Kevin Bronson on March 3rd, 2009

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Bob Mould, two ticks short of 50 years old, played the Hotel Cafe on Monday night, and it’s no big deal that a middle-aged rocker with a shaven pate and the gray beard of an academic – especially a guy whose next album is called “Life and Times” – would wield his guitar at the singer-songwriter haven.

It wasn’t until late in the hourlong set, after Mould had toured a couple decades worth of tunes and the mini ma-and-pa moshpit near the south wall had subsided, that you realized how wrong it was. He even provided the reminder. “You all live in L.A.,” he told the crowd of his contemporaries. “You need to go see No Age if you haven’t.” Just guessing here, but that would have applied to most folks in the house.

Mould had played with the L.A. noise-rock duo the night previous in San Francisco (in fact, he will conduct an interview today with Randy Randall and Dean Spunt for LA Record). “I saw the mosh pit forming and said, ‘Don’t get any ideas that I’m gonna do that,'” Mould laughed during the meet-and-greet Monday. “I’m too old for that.”

Maybe not. When somebody suggested he ought to play the Smell – the L.A. underground venue where Mould’s seminal band Husker Du would have felt right at home back in the day (and which recently hosted Thurston Moore) – he allowed as how the topic has been broached of his playing Sean Carlson’s F-Yeah Fest. Can we just schedule that now?

On Monday, though, solo Mould was stellar, no matter your age. He started with “Wishing Well,” off his 20-year-old album “Workbook,” and touched on his ’90s material with Sugar, including “Hoover Dam.” He played three songs off his forthcoming album (April 7 on Anti-), including the title track and a number he called “the best song I’ve written in 15 years” – “I’m Sorry, Baby, But You Can’t Stand in My Light Any More.”

He was joined for the finale by “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” composer Stephen Trask.

Photos by Alric Kaczor ([email protected])