minutemens double nickels on the dime (33â…“ series).pdf

Double Nickels on the Dime Praise for the series: It was only a matter of time before a clever publisher realized that there is an audience for whom Exile on Main Street or Electric Ladyland are as significant and worthy of study as The Catcher in the Rye or Middlemarch.... The series, which now comprises 29 titles with more in the works, is freewheeling and eclectic, ranging from minute rock-geek analysis to idiosyncratic personal celebration—The New York Times Book Review Ideal for the rock geek who thinks liner notes just aren’t enough—Rolling Stone One of the coolest planet—Bookslut

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These are for the insane collectors out there who appreciate fantastic design, well-executed thinking, and things that make your house look cool. Each volume in this series takes a seminal album and breaks it down in startling minutiae. We love these. We are huge nerds—Vice A brilliant series...each one a work of real love—NME (UK) Passionate, obsessive, and smart—Nylon Religious tracts for the rock ’n’ roll faithful—Boldtype

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[A] consistently excellent series—Uncut (UK) We...aren’t naive enough to think that we’re your only source for reading about music (but if we had our way...watch out). For those of you who really like to know everything there is to know about an album, you’d do well to check out Continuum’s “33 1/3” series of books.—Pitchfork For reviews of individual titles in the series, please visit our website at www.continuumbooks.com and 33third.blogspot.com Also available in this series: Dusty in Memphis by Warren Zanes Forever Changes by Andrew Hultkrans Harvest by Sam Inglis The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society by Andy Miller Meat Is Murder by Joe Pernice The Piper at the Gates of Dawn by John Cavanagh Abba Gold by Elisabeth Vincentelli Electric Ladyland by John Perry Unknown Pleasures by Chris Ott

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Sign ‘O’ the Times by Michaelangelo Matos The Velvet Underground and Nico by Joe Harvard Let It Be by Steve Matteo Live at the Apollo by Douglas Wolk Aqualung by Allan Moore OK Computer by Dai Griffiths Let It Be by Colin Meloy Led Zeppelin IV by Erik Davis Armed Forces by Franklin Bruno Exile on Main Street by Bill Janovitz Grace by Daphne Brooks Murmur by J. Niimi Pel Sounds by Jim Fusilli Ramones by Nicholas Rombes Endtroducing... by Eliot Wilder Kick Out the Jams by Don McLeese Low by Hugo Wilcken

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In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Kim Cooper Music from Big Pink by John Niven Paul’s Boutique by Dan LeRoy Doolittle by Ben Sisario There’s a Riot Goin’ On by Miles Marshall Lewis Stone Roses by Alex Green Bee Thousand by Marc Woodsworth The Who Sell Out by John Dougan Highway 61 Revisited by Mark Polizzotti Loveless by Mike McGonigal The Notorious Byrd Brothers by Ric Menck Court and Spark by Sean Nelson 69 Love Songs by LD Beghtol Songs in the Key of life by Zeth Lundy Use Your Illusion I and II by Eric Weisbard Daydream Nation by Matthew Steams Trout Mask Replica by Kevin Courrier

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People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm by Shawn Taylor Forthcoming in this series: London Calling by David L. Ulin Aja by Don Breithaupt Rid of Me by Kate Schatz and many more . . .

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Double Nickels on the Dime

Michael T. Fournier

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2009 The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc 80 Maiden Lane, New York, NY 10038 The Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX www.continuumbooks.com Copyright © 2007 by Michael T. Fournier All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers or their agents. Printed in Canada Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fournier, Michael T., 1973Double nickels on the dime / by Michael T. Fournier. p. cm. – (33 1/3) eISBN-13: 978-1-4411-2216-2 1. Minutemen (Musical group) Double nickels on the dime. 2. Punk rock music—United States—History and criticism. I. Title. ML421.M58F68 2007 782.42166092′2—dc22

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2007004600

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In memory of D. Boon 1958-1985 Frank L. Fournier 1914–2006 Craig Ryder 1967–2005

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Contents History Lesson History Lesson (Part II) Arena Rock Is the New Wave: Side D. Punk Rock Is the New Nostalgia: Side Watt Dance Rock Is the New Pasture: Side George Chump Rock Is the New Cool: Side Chaff Real Names Be Proof

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History Lesson The three members of the Minutemen—singer/guitarist Dennes “D.” Boon, bassist Mike Watt, and drummer George Hurley—spent their teen years in San Pedro, California, a working class port suburb of Los Angeles. San Pedro was a rough town, so Boon’s mom encouraged him and Watt to play music. That way, she reasoned, they’d be doing something productive and safe, away from the streets. Boon was nominated guitarist. Before Watt got a proper bass, he played the low strings on a guitar. D. and Mike mostly taught themselves their instruments, trying to do covers of “Smoke on the Water” and such. The famous anecdote about their early years is that they didn’t realize that instruments had to be tuned together. They thought that the looseness or tightness of strings was a matter of personal preference—some guys liked to play tighter than others. Their high school graduation came at roughly the same time as the first wave of punk acts playing in Los Angeles. Watt and Boon would drive up and see bands play the (in) famous Masque club. If the weird dudes up on stage could play in a band, the two friends reasoned, anyone could. Including them. Watt and Boon’s first punk band was called the Reactionaries. (Their first group, which mostly played covers, was titled Bright Orange Band. Watt had the band’s acronym painted on the back of his jacket, causing everyone to mistakenly start calling him Bob.) George Hurley, a former surfer who

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switched to the drums after a near-death experience on the waves, played the skins. Martin Tambourovich was the singer. After the Reactionaries disbanded in 1979, Boon and Watt kept writing and playing songs. George Hurley joined a New Wave band called Hey Taxi!, leaving the two friends drummerless. Local welder Frank Tonche assumed the role. The new three-piece was dubbed the Minutemen. Tonche was none too enamored with the punk scene. He quit the band quickly. Hurley was re-recruited when Hey Taxi! broke up. The Minutemen eschewed a traditional front man, feeling that such a role was too “rock,” preferring instead to have a band member (usually Boon, sometimes Watt) sing the quirky lyrical bursts the band became known for. The Minutemen played their first gig with Los Angeles’ Black Flag. After their set, Hag guitarist Greg Ginn, owner of the SST record label, asked the trio if they wanted to put out a record. The Minutemen guys couldn’t believe it. A record after their first show! The Paranoid Time EP, released in 1980, contained seven short spurts of song that sounded wholly unique—jagged, obtuse, and edgy. The records that followed—The Punch Line, a fifteen-minute long LP released in 1981; What Makes a Man Start Fires, their second long-player; the Joy and Bean Spill EPs—documented the band defining and refining their sound and aesthetic.

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“It was such odd, prickly, and, at first pass, un-listener-friendly music,” says Clint Conley, bassist for Mission of Burma. “Furthermore, it seemed like rock in a different language—like these savants had been airlifted in from some distant continent. It shared almost none of the syntax, surface, and convention of the ‘new’ music of the time. No fat guitars, no power chords, no mouthfeel! These short, strange eruptions had no specific reference to any spot on the rock spectrum, really—Chuck Berry to Velvet Underground. It was completely original and brave music.” The Minutemen’s music sometimes takes the back burner when the group is discussed simply because of the character of both the band itself and the three men who played in it. They were striking onstage: The ex-surfer drummer with the squeeb ‘do playing faster than seemed humanly possible as the flannel-clad ringer for Castro wrestled his bass and blew locomotive steam from his cheeks. In the front, this huge guy in bad shoes and cutoffs dwarfing his guitar, playing dentist-drill blasts. They played songs about Latin America and big thunder law, extended these metaphors you’d piece together as you fell asleep weeks after hearing ‘em. They portrayed the personal as political but were never preachy or out of line, leading by example with a sense of humor, a huge set of influences, and fierce determination to do it their way. The Minutemen were a bunch of normal dudes with jobs and worries who put things together and made it happen. They were a band that used the infrastructure and ethos of punk rock but were light years away from the scene’s musical orthodoxy. There is tragedy in the Minutemen’s story, as well. Singer/ guitarist D. Boon died in a van accident on December 22, 14

1985, just after the Minutemen’s 3 Way Tie (For Last) was released. Watt swore off music until a young man from Ohio named Ed Crawford showed up at his door. Shortly thereafter, Crawford, along with Watt and George Hurley, started a new band named flREHOSE. This book is not about all that. But it kinda is. See, the music I love has always made me want to dig deep, to figure out what the songs were about, and who/what influenced them. Once I get those things, it’s easy to start putting together an idea of what the players were thinking, what they were shaped by, and how they funneled their energies into something unheralded. In the course of researching for this book, I have been lucky enough to receive commentary and support from some of the folks who were involved in making what I consider to be the greatest record of all time. I’ve heard tons of stories and have been presented with new ways to look at the album. A lot of the anecdotes are pretty specific, super geeky—just the kind of stuff, in other words, I would want to read about the album if I wasn’t writing this book myself. I guess what I’m trying to get at is this: I’m assuming that you, the reader, are way into the band. Maybe not, though. Maybe Double Nickels is one of those records that’s been sitting on your shelf for a long time. Lord knows it’s more than a little intimidating. It’s a long-ass album, daunting and seemingly impenetrable. There’s a lot to absorb, which is why I’ve been going back to it again and again for fifteen years. I still hear new stuff with

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every spin, little nuances that had been missed in the largeness of the opus. So, it’s up to you how to read this. You can go straight through and read about all of the songs, start to finish, or you can flip around and find your favorites first. It’s cool.

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History Lesson (Part II) Work on the record that would eventually become Double Nickels began in the summer and fall of 1983, following the Minutemen’s European tour with label mates Black Flag. In early 1983, the Minutemen were asked to contribute a song to producer/ex-Blue Cheer keyboardist Ethan James’s Radio Tokyo Tapes, named after the Venice, California, club where he worked. Write a song, James told the band, and I’ll record it for free. The Minutemen, of course, wrote really short tunes, so they mashed three songs together—“Self-Referenced,” “Cut,” and “Dream Told By Moto”—and recorded them all in one shot. (Those three songs, along with five more recorded for a total of $50, would later be released as the Buzz or Howl Under the Influence of Heat EP.) In the early eighties, it was difficult to find recording engineers and producers who understood both the sonic and aesthetic qualities of punk. Prior to the Radio Tokyo sessions, the band had recorded solely with Spot, SST’s de facto house producer. He always did a good job with the band, but, as bassist Mike Watt said, “Ethan, although not knowing us much, tapped right in. He’s a very open guy, not a lot of prejudice.” The Minutemen were so impressed by the Radio Tokyo sessions that they enlisted James to record their next full-length. The Minutemen recorded an album’s worth of material with James in early 1983.

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Then, in December, Hüsker Dü, a Minneapolis three-piece, came through town, and posed an inadvertent challenge to the band. Hüsker Dü—singer/drummer Grant Hart, singer/ guitarist Bob Mould, and bassist Greg Norton—were friends with the Minutemen. Both acts were three-pieces, providing musical camaraderie and kinship, and both bands, by that time, were recording for SST Records. Hüsker Dü’s first recording was released on the Minutemen’s New Alliance imprint. “[SST] didn’t have the wherewithal to put out this tape that (Hüsker ü) gave them called Land Speed Record and we thought it was like methamphetamine Blue Oyster Cult,” Watt says. “We really liked it, so we put it out. We put out their first album.” (Hüsker Dü later returned the favor by releasing the Minutemen’s Tour Spiel’EP on their Reflex imprint.) In the winter of 1983, Hüsker Dü made their way to California. They were eager to get into the studio to record their long batch of ambitious new songs, tided Zen Arcade, with Spot. Zen Arcade is a double-length concept album about a runaway who experiences a life full of confusion and terror outside of the familiar confines of home (before, of course, he wakes up and finds that his trip was merely a dream). The record contains tinges of psychedelia, quiet acoustics, and Eastern meter, light years from the angry, buzzing thrash the band was known for. It wasn’t all new and unconventional for the band, though. Bits of, pop melody lie submerged under Bob Mould’s trademark locust hum of guitar, with drums that always felt a fraction of a second off anchoring howling torrents of lament. Nothing like Zen Arcade had ever come out of the punk scene before. The album (along with Double 18

Nickels, a little later) was, according to American Hardcore author Steven Blush, “either the pinnacle or the downfall of the pure hardcore scene.” After Hüsker Dü and the Minutemen released their respective double albums, many punk bands would begin to ignore the stylistic limitations of the punk scene. In the wake of Hüsker Dü’s magnum opus, the Minutemen decided to rise to the inadvertent challenge presented by their friends. Reknowned rock critic/former SST Records manager Joe Carducci says, quite simply, “It just hadn’t occurred to the Minutemen to do a double album.” SST Records was willing and able to release the double albums by both bands. “One thing that was really amazing about SST records what that they did not censor their art in any way,” says Steven Blush. “If a band came up and said that they wanted to put out a triple album, they’d do it. If you went to a major label with a relatively young band and said that you wanted to do a double album or a triple album, they’d laugh you out of the office.” “[Hüsker Dü] had a whole concept with theirs,” says Mike Watt. “[W]e already invented a batch of songs, recorded ‘em, so we had to stretch and make a concept to put this [record] together to be like them. It wasn’t really a competition, even. When I wrote ‘Take That, Hüskers!’ in [the Double Nickels liner notes] it was acknowledging that they gave us the idea to make a double album.” It was back to James’s Radio Tokyo to record a second batch of songs. It’s interesting to note that the songwriting 19

throughout Double Nickels is cohesive despite the time that passed between the first and second recording sessions. The players have no memory of which songs come from which session—the work was simply done. (There are a few songs that I was able to pin down as being products of either the first or second session due to contextual clues. When such hints come up, I’ve made notes in the entries for the tunes in question.) So, the challenge the Minutemen faced was to create a concept from a seemingly disparate bunch of songs, recorded months apart in two separate sessions. They rose to the occasion and came up with interlocking concepts. The first was a reaction to the popular music of the time: a pre-Van Halen Sammy Hagar had scored a big pop hit with “I Can’t Drive 55.” The Minutemen thought it would be funny to comment on the nature of Hagar’s little ditty by letting listeners know that driving fast wasn’t terribly defiant. “So to wear red leather and say that you can’t drive 55 like that’s the big rebellion thing ... to us, the big rebellion thing was writing your own fuckin’ songs and trying to come up with your own story, your own picture, your own book, whatever. So he can’t drive 55, because that was the national speed limit? Okay, well drive 55, but we’ll make crazy music,” says Watt. The cover of Double Nickels on the Dime spells it all out: Watt driving his VW Beetle at exactly 55 miles per hour—double nickels, in truckerspeak—on California’s Interstate 10, affectionately known as the Dime. Minutemen buddy/contributor

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Dirk Vandenberg snapped photos from the backseat as Watt piloted the Dub under a sign for San Pedro, the Minutemen’s hometown. It took three circuits around Los Angeles to get the photo right, but they got it. “We had to drive all over Los Angeles and whenever we found a San Pedro freeway sign we took a shot,” says Vandenberg. “There were three elements that Mike wanted in the photo: a natural kind of glint in his eyes reflected in the rearview mirror, the speedometer pinned exactly on 55mph, and, of course, the San Pedro sign guiding us home. There were two separate days of shooting with me smashed up in the backseat of his VW. I had to push myself back in the seat as far as possible to get every element needed in the shot. We finally got lucky and nailed it. The big story to me is how we worked pretty hard to get it right and when the shot was finally presented to SST someone botched the cropping for the print and cut off the end of the word Pedro on the album jacket.” For their second concept, the Minutemen decided all three dudes in their band would have a solo song on their album sides. Their inspiration was Ummagumma, a double album released by Pink Floyd in 1969. Ummagumma featured solo performances by each band member. In keeping with the automotive/driving 55 theme, each side of Double Nickels would be announced by the particular band member’s car starting (and, at the end of the record, the song “Three Car Jam”—all three engines revving at once—would send things off).

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The good songs, Watt realized, should be at the beginning of each side, and the ones that weren’t quite up to par should be “hugging label,” on the inside of the record. The solution, then, was to have a kind of fantasy draft, to draw straws and let each member of the band pick songs in turn, and put the leftovers, the “chaff,” on the final side of the album. That way, says Watt, the songs that weren’t on the band’s top shelf wouldn’t “glob up” and each member’s individuality would show through all the more in the songs that they chose as their favorites. “[Y]ou separate the wheat from the chaff,” Watt explains, “’cuz that was the side that had the songs that nobody picked.”

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Arena Rock Is the New Wave: Side D. Songs selected by D. Boon comprise the first side of Double Nickels on the Dime. I remember the day I first bought the record. It was sometime in 1991, after finishing up my SATs at Concord High School in New Hampshire. I was deep in the throes of skateboarding at that point, spending hours a day skating in an upside-down metal satellite dish (no kidding—hey, East Concord was pretty rural!), watching videos of my favorite skaters—Mike Vallely, Matt Hensley, Mike Frazier, Neil Blender—when I finished. The old Santa Cruz skateboard films turned me on to tons of great music on SST Records. I remember being particularly impressed by this one song that played while Jason Jessee skated a halfpipe. The song was called “Paranoid Chant.” I tracked down a copy of the song on one of my record-buying trips to Newbury Comics in Harvard Square. This is all before the internet—I really had to dig to find information about stuff back then. We all did. I went through microfilm at the school library during free periods, looking for catalogued articles about the Dead Kennedys, Clash, and Sex Pistols. At one point, I found a clipping that talked about what an amazing record Double Nickels was, and made a mental note to buy it the first chance I got. After I finished my SATs, I went down to Warren Street, first to the comic shop, then to the record store directly across the street. A cassette of Double Nickels was there in the small

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import/punk section. I bought it and drove home listening to it in my 1981 Volkswagen Rabbit pickup. For the first few months that I owned Double Nickels, I’d start at the beginning of side one and listen for awhile, mostly when driving, then rewind back to “Anxious Mofo” and start again. The thought of listening to the whole record from start to finish every time was way too intimidating. It makes sense, then, that I know the first batch of songs on Double Nickels the best—I’ve listened to them the most. Some of the record’s most silly, catchy, and intense songs are on D.’s side. As I listened to the record more and more, I came to appreciate the fact that the Minutemen had this goofy sense of humor that set them apart from other bands. They had their own style and weren’t afraid to be self-deprecating. Take “#1 Hit Song,” for example. I was charmed by D. Boon singing this seemingly by-rote ditty about love and tapering off halfway through, going so far as to spell out the letters to “et cetera.” If the Minutemen were going to sing a love song, I quickly realized, they would never be so direct, so cloying. Stopping halfway through made “#1 Hit Song” that much funnier: “We know that you know we’re winking.” Awesome! I had listened to and enjoyed SST’s cassette reissues of the first batch of Minutemen EPs and long players, but as wonderful as some of that early stuff was/is, the songs tend to blur together. Burst after burst after burst—it was hard to catch up. There’s always talk of the Minutemen being iconoclasts, writing these short, intense songs with an unwavering ferocity and dedication to their craft. The talk, of course, is all true. Thing is, though, that there were also all 24

these other bands who were writing really, really short songs and playing them at blinding speeds. A lot of the hardcore records I was listening to at the time, like the seminal This Is Boston, Not L.A. compilation, featured ridiculously fast, angry songs. I thought the Minutemen were good, but I wasn’t sold on their greatness until I heard Double Nickels. The onslaught of short, blazing songs the Minutemen were known for was replaced by a greater sense of texture. Take D.’s side, for example. After three songs, the shimmering, gorgeous “Cohesion” gives a listener the space to breathe a little bit. The complete change in musical gears that “Cohesion” provides recontextualizes the beginning of the album, making “Anxious Mofo,” “Theater Is the Life of You,” and “Viet Nam” into a block of listening, a unit of measurement. It was like the band was demarcating easy-to-digest segments. Three songs, the pretty instrumental, three more, the pretty song with the funny title, three more, the weird one that mentioned the bass player by name, then the car noise that signified the beginning of side two. The sequencing was something of a happy accident—again, the band had their own fantasy draft to determine the record’s running order—but it all worked out for the best. The segments on D’s side of the album, with their bursts and pauses, pulled me in, allowed me to keep listening to this monster of an album, left me excited to return and keep learning more about both the band’s songs and the reasons behind them. A goofy, varied introduction to their spiel, one that proved to be warm and inviting enough to keep me coming back.

