The Cult has just released its first new full-length album in five years, “Choice of Weapon.Todd Park Mohr has been in the music industry long enough to have angered executives at several record companies across several decades.
Mohr’s band Big Head Todd and the Monsters performs Wednesday on the Pepsi Stage in Super Bowl Village.
In 1993, when Big Head Todd and the Monsters first became known to the world thanks to the record “Sister Sweetly,” Mohr was asked to make a music video for the single “Bittersweet.”
Mohr says he didn’t much like music videos or the bands that were known for making a lot of them, so he declined.
Years later, another label asked Mohr to collaborate on songwriting with several prominent hitmakers. The resulting songs would probably have made the band a lot of new fans and disgusted more than a few old ones. But Mohr declined.
“A lot of (popular music) and movies and TV shows are written by committee these days,” Mohr says, “and you just sort of feel that there’s not an individual present in it.”
Mohr says the label subsequently “sat on” the band for four years, not allowing it to release music or do much of anything. He says he still isn’t sure whether any of those decisions were the right ones.
“There’s no way to know if you are making the right decision,” he says. “It’s just that certain things repulse one.
“I might live in a bigger house now if I’d made that video for ‘Bittersweet,’ ” Mohr says. “On the other hand, we might not be around anymore.”
Mohr believes slow and steady has won the race.
Big Head Todd and the Monsters don’t fill stadiums, but the band has built up enough of a certain kind of following that Mohr can make almost any kind of music he wants and no one will jump ship.
For example, the band’s last album was a tribute to Delta blues legend Robert Johnson – a career move as wise as it was non-commercial.
Mohr says he has been playing Delta blues in Chicago clubs for the last few years and says the experience has been rewarding and humbling.
“It is not often that you hear someone play Charlie Patton and Son House these days, and there is a lot of excitement to be found in it,” he says. “It is very different from Chicago blues – unlikely chord changes, skipped beats, skipped bars and no choruses.
“It is not very commercial music,” Mohr says, “At the same time, it is easily understood. There’s a lot of poetry and passion in it, which is largely missing in today’s music.”
For all of Mohr’s iconoclasm, the music of Big Head Todd and the Monsters is also easily understood – a hybrid of blues, soul and rock that is not likely to alienate many listeners.
And Mohr’s flights of fancy and periodic digging-in of heels clearly hasn’t alienated his fellow band members. The same guys who helped Mohr found Big Head Todd and the Monsters are still around nearly 25 years later.
“Well, we all love the same things about music,” he says. “We are all committed to the music that we create, and we’re all equally afraid of having a day job.
“And we get along well,” Mohr says, “so there’s really been no reason to contemplate parting ways.”
Mohr’s capacity to surprise extends to digital piracy (he is for it) and the future of music in the digital age (he feels hopeful about it).
“I have always embraced the idea of downloading music and piracy,” he says. “The more people who can enjoy and use music, the better off everybody is. I think it is good for an artist’s career for music to get around that way.”
Mohr believes the digital age had brought a lot of opportunity.
“A lot of different kinds of music can co-exist,” he says. “It is healthy for music that it isn’t necessarily dominated by corporations all the time. Creative people are doing whatever it occurs to them to do. It is a fascinating time for the arts.”
