to do this, but not actually famous.

John and I met in the early ’90s when my old band DiskothiQ was playing around the inland empire. We met through Dennis Callaci, who runs Shrimper Records; and we became friends through that. It was a very collegial, incestuous scene. We collaborated together; there were lots of cameos—John appeared on our records, and I did some things with him. But it wasn’t until he moved away to Iowa—I think it was in ’95—and a year later, out of the blue he called. He had been touring with the bass player Rachel Ware, and they had two weeks of German shows booked, and she had to pull out at the last minute, and John called me. He had never—we had just goofed around a bit, but we had never actually played together; I had never played bass with him. He asked me if I wanted to come with him and do the shows. I was teaching at the time and I said, “Yeah sure, that would be awesome.” I had always been a huge fan of his stuff, even then; and I was excited to just get my hands on these songs and actually play parts that I wanted to hear.

So we did this tour; it was just a couple of weeks; but it was really good. The guy who had booked the tour in Germany said, “Look, this is so good; how about you guys come back in six months and we’ll do five weeks.” And we had actually gone home with money—not a ton of money, but like a thousand bucks. At that time to come home with anything was just—I remember the last night there ,we were just counting the stuff out on the floor. We were thinking we were the richest men alive. We were like, “Hell yeah, if we can get a thousand bucks for two weeks, imagine we come back and do five weeks and come home rich as kings.”

So we did that. I turned down a full-time editing job that I had interviewed for and was offered. I did the tour, and of course the tour was a complete catastrophe; everything that had gone right the first time just went wrong. We were over there for five weeks and it was just totally brutal—you know what it is like when tours go bad. It was kind of a traumatic episode, and we came home from that and for me it was like—I thought I was going to come home with all this money, and I thought I would have this job waiting for me, and nope, nope. I was at a point where the substitute teaching was literally causing me to have dreams about strangling people. I went back for one day and was just sitting there at this desk. This kid walks in looks at me—and usually when kids walk into the classroom and see that there is a substitute teacher, it is just like this involuntary reaction like, “Hell yeah!” And this girl just looked at me and did a double take; and then she came over and said, “Are you okay?” And I wasn’t. I quit that, and went into this real dark time, where I realized this was a dead end.

I [had to] figure something out; and so basically, long story short, John and I didn’t end up playing together for another five years. He went back to Iowa and I went back to California. We still kept in touch; we were pretty much best friends, emailing every day. But as far as playing music, he wasn’t in quite the same place, but kind of similar—he will tell you he was working at grain silos and psych hospitals, not glamorous stuff; but still playing out occasionally and touring occasionally.