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“D. Boon had the most trebly guitar sound, totally scratchy and everything,” says Mac McCaughan, owner of Merge Records and singer/guitarist of Superchunk and Portastatic, “but the songs are so catchy it was like they were ... making this super catchy, memorable music. It’s totally in your face in a lot of ways, and definitely lyrically, but at the same time there was this pop side to it that was awesome. They managed, in a forty-second song where thirty seconds of it was scratchy guitar and crazy rhythms ... to have ten seconds of it be this super catchy chorus.” “Anxious Mofo” starts the album out (after, of course, the sound of D. Boon starting his van). The Minutemen were democratic in their songwriting. Someone would bring in a riff, a bridge, some part of a song, and the rest of the band would write around it. Drummer George Hurley wrote the lyrics to “Mofo.” It’s a bold way to start an album, with the lyric “Serious as a heart attack / makes you feel this way.” The listener is struck with a gravity that’s nonspecific—you’re not sure exactly what he wrote the lyrics about, but they impact you nonetheless. Hurley’s lyrics tend to be dense to the point of being almost indecipherable, but, somehow, they don’t lose any immediacy because the listener can still find something in the words to latch on to. At the time the album was being written, Hurley was working early in the morning at a factory job, which informed his songwriting. “[I]f you know the situation,” Watt says, “you know the environment that bred it. The only time [Hurley] ever explained a song to us was our first song that was over two minutes. On What Makes a Man Start Fires, it was called ‘The Anchor.’ He said, ‘This one’s about a dream.’ Okay, but all the rest are about work. I know ‘cuz 26

that’s when he’s writing ‘em. But that’s when they’re really loose, too, because you can’t concentrate on songwriting in this big horizontal mill, running in needles for needle valves. Can’t give too much—he’ll hurt himself! Minutemen, we’re always servicing expression, not really trying to pay tribute to a form, in a way. Not at all, because we didn’t really know about songwriting. We’d never done it.” The lyrics that follow the introductory salvo—“No device to measure / no words to define / I mean, how can I express / let alone possess?”—can apply to some unspecified instance in a listener’s life. Or, if you’re feeling literal, it’s easy to picture Hurley, bleary-eyed and sleepless from playing a show the night before, reluctantly settling into a day of repetition. The devices mentioned in the lyrics can be metaphorical or actual—it could be George at the factory, or it could be the recurring Minutemen theme of language coming into play, the thought that there’s not a specific word to discuss the situation at hand. (As the record progresses, multiple instances of rumination on the topic of language will be discussed.) “Mofo” also features one of the sparsest guitar solos on the record. D. Boon was an amazing guitarist, incorporating elements of funk, jazz, and flamenco into his style, sometimes using all three in the course of one song. At the end of “Mofo,” he uses fewer notes than usual. Watt calls Boon’s guitar playing on the song “econo,” one of the Minutemen’s catchphrases (as discussed in the song “The Politics of Time,” on Hurley’s side of the album). The notes that are played all count. There’s no filler.

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The words to “Theater Is the Life of You,” according to Watt, are “just a spiel.” Watt found notes, ramblings written on scraps of paper in D. Boon’s van, and brought them to practice to be used as lyrics. Boon was “never embarrassed, never ashamed or anything, never changed [the words],” says Watt, because “he understood the thing with epiphanies.” Boon and Watt had played together since they were boys, and, as such, were keyed into each other’s styles and nuances. A single listen was generally all it took for one dude to link musically with the other. More of the practice time was spent working Hurley’s drums into the mix, Watt says, because “we didn’t want him to be just the backbeat shit. That’s the whole idea of the band, not just economy in the material sense, but makin’ it like conversation. Making this an interesting conversation. We’re going to have Georgie in here, man. We’re going to make space for him, he’s going to come in here and speak, spell his name with his fuckin’ fills, so that would take a little of the time. That wasn’t really that traditional, but luckily, Georgie didn’t have reverence for what was tradition.” Musically, “Theater” is dense. There are many instances on the album where members of the band will advance or retreat their playing to allow for the other instruments to come to the top of the mix. On “Theater,” though, everything collides a bit, doesn’t have room to breathe, like the part of the conversation where everyone talks at the same time. Hurley’s drumming, heavy on crash cymbals, occasionally overpowers D. Boon’s treble-heavy guitar work. The listener gets a nice dichotomy right at the beginning of the record: the intense focus of “Anxious Mofo,” with its democratic arrangement, versus the focused intensity of 28

“Theater Is the Life of You,” with all three dudes howlin’ at the same time. The three Minutemen were inspired by different things at different times, which is reflected by the variation in both their music and lyrics. Boon’s words in “Theater,” much like Hurley’s on “Anxious Mofo,” aren’t sweeping; they rely instead on impressions of a specific moment, without context provided, to form a narrative flow. The moment that Boon was writing about has been lost to history, but the lyrics are universal enough to be easily applied to some instance in the listener’s life. Elsewhere on the album, like on “Corona,” Watt’s homage to spending Fourth of July on a Mexican beach, the lyrics are more anecdotal. “Viet Nam” is a song that shows the influence of the Pop Group, a band that, along with Wire and Creedence Clearwater Revival, was a huge influence on the Minutemen. The Pop Group’s music integrated elements of funk, reggae, and jazz into a post-punk framework. When the Minutemen started playing, punk rock was still loose, undefined, and relatively free of stylistic codes and taboos. It was the influence of the Pop Group, says Watt, that helped bring home the point that the Minutemen could mix their copious influences however they saw fit. The members of the Pop Group were all fiercely well read, erudite, and full of ideas on literature, politics, and seemingly everything else. The Minutemen were the same way—always reading, always trying to learn more about the world. “We can put anything with anything!” says Watt. “Anything goes! Take pictures, don’t take pictures, gigs, flyers, all these things! All up to us! World of possibilities!” 29

The Pop Group has a song called “Blind Faith” that influenced the structure of “Viet Nam.” Watt describes “Blind Faith” as “kinda disco.” Prior to starting research for this book, I had never listened to the Pop Group, so I tracked down some of their albums. The Pop Group’s sonic influence is easily audible in the Minutemen’s recordings—trebly guitar, off-kilter rhythms, bubbling bass. “Viet Nam” is funny, at least initally. The song’s first lyrics are “Let’s say I’ve got a number / that number’s fifty thousand / that’s ten percent / of five hundred thousand / oh, here we are / in French Indochina.” To a contemporary listener, the words sound like a bunch of non sequitors strung together to fit the meter, a trick used to best effect by Pavement in the early 90s. I was doing a lot of my initial listening to the record while I was driving, and, as such, didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to the names of the songs. So, for me, “Viet Nam” was “the 50,000 song,” “#1 Hit Song” was “the E-T-C song,” stuff like that. I did eventually get around to looking at the track listing on my cassette tape’s cover. Once I did, “Viet Nam” was put into context, and didn’t seem as funny any more: 58,148 Americans killed, and an estimated 500,000 North Vietnamese dead. The reason for all of the atrocities is outlined in the last lyric: “not one domino shall fall,” a reference to the American anti-Communism campaign that was used, to similar results, during the Korean War in the 50s. (The Minutemen often sang about the effects of American foreign policy—elsewhere on Double Nickels the theme is revisited on both “West Germany” and “Untitled Song for Latin America.”) 30

The lyrical gravity of “Viet Nam” is put into relief by the musical form the band chose. The main guitar riff sounds kinda silly, not unlike a scale as it slides up and down the guitar’s neck—the kind of stuff that you try to play the first day you figure out the shape of a barre chord. Watt’s bass punctuates, adding ringing twangs to silences like he’s trying to get a word in edgewise, and Hurley’s drums are unrelenting. The song’s this all-out assault, poppy and busy, and it’s about American foreign policy. It’s like, who the hell are these guys? That was the thing—the Minutemen’s juxtapositions added import because they were so jarringly original, following the Pop Group’s stylistic lead of mixing improbable genres, taking it to the next level. Again, the Minutemen’s unorthodox habit of putting anything with anything recurs throughout the record, one of many underlying themes of Double Nickels. The first instance of the band’s recurring Ummagummathemed instrumentals is “Cohesion.” As Watt and Boon were growing up, they were both influenced by a San Pedro musician named Roy Mendez-Lopez. He was an “incredible virtuoso” on the guitar, says Watt, with a Coltrane-esque practice regimen, spanning an incredible number of hours a day. Mendez-Lopez lived in his car—“talk about econo,” says Watt—built his own guitars, learned Vivaldi pieces, and played intricate flamenco songs. He was an inspiration to Watt and Boon, encouraging them both to play along with their favorite records, then put their own personal spins on the material after they had it wired. Mendez-Lopez often played a flamenco classic called “La Linda,” a song later appropriated

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by the Doors in their song “Spirit Caravan.” “La Linda” was also an inspiration for “Cohesion.” The Minutemen thought that the record’s themes would be readily apparent to listeners—the respective record sides named after band members, the obvious 55 miles per hour imagery, the Floyd-esque solo songs. “No one got it. No one! Zero! Stuff that was so obvious. [W]e were in our own world so much. . . . How could you see that, not being us?” says Watt. The references that might have been obvious to the band, who grew up in the “thermos bottle” of San Pedro, were often lost on the punk rock public, whose knowledge of music and history was generally far more limited in scope. Initially, punk rock was a reaction against the status quo, and part of that reaction was carving out a new path and forgetting the past. “There wasn’t hardly anyone doing it” in San Pedro, says Watt, but the scene in Los Angeles was only a short drive away. The relative isolation of playing their blue-collar port hometown ensured that their style, though influenced by others, would remain their own thing. They were always happy to map out the geneaology of their own group via the bands and people that influenced them (and did so at the end of Side Watt, on “History Lesson, Part II.” Skip ahead, if you like). When the Minutemen first got into punk rock, things were wide open, undefined—part of the reason why they liked the new thing so much. As time passed, a sort of musical and stylistic orthodoxy came about, due in part to the emergence of hardcore as the next extension of punk. Suddenly, this umbrella, under which all of the weirdos 32

gathered and did their thing, disappeared, and a strict code of rules took its place. Coloring inside a set of lines took the place of creativity. “Part of the problem with hardcore,” says Steven Blush, author of American Hardcore, “is that it kinda wanted you to stay the same. And as you grow, you expand and you experiment, and hardcore stood in opposition to their experimenting.” Students in my History of Punk Rock class at Tufts University were very fond of the Minutemen’s music. The band’s ability to take risks and to draw influence from many different styles and genres went over very well with them. The scene police, I’m sure, would frown, and heavily, on a flamenco instrumental being included on a so-called punk album, but the Minutemen’s insistence on not giving a shit and playing what they wanted to play was universally well received by a bunch of kids who had little prior exposure to the band. “Punk wasn’t a style of music,” says Watt, “it was a state of mind, and the style of music was up to each band doing it.” “It’s Expected I’m Gone” starts with a slow drumbeat (for the Minutemen, anyway), no bass or guitar. Over the years, the song has been a popular one for other musicians to sample/cover: Jawbox, Sublime, and, most recently Bonnie “Prince” Billy with Tortoise have all tried it. The song’s relative slowness was the Minutemen’s attempt to change their dynamic. Playing a bunch of songs of the same speed and length wouldn’t make for a good show, they realized, so the tempo was slowed to a more relaxed pace 33

to try and replicate the way thoughts occur. “[W]e changed gears a lot because that’s how it seems the mind would work, from there to there to there to mere,” Watt says. After Hurley’s drums start things off, Watt’s bass line and Boon’s guitar weave around each other through the song’s verses. I’m inclined to say that it’s the bass line that provides the lead part of the song, but both sets of strings wind up balancing out pretty well—there’re bursts of treble from Boon, with Watt adding coughs of bass as the waves of guitar subside. Structurally, the guitar solo doesn’t have a lot to do with the rest of the song. What had been a very calculated, thick-sounding number suddenly veers off course and becomes the platform for one of Boon’s prototypical blues-tinged solos, with Watt punctuating, this time using a jazz framework for his bass playing. The two parts, guitar and bass, don’t sound like they should fit together, but somehow they do—the Minutemen, once again, trying to replicate how the mind works. Then it’s suddenly back to the beginning, a repeat of Hurley’s drum intro, then the verse. The lyrics to “It’s Expected I’m Gone” are very self-referential, an instance of impressionistic thoughts that refer back to a specific moment in time. The lyric “I don’t want to hurt / see, my position was here / I mean, as it was, I was” could be talking about anything, really. It’s up to the listener to try and find a situation in his or her life to apply the words to. The last lyrics of the song, “No hope / See, that’s what

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gives me guts / big fucking shit / right now, man,” were written specifically because Watt thought it would be funny for D. Boon to shout “big fucking shit” onstage. Seriously. D. Boon was picked on a lot as a kid because of his size, and developed both character and self-confidence as a result. When he strapped his guitar on, he was determined to play without any inhibition. “He would get so into it, man, I just wanted him to say that, just the feeling—no meaning or sense of the word,” Watt says. “I never really told him that until later.” On a record as long as Double Nickels, there are going to be peaks and valleys, ebbs and flows. On each of the album’s four sides, there are lulls in the action before the intensity begins anew. Sometimes songs contain many different, disparate parts. “#1 Hit Song” is an example. The tune starts off with something resembling a tide—the band builds to what seems to be a crescendo, retreats, builds back to almost the same point, stops. As the intro notes fade away, the main riff of the song kicks in: this very rock-sounding guitar lead. From there, Hurley’s drums propel the song along at an even, radio-sounding pace, far less frantic than his usual fare. D. Boon sings Hurley’s lyrics, in what Watt describes as a “caricature of being smooth”: “On the back of a winged horse / through the sky, pearly gray / love is leaflike / you and me, baby.” The listener is set up for the punch line, the final lyrics: “twinkle, twinkle / blah blah blah / E / T / C.” The last bit, the et cetera, acts as a sort of surrender, like “all right, we tried to play it straight. We’re not buying it, and we know you aren’t, either. We hope you enjoyed our little experiment—now we’re going to go back to doing what we do.” What D. Boon does, of course, is kick 35

into a typically blazing guitar solo, one of the few overdubs on the album. “D. Boon only used an effect on records. He would overdub with his green Tube Screamer, 909. Worth a lot of money now, econo shit [then],” says Watt. “He used this hollow body Gibson ES 120 that had to have the cord soldered right into it. He used that to overdub leads. Never played it live, hardly.” It’s interesting to note that after Double Nickels was released, the band decided to release a follow-up album that utilized more traditional song structures and lyrics, kinda similar to “#1 Hit Song.” It was a bit of a goof—“we made fun of ourselves really heavy,” says Watt—but it was an attempt to see what could happen if the band played music that was geared toward a wider audience. The follow-up, titled Project: Mersh, contains songs that eschew the Minutemen’s formula (or what passes for one), taking on the more familiar trappings of rock music: verse-chorus-verse song structure, songs between two and a half and four minutes in length, fadeouts. Mersh still sounds good after all this time—the horns!—but it’s not a record I pull out all that often. When all was said and done, it sold half as many as Double Nickels did. Minutemen songs sometimes had a certain musical gravity to them, a weight, but not because of the use of power chords. D. Boon’s guitar playing seldom relied on standard chugga chugga punk riffage. “His chords were thirds, or ninths, thirteenths,” says Watt. On “Two Beads at the End,” though, Boon uses standard punk chord shapes, making the song sound more like a “pop norm” than usual. Of course, the Minutemen’s idea of a pop norm was often pretty far from pop, as is the case here. The standard chord shapes are only used for the half of the song that features 36

lyrics. There’s the song’s introduction, a reprise, and then an extended, repeated outro which takes up the other half. David Rees, the artist responsible for the comic strip Get Your War On, is a huge fan of “Two Beads at the End.” “It’s . . . funky and rhythmic without sounding like ‘funk music,’ which I don’t really like,” he says. “It’s just bad-ass and original. It’s physical, in a way, because Boon is obviously in total control of his instrument. The world I always think of for that lick is ‘jabbing.’ Like it’s jabbing at the other instruments. The quick slide down the neck . . . sounds so casual, with so much panache—I love it! Then, a few beats later, the song opens up and the verse begins. ‘Two Beads at the End’ is an original, sophisticated song.” Hurley wrote the lyrics for “Two Beads.” As per usual, when Boon and Watt asked what the song was about, Hurley said he couldn’t remember. “Georgie said a lot of times he’d write [lyrics] and then right away forget what they were about. So [we] never had any inkling to that one. [T]he songs would sometimes be little babies, little creatures of their own. It came from us, but now it’s gone. [‘Two Beads’] was like that. He never told us about . . . ‘feel like a poker in someone’s fireplace,’” Watt says. Despite the obtuse nature of the lyrics, though, Boon was able to sing them with conviction. There’s an urgency to Boon’s delivery that makes a listener identify with what’s being said, even if the lyrics are indecipherable. “Do You Want New Wave or Do You Want the Truth?” is one of the angriest songs on the record. It’s also one of the prettiest. Upon initial listen, the song seems gentle. The first few lyrics—“a word war / could set off the keg / ‘my words are war!’ / should a word have two meanings?”—feel 37

innocent, but the first cuss—“what the fuck for? / should words serve the truth?” ends the verse. Something is going on here. “New Wave” was written as a pause, a breath. Watt thought of Minutemen albums as “big landscapes,” and intended “New Wave” to be a valley, despite the quiet rage that seethes throughout it. Boon plays his guitar quietly, Watt chips in with drone, and Hurley contributes guitar, as well as drums that recall the stand-up style of Maureen Tucker of the Velvet Underground. Artist Raymond Pettibon turned the band on to the language and semiotic theories of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Umberto Eco, which the Minutemen referenced in the song. The song’s lyrics deal with the duplicity of words—wondering if there are still sensations that have not been strictly defined by language, and reflecting on anger in the ways that words can be twisted around to be used as weapons. Ruminations about language are another recurring theme on the record—on the first song, “Anxious Mofo,” the question “how can I express, much less possess?” is posed, and later on, in “The World According to Nouns,” the theme is revisited once again. As “New Wave” winds down, the multiple narrators state their opposing views: “I stand for language / I speak for truth / I shout for history.” The very last line—“I am a cesspool / for all the shit / to run down in”—finds the multiple narrators united as they swap lyrics. It’s a shocking end, alarmingly immediate, as the song itself glides in for an easy landing. Finishing on such a lyrically jarring note provides a good counterpoint to the shimmering beauty of the rest of the song. 38

How does the genre of New Wave tie into the notion of language, semiotics? Through record sales and marketing. The first batch of CBGB’s and London bands didn’t sell as well as the record companies had hoped—they were a little too edgy and inaccessible. In an effort to try and boost sales, bands that weren’t altogether mainstream in approach were marketed as “New Wave.” When we remember New Wave now, twenty years later, the tendency is to think about synth-based stuff, the kind of songs that are played at retro 80s nights at dingy scenester bars. At the time, though, anything that was remotely left of center was being marketed as New Wave to try and capture the attention of the record-buying public—throwing a bunch of shit at the wall to see what would stick. As the music was codified, it became easier for bands to tailor their sound and image to the trends, which resulted in a more homogenous sound. Happens every couple of years—disco, grunge, swing, shoegaze, et cetera. The music that was the inadvertent spawn of punk rock left the Minutemen wondering what had happened, how words had been twisted to betray. “Don’t Look Now” is the only song on Double Nickels on the Dime that wasn’t recorded at Radio Tokyo. At the suggestion of former SST co-owner/rock critic Joe Carducci, the Minutemen used a cassette tape of the song, a Creedence Clearwater Revival cover, that was recorded at a live show at Hollywood’s Club Lingerie. “They had [‘Don’t Look Now’] recorded [in a studio],” says Carducci, “but I liked my version with the first bunch of casual knucklehead fans talking over the band and that lyric. So I explained what it added to the song to Mike and he said, ‘Yeah, switch the versions,’ without even hearing it. The Minutemen were always brave like that.” 39

Sonically, the song sounds pretty good, especially considering that it was recorded live to cassette. The band is a little distant, like they’re playing at the end of a long hallway, and there are musical intricacies—fills, licks—that are lost in the tape’s muddiness. Carducci’s point wasn’t really about the band’s performance, but what was going on in the audience while the song was being played. The Minutemen were big fans of CCR for several reasons: their politics, their music, the everyman approach they took to playing (Watt’s well-documented love of wearing flannel is a direct result of seeing John Fogerty decked out in checks on Creedence’s artwork). In the case of “Don’t Look Now,” the emphasis is on politics. Who’s going to take care of all the things that are usually taken for granted—food, shelter, clothing? Not the band, D. Boon intones from the stage, and not the audience, either—they’re not even paying attention. They’re busy talking. Singing, Watt says, is one thing, but actually doing is another, something that CCR’s singer/songwriter John Fogerty had to deal with in the sixties, a decade rife with slogans and patriotism. “[Fogerty]’s like, who’s going to grow the food, who’s going to do this or that, you know? You talk the fuckin’ talk, but what’s real?” By using Carducci’s tape, the onus is thrown direcdy on the listener. It’s not the people gossiping at the show who are going to take any sort of responsibility. Is it you, the listener? Are you even paying attention? “All the stuff you take for granted,” says Watt. The theme of responsibility recurs on the third side of the album, on the song “Themselves,” which is a much less rhetorical, more hands-on take on the same issues. The 40

Minutemen’s working-class background is as much of an influence on their songwriting as any of the groups they cite—time and again on Double Nickels (and in the rest of their catalogue), lyrics are drawn from the band members’ experience and perspective. “We didn’t make enough to live on [playing music] even living econo,” says Watt, “so we’re always working the whole time. So we never had lack of stuff to write about.” “Shit from an Old Notebook” is a song Watt built around some writing Boon had done. “To keep me from getting in the ruts, I’d ask those guys to give me words,” Watt says. “So that was actually an old notepad. Not even haiku, just thinking out loud, not rhyming or anything.” “Notebook” is the last song Watt played with a pick (though he sometimes uses one now, after an extended layoff). On the early records, the Minutemen’s breakneck tempos rendered Watt’s bass playing down to something resembling rhythm guitar—he played lots of chords. As the band began to diversify a little, adding more space and time to their songs, Watt’s bass lines began to breathe more. (Plus, Watt got a Fender Telecaster bass, which he wanted to play with his fingers.) I went back and listened to “Shit from an Old Notebook” more critically after Watt told me that the song was his last use of a pick. With that nugget of info in mind, I could hear how his bass sounded restrained and less funky than on some of the album’s other songs. But maybe, I thought, I was a victim of suggestion, filling in gaps that weren’t really there. I don’t play bass, after all—don’t play anything; I just listen. Ryan Gear, who runs the Watt/ 41

Minutemen/flREHOSE mailing list, plays bass, so I asked his opinion on the matter. “[I]t does sound a bit flatter than some songs written later not played with a pick,” Gear said. “It’s still one of my favorite Minutemen songs, more for the lyrics mainly. Instead of Watt’s bass lines anchoring the song (pardon the pun), I get the aural feeling that’s led along by Georgie’s drumming and D.’s voice. . . . Also, in regards to playing, I could never really play bass that well with a pick, mainly because I never learned with a pick, and didn’t even try playing with a pick until after I’d been playing for five years or so. So whenever I play/try to play with a pick, my playing feels more forced and robotlike and I don’t really have the feel like I can flow through notes than when I just play with my fingers. That’s another impression I was just getting from ‘Shit from. . .’ from hearing it again now.” The song itself is a screed against advertising. “Psychological methods to sell,” sings D. Boon, “should be destroyed.” The lyrics are rattled off in a rapid-fire staccato of fury, syllables crammed up against each other. The thought of promoting the art in question, whether it’s writing, painting or music, gets more thought and effort than the art itself—things get too commercial (or, in the Minutemen’s slang, mersh) and the focus gets lost. “Notebook” is a cautionary tale, a reminder that the business aspect of art shouldn’t get in the way of its creation. The last lyrics of the song—“Morals, ideas, awareness, progress / let yourself be heard!”—provide a counterpoint for D. Boon’s guitar solo, which runs for the second half of the song’s ninety-six seconds. Not only is Boon doing what he was just singing about, letting himself be heard, but he’s letting the product (in 42

this case, the song) sell itself, through its passion and its nonreliance on traditional structure. A fifty-second guitar solo to finish the tune off is a giant middle finger to the suits the band is singing about/against—fuck advertising indeed. The Minutemen wrote a lot of material. (Maybe you’ve noticed.) They were afraid of falling into ruts, writing songs that were similar in style, like tract houses—“put the garage on this side,” says Watt, “the porch over here.” In an effort to keep things fresh, the band often asked their friends for lyrics/ songs, and the remaining songwriting duties were divided among the three guys. Not assigning songs, but rather writing them when muse struck kept the pressure low. “Nature Without Man” is one of two songs on the record—along with “Little Man with a Gun in His Hand”—with lyrics penned by Chuck Dukowski, bass player for Black Flag from 1977 to 1983, and former manager of Global Booking, the agency responsible for booking the tours of many bands on the SST label. While Black Flag and the Minutemen were on tour, Mike Watt found the lyrics to “Nature Without Man” penned in a little notebook Dukowski carried around and asked Chuck if the words could be used in a song. “I was thinking about morality and the intellectual impositions we place upon an existence that I feel is without purpose, or morality,” Dukowski said. “I was saying that humanity is inherently self-conscious and self-important. We think our morality is universal when in fact it’s all in our heads. We’re trapped inside ourselves. Our feelings are what offer us our grounding and our core intellectual and moral direction. The heart and mind, the pied piper in the poem, exact their payment from humanity for their gifts of self-consciousness and the rushes of fulfillment and 43

understanding. But the main point is that these things exist only for us and have no reality outside of us.” Watt describes “Nature Without Man” as “mechanical.” D. Boon begins with this sorta rolling guitar riff, which, after two repetitions, is augmented by a typically inventive Watt bass line and a Hurley drumbeat that incorporates a series of seemingly disparate stutters and fills that hang together and form a steady backbeat. When the verses kick in, Watt’s bass provides the main riff. D. Boon sings Dukowski’s lyrics, and Hurley adds tight, varied drum fills in behind every bleat of Boon’s guitar. When he’s not filling, Hurley plays the cymbals to fill the void left by Boon’s guitar. After the verses, the main riff is repeated, and a section that would be the solo in any other song comes around, featuring diis mechanical main guitar line. The line is reminiscent of both Gang of Four and Wire, and reminds me of stuff that would later come out of the Louisville scene—Slint, Rodan, Crain, et cetera. The pinpoint precision of the “solo” part of the song acts as a nice counterpoint to the rolling, comparative looseness of the main riff. There’s also the gag that this mechanical-sounding song is being used to describe the state of man’s consciousness. It took me a jillion listens to tap in, get the joke, another layer. “One Reporter’s Opinion” is a collection of slights and slags on Mike Watt. I, had always assumed that one of the Minutemen had lifted the lyrics from some rock critic’s scathing fanzine review and set ‘em to music. Not the case at all, as it turns out: Watt wrote the song about himself. 44

Watt had been reading James Joyce’s epic Ulysses on tour and was smitten with the way the book was written. The action of Ulysses takes place over the course of twenty-four hours, a single day, during which Joyce shifts his writing style to fit the mood of the main character, Leopold Bloom. Watt’s lyrical style veered toward the obtuse. D. Boon sometimes said that the words Watt wrote should be more concrete, more inviting to the listeners. Watt decided that he would shift his lyrical perspective, as Joyce did, and use a song as a vehicle to pick on himself. He was “relating expression to a personal experience” by putting his own name in the song. D. Boon included “One Reporter’s Opinion” on his side of the record as a validation of the form (and perhaps in the same humorous light that Watt used when he wrote lyrics like “big fucking shit / right now, man” specifically so that D. Boon would yell them during a performance). D. Boon delivers the lyrics to “One Reporter’s Opinion” over a hi-hat-driven Hurley drumbeat and a jazzy, inventive Watt bass line that caroms all over the place. Boon’s guitar fills in gaps where there are no vocals, culminating in the song’s outro, during which the whole band plays together. Boon spits the words out as he begins his bursts of stun guitar. The lyrics to “One Reporter’s Opinion” are downright clever. Watt observes that at the end of Ulysses, the book “got skeletal, [Joyce] is doing question/answers.” The first lyric—“What could be romantic to Mike Watt? / He’s only a skeleton”—plays on that notion and pays homage by asking a question, then referencing the aforementioned ques-tion-and-answer form of Ulysses as the answer. Watt is a

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skeleton—no meat on him, no substance, just “a series of points / no height, length, or width.” The next lyric—“In his joints he feels life”—is a double entendre. Watt either feels life in his joints, where points meet, thereby reinforcing the previous lyric, or in his joints, the dope that he smokes. Pain, the song goes on, is the toughest riddle—not a feeling, but something that Watt has to ponder, ruminate on, because he’s so dumb. The final lyrics outline all of Watt’s shortcomings: “He’s chalk.” Watt says that chalk “don’t break easy ... it crumbles.” When used the wrong way on a blackboard, of course, chalk screeches and sends chills to the base of your spine. “He’s a dartboard.” What do you use a dartboard for? As a target, or course, something to throw projectiles at. “His sex is disease.” Another double entendre here—he either needs to go to the free clinic, or he has his own horrible gender. “He’s a stop sign.” He causes things to screech to a halt.

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Punk Rock Is the New Nostalgia: Side Watt A couple years back, I decided to get serious, stop calling myself a writer and actually do it—try and sit down at the same time, every day, and work on craft and self-discipline. The vehicle I chose was my CD collection. My New Year’s resolution for 2005 was to listen to and review every compact disc in my rack. Somewhere in there, probably summer, around the time I was on the letter P, I got the notion in my head that I should write a book about Double Nickels for the 33 1/3 series. It’s my favorite record. I knew that simply submitting clips from my blog wasn’t going to cut it, in terms of the application process. I had to find something concrete that would help me out. My idea was still in its early stages when We Jam Econo screened at the Coolidge Corner Theater in Brookline. Me and my then-roommate Stoops walked over. Before the film started, we checked the merch booth as the Minutemen played over the P.A. I bought a brown “econo” shirt. The woman behind the table thanked me and said that buying T-shirts live saved them a trip to the post office. *Ding!* “You did the film?” 47

“No, my husband did.” “Is he here? I’d love to meet him!” She stepped away for a sec, then returned with this guy Keith. He was very nice, and took relish in answering all my dorky questions about making the film, doing the interviews, all that. I mentioned to him that I was going to write the Double Nickels book for Continuum, and he said “Great! Let me know how it goes.” Cut to a few months later. The due date for book pitches was looming. I found Keith’s email address online and sent him a message explaining we had met and talked about my book at Coolidge Corner. Could he hook me up with Watt? A few days later, an unfamiliar email address in my box. Watt. He had been impressed by the Pink Floyd book, and was amenable to being interviewed. Holy shit. Holy shit. Holy shit. I made some calls, and booked tickets for California that night.

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Come January, my friends John and Kimmee dropped me off in front of Watt’s place, this big stucco apartment complex in San Pedro. Within minutes, we were in his van, driving around town. I couldn’t believe it. This guy whose music had been so inspirational to me was showing me the sights—his sights. That’s where D. Boon used to live, he said, pointing to an apartment window. That’s where Minutemen played their first show. As the afternoon wore on, the amazement, the Is this happening? wore off. Something else took its place. My Watt interview was conducted in front of this coffee place on San Pedro’s main drag. People recognized him, had questions, wanted records signed—he was humble and appreciative about everything. Watt has been a boisterous proponent of punk rock since he discovered it, but there’s more to it than him talking (and believe you me, dude talks a lot!). He’s always saying that everyone should start their own band, paint their own picture, write their own book. It wasn’t a speech to me, though—it was action. He was helping out, taking an active part, even though we had never met before I flew out there. Real names be proof, you know? “I think that somehow Watt manages to . . . see the current scene as though it was still 1985,” says Mac McCaughan. “And I don’t mean it in a retro way ... back then if you were into punk rock you were part of this community because everyone wasn’t into [it], and you couldn’t just ... go online to find out about punk rock. You had to go to a hardcore show . . . you had to go see bands in the basement of a church or 49

whatever. So it created like a bond between people, I think ... it was like an extended family, really, and I think that Watt has managed to keep that kind of perspective on things when I think it’s easy for people to kind of grow out of that or something, you know?” Yes, I do. * * * For me, the biggest surprise about Double Nickels was Watt’s admiration/integration of stylistic elements drawn from James Joyce’s epic Ulysses. I had never thought of the novel and the record in the same mental breath, but it makes sense: Ulysses, like Double Nickels, is one of those grand, commonly referenced pieces of art (uh-oh, here he goes talking about art!) that sits on the shelf unappreciated because of the intimidation factor. Ulysses takes place over the course of a single day. The writing style varies from chapter to chapter as multiple narrators and perspectives come into view. Watt’s side of the record liberally borrows from Joyce’s novel, using a number of different lyrical and narrative devices—a real literary record. It’s not a song-by-song/chapter-by-chapter likeness, by any means, but the influence can be felt most keenly (but not solely) throughout Watt’s side. “It seemed to me then, and still does now,” Watt says, “that [Joyce] was trying to write about everything. And in a way the Minutemen were trying to do the same. Never sat down and agreed to do this or anything, but it seems like we’re trying to write about everything. The whole world, the 50

history, the future, what can be, could^ be, would be, what might have been. So, we’re overreaching, and this is the thing we get out of it—basically, [Ulysses is] about one fuckin’ day! Guy goes to a funeral, takes a bath, beats off on the beach. You know, so like Minutemen, we were writing things, and therefore trying to like ... we were obviously overreaching, so I felt a sympathetic chord, for some reason.” Patterning an album after one of the masterworks of literature is certainly overreaching, but the only way progress is ever made is by challenging oneself. The songs that are on Watt’s side of Double Nickels succeed way more often than they fail, even if you’re not into the whole Joycean theme. There are a bunch of different styles and sounds that come up over the course of the side. The more you listen to the record, the deeper into the songs you can get. I’ve heard Double Nickels a zillion times, and half of that zillion has been over the last year or so, in researching and writing this book. When I listen to the album now, I tend to think of Watt’s side as my favorite. Sure, I listened to D.’s side the most back in the day, but knowing the story (okay, stories) behind Watt’s songwriting changed my view. Double Nickels, obviously, is a long-ass album, and the way that everyone seems to get through it initially is by picking favorites and using those songs as touchstones. (“Okay, ‘Political Song’ is on, then there’s a few until ‘Toadies,’ and then . . . “) My recent immersion in the album allowed me to spend time with some of the songs on the record, Watt’s side in particular, that I had previously skipped over while I was waiting for the next immediately poppy, catchy song to come up. There are ebbs and flows that add up to this fantastic slab.

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“Political Song for Michael Jackson to Sing” has always been among my favorite Minutemen tunes. It’s a perfect mix of poignant and silly, with great stop/starts and sing-along parts. Watt wrote the song for Michael Jackson, no joke. “Wrote a letter to him, with the lyrics, never got an answer back,” Watt says. “But actually, that’s why [the song is] called that, I actually thought of him to sing that song. I thought, ‘Man, if he would sing this song people would think about sending people off to war.’” The lyrics for “Political Song” reflect on experiences that Watt had during his time in the Boy Scouts. The town of San Pedro was heavy on blue-collar tradition—the men went to work; the women were homemakers. Watt was put in the Boy Scouts, like many other young men, to help fill the hole left by his father working all the time. His first Scoutmaster, Watt says, a man named Riley, was great. “Hiking up the mountains a lot, lot of nature, learned a lot about the Indians. . . . They were teaching us about the nature, the traditions, all that.” When Riley retired, though, another Scoutmaster took over, one that shifted the focus from learning to regiment, from the outdoors to a more militaristic approach. Instead of going on hikes, the boys in the Scout troop were made to dress identically and drill. Watt grew up with the Vietnam war on the news every day, watching ships depart from his Naval home town, but “none of it had as much effect on me as how the Scout thing went from going out there on bigass hikes, really strenuous, learning stuff about Indians, which the only other way to learn about was the movies, which the guys 52

making those movies knew nothing about them—Tonto, Tonto means idiot. This guy says, No, this is the way you drill, everybody’s uniform, you can’t wear your special little patches, my Order of the Arrow thing, conformity, conformity—we’re going to make it the military.” Watt’s hope was that Michael Jackson would use the lyrics and make people think more about war, the prospect of sending boys—some of them just a few years removed from their Boy Scout experiences—off to fight and die. The music on “Political Song” is fairly standard punk fare, atypical for the Minutemen. Riffs are straightforward, allowing Watt’s lyrics to come to the forefront. As the song builds, the Minutemen set the listener up. Prior to the music kicking in, D. Boon intones the words “List monitors arrive with petition,” then the song immediately revs into high gear. As the music tapers off at the end of the verse, there’s a pause reminiscent of the way the song starts, during which D. Boon immortally says “I must look like a dork.” (The song was always a favorite during my years working on staff at Wah-Tut-Ca Scout Reservation in Northwood, New Hampshire. Short shorts and knee-high wool socks during the middle of summer? We all knew a little something about looking like dorks.) Then the song starts again. So, after two instances of vocals over silence, the listener expects a third. Instead, the Minutemen deliver a joke. “If we heard mortar shells,” Boon sings, “We’d cuss more in our songs / and cut down on guitar solos.” Pregnant pause.

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Ridiculously over-the-top guitar solo. There are no mortar shells to be heard. Then, back to vocals over silence. “So dig this big crux”: ten years after the war, there’s no worry about the draft, the “big sweat point,” but kids in the Scouts being made to act and dress the same is downright wrong. Boys shouldn’t have to glimpse into a “wholeness that’s way too big.” They should simply be allowed to be boys. Check out the bass line on “Maybe Partying Will Help”—pretty funky, eh? It’s not hard to envision the likes of Flea and Les Claypool perking up their ears upon hearing the song. When Watt was growing up, the only records with bass lines that weren’t buried deep in the mix were funk albums, so he played along with them. It shows. When the song starts, all that’s audible is the bass, which sounds lighthearted. In typical Minutemen fashion, the song becomes at odds with itself very quickly. The whole band plays at the same time, not taking turns or creating a whole lot of space for each other, similar to “Theater Is the Life of You.” “As I look over this beautiful land,” D. Boon sings on “Partying,” “I can’t help but realize that I am alone.” From there, the lyrical stakes get higher as the guitar drops out and the song slows down, gets more reflective: “Why I’m able to waste my energy / to notice life being so beautiful / maybe partying will help.” The contradiction is deep: the narrator, who is alone, wants to party with other people so that he will 54

stop noticing how beautiful everything is. It’s a bit of a knot—partying as an antidote to solitude is one thing, but to eradicate beauty? The lyrical narcissism of these lyrics suits the quiet mood of the chorus’s music, but then, once again, the funk bass kicks back into party mode. The next verse contains an instance of the printed lyrics being at odds with what’s sung. The album’s sleeve contains the lyrics “What about the people who don’t have what I have? / They’re victims of my leisure.” Makes sense, right? For years, I’ve been hearing “What about the people who don’t have what I ain’t got? / Are they victims of my leisure?” The double negative makes zero sense, and is certainly arguable—because of D. Boon’s inflection, it’s possible that he’s dragging the “I” out and not saying “ain’t” at all. Thing is, though, that it does make sense in the context of the song. In the first verse, the narrator has been talking in contradictory tones about not wanting to notice the beauty that surrounds him. The seeming nonsense of “don’t have what I ain’t got” fits right into the theme. Perhaps the third verse will offer some kind of lyrical insight to help clear up what the intent of the song is. If the lyrics are positive in outlook, maybe D. Boon did say “have what I got.” But there are no more verses. The song’s second half features some slap bass from Watt, and a minute of D. Boon soloing. There’s no resolution to the tension created by the song, which, in turn, makes the song even more (in)tense. The song “Toadies,” says Watt, was written after reading the memoirs of Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich. His work is considered to be some of the most vital and lasting of Russian music history, despite the fact that his work was 55

twice denounced as too formal by Josef Stalin, in 1936 and again in 1948. “The cat,” Watt says of Stalin, “surrounded himself with toadies.” Stalin’s denouncements dried up Shostakovich’s commissions and grants, leaving him to scramble for piecework to pay his rent. The Minutemen didn’t spend a lot of time working in offices—they were, after all, blue-collar dudes from a working-class town—but the whole concept of toadyism should ring familiar for anyone who has. “It’s human. This dick is not the boss, but he’s a little bit above you. That’s all he needs,” says Watt. You know the type. There’s the guy who’s been at the office for a month longer than you. He always comes by at five of five to drop a stack of work on your desk that needs to be done ten minutes ago. In the case of Shostakovich’s Russia, the consequences were more dire than a talking-to from the boss or having to stay late at work. According to Watt, “The whole C.Y.A.—cover your ass—it’s just the way humans organize. Then, humans are funny. They’ll organize against it, maybe.” The last lyrics of the song, though grim, do symbolize some hope (though it might not be consoling as you sit in your cube): “We are cusswords / nearly illiterate / dedicated / to fighting toadies.” It’s the word “we” that does it. Maybe it’s just the listener and the singer, or maybe the singer has a bunch of people there with him, ready to rise up against toadies. “Toadies” is a great example of the Minutemen’s attempt at making all of their songs into musical conversations between band members. The song is introduced and then driven by Watt’s bass line. When D. Boon starts playing his guitar riff, it adds texture, but leaves room for the song to breathe. The 56

guitar is never in any danger of overshadowing the bass line, and it interacts well with Hurley’s drums. Hurley is fairly restrained—he plays some big, punctuating torn hits in the spaces left by Watt’s line, and uses his hi-hat to keep time and accent Boon’s waves of guitar. It’s always amazed me that the Minutemen operated with such a small amount of ego. So many times you hear of an act with a few people struggling for power and creative control. I’ve never heard anything of the kind about the Minutemen. In fact, all the people who knew or worked with the guys in the band have gone out of their way to tell me how thoughtful and considerate the players were, both in their songwriting and day-to-day lives. I’m not sure if they sought to construct an active, working model of socialism—the opposite of working with a bunch of toadies—but, in retrospect, it seems that they managed it pretty well. When “Retreat” begins, it sounds as if maybe it’s a continuation of “Toadies,” another movement of the same song. The first dozen or so times I listened to the record, I thought “Toadies” was a long song with more parts than usual. The similarities are derived from their respective bass lines. As “Retreat” plays through the differences appear: “Toadies” doesn’t have the same level of dynamism that “Retreat” does. Aside from the quiet bit in the middle, “Toadies” maintains an even keel, whereas “Retreat” is symphonic, both in dynamic structure and sound. It’s easy to imagine an orchestra’s string section playing the opening riff. Watt characterizes classical” in nature. songs on his side, “Toadies” is. As

his bass line on “Retreat” as “kinda It’s far less funky than some of the other and far more subdued and muted than the song progresses, there are these 57

freak-outs that act as the song’s chorus, massive shifts in sound that jar the listener. The symphony metaphor extends throughout the blasts of noise—a string section could be playing the “choruses” during a performance. Watt’s scalelike run of notes during the skronk is stylistically similar to the line he plays on “Martin’s Story,” found on Side Chaff. The origins of the song are varied. Part of the impetus for writing “Retreat” was Watt’s reading of Ulysses. Watt was inspired by how the book discussed “things beyond being analyzed. Dream sequences, unconscious things. Sensations, you feel ‘em and stuff. I was trying to get those into songs.” Much like “It’s Expected I’m Gone” (and Ulysses), “Retreat” reflects on a day’s specific impressions. Watt characterizes the song as the reverberations from dabbling with hallucinogens. He’d sit by himself and wrestle with his thoughts for twelve hours at a time. “A lot of this ... is about sensory stuff—I hear the toilet flushing, reactions of people,” says Watt. “It’s all a perception kind of thing. A lot of this shit, you turn on your own values of yourself, especially insecurities, stuff like this. Voice is a tape recorder, thunder—my head is a tape recorder, your voice is a thunderclap.” The song’s symphonic elements were the band’s attempts at approximating the emotions felt when, in altered states, things would set his trip off in unexpected directions. “Retreat” finds Watt in the middle of confronting inner demons, only to be set off in a tizzy by the toilet flushing in the next room over. “The Big Foist” starts off with a familiar, poppy four-note figure that repeats a few times through the song. While the Minutemen were on their European tour with Black Flag, they 58

played London, and picked up the figure/riff from the chiming bells of Big Ben. Listen to the song again—hear it? “The Big Foist” is sequenced after “Retreat” because of their respective bridges. “One’s classical,” Watt says, referring to “Retreat,” “the other’s this corny-ass prog rock ‘cuz I was being satirical. I was actually laughing at us, because when we made a song it was kinda a big foist.” The bridge in “The Big Foist” that Watt refers to features a Boon guitar solo which, honestly, I never thought of as remotely proggy prior to conducting the interview. Which, I suppose, makes sense in the context of the song. The lyrics, though minimal, reflect on the nature of art, how interpretations change once something is released for public consumption. “A richer understanding / of what’s already understood” is a rumination on how once something is created, the viewer is able to interpret the piece’s meaning any way s/he wants to, even if the original intentions of the artist are lost. “When you lay something on someone,” says Watt, “you’ve got good intentions, what if . . . the guy’s . . . gonna put on a brown shirt and march behind you?” In the case of the song, the thought of a prog-influenced bridge never even occurred to me. I thought that the solo had more to do with the Minutemen using the trick where they jar the listener by adding a seemingly disparate part to a song. Which, again, ties right into the gist of the song. I’ve got my opinion, which is valid, even though the band’s intent doesn’t match up with my interpretation. (Heady theory stuff, I tell you!) “The Big Foist” also features one of those lyrics where D. Boon gets all mad and shouts expletives at the end of the song, much Else in “It’s Expected I’m Gone.” “Foist” 59

concludes with the lyrics “What gift could be the work of art? / Can You call it the Big Foist / I’m fucking overwhelmed!” Again, try and picture this huge dude, face beet red, shouting those lyrics. Awesome! The last bit of trivia about the song has to do with the cadence of the vocals. Listen to the first few lines: “A richer under stanging / of what’s already understood / no meanings from the here and now.” The vocal emphases are overexaggerated. The syllables that get the stress in each lyric are drawn out to the point of breaking. Watt and the band were trying to use the rhythm and pronunciation scheme that made the vocals of the Dead Kennedys’ Jello Biafra so distinctive. The Minutemen were big DK fans, and thought their lyrics sounded like something Biafra would sing. The listening public didn’t pick up on the nuance, though, despite the Minutemen’s assumption that the joke was pretty obvious. (I never heard it until Watt mentioned it to me. Now that I’ve been told, it makes perfect sense.) “God Bows to Math” is another of the songs that, in Watt’s words, the Minutemen “outsourced” to keep things fresh. The lyrics were written by Jack Brewer of Saccharine Trust, a band on the SST roster that the Minutemen had a deep kinship with—Watt produced two of Saccharine’s albums and played on another. The lyrics to “Math” refer to the broadcasts of Gene Scott, the deceased Howard Stern of televangelists. Scott was considered to be highly unorthodox in his methods, often skating on the edge of profanity during his broadcasts, smoking cigars, telling viewers he wantonly spent the money they sent in to him. During his shows/sermons, Scott would 60

veer off onto subjects that were a little cultish: UFOs, Atlantis, and pyramids. Part of Scott’s “teaching” was that numerology could be used to ascertain that the pyramids were in fact giant monuments which depicted the history and future of Christianity. The lyrics goof on the topic of math—the Queen is buried in the tomb, all her life spent guarding “the holy cubit,” the unit of measurement based on the space between the elbow and tip of the middle finger, and “the sacred inch.” The idea of the queen basing “god given accuracy, measuring untold prophecies” on a unit of measurement as arbitrary as the length of an arm (whose arm is it?) adds a subde humor to the song, as the math that’s being bowed to fluctuates wildly from person to person. The band wrote the music for “Math” as if they were, in Watt’s words, “taking a trip through a tomb, like a pyramid.” The main repeating guitar line is sparse and creepy, not terribly Western-sounding. Watt’s bass locks in nicely with Hurley’s drums, and, as on “The Glory of Man,” later on the side, the sparse guitar gives the rhythm section the space needed to rise to the forefront of the song. D. Boon’s guitar solo on “Math” is reminiscent of the one on “Anxious Mofo,” the album’s first track. Both eschew the fast, loose, bluesy style that Boon often played with, choosing instead to focus on a more minimal, impactful style, played with more precision and less speed. “There’s hardly any notes,” Watt says. “Just the right notes, they’re beautiful.” The same can be said of the song’s outro, which sounds more in line with Boon’s usual bluesy style of playing, except slowed down. There’s an ominous feeling to the song’s final 61

seconds, as if a new tangent is about to be expounded on. Boon finishes the bit instead, and the song abruptly ends. It’s worth noting here that the creeping feeling of doom at the end of the song isn’t as prevalent any more because of our modern gadgetry. If you’re listening to “God Bows to Math” on a CD player or iPod, chances are there’s a digital readout telling you how long the song has been running and/or how much time is left before it’s finished. Any anticipation is being killed by visible math. Bow down! Listening to the record on vinyl didn’t produce such an effect. You could peek in to see where the needle was, but there wasn’t as much precision. The original release of Double Nickels presaged CDs by a few years, so the Minutemen didn’t intend to comment on the way we listen to music, but, as it happens, they did. Funny that I would notice such a thing on a song titled “God Bows to Math.” It’s like rain on your wedding day, dude. “Corona” is the most recognizable song on Double Nickels. The opening bit was used as the theme song for MTV’s wildly popular show Jackass. Spike Jonze approached Watt with the show’s pilot and asked if “Corona” could be used as the nascent show’s theme. Watt is a big fan of skateboarding—he likes the vibe and the way it keeps people humble. “[I]f you fall down,” Watt says, “you can’t talk your way out of it, you’ve gotta get back up. You don’t need a lot of equipment. You can totally open it up, make your own styles. It’s populist, you know?” Jackass, he reasoned, was “over the top” the same way skateboarding was, and he was a fan of Spike Jonze’s work.

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“Corona” as the theme of a popular TV show, Watt reasoned, would be a good chance to expose new people to his friend D. Boon’s music. “[P]eople get to hear D. Boon play,” Watt says. “This way, we’re going to let everybody hear. He can’t do gigs. He can’t be here to tell you about this stuff, and I can’t do a good enough job for him. Thank God the music is here. We recorded that, you can hear him play. So that’s why I put that in there.” The money that came in as a result of the song’s use was given to D. Boon’s father, who used it to help treat his emphysema. The Minutemen spent Fourth of July in Mexico. The holiday was on the same weekend as the country’s general election. Right before the holiday, they had shaved their heads as part of a performance art piece in which they painted their bald noggins black to look like matches in a book. It didn’t occur to them to apply sunscreen while they swam in the ocean. The results were predictable. The next morning, the three dudes woke to hangovers, huge sunburns, and, in the distance, clanking. There was a woman walking up and down the beach, collecting empty Corona bottles to deposit. The same trip was also the catalyst for the song “I Felt Like a Gringo” on the Minutemen’s 1983 Buzz or Howl Under the Influence of Heat EP. Upon waking, Boon, Watt, and Hurley went to a cantina, where teenaged soldiers entered and passed out bread to the customers. Watt asked the soliders about the election, and they laughed at him. He must have been a sight, bright red, sand on his face, hung over and stinking of booze. During live sets, Watt would sometimes refer to “Corona” as a “cowboy song.” It has a do-si-do square-dance vibe to it. 63

Watt’s bass line, simple and driving, takes precedence over Hurley’s crash-heavy drums and D. Boon’s mosquito drone during the verses. During the choruses, the now-familiar guitar phrase takes the front. (Quick story: the Minutemen had a whole class devoted to them in my History of Punk Rock course at Tufts. When I put the syllabus together in the fall of 2005, I slated ten minutes of in-class time for viewing clips from We Jam Econo, which I figured would be available before the allotted class period rolled around. It wasn’t—production was delayed. The kids were stoked when they got to watch clips from Jackass instead. During my second semester of class, I showed both.) “The Glory of Man,” by Minutemen standards, is an epic—almost three minutes in length! Look out! Part of D. Boon’s brilliance as a guitar player was in knowing when to reel it in a little bit. “Glory” is a fine example. Watt’s bass line—“the best kind of disco,” he says—and Hurley’s drums, more kick-heavy than his standard fare, could have easily been drowned out by some crazy guitar lead. Boon keeps it econo and plays a textural line instead, allowing the rhythm section the space it needed to be heard. “Do a two-note verse that stays like that because if he bog-arts there you wouldn’t hear that drum, you wouldn’t hear that bass,” Watt says of Boon’s guitar. Watt’s bass line doesn’t sound particularly airy, but the few aural spaces he leaves are filled in immediately by Hurley’s kick drums. Lyrically, “Glory” is, according to Watt, “the most overt of the Joyceans, except for ‘June 16th.’” There’s some lyrical metacriticism going on in the song. As D. Boon sings each 64

lyric, parenthetical asides comment on what was just said. “Glory” begins with this heavy bit: “Starting / with the affirmation of man / I work my way backwards / using cynicism.” Then, in parentheses: “(the time monitor / the space measurer).” The narrator of the song is commenting on the song itself and the thought process involved. We invent units of measurement to assume ownership of space and time. The line “I live sweat / but I dream light years” embodied the Minutemen well: throughout the course of the band they all worked jobs, living sweat, but their aspirations were well beyond the walls of the factory. And again, in parentheses: the laugh child, making the best of it, one of many dreaming light years. Watt remembers “The Glory of Man” being one of the second batch of songs recorded with Ethan James. Originally, Watt had been slated for vocal duty, but playing the bass line and singing was too prohibitive for him. D. Boon sang instead. If you listen to his inflection, it becomes obvious that he didn’t really know the words well. He was reading them off of a piece of paper in the studio. Listen to how his says the word “measurer,” for example: MAY-surer. He’s trying to cram all of the syllables into the meter at the last minute. “Political Song for Michael Jackson to Sing” has another such instance, too, on the lyric “organizing the Boy Scouts for murder is wrong.” On tapes of live shows, you can hear Boon truncate the lyric to something more manageable: “organizing Boy Scouts for murder is wrong.” Omitting the “the” makes for a better fit. “Take 5, D.” is Mike Watt’s “solo” song, though it’s not solo so much as it is a song that doesn’t feature D. Boon. Instead of relying on Boon to play, Watt busted out a twelve-string. 65

He also had a bunch of his friends come in and play guitar. John Rocknowski was in Tragic Comedy, the band that played with the Minutemen on the Project: Mersh tour. Joe Baiza, a member of Saccharine Trust, puts down some tracks. So does Dirk Vandenberg, the guy who shot the cover photo for Double Nickels. In addition to playing a little guitar and shooting the album’s cover, Vandenberg provided the note that Watt then turned into the song’s lyrics. ‘“Take 5, D.’ came from Mike and me musing about how a note from my landlady telling me not to use the shower because the apartment downstairs would get flooded, would make a cool idea for a song . . . sort of a haiku/poem type deal,” Vandenberg says. Boon often accused Watt of writing lyrics that were too out there, so Watt thought he would use his solo song to sing about something a little bit more concrete. “D. Boon was sayin’ ‘Your lyrics get a little spacy, man. People don’t know what you’re talkin’ about’ For me, you know, they seemed kinda clear,” Watt explains. “So I thought, well, I gotta be real, huh? I’ll make ‘em real real. It was the landlady’s note!” The language in the note is terse—more command than request—but in the context of the song, spoken by Watt over both acoustic and electric guitar, the note sounds both wistful and mournful. It’s a pretty little bit, followed by a Jandek-sounding junk guitar bit, then a Greg Ginn—sounding wail. “My abilities as a guitar player at that time were, and still are, limited,” says Vandenberg, “so I just sat there and finger 66

tapped the fretboard fast and faster in a flurry of notes and clunks. I had to invent something different to compete with those two ‘gunslingers.’” Watt thought the joke would be obvious—here’s a song that mentions in the title that D. Boon doesn’t play on it, adding more weight to the whole Ummagumma quasi-concept, but, again, the humor largely went over the heads of the listeners. “The punk scene ... didn’t really understand them,” says Jack Rabid, editor of The Big Takeover. “They were too weird and esoteric and unique for the loud fast crowd in the emerging hardcore scene. And the old and new art rock crowd didn’t know them at first; they just thought they were a punk/ hardcore band since they were on the Black Hag label . . . but it wasn’t until some of the more mainstream writers started mentioning the band that they really garnered a more underground/indie audience while hardcore fans went up their own butts in narrowing their vision.” “My Heart and the Real World” finds Watt using a bass style that sounds like the Cars—“wind-up toy shit,” he says—over a beat that references the early drum sounds of the Jam, the punky British Mod band that started playing in the wake of the Sex Pistols in late 70s London (think “In the City”). “My Heart and the Real World” sounds pleasant, upbeat, and remarkably poppy, even though the subject matter is grim. Watt was referencing Ulysses with his lyrics. “[M]oving through styles, through the journey, through the time of the day, through the whole thing,” Watt says. The fourteenth chapter of Ulysses finds Joyce, over the course of sixty 67

paragraphs, equating the birth of a baby to the birth of language by parodying the development of both with stylistics. The language in the chapter starts with a spoof on Latin, moves through the Middle Ages, then, for the last ten paragraphs, reflects on (then) contemporary Dublin slang. Pretty intense stuff to work into a rock album, eh? There’s a direct lyrical link to the language element when Boon sings “And if I was a word, could my numbers number a hundred? / More likely coarse and guttural, one syllable Anglo-Saxon.” (My favorite lyric on the entire record, that.) “Heart” doesn’t get any lighter, despite the upbeat nature of its music. The lyrics are riddled with loss: the narrator’s soul collapses, the world is wrong, he’s defeated, and, of course, “some big thunder law forces [him] to eat shit.” Watt had originally intended to sing the song himself, but found that singing and playing the poppy bass line was too prohibitive. D. Boon sang instead. Watt was dabbling with the power of words, how speaking certain strings of them can provide a kind of catharsis, like when Masons do their incantations, or when the Pope says Mass in Latin and everyone knows when to respond and what to respond with. Conversely, though, there are times when there are no words for certain sensations or situations. The grimness of “Heart” is intentional, but at the same time, it’s a critique of Watt himself. “I’m trying to talk about something very bleak, a little bit,” Watt says. “But how dare you get so carried away with yourself, with declaring things so bleak, see? In a way, it’s an indictment on that, on myself a little bit. Words serve as an example, kinda.” It’s complicated—using language to describe a situation that there are no words for, but, at the same time, condemning yourself 68

for finding the words to describe a situation so bleak. A hell of a paradox. Paradoxical, also, is the dark humor contained in the song. “Some big thunder law forces me to eat shit” is a funny lyric on the surface, even if the subject matter is grim. The vocal inflections have elements of humor to them, as well. D. Boon sounds goofy when he crams a zillion syllables into each line to fit the meter. “Finally, I felt like handcuffs / machines disregard my pronouns” zips by quickly. My initial listens resulted in laughter and reminded me of fast lyrical songs like R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine)” and the Meat Puppets’ “Sam.” The silly-sounding singing mixed with the bleak lyricism makes the song more poignant. A lyric from “History Lesson, Part II”—“Our band could be your life”—was used as the title of Michael Azerrad’s book chronicling the careers of seminal indie acts. The Minutemen continue to be an important band as much for their way of looking at the world as for their music. They were three guys, very intensely into their own things, who got together and made it happen. Their message, spoken as often as not, was that you didn’t have to be _______________ to be in a band (or write a book). You just had to be yourself. Punk rock has always been reactionary. The initial wave of punk came at a time when thickly produced dreck was clotting the airwaves. Real people didn’t play in bands—rock music, or whatever it had turned into, was for rock stars, another breed entirely. When punk happened, it dawned on thousands of kids, Watt and Boon included, that music didn’t

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have an elite ruling class. They could play however they wanted. Within years of the Ramones, Sex Pistols, and Clash, though, punk was stripped down, sped up. The transition was made from punk to hardcore, and, suddenly, kids who listened to music reacted to it differently. Hardcore codified punk. When the Minutemen started, they saw punk as a genuine outlet for expression. “I can’t imagine us doing anything that we did without the punk movement happening,” Watt says. “What happened to us even back then—‘You guys don’t sound like a punk band.’ Well, I thought that was the idea! Punk wasn’t a style of music, it was a state of mind, and the style of music was up to each band doing it.” Lance Hahn, the singer/guitarist of J Church, says that “History Lesson” “sums up [the Minutemen’s] antihero status in punk while at the same time using reverse psychology to mythologize themselves. ... It was really one of those epiphanies where I also started to realize that a punk band could also have a hard hitting impact while playing slow.” In an attempt to document the roots of the Minutemen, Watt paid homage to the main riff of the Velvet Underground’s “Here She Comes Now”—“It’s pretty gende in a weird way,” he says—and told the band’s story, starting with their origins as “fucking corndogs” in their working class hometown. They mentioned the musicians that had influenced them: Richard Hell of the Voidoids, Joe Strummer of the Clash, X’s John Doe, and Blue Oyster Cult’s guitarist Eric Bloom, who is credited on a Blue Oyster Cult album as “E. Bloom on guitar.” (A young Dennes Boon saw the credit

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and decided he’d sign his nascent paintings “D. Boon” in homage.) The name checks were, and are, amazing. Information wasn’t widely available in the days before the internet. Trying to find like-minded music in the early punk days wasn’t easy, especially if you happened to be a kid living someplace remote. Often times, it came down to scouring an album’s liner notes for unfamiliar bands that were thanked. The Minutemen take things a step further and say, “Here are the people who influenced us.” D. Boon mentions that “real names be proof,” then provides a list of influences. The implication is that, as he says, our band could be your life. It’s a call to action. Start your own band, paint a picture, write a book, build a sculpture, whatever—and plug in the real names from your life. Take your own mix of unique influences, whether they’re obscure or common, and do it.

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Dance Rock Is the New Pasture: Side George There’s that discussion. You know the one. You’re sitting on the back porch with your buddies, maybe coming out of the basement, and the topic shifts to superlative____________. Best working actor, Chris Rock’s best role, best solo album by a member of Steely Dan. The inevitable bullshit esoterica. Whatever the topic of discussion is that night. George Hurley’s name never comes up for “most underrated drummer.” That’s how underrated the guy is. It’s understandable. When you think of the Minutemen, the tendency is either to think of D. Boon, with his bulky urgency, or Watt, the rambling bass lumberjack. Hurley was simply in the back, doing his thing. His haircut, certainly, was well known—the huge curly swath nicknamed “The Unit,” which bobbed in time with his hyperkinetic drum fills. Aside from the ‘do, it was the other two guys who were the visible ones. Hurley was, in some ways, the most orthodox member of the Minutemen. In high school, where Boon and Watt were lumped in with the weirdos, Hurley was a cool kid, one of the social elite. It speaks volumes of his character that he was unafraid to align himself with these two complete geeks who 72

asked him to be in their band. At the time of the Minutemen’s inception, punk rock was not a fashionable subculture, as it is today. Being a punk back then meant that you were one of maybe a handful of kids who were into it. Dressing the part meant that you were painting a target on your back. Hurley, though, didn’t care, and played with those guys anyway. As I made my way through Double Nickels, I began to realize that each side has its own character, a result of each band member choosing the songs. D.’s is the most welcoming, I think, and Watt’s is the most literary. It took a while longer for me to get to the heart of Hurley’s side. Because I’m a writer, I tend to listen to lyrics first. A lot of the songs that Hurley wrote words for were elliptical, open-ended affairs. (Not all of them, of course. “#1 Hit Song,” one of my favorites on the album, has lyrics penned by Hurley—it’s totally dry, straightforward, and funny as hell.) My listening style has changed a bit as I’ve gotten older. I’ve become more aware of time changes, lead instruments, et cetera. (Q: What do you call someone who hangs out with a bunch of musicians? A: Rock critic.) Knowing the back story behind the album’s sequencing helps add focus to the side. I think George’s side boils down to lyrics and drumming. The Minutemen were no fans of the orthodoxy that began to rule punk and hardcore in the eighties. Despite the band’s misgivings, some of their songs still had moments that the Sid Vicious clones in the pit could easily understand and mosh along to. George’s song selections feature some of the most interesting and fun stuff. He puts on a clinic over the course of his side, playing all these impossible beats and insane fills at speed. 73

As mentioned earlier, Hurely’s lyrics could be hard to decipher. It’s no surprise, then, that he chose a lot of songs with his own lyrics. George’s forays into writing were so dense that most of the time he forgot what the lyrics were about minutes after writing them down. Watt and Boon spoke a secret language like twins, so it was only natural that many of George’s transmissions would land on his own side. I found the time invested in Side George to be well spent. The side is off-kilter, a little prickly, and challenging—a microcosm, in other words, of the Minutemen. When it came time to sequence Double Nickels, the Minutemen drew straws to determine the order in which they’d pick songs for their respective sides. George won the draw and got to pick first, followed by Watt, then D. Boon. With George’s first pic, he chose “You Need the Glory,” his solo song, featuring a bunch of drums and a scat solo. Boon and Watt were astounded. Out of all the songs Hurley could have chosen, he picked his own, a song that featured him pounding on oil cans and singing nonsense syllables. At first Hurley’s selection might seem a little bit silly, like having the first pick in a baseball fantasy draft and selecting Doug Mirabelli. The Minutemen had already developed their dual themes for the record, so there was no danger of either Boon or Watt selecting “Glory.” Hurley could have chosen any of the songs in the pool, could have kept Watt from choosing “Political Song,” say, but didn’t. In retrospect, one can almost feel a sort of competition between Watt and Boon in their song selections, scheming and hoping to select tunes they were both fans of. There are a number of “hit” songs on George’s side—“This Ain’t No Picnic” is one of the 74

most recognizable songs in the Minutemen canon, and “West Germany” isn’t far behind—but some of the most out-there stuff is included, as well. It’s funny to think of the three guys sitting around a table, drafting their own songs, fantasy-league style. It provides insight as to the relative weight of the songs. If you put the three non-chaff sides back-to-back, you can determine the draft order by alternating George/Watt/Boon, like so: “You Need the Glory” / “Political Song for Michael. Jackson to Sing” / “Anxious Mofo” / “The Roar of the Masses Could Be Farts” / “Maybe Partying Will Help” / “Theater Is the Life of You” / “West Germany” / ‘Toadies” / “Viet Nam,” et cetera. There are a few records with alleged “alternate sequencings,” which are supposed to make the albums sound better. The most famous is the Pixies’ Doolittle. The story, apocryphal or not, goes like this: The Pixies wanted the record to be sequenced differently than it ultimately was, and, as such, put clues in their CD insert to provide the listener with a chance to hear the record differently. The first page has the lyrics for “Gouge Away,” track fifteen. You program in the numbers provided on in the CD booklet, then, when the end of the booklet is reached, you flip it over and enter in all the songs with lyrics upside down, in reverse order. So, after “Monkey Gone to Heaven,” the next track is “Silver,” followed by “Number 13 Baby,” et cetera. Probably total bullshit, but the new sequencing sounds good—maybe even better than the standard order.

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Another such record is Radiohead’s OK Computer. The alternate sequencing isn’t anywhere near as expansive. A few minor changes in the order of the songs makes the narrative more cohesive. The resequenced record begins with song number two, “Subterranean Homesick Alien,” then skips to the fourth song, “Let Down.” From there, it’s straight. When the last song, “The Tourist,” comes up, the alternate sequencing then switches the first song, “Airbag,” to the penultimate position, finally concluding with “Exit Music (For a Film).” As the title of the final cut implies, the alternate sequencing is supposed to make the record more cinematic and linear: Thorn Yorke’s vocals on “The Tourist” plead for someone to slow down. Then, afterward, an airbag saves his life, and the film ends. Again, probably total bullshit, but listening to a favorite record in an alternate order brings new angles out. There’s no urban myth (none that I’ve heard, anyway) regarding the sequencing of Double Nickels. I decided that listening to the album in the order in which it was drafted might be a fun exercise. I had heard the double album so many times that I began to feel stuck in a rut (plus, honestly, there’s only so much to write about a drum solo with scat breaks). The complexion of the record changes when sequenced differently, but not as dramatically as you might think. The Minutemen wrote songs containing different dynamics and styles in an effort to make the record flow from peak to valley, one extreme to another. So, the stylistic similarities of “Toadies” and “Retreat” are lost in the resequencing because the two numbers are no longer back-to-back, but the alternate

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trifecta of “Retreat” into “Cohesion” into “Themselves” works well, a little subdued but powerful nonetheless. Give it a shot—you’ll hear things differently. “The Roar of the Masses Could Be Farts” is another song “outsourced” to Dirk Vandenberg. The song’s tide was provided by Watt, but Vandenberg penned the lyrics. The Minutemen were very much into the idea of giving their friends the chance to contribute. “It’s like vox populi, everyone’s got an opinion,” Watt says. “We’ll get the player piano.” Vandenberg’s lyrics—“soft and understanding / eyes of the young / moving with abandon / atop the green lawns”—are dense and cerebral. “It’s difficult for me say what that song is about,” says Vandenberg. “It’s mosdy wordplay, but it soon took on a sense to me that it was describing how the personal emotion and innocence of creation or the creative process in general is easily taken for granted and/or ripped off to be plagiarized and commercialized.” When the song was written, Watt brought his rumbling bass line to practice, along with the words that Vandenberg had penned. Hurley came up with a solid drum line, adding a little flair with cymbal hits as accents, and D. Boon managed to cram all of Vandenberg’s words into something resembling a traditional meter. “A lot of people actually liked it—maybe it has a good beat, maybe it’s the way D. Boon sang it, maybe the words do have something,” Watt says.

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As I was learning about how Double Nickels was written and recorded, I was continually surprised to find that there were plain-as-day factoids that had evaded my detection. I’ve got good retention skills, and usually only need one or two tries to get something lodged in my head. How was it, then, that basic bits, like songwriting credits, got by me? It all goes back to my cassette copy. Again, I learned Double Nickels as I drove around Concord, New Hampshire. I remember the minimal cassette artwork—the J card consisted of a photo of the album cover, and a list of all the songs in teeny, teeny type (this is when each side of Minutemen cassettes, rather than listing songs, said something like, “Do you really expect all of the song titles to fit on here? Look at the cover.”). I eventually wore through my cassette copy and bought a CD, but by that time, I had already listened to the cassette enough that I didn’t spend as much time with the album notes as I usually would have (plus, said notes, in CD form, are tiny. I love the Minutemen’s art, but the transition from twelve-inch to CD has been brutal—the intricacies are lost. It’s August 1, 2006, as I write this, and the music industry is kinda buggin’ out about record sales being on the decline due to the easy availability of music through file sharing. Whatever. I have bought more vinyl than ever before since songs became so easy to download. CDs don’t seem as permanent any more. Anyone can burn one. Vinyl, though, makes me feel more connected to the artist.) Speaking of cassettes and CDs and LPs, “Mr. Robot’s Holy Orders” is the song on the record I know the least.

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I bought Double Nickels on cassette, then upgraded it to CD. The first side of the tape ran from “Anxious Mofo” to “History Lesson Part II”—D. and Watt’s vinyl sides on side A of the cassette, with sides George and Chaff on the flip. I listened to the second side of the tape a little bit, but spent most of my time rewinding and listening to the first side over and over again. I had bought the CD by the time I had digested D. and Mike’s stuff, and, as such, didn’t really get to know “Holy Orders” well. It was cut from the compact disc reissue to ensure that the recording would be less than seventy-four minutes long, a suitable length for all CD players. What a strange song! Hurley stutters out this amazing drum line that implies (but manages to avoid) a beat as Boon solos over Watt’s Morse code bass transmission to jazzy aliens. Then, Boon solemnly intones haiku-like lyrics: “Force fed / sifted / tin can / turn handle, puppet / (pull toy).” Another one of George Hurley’s early morning factory screeds, underslept and working a needle valve press. “How old are we? Twenty-five? Gotta understand Minutemen worked the whole time,” says Watt. “Even though we lived very econo, still wasn’t enough. There’s three pictures in [the album insert] on the right when you open it up, eh? Starwood, our first paid gig. It was about a hundred dollars. Tons of gigs before that, but the point I’m making is that we didn’t make enough to live on even living econo.” Writing about what you knew—the drudgery of factory work at fuck o’clock in the morning—is a recurring theme, both over the course of the record and on Hurley’s side.

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There are no obvious clues that “Holy Orders” is missing from the CD version (well, aside from the inclusion of the song’s lyrics in the album notes). If you’re listening to Double Nickels on CD, “The Roar of the Masses Could Be Farts,” with its blazing D. Boon guitar solo outro, bleeds right into “West Germany,” which begins with a typically busy Hurley drum line. Both “Masses” and “West Germany” are similar in tempo, so the transition is smooth. “Holy Orders,” on the other hand, starts with Hurley’s oddly inflected drumbeat, which, honestly, would sound weird no matter where it was placed on the album. The ending is pretty rock, for lack of a better word—all three dudes hitting a note/ beat for a few repetitions, then one final time. Because of its familiarity, the outro would transition well into pretty much any song on the album. It should be noted, as well, that Watt remastered the album when Double Nickels was initially converted to CD in 1987. Watt acknowledges that his remix was “even a bigger nightmare. . . . Totally worse than the Ethan James mix. There’s only like 800 of them, went back to the other [mix].” Discussion about a reissue with the complete track listing intact continues. Musically, “West Germany” reflects the band’s fondness for label/tour mates the Meat Puppets. D. Boon wrote both the lyrics and a lead riff that he thought sounded reminiscent of the work of Meat Puppets’ guitarist Curt Kirkwood, so Watt “tried to put a Cris Kirkwood bass line to it.” “West Germany” is similar to “Viet Nam” in that both songs are direct comments on US foreign policy. “West Germany” is far more specific because the band got a chance to pass through Checkpoint Charlie while on tour with Black Flag.

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They read the “I laugh at you Yankee” graffiti sprayed on the Berlin Wall. As boys, the members of the Minutemen had read as many rock magazines as they could get their hands on. In their reading, they had encountered passages that dealt with the grim realities of being in a rock band on tour: the drudgery, lack of sleep, shitty food, getting sick. In their band, though, touring was regarded as “the greatest side benefit in the world.” For a bunch of corndogs from Pedro, the chance to see—actually see—all this stuff they had read about was an amazing opportunity that might not have presented itself had it not been for punk rock. “That’s why I still keep touring,” Watt says. “You get to see all this shit. We grew up sailors’ sons. They didn’t see this shit! D. Boon, his daddy put radios in Buicks. A lot. For us to see these things, not just get them from TV or even books or this guy telling you, to just go and make up your own mind, that’s what’s the song was about.” The similarities between “West Germany” and “Viet Nam” extend beyond political commentaries. The Minutemen didn’t always make their intentions clear to listeners, “West Germany,” like “Viet Nam,” narrows the scope of interpretation. When D. Boon sings “a new kind of fascism / here in West Germany,” there’s little doubt as to what he’s singing about. “West Germany” and “Viet Nam” both veer toward the same well-tread political ground that scads of punk bands were singing about in the era of Reagan, but neidier song comes across as formulaic or preachy. Watt doesn’t sing a whole lot on Double Nickels, just on “Take 5, D.,” “Dr. Wu” and the first part of “The Politics of Time.” It’s funny, because the bass lines on the verses that 81

Watt sings are some of the fastest and most complex on the record, and the most difficult to sing over. By the latter part of the song, with lyrics growing more wordy, Watt cedes singing duties back to D. Boon. There was always this sort of urban myth about the Minutemen naming their band as they did because all of their songs were going to be sixty seconds or less. Instead, the name came from two different sources: there were the people’s militias in the time of the Revolutionary War, and the countercommunism group that formed in little cells, not unlike the famous Weathermen. The name was also about trying to stay humble, picking on themselves: “my-NOOT-men” (and speaking of picking on themselves, you can probably guess what else can last a minute or less). Lyrically, “Politics” recalls the Joycean “Glory of Man,” which, among other topics, discusses the need that we have to affix names and measures to things. To them, “Politics” is the only song on the record that comments directly on the band. While the band did take time to comment on politics, their lyrical content was far less ham-fisted than the typical run-of-the-mill “Reagan sucks” hardcore song that was prevalent in the early eighties. More than lyrically, though, the Minutemen’s lifestyle was an example of making a statement through actions rather than words, the personal becoming political. The band was making a statement to others that power could be redistributed. It was one thing to say stuff, to preach, but the Minutemen did things their own unique way, from touring to recording—jamming econo, as the lyric says—right down to writing songs. “The politics of time—we made time a political issue. This is how the 82

power’s going to be distributed in this band, put the clocks on us.” George Hurley’s drums are all over the map on “Politics.” The introductory bit (before the lyrics kick in) features jazzy-sounding cymbal hits over a sped-up, obtuse Watt bass run and a shrill D. Boon guitar line. Later in the song, after the first instance of Watt singing, there’s a little bridge during which Hurley plays some tight, fast hi-hat lines, reprised when D. Boon sings the bit about being time Nazis. Hurley picked the song for his side, I’d guess, because he was fond of the challenge of playing the song. “Themselves” is one of several instances of D. Boon singing words that don’t correspond exactly with the lyric sheet. On such songs as “Political Song for Michael Jackson to Sing” and “The Glory of. Man,” Boon was singing Watt-penned lyrics in the studio. “Themselves,” says Watt, is a “D. Boon song from the get-go. His chords, his words, his vision.” Inside the record, the lyrics listed for the second verse are: “They keep themselves in the castles / they keep the workers in the fields / afraid of the reality they’ll have face / for all the crimes upon their head.” The lyrics, as written, put a feudal spin on the song, making it feel like a historic tale of medieval times. When D. Boon sings the song, though, he changes the words, which makes the song much more immediate: “They keep themselves hidden away / they keep themselves up on the hill / afraid of the day they’ll have to pay / for all the crimes upon their head.”

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Putting the song’s oppressors on a hill rather than in a castle reflects back to the Minutemen’s upbringing in San Pedro. The nice part of town was up on the hill. The people who lived up there looked down on the rest of the town. “Themselves” was inspired in part by The Sand Pebbles, the only novel written by author Richard McKenna. The book was later made into a film starring Steve McQueen and Candice Bergen. Boon and Watt saw The Sand Pebbles many times when they were boys. In the book and the movie, the main character, Jake Holmann, loves working on his ship’s engines, but has a hard time with the impositions that the Navy and his fellow crew members have placed on him. Holmann’s desire is in direct opposition to what he is told by his crewmen and superiors. “Everyone’s talking the talk, but he walks it,” Watt says. The structure of “Themselves” is something of an allusion to The Sand Pebbles, as well. The song is written in waltz time—1-2-3, 1-2-3—which, says Watt, “always reminded me of a whaling song . . . but dirgey.” The song’s meter, sounding like a sea shanty, references the nautical nature of the novel. Hurley’s drums have a very jazzy feel about them, start to finish. Before the bass and guitar parts kick in, he plays an intro bit that has always amazed me—his drums are so specific, so precise. It’s an interesting way to start the song—upon an initial listen, there’s no indication of which direction “Themselves” might go. It’s a moment full of potential. When the guitar and bass finally kick in, each part is given enough space to be heard and appreciated. Hurley’s intro repeats and turns into the main drum line, intricate under 84

the broad strokes of Watt’s comparatively simple bass line and Boon’s tinny, driving guitar chug, punctuated by big, ringing chords. When the chorus—“and all the men who learn to hate them”—kicks in, Hurley shifts gears and plays a series of drum rolls that sound more like Neal Peart from Rush than the informed-by-jazz stuff that dominates the verses. His rolls don’t sound at all out of place in the context of the song—he seamlessly shifts from rolls back to the main drum bits. The lyrics to “Please Don’t Be Gentle with Me” were outsourced to Joe Brewer, cousin of Saccharine Trust guitarist Jack Brewer. Joe wrote the lyrics after he heard the song’s bass line, which Watt describes as being in the same funk model as “Maybe Partying Will Help.” “Gende” isn’t terribly concerned, with the notion of space. You have to strain to catch everydiing mat’s going on. Boon’s guitar playing is not concerned with the rhythm section. Watt and Hurley are in the pocket—check out the stutter drum hits mat emphasize Watt’s funk slaps at the end of each repetition. (The description could easily be reversed, described as Watt punctuating Hurley’s playing rauier than vice versa, but hey, it’s George’s side of the record, right?) “Gende” is another song, like “It’s Expected I’m Gone,” where the humor lies in what’s being said by D. Boon. The thought of a rock singer writing a song tided ‘Tlease Don’t Be Gende with Me” is pretty funny, but the mought of D. Boon, this huge guy, saying it. . . mat’s really funny. Funnier still is the fact that the song, all forty-seven seconds of it, has a traditional (diough abbreviated) structure. The 85

song opens with Boon singing Brewer’s lyrics: “Just wake up / and tug my hair / and let me know / all the outside of the wodd and you are mere / and never be too gende wim me.” After uiat, there’s a little break, what passes for a solo in the song, before the verse kicks back in. Usually, anodier verse means more vocals, but there’s only music Presumably, whoever D. Boon was speaking to in the first verse is not being to gende with him, which keeps him from singing. “That was a provocation,” Watt says, the push to try and get the listener to envision what happens next. The familiarity implied by the very first line in the song (“just wake up”) leads a listener to believe mat the lack of gendeness is part of the relationship uiat is being described. Yow! “Please Don’t Be Gende with Me,” at forty-seven seconds, is the shortest Minutemen-penned song on Double Nickels (unless you count “Three Car Jam,” which wasn’t penned so much as revved). I did a quick check to try and place the length of the song in context and found some cool ephemera: “Sickles and Hammers” also weighs in at forty-seven seconds. The band has no fewer than seven unique songs that clock in at forty-one seconds. By the time “Double Nickels” was written, the Minutemen had already written “The Anchor,” their first song longer than two minutes. Songs were starting to get longer, more developed, so “Gentle” was something of a throwback. “Nothing Indeed” is a prototypical Minutemen song. Hurley’s lyrics are nonspecific in such a way that a listener is able to easily plug a distressing situation (in the case of this song, some moment or instance that took the listener aback when it shouldn’t have) from his/her life into the context of the tune: “Interruption went / small snag in life / pothole in 86

the road / (it’s only a detour).” The song is about the mental highlight reel that plays in your head after something happens. The singer walks away unscathed but is thinking about reacting differently the next time the situation comes around: “There is no cause / no cause at all / for my hesitation / nothing indeed.” Watt’s bass line on the song was influenced by the work of Tracy Pew, the cowboy bass player of the Birthday Party. The song’s shuffle beat, the only one of its kind on the album, was something of an abnormality for the band—“Nothing Indeed” has a groove that’s more traditional than a lot of the band’s work, and, as such, the Minutemen sometimes had a hard time playing the song. “We barely hang on to the groove.” Watt says. “It’s hard for the Minutemen to hold on to a groove.” Another song, in other words, which must have been both challenging and fun for George Hurley to play. Hurley’s drums open the song, with Boon and Watt alternating licks before coming together for what passes as the song’s chorus, the musical interlude that repeats between sung verses. The song’s lyrics, internal as they are, pertain to the thought process. The structure of the song reinforces the lyrical theme. The musical gaps between singing, for example, echo the thought process—initially, there’s some structure before the song (and the mind) go off on a tangent. An extended guitar solo, complete with key change, works as a kind of epiphany, as if the thought process is expanding to include a conclusion. In typical fashion, though, you can listen to Boon’s guitar playing and Watt’s bass line independendy of each other. They fit together in the context of the song, but born dudes are playing these disparate lines that somehow manage to link together. Watt somehow fits his 87

cascading bass into spaces at the end of D. Boon’s lead phrase. When asked directly about the meaning of the words, Hurley demurred with his typical ambiguity. “The bottom line,” Watt says, “whatever the particulars involved, is that it’s about our band, it’s about us playing for you. So [D. Boon is] going to sing my fuckin’ heart out even though it’s about nothing indeed. Nothing? Indeed nothing!” Got any Wire albums in your collection? If you have Chairs Missing, their second long player, throw on the song “Mercy.” Check it out. Close to six minutes long, wave upon wave of bombast buttressed by little pockets of calm. Now listen to “No Exchange.” Along with Creedence Clearwater Revival and the Pop Group, Mike Watt cites Wire as one of the Minutemen’s main influences. As Wire’s career progressed, their music made turns into new directions. The shift from their first album, Pink Flag, to Chairs Missing, their second, made enough of an impression on Watt so that he modeled a song after it. Pink Flag’s influence on the Minutemen’s work is audible in several ways. Initially, Wire wrote short songs. Traditional verse-chorus-verse structure was largely eschewed—songs lasted as long as they had to, ending with no warning. The Minutemen grew up listening to prog and classic rock, thinking that musicians were this elite class of people far removed from everyday life. Hearing Pink Flag further emphasized the fact that anyone, even them, could be in a band. 88

Chairs Missing, the follow-up to Pink Flag, was something of a revelation to Boon and Watt. Wire’s songwriting had changed. Gone, for the most part, were the really short numbers, replaced by a more prominent, layered synth/ key-board sound. The new instrumentation allowed Wire to experiment more with tension and release than their previous, more rudimentary sound had allowed. “No Exchange” opens with a subdued, palm-muted guitar riff, accented by Watt’s bass line. The main bass and guitar riffs, with Hurley’s punching drums, continue along for a full minute, until the song apparently ends. A minute long, you think when you first listen to it, another concise gem of a song. Strangely, though, when the song appears to be over, D. Boon slides into a classical-sounding guitar figure with no drums or bass to accompany him. From there, the song starts again, gaining steam as Boon removes his palm from the strings of his guitar. The classical figure and the introduction of Boon’s regular guitar tone at the end of the song work in such a way as to symbolize a final movement, a tension release, emulating the symphonic form of “Mercy” and its waves of buildup and frenzy. “Couldn’t really tell you what it’s about except, again, it’s the Minutemen playing for you and here’s one from the drummer!” Watt says. “[Hurley] channels eternities and goes into punk. It is, it’s almost like that, it’s really passionate, but musicwise, I wanted to get symphonic for a minute and a half. We used to like to play that one live a lot. It had a weird tension it would build.”

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“There Ain’t Shit on TV Tonight” is a song that Watt says “shows uncharacteristic restraint for the Minutemen.” The song is sedate, with a sound that borders on bossa nova. “It’s a real gentle one . . . having fun with forms,” Watt says. There’s no big boom at the end of the song, no dynamic shift to resolve tension. Hell, there’s not even a guitar solo. The song is steady, with pretty vocals. D. Boon could certainly sing, but his delivery, even on subdued songs like “History Lesson, Part Two,” could border on a speaking/singing hybrid. His vocals on “TV” show an uncommon vulnerability—D. Boon challenging and extending himself (though he does slip back into the familiar hybrid at points during the song). The lyrics, written by Hurley, aren’t nearly as obtuse as some of his other offerings. His words are introspective. He wonders about the nature of self-awareness, how the sense of self is shaped, and the accountability of outside forces on one’s image. Watt came up with the title of the song, describing that moment when you’re sitting on the couch, flipping channels with the remote, complaining that there’s nothing on the tube. You don’t get up, though—you sit there and keep bitching, unwilling to do anything else. ‘“There ain’t shit on TV!’” says Watt. “You know how people say that but still watch TV? It was that kind of ennui.” The notion of channel-surfing boredom is directly linked to the last lyrics of the song: “I’m worried / worried but I feel guilty / the media / robs and betrays us / no more lies! / we are responsible.” Those lyrics, out of context, sound as if they could be from any of a zillion lockstep eighties hardcore bands. When such 90

rhetoric is applied, though, to a sleepy, quiet song, the sentiment has more impact. It’s not a dude with a mohawk shouting at you—it’s a guy on the couch, trying to come to shake his life up. He’s having a tough time of it, though, because he’s still looking for something good on television to take his mind off of his situation. The very last lyric, “we are responsible,” shifts the onus from the narrator of the song to the listener. We—the narrator, everyone who’s sitting around flipping channels, you—are responsible for the apathy. It’s not the networks, not the advertisers. Sure, the television networks are owned by the corporations who foist their multinational interests blah blah blah, but ultimately the responsibility rests on the viewer who makes the decision to turn the tube on in the first place. No more lies to ourselves, no more placing the blame on big, faceless entities. It’s us. The Minutemen knew that some of their songs would leave the audience scratching their heads. “TV” is one of them. “Maybe it’s a retreat song,” Watt says. “It gave itself a good dynamic to the set. Whoa, are these guys playing this?’ and then they didn’t last too long, so it didn’t bring people down—it was just a weird segue for them. We had a sense we were big enough to see outside ourselves and look down at the thing, and it wanted the gig to be a journey.” “This Ain’t No Picnic” is one of the most recognizable songs on the album, due in large part to its anthemic nature. “Picnic” features a chorus that not only repeats itself, but works well in a show environment as a fist-pumpin’ sing-along. If you were new to the band, you could see them play and hear everyone shouting “This ain’t no picnic!” 91

before the guitar solo; then you could join the crowd after it was finished. The song’s lyrics discuss working a nine-to-five job, presided over by an asshole boss. (Years later, it’s interesting to note, Watt, Hurley, and Ed Crawford—fIREHOSE—would cover anodier song about working for an asshole boss, Superchunk’s “Slack Motherfucker.”) You can hear how pissed off D. Boon is as he sings the lyrics “I’ll work my youth away / in the place of a machine / I refuse to be a slave.” The universal nature of the song also contributes to its popularity. Chances are diat you, the listener, have had a job that you’ve hated. The specific situation that was the catalyst for the song came when D. Boon was working a job at the parts department of an auto supply warehouse. He had the radio on, tuned to a soul station, when his boss walked by and told him, “I don’t want to hear any of diat nigger shit.” Boon was outraged. He kept his mouth shut at the job, choosing instead to channel his frustration into music (and choosing—wisely, I think—to keep the specifics out of the final composition. Boon originally put the name of his boss in the song, then changed it before it was committed to vinyl. This is before the age when bosses fire employees based on what they say about their jobs on blogs, but still). In addition to its anthemic chorus, “Picnic” features recognizable verses that boast guitar lines which, once again, sound like some of Wire’s stuff. Once the song starts, there’s no picking until after the shout-along chorus, when D. Boon lets loose with a sick solo. During the verses, Hurley’s drums are relegated to the background a bit—mostly cymbal hits up 92

higher in the mix than the guitar—but they take the forefront during the chorus, when both Boon and Watt stop playing their respective instruments. The Minutemen separated their band into two different categories: gigs and flyers. Anything that wasn’t a gig—T-shirts, interviews, records—was a flyer, designed to get people to come and see them play. “Picnic” was the first instance of the band making a video, recorded by a UCLA grad named Anthony Johnson for the princely sum of $450. “This new telephone pole is up,” says Watt, “called MTV.” The video, which starts with some Grapes of Wrath-looking Dust Bowl farming footage, features the band (including Hurley, playing a snare drum strapped to his body) playing amidst rubble as a fighter plane piloted by none other than Ronald Reagan takes shots at them. The video is available on the We Jam Econo DVD. The Minutemen were good friends with the guys in the Descendents, a band that famously used the suffix “-age” in their song titles: “Myage,” “Tonyage,” “Bikeage.” In fact, several of the Descendents’ records were originally released on Boon and Watt’s New Alliance label. The song “Spillage” nods to the Descendents and their method of song titling. Lyrically, the song seems to be all over the place. The phrase to pay attention to is “My stoned mind just spilled that line.” The band is letting you know that all of the lyrics are being written—spilled—after getting stoned. Using that framework, it’s easy to decipher some of the more nonsensical-sounding portions of the song.

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“Clear and dusty day in June / (my stoned mind just spilled that line)” starts the song off. The immediate statement that the narrator is high makes the listener wonder if it is actually June as the song is being written, or whether the phrase just popped into his head as a passing grass-induced fantasy. The parentheses denote an aside, breaking the third wall to let the listener know the narrator is in on the joke. “Describing what it’s like describing / believing that the sum is ‘yes’” refers back to the first lyric and the discussion of the day in June. The narrator is realizing that he’s describing things as they happen in a stream-of-consciousness manner. (Your guess is as good as mine about the sum.) The narrator refers to his peers as “comrades,” which makes him think that of fascism, Stalin, and maybe a day when everyone refers to everyone else as “comrade”—very paranoid stuff (it happens). The recognition that the word “comrade” started the narrator off on such a paranoid tangent is acknowledged in the next lyric, “(my police state mind just spilled that line.)” It’s also a reference, of course, to a few lyrics back, when the narrator initially mentions that he’s stoned, the way that smokin’ dope can make time fold back on itself. Once again, the parentheses denote an aside, an elbow in the rib of the listener. The narrator struggles to find words to describe the bonds, real or perceived, of his friends/comrades. Said struggle continues the theme of language that runs throughout the record, the realization that there are still situations that have not yet had words attached to them. As he’s thinking things over, the lyric “But what makes my heart run / why all the thunder in my thighs?” comes up. 94

When you read the lyric sheet, this lyric appears in quotes. The use of punctuation obfuscates things a little bit—is the narrator speaking out loud, rather than just thinking, or is he thinking of something that someone else said in the past? Could be either, but I’m inclined to think that as he’s sitting there, he feels his heart racing, then speaks out loud. It’s a metacriticism—he’s commenting on himself. The next lyric, the last one, is “My body / my mind / the idea of my life / seems like a symbol.” The narrator has been referring to all this stuff going on in his head for most of the song. Then, presumably, he has spoken out loud to call attention to his physical being before concluding the song with mentions of both mind and body. As the song ends, there are two distinct guitar lines: one’s choppy, and the other is more solid, a wall of sound. The two lines contrast the body/ mind dichotomy that has been put forth—the introspective and the physical.

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Chump Rock Is the New Cool: Side Chaff Side Chaff, the fourth side of the record, is the resting place for all of the songs the Minutemen didn’t pick in their draft. It’s understandable to assume, before listening, that the fourth side sucks. Why not? The three guys in the band didn’t select any of the songs, after all. Side Chaff consists mostly of goofy covers, instrumentals, and song with lyrics outsourced to someone else. Thing is, it works. Side Chaff is a little bit more threadbare than the first three sides of the album, but the relative lack of cohesion can be attributed to the fact that there was no unifying force behind the (non) selections. George, Mike, and D. all chose their sides. Through repeated plays, a listener can start to make sense of the respective running orders, see themes, make connections. Side Chaff’s scraps have none of the cohe-siveness of the other three sides. “More than any record of that time, Double Nickels seems to capture the pathology of being in a punk rock band,” says Lance Hahn. “On the one hand, sure, it’s art. You can’t avoid that it’s art. It’s a beautiful expression. But it’s also totally personal. I like that there are a few fuck ups. I love that the vocals don’t stay in key. They’re just belting it out from the heart. But there’s something pathological about the whole enterprise. It’s like going on a three-month-long tour that you 96

know will lose money. You do it because you’re a punk band and that’s what you do. The length of that album and the intensity of that recording captures that feel for me. I appreciate what other critics say about the variety of influences and styles. But I’m mostly drawn to this idea that there’s no financial or, really, logical reason to do a record with that many songs. But it’s there and in its entirety, even the mistakes sound fucking fantastic to me. If you break it down into its various parts, you can probably find faults here and there. But this record demands patience and if you let the whole thing affect you in it’s entirety, every moment is perfect. There are very few records like that in the world. I used to think Exile on Main Street and maybe the White Album were the only ones. But Double Nickels, for me personally, far surpasses even the Stones and the Beades.” “It was art first,” says Steven Blush. “It was success in noneconomic terms. It was the idea that you could be broke and successful.” “To me, what makes it more amazing is that... when you hear that story [about the Minutemen being inspired to make a double album by Hüsker Dü] and listen to the record ... it’s all so quality,” says Mac McCaughan. “Like, all the stuff is so good, and when you think about the fact that so much of it is stuff that they went back and . . . wrote and recorded in a short period of time—no filler, you know? And the songs are so short, imagine how many songs they had to write to make a double album. So that makes it even more amazing.” Boon, Watt, and Hurley were never afraid to show their influences. “Van Halen was one of my favorite bands growing up,” says McCaughan, “and now here’s my new 97

favorite band doing a Van Halen song, and I’m like, that’s awesome, you know? I’m a litde bit less embarrassed to be a Van Halen fan.” In addition to the covers, the songs with lyrics written by friends and associates served to further the Minutemen’s belief that they were a part of a community. All told, the odds and ends of Side Chaff cohere and make for interesting listening. “Untitled Song for Latin America,” a song by D. Boon, reflects on his time as a member of CISPES (Committee in Solidarity with People of El Salvador). The US’s foreign policy was similar in both Latin America and Southeast Asia. The prevalent school of thought, called the Domino Theory, was that one country would fall to communism and then cause a chain reaction in the rest. Rather than waging a war with US troops, as they did in Vietnam, the United States funneled influence, money, and weapons into Central American countries. “Untitled Song” is cut from the same cloth as both “Viet Nam” and “West Germany.” D. Boon wants you to know what’s going on, so his lyrics are straightforward. In addition to boasting unveiled lyrics, “Untitled Song” features more traditional song structure than many Minutemen songs. There’s not a lot of repetition in the lyrics—Boon’s words are more of a narrative—but there are identifiable verses and choruses. The Minutemen want you to focus more on what’s being said, rather than how, so there aren’t a lot of curveballs being thrown. Pay attention to the message, the Minutemen are telling you. I don’t think “Untitled Song” would sound out of 98

place on D.’s side—it’s populist. Neither would it be wildly out of context on George’s—some fine drum rolls during the song’s choruses sound like a lot of fun to play, as do the huge crash cymbals during Boon’s guitar solo. Watt attended CISPES meetings with Boon, and began to get some understanding of what was going on in El Salvador. The members of CISPES were against the United States sending money and arms to the Nationalist Republican Alliance, the right-wing faction fighting in the Salvadorian Civil War. The left-wing faction, called the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, was fighting against a right-leaning dictatorship that was funded by the American government. Watt didn’t need to be persuaded that the United States was in the wrong. He did have some questions, though. “I went to a couple of meetings and I asked the dude ‘Where do they get the guns?’ That was kinda strange. But I really agree with the sentiments. ‘Where’d they get the guns? Who’s giving it to ‘em? Is it China? Is it Russia?’ I didn’t have to be convinced, the Contras, that shit, was illegal and disgusting, okay, so I didn’t have to be convinced of that, but I had other kinds of questions. It wasn’t like I was the brave guy to ask ‘em, I was just blurting out what was on my mind.” You can see Watt’s involvement with Boon and CISPES on the cover of Three Way Tie (For Last). The album’s cover features a D. Boon painting of each member’s head mounted on a wall like a hunting trophy, with an engraved plaque to describe each member. Boon’s says “singer/activist,” Watt’s reads “anti-war sympathizer,” and Hurley’s says “dude local.” “Jesus and Tequilla” was another outsourced song, with lyrics written by former SST honcho Joe Carducci. 99

“[D. Boon] was living at SST while Black Flag and Spot and Mugger were out on tour, and I had the radio on the country stations then,” Carducci says. “So we thought about doing a Boon solo album we were going to call Hard Working Man, mostly because he kept calling in sick and then going back to sleep. I wrote three lyrics for him. When Mike was turning Double Nickels into a double album he pushed D. for new words and [D.] told him he had one of those [three] songs done.” The lyrics that Carducci wrote and gave to D. Boon drip with the stereotypical hallmarks of country music—hard times, booze, romantic trouble. Thing is, though, that the stereotype is bucked—the song’s protagonist has found solace, despite all of the tough times that are being sung about. “D. Boon showed me that song,” says Watt, “and I thought, right away, Crazy Horse, Neil Young. Maybe a little more notes than [Neil Young would] play, but something with that kind of feel. That’s what I was thinking of.” “Jesus and Tequilla” is another one of those Minutemen songs that has achieved favorite status among fans. It’s got a catchy title, juxtaposing religion and booze to humorous effect. The song’s structure is even more orthodox than “Untitled Song for Latin America.” In the case of the latter, the repetitions are only musical. “Jesus and Tequilla” boasts music and lyrics that repeat, making it even easier for casual listeners to hear and remember the song. For fans in bands of their own, the song is a favorite because it’s relatively easy to play. Watt’s bass line is catchy but remains steady throughout the song and isn’t terribly funk-inflected or spazzy. D. Boon’s guitar is played at a less 100

breakneck pace than usual, with a heavier reliance on finger-picking than weirdo skronk chords. Boon’s solo is relatively subdued, too. (Hurley, as per usual, is playing the hell out of his drums. Not hard to imagine a drummer in some garage trying like hell to play a passable, slightly easier rendition of George’s line. The song itself moves pretty slowly, but all of the cymbal hits, I think, are deceptively difficult and fast.) In addition to the structure and the relative ease of play for geeks in bands, the song is catchy. “Jesus and Tequilla” was a harbinger of what was to come on Project: Mersh, the follow-up to Double Nickels. The instrumental “June 16th” is commonly regarded as one of the album’s highlights—the song is a little bit more accessible than the record’s other compositions, and boasts a deceptive elegance. “June 16th” doesn’t sound like it has much going on, but the musicianship—particularly Hurley’s drums, which might not be the listener’s focus the first few times through—pay dividends upon repeated listens. June 16th, also known as Bloomsday, is the date on which all the action in Ulysses takes place. It’s also Raymond Pettibon’s birthday. “Next to D. Boon,” Watt says, “[Pettibon was the] biggest influence in my life. Guy was very subtle in some ways, but his art is totally bold-ass! His mind, huge leaps. He can retain incredible amounts of information, very humble, very funny guy in a dry way. Incredible guy.” The Miriutemen were always big fans of the Urinals, often covering their song “Ack Ack Ack Ack” both live and on their 101

records. The Minutemen had the work of the Urinals in mind while writing “June 16th. According to Watt, “They were such a fuckin’ elegant band! Like Ack Ack Ack Ack,’ it’s only one chord, then the big change comes and it’s only a half-step away! So econo! Much more econo! So I was kinda thinkin’ about that. And D. Boon, beautiful lead guitar—just enough notes! So econo! Beautiful!” The instrumental is very sparse, driven mainly by the rhythm section. D. Boon’s guitar line was written after hearing Watt’s bass line once. Boon adds sharp flourishes here and there, but never actively forces himself to the top of the mix. Despite the airy feel that the song has, its verses still feature intense drumming on the part of George Hurley—he’s using his whole kit, making a lot of hits, though not as hard as usual. Hurley fills the space that would normally be taken up by the guitar, but does so in a manner that is more calm than frenetic. The chorus part of the song, at the dead center, is all George’s. His torn hits drive the bit, which is never repeated (again, it’s tough to name the respective parts of Minutemen songs because of their non-reliance on traditional structure. The part that I’m calling the “chorus” starts at about 0:36). On Hurley’s side of the record, he picked a lot of songs that were fun to play on the drums, often songs that he wrote the lyrics for, as well. “June 16th” could have easily fit onto George’s side of the record because of its reliance on drumming. The song, with its Ulysses theme, also could have fit onto Watt’s side. “Storm in My House” features lyrics outsourced to Henry Rollins. Henry was the longest tenured singer for Black Flag 102

(since then, he’s fronted several incarnations of the Rollins Band, as well as pulling numerous acting jobs and, more recently, hosting a self-titled television show on the Independent Film Channel). A pre-Rollins Flag lineup met the Minutemen in San Pedro in 1980, and the two acts became fast friends through their various jncarnations. Black Flag’s guitarist, Greg Ginn, was’ responsible for releasing many of the Minutemen’s albums on his SST Records imprint. (Michael Azzerad does a fantastic job chronicling Black Flag’s history in his wonderful Our Band Could Be Your Life) By the time Rollins joined Black Flag, both bands were rolling. Flag was one of the first punk groups to tour heavily (along with San Fransisco’s Dead Kennedys and Canada’s D.O.A.), inspiring countless acts to do the same, the Minutemen among them. The Minutemen and Black Flag played many shows together, and toured crammed in a rickety van. The event that Watt remembers fostering an even greater degree of closeness between the two bands was Rollins and D. Boon building a house owned by Regis Ginn, father of both Greg Ginn and his brother, Raymond Pettibon. “[Regis] was building this house, and he had Henry and D. Boon working together,” Watt says. “And I think that’s when D. Boon asked him [to contribute], and Henry wrote that song.” In the narrator’s house, there’s “wind tearing at the rafters / howling through the timbers.” The lyrics evoke a state of unfinished construction—wood still exposed for all to see, bare like the lyrics. The song concludes with the lyric “hope

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the storm doesn’t rip my roof off / my skin keeps the storm inside,” letting the listener know that the use of the word “house” isn’t literal, despite the use of construction terms earlier in the song. The action of “Storm in My House” is taking place as the narrator speaks to someone: “Tell me it’s not always going to be like this / the world is surely the coldest place.” The narrator is asking for a reassurance that there’s someplace less inviting and chilly than his head, his house. Despite the ruminations on the storm’s violence, the song comes across in a gende fashion, atypical Rollins fare in 1984. Musically, Watt says, the tone of the song is similar to “Two Beads at the End.” D. Boon singing Rollins’s lyrics gives a shift in perspective. “[E]ven though they’re Henry words,” Watt says, “the way we make ‘em gives Henry a different perspective, I think. I think we could have made a good team. He coulda probably written us a lot of good words because it put a spin on ‘em people weren’t aware of. . . . He helped us out there in a strange way, because it gives the record a new facet, a new shape, but it helps him, too, because it helps people see . . . Henry has a lot of dimensions to him. And D. Boon was sensitive like that where he could pick up on people.” The lyrics to “Martin’s Story” were provided by Martin Tamburovich. The members of the Minutemen were well known for flying the flag of their hometown of San Pedro. Despite their shout-outs, though, none of them had been born in the town—Hurley was originally from Brockton, Massachusetts; 104

Watt was born in Portsmouth, Virginia; Boon was from nearby Napa. Tamburovich was born and raised in San Pedro, which endeared him to the Minutemen even more. “We lived together in this apartment building we called the ManBoat,” Watt says, “had all these old retired sailors. And one plug. Each apartment had only one plug, everything had to go through the one because it was built before electricity, when they put it in they just put in one each.” One of the Minutemen’s inceptions had been a four-piece act—Boon, Hurley, and Watt playing their respective instruments, with Tamburovich as the lead singer—named the Reactionaries. Tamburovich remained tight with his ex-band-mates. He worked for the band as a roadie, and, along with Boon and Watt, was one of the owners of the New Alliance record label. Tamburovich wrote the lyrics for “Martin’s Story” with the Minutemen’s history in mind, reflecting the slow but steady progress that the act showed as they continued refining both their sound and approach. The song has a very terse, almost mechanical feel to it—“Takes time, I guess it sounds like how to bake a cake,” Watt says. The repeated mentions of time go well with the main riff of the song, propelled by Watt’s run of bass notes. The song moves at a hectic pace, pausing a few times to let the listener catch breath before reembarking. All of the lyrical mentions of time ring with patience—“what you makin’, man / takes time / a little bit / a little bit more / the effort’s worth it,” for example—but the song itself is anything but patient,

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feeling more like a ticking bomb than an exercise in restraint. It’s a nice contrast. One of the reasons that Boon and Watt pulled in their friends to write lyrics for them was to make sure that they never got stuck in ruts. Repeated listens to Double Nickels confirm that each member of the band had a sense of style that was unique and noticeable—once you’ve got a basic understanding of each band member’s particular brand of song-writing, it’s fun to put the album on shuffle and guess who wrote the lyrics for a particular song (geeky, I know, but so is writing a whole book about one album). Tamburovich’s lyrics don’t sound like anything else on the record—the goal of trying to keep things fresh was nicely realized by the contributions of all of the Minutemen’s friends. “I know in a lot of music they do shout-outs to people,” says Watt. “It’s important. It gives Double Nickels a lot of strength, too. Like a flannel. It’s in all the threads” “Ain’t Talkin’ Bout Love” is a cover of a song off of Van Halen’s eponymous 1978 debut. Van Halen was the last non—punk rock band that I regarded as my favorite. When my folks and I moved to Concord, New Hampshire, in the summer of 1987, I found myself friendless and lonely in my new rural setting. I immersed myself in music, and decided the Halen would be a logical choice for my study. I procured cassette copies of 1984 and 5150 from one of those mail-order record clubs. I meant to backtrack and learn all of the early stuff, but my plans on absorbing more of the band’s catalogue were interrupted by my discovery of the Sex Pistols and Dead Kennedys. (For whatever it’s worth, I have started to listen to the old Halen stuff, almost twenty years later.)

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I was surprised to find a thematic link between the Minutemen and Diamond Dave’s crew When Van Halen was recorded, they were, of all things, econo about it! You’d think that David Lee Roth’s flamboyance and excess would have carried over to a studio experience full of mountains of coke and stereotypical “writing in the studio” stories, but no! Instead, Van Halen did without needless overdubs, left mistakes in the recordings, and generally conducted themselves in a focused manner that was more similar to the Minutemen’s attitude than that of the excess-laden Sunset Strip scene of the time. Right on! The Minutemen’s “Ain’t Talkin’ Bout Love” cover was omitted from the track listing when Double Nickels was pressed to CD. The cover was available on two other releases—SST Records’ Blasting Concept Two, and as a live recording on the Tour Spiel EP. There are differences in each version, little flourishes and changes, but all three follow the same basic formula: The Minutemen start their cover at what is about the halfway point of the original, two minutes in.’ It’s that part of many Van Halen songs when the band brings it down a litde bit so that Dave can do his gravelly/sexy/silly monologue (like on “Panama,” when he does the whole bit about barely being able to see the road because of the heat coming on). He’s lost a lot of friends, Dave deadpans, and doesn’t have time to mess around. D. Boon, though, is totally going for it, full tilt, when he sings the same lyrics. (On the version found on Blasting Concept Two, he full-on screams: “Got no time to fuck around! Fuck you! AAAAAAAGGGH!” It’s that bit that makes the BC2 cover my favorite of the bunch, even though it’s slower and longer than the other two.)

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The Minutemen omit Van Halen’s chorus, a repetition of the song’s tide, choosing instead to go right into one of D. Boon’s trademark blues-tinged solos. They cut out everything except for the campiest part of the song, then go straight for the gut. D. Boon doesn’t try to sound like Eddie Van Halen. He sounds like himself, playing a solo that wouldn’t sound out of place anywhere on Double Nickels. I get the feeling, listening to the song, that the Minutemen felt like the song’s hook was way at the end, the bit where everyone goes “hey hey hey!” The rest of the cover version hangs on that part, builds up to it, then delivers. The listener expects many repetitions of the climax, but since when have the Minutemen done anything by the book? You might not expect as many repeated instances of the hook as Van Halen gives you, by any means, but an even number doesn’t seem that far out of the realm of possibility. Instead, the Minutemen give you three repetitions—three!—before abruptly ending their forty-second cover of a four minute original. “We had a lot of fun doing [the cover],” Watt says. “A lot of people think we’re mocking. It’s not like that.” The Minutemen grew up listening to classic rock before punk took hold, and had an appreciation for all forms of music. They were never too cool to admit their non-punk influences. It’s still a funny cover, though. There are these little phases, tiny epochs, when certain bands get name-checked a lot in a small period of time. In recent years, more and more bands have been citing Steely Dan as an influence, to the point where the Dan’s Donald Fagen has become a figure of speech—“dropping a Fagen” is to make some obscure cultural reference that alienates at least half the people in the room. The first such instance I can remember 108

was when the Dismemberment Plan said that their Emergency & I album was informed by the Dan (easily heard in the first song on that record, “A Life of Possibilities”). After that, it seemed that the floodgates opened. George Hurley was a big Steely Dan fan, so Mike Watt brought a cover of “Dr. Wu” to the practice room, thinking that George would get a kick out of it. When the Minutemen were on tour, listening to tapes in their van, “we had these cassettes with like two of [Steely Dan’s] albums on cassette, so we musta heard ‘em each five thousand times,” Watt says. “What were their words about? Drugs? I don’t know. We thought they were all about drugs.” The Minutemen’s take on Steely Dan is fairly straightforward—less stripped down, certainly, than their Van Halen cover, similar to their interpretations of Creedence Clearwater Revival songs. I had assumed for years that D. Boon and Mike Watt shared duties on the cover, with Mike spieling in the front of the mix and D. singing in the background. However, Watt said that he did both set of vocals. When I listen now, I can hear why I thought what I did: Watt and Boon have similar vocal inflections, for one, and two, the sung vocals sound a little bit strained. I guess I was under the impression that it was D. Boon singing, reaching for a higher range than he was generally accustomed to. My old theory, of course, is blown to hell by the last sung lines in the song, where the singing Watt says “Are you with me, doctor? Can you hear me, doctor?” Those sung lines are very obviously Watt and not D. Boon. (Another instance of me knowing the fourth side of the record less well than the other three.)

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“I don’t know whose idea it was to have the two voices,” Watt says. “We never really did that one live, just for the record. I remember I brought it to the band kinda for Georgie ‘cuz I know he loved the Dan, just loved the Dan. So I don’t think it goes any deeper than that.” “The World According to Nouns” returns to the theme of words and their meanings. D. Boon’s side contains several mentions of the nature of words: in the Hurley-penned “Anxious Mofo,” the lyric “how can I express, much less possess?” ruminates on the notion of naming and posession through language—putting a word to something that hasn’t been stricdy defined implies a sort of ownership over whatever has been named. The whole of “Do You Want New Wave or Do You Want the Truth?” deals with words, as well. In fact, the lyric “do words serve the truth?” is repeated almost verbatim in “The World According to Nouns”: “the how, the why, the where, then when, the who—can these words find the truth?” “New Wave” is one of the angriest songs on Double Nkkles. “Nouns” shares some of the same energy, but is much more streamlined lyrically: the first verse asks, “The state, the church, the plans, the vote—what’s the verb behind it all?” “I had stumbled onto Wittgenstein and this idea of semantics,” Watt says. “The world according to nouns—are there any thoughts left in the head that don’t have a word assigned to it? He had this argument, I think it was with Moore. Moore says, ‘I know that’s a tree.’ Well, no, you can only believe it’s a tree because a tree’s a word. Some people think it’s kinda corny and cheesy, having to talk about it in the first place with the language and that shit. You should be 110

aware of this, especially when you’re a young person. To find out where a wall is, you push. You’ve heard so many people talk about where it is. You’re like ‘I wonder if it really is there.’ So you’re pushing. And that wound up on the fourth side. I liked it later.” “Nouns” starts off with an ominous Watt bass line and a slow roll of Hurley drums. Boon’s guitar is downright eerie, and, for me, conjures up this image of wind pushing around masts on a ship, pulling the rigging taut. At 0:33, things become slightly more straightforward, with Boon soloing sparsely until the original figure is reprised at 0:53. The reprise only lasts for about ten seconds before Boon starts hollerin’. Since the creepy intro part was initially very long, the listener expects a similar figure to repeat, making the abrupt segue into lyrics even more jarring. When the phrase is played yet again as the song’s outro, it’s disorienting—the Minutemen are making you wonder what they’re going to do on the third time through, winding you up for some unexpected new twist. Instead, the song simply ends. “Little Man With a Gun in His Hand” is a song that also appears on Buzz Howl Under Influence of Heat. It’s not on the CD version of Double Nickels, which I always thought was strange—it’s a good song, anthemic, with lots of buildup. When “Litde Man” was recorded for Buzz or Howl, the Minutemen had just gotten back from touring Europe with Black Flag. While on tour, they had written the song with the help of Black Flag’s Chuck Dukowski (more on that in a sec). They liked what they had enough to record the song with Spot. Thing was, they didn’t know how to finish the song. The Buzz or Howl’version of “Little Man” ends with a 111

fadeout (the first such instance on a Minutemen record), as well as Watt shouting “Is that good enough?” The band had written an ending for “Little Man” by the time they recorded the songs that would become Doule Nickels with Edian James, and decided to rerecord the now-complete tune for the album. “We recorded it again,” says Watt. “It was really shitty. Terrible! We liked the Buzz or Howl one way better. Spot recorded it better, too.” So, despite the song’s anthemic outro (used to great effect in We Jam Econo), Watt decided that the inferior version of “Little Man” would be a logical omission from the CD version of Double Nickels. A popular rumor about “Little Man” was that Chuck Dukowski had written the song about Mugger, who did double duty as Black Flag’s roadie and as the singer of the vile/funny Nig Heist (Mugger’s bit in the American Hardcore film, just released as of this writing, is pretty damn amazing). The Mugger theory is incorrect. ‘“Little Man’ is about the fruits of jealousy and envy,” Dukowski says. “It’s about the kind of person who will take (or destroy) what they desire and someone else has. They’re little because of it. They become pitiful, ugly, and uninspiring. They will lose what they thought they took in the end. Sophocles wrote: ‘Proceed but don’t forget. For the trapper’s in the trap, the looter has been looted, and stolen goods soon spoil.’” Dukowski carried a little notebook with him on tour, taking time to jot down observations, phone numbers, little bits of song inspired by what he was seeing and reading. ‘“Little 112

Man,’ as a song, came to be when Boon and I were talking before sound check in Hamburg,” Dukowski says. “We were sitting around waiting for the soundman to arrive and Boon asked me if he could look in my book. He asked if I’d like it if he did some drawings in it and I told him ‘of course.’ He drew these great pictures in the book and then suggested writing some music to the ‘Little Man’ poem. He started playing, he said had an idea for some music for it. It was great.” It’s worth noting that D. and Chuck drew the attention of Mike Watt, who wandered over and checked out Chuck’s notebook. Watt found lyrics written therein and asked if he could use them in a Minutemen song. Dukowski agreed, and that song eventually became “Nature Without Man.” Crazy! “Love Dance,” an instrumental, is the final song on the record. The song starts off with some Hurley drums that are reminiscent of the stuttering precision he displays on “Themselves.” Watt’s bass line percolates behind as Boon plays some faint hammer-ons before playing this very animated, bluesy guitar line. There’s none of the tension and release that is one of the record’s hallmark, no theatrics. The band simply plays until the song fades out with Boon doing more hammer-ons. “We thought it was a metaphor for infinity,” Watt says. “For one thing, Minutemen songs did not fade out. That was really weird. They’re all designed for live play—you can’t fade out live. That’s the big joke with Project: Mersh, because we have all these fadeouts. But you can do it there, and we make

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it like infinity—supposed to be like infinity. There’s only one part, but the chord just changes the key.” Watt explained that “Love Dance” was recorded in the basement of Ian MacKaye’s Dischord House. When asked, MacKaye said that he had heard the story from Watt, but didn’t specifically remember the events around the song being written—it was probably in February of 1983, when Black Flag and the Minutemen were touring. Alas, MacKaye did not start keeping a daily journal until March of that year, when his Minor Threat went on tour. “Love Dance” could have fit well on Watt’s side of the record because of the song’s Joycean elements, but Watt felt the placement of the song at the end of the record made the infinity metaphor all the more poignant—presumably, the record starts again, and will play for an eternity. “[It’s] supposed to be infinity. Like Bloom and MoUy sleeping in bed head to tail, like yin and yang. So I made sure it was last.” Making sure that the song was last turned out to be an easy task, as the song was not selected in the fantasy draft by any of the three members of the Minutemen.

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Real Names Be Proof My mom and dad, Kathy and Ray Fournier, have always been supportive of my choices, even the dumb ones (lord knows there have been plenty of those). I can’t thank them enough. Same goes for the rest of the family. My aunt, Kathy Lacroix, can finally put my book on her shelf. I am grateful for the opportunity afforded to me by David Barker and the rest of the gang at Continuum Press. Mike Watt has been an inspiration for so long. His involvement is an honor. Thanks to Robyn Gittleman, Cynthia Stewart, Howard Woolf and the staff of the Experimental College at Tufts University for taking a chance on me. During my stay in Los Angeles, John LeBlanc and Kimee Balmilero went above and beyond every expectation of hospitality. I couldn’t have done this without them. Leslie Brokaw cheerfully endured my questions and occasional panic. Ned Greene, Duane Gorey, Terry G. Lorber II, Ed McNamara, Tommy Pichette, Brendan Emmett Quigley, Frank “The Bank” Trippi, and other assorted drunks Make Mondays Tuesdays. (Quick, write that down.)

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Dr. Damian Adshead gets stuff done. Big ups to the folks who contributed their time and thoughts: Steven Blush, Joe Carducci, Clint Conley, Chuck Dukowski, Ryan Gear, Lance Hahn, Ed Hochuli, Ian MacKaye, Mac McCaughan, Kara Nicks, Dale Nixon, Jack Rabid, Paul Rachman, David Rees, Bruce Siart, Dirk Vandenberg. Don Cheadle is America’s actor. When it comes to editing, Howard Martin III is number one in Easton! Southboro! West Northborough! Framing-ham! New Brunswick! First readers: Pam Ginzler, Rebecca Griffin, Simon Joyce, Rich Ladew-tang, Miriam Leibowitz, Honor Moody, Jay O’Grady, Patrice Taddonio. The academy: Austin Bagley, Matt Barre, Don Bixder, Campaign for Real-Time, MK Carroll, Giordana & Peter Chipcagni, Marc “Gus” Desgroseilliers, the Fagen High Council, Shelly Fank & Jacob Meyer, First Strike, Michelle Fournier, Everyone at Gargoyles on the Square, god.fires.man, Joseph Grillo, Lake Effect, Dennis Livoli, Brian Lobao and the Key Foundation, Zeke Mermell, Menendez and Mendoza Oblongata, Q, Rideside, Andy Rubenstein, John Straub, Ryan Tacy, all my friends and brothers at Wah-Tut-Ca Scout Reservation, Public Emily Weinsinger, and you. Oh, and to the Fight for Time’s Right: You’re not fooling anyone.

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More praise for the 33 1/3 series: We . . . aren’t naive enough to think that we’re your only source for reading about music (but if we had our way . . . watch out). For those of you who really like to know everything there is to know about an album, you’d do well to check out Continuum’s “33 1/3” series of books.—Pitchfork As individualistic and idiosyncratic as the albums that inspired them—Rob Trucks, Cleveland Scene The best albums ever made—turned into books!—Blender magazine This is some of the best music writing going on right now—Pulse of the Twin Cities Music writing done right—Tape Op magazine Admirable. ... 33 1/3 has broken new ground—THES (UK) The series quietly breathes some life into the world of music fanaticism ... an explosion of sincere, humbled appreciation—The Portland Mercury The series represents the Holy Grail of millions of late Baby Boomers—All About Jazz Inspired—Details

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Neat—Nick Hornby, The Believer A much-needed reprieve from the bite-size capsule reviews that rule much of today’s music criticism—San Francisco Bay Guardian Informed, fun and personal—Paste Magazine The series tries to inject new life into a tired form—Newsday All [these] books revel in the distinct shapes and benefits of an album, its ability to go places film, prose or sculpture can’t reach, while capable of being as awe-inspiring as the best of those mediums—Philadelphia City Paper These first few installments set the bar pretty high for those to come—Tangents At their best, these Continuum books make rich, thought-provoking arguments for the song collections at hand—The Philadelphia Inquirer A really remarkable new series of books—The Sunday News-Herald, Michigan A brilliant idea—The Times (London) The series treats its subjects with the kind of intelligence and carefully considered respect they deserve—Pop Culture Press Lucid . . . each volume provides insightful commentary—The Paper, Central Illinois

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Idiosyncratic, pocket-sized monographs done with passion and insight . . . the analysis is both personal and articulate—Harp Magazine The series delves as deep as it’s possible to go without resorting to padding ... 5 stars each—Classic Rock Magazine (UK) Passionate, astutely written, insight—Amplifier Magazine

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If an enterprising college professor were to put together a course on pop criticism and classic rock ‘n’ roll records, the textbooks could clearly be found among the ... 33 1/3 series presented by Continuum Books. Each book delves deeply into an iconic album of the past 40 years, with a variety of approaches—St. Louis Post-Dispatch Informative, thought-provoking, creative, obsessive and more—Albany Times Union Articulate, well-researched, and passionate—Library Journal A cracking good idea, and if you like the albums in question, you’re sure to love the books—Leaf Salon, New Zealand Eclectic enough that there should be something for everyone—Maxim A nifty little string of books attention—Columbia Daily Tribune

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These little tomes have captured me in a gobsmacked haze. . . . These writings are so vivid and uplifting—Cincinnati City Beat Cultural elitism never had it so good—Louisville Eccentric Observer Praise for individual titles in the series: Meat Is Murder My personal favorite of the batch has to be Joe Pernice’s autobiographic-fiction fantasia. . . . Over little more than a hundred pages, he manages a vivid recollection of a teenage New England Catholic school life circa 1985, in all its conflict and alienation, sexual fumblings and misplaced longing—Tangents Pernice’s novella captures these feelings of the despair of possibility, of rushing out to meet the world and the world rushing in to meet you, and the price of that meeting. As sound-tracked by the Smiths—Drowned in Sound Pernice hits his mark. The well-developed sense of character, plot and pacing shows that he has serious promise as a novelist. His emotionally precise imagery can be bluntly, chillingly personal— the Boston Weekly Dig Continuum ... knew what they were doing when they asked songwriter Joe Pernice to pay homage to the Smiths’ Meat Is Murder—Austin American-Statesman

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Pernice’s writing style reminded me of Douglas Coupland’s: the embodiment of youthful vitality and innocent cynicism, clever, quickwitted, and aware of the ridiculous cultural symbols of his time—Stylus Magazine (University of Winnipeg) Forever Changes Love fan Andrew Hultkrans obsesses brilliantly on the rock legends’ seminal disc—Vanity Fair Dusty in Memphis Warren is a gready gifted good heart, and I love him. Read his book, listen to his record, and you will too—Stanley Booth, author of the True Adventures of the Rolling Stones Warren Zanes ... is so in love with Dusty Springfield’s great 1969 adventure in tortured Dixie soul that he’s willing to jump off the deep end in writing about it. Artfully blending academic citation, personal memoir and pungent commentary from Dusty in Memphis principals such as producer Jerry Wexler, Zanes uses the record as a springboard into the myths and true mysteries of Southern life—Rolling Stone (4 star review) James Brown Live at the Apollo Masterful—The Big Takeover Exemplary. ... Most astonishing, however, is Wolk’s conjecture that to avoid recording distortion, the riotous album captured “James Brown holding back”—Mojo (UK)

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Let It Be (Replacements) These are solid short-short stories with bona fide epiphanies—that they shed light on Meloy’s past only makes them more engaging—Village Voice For reviews of individual titles in the series, please visit our website at www.continuumbooks.com and 33third.blogspot.com

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