by Mike Watt
I met d. boon some three or so years after coming to san pedro, ca, from norfolk, va, when he jumped out of a tree and landed on me in peck park, thinking I was a friend of his, nicknamed “eskimo”—I told him I wasn’t eskimo, that I was someone who just moved from the navy housing to this proj that was just built next to the park. I told him I’d show him and, on our way walking there, he started reciting all these bits, really funny and trippy stuff. I thought, “man, this is the smartest dude in the world!” now I was only twelve years old and had never heard of george carlin—that’s right, when the next day d. boon took me to his pad, a few blocks away in an older proj called “park western” (mine was called “park western estates”), he played me some of this comedian’s act he had recorded from tv, and damn if those bits I thought he was making up on the spot yesterday were actually right from this man! after removing my palm from my forehead I realized this didn’t matter cuz it was too late; I was way into him.
now, the reason I had to move from navy housing and, in fact, the reason I was in san pedro in the first place is cuz my pop was a sailor in the navy; he worked in the engine room as a machinist mate. california was a lot closer to vietnam than virginia was, and that was the war that was going on then. in the service, families gotta move lots; as soon as “the orders” arrive you’d have, like, thirty days to reinvent your whole world. well, when my pop got transferred from the uss long beach to our first atomic-powered aircraft carrier, the uss enterprise (my pop worked in nuke engine rooms), the word came to move north to alameda and my ma said, “fuck that.” so we stayed in pedro but had to leave the navy housing. trippy how ‘pert-near right away of leaving there I would meet d. boon and then his family took me in like they did. his pop, danny, was like a second father to me—I mean all the tours my pop did in vietnam (yeah, they had “tours” too!) made for me hardly seeing him, but now it was even more that way. danny boon treated me like a son. d. boon’s ma, too, was very kind to me. she was upfront about her thinking and didn’t airbrush w/ words, but I liked that. it was her, too, who decided prolly one of the biggest decisions in my life: I would be on bass. yeah, she decided me and d. boon should be in a band and I would be on bass. hell, I didn’t even know what a bass was. she played guitar when she was younger, so of course d. boon would be on guitar, but a band needs a bass, so that was for me. now, her thinking wasn’t, I believe, cuz of careering but more like econo childcare or something. it was the early ’70s, and there wasn’t a lot of guns and stuff, but there was some fighting, so I think she wanted us to maybe be in the pad after school doing music and off the streets where we might get into trouble. hey, I was into it cuz I got to be w/ d. boon, that was good enough for me. thank you much, margie boon!
when I met d. boon, the only rock band he knew about was creedence clearwater revival—he knew nothing about cream, the who, steppenwolf, or t-rex cuz I think his pop was way into buck owens (even though danny boon was from nebraska, the boons had lived in bakersfield before coming to pedro), and that might’ve been a factor. but anyway, d. boon had all those first six ccr albums. they’d be laying on the hardwood floor w/out being in their jackets, grape juice and shit spilled all over them, and the econo record player needed, like, five quarters above the stylus to try and keep it from skipping. let’s put it this way: it was hard to hear what the bassman was doing—hard for me anyway. hell, I can hear stu cook (ccr bassman) real good now but then, no way. actually, I was playing a cheap guitar from a pawn shop w/ only four strings on it, that’s what I saw in the pictures on album covers—something like a guitar but w/ just four tuners. I really thought basses were guitars w/skinnier necks and two fewer strings! I didn’t really comprehend that the word bass meant lower; what a dumbfuck I was. anyway, it stressed me so much not knowing what to play when we tried to copy ccr tunes, so looking at their album covers, I decided to wear shirts like their guitar/singerman john fogerty wore—flannels. I thought this was his kind of rock ‘n’ roll shirt and maybe if I wore shirts similar to his that d. boon still would like me, even w/ my inability to figure their bass parts out. d. boon had a big heart, though, and let me stumble through w/ whatever, and luckily we moved on to trying to learn tunes by the who and cream, where I could definitely hear the bass parts. a lot of the bass in rock coming from england had the bass way up and it helped much; r & b stuff, too, like james jamerson and larry graham—that would have a big impact later now that I think of it. anyway, there was some u.s. rock like blue öyster cult and alice cooper, where I learned much too, but what really helped us both was a man who lived in his car named roy mendez-lopez. this guy gave lessons to d. boon out of chuck’s sound of music in our town, a pad where they sold music stuff and albums too—it was like that in those days. roy was an incredible cat who was a very singular individual who built his own instruments, studied music constantly, and lived econo. he was way into prac and instilled that much in us, especially d. boon but me too. the way he brought it to us wasn’t like the “b” word burden but more like the “o” word opportunity—to play for the love of it. it wasn’t just talk: he lived his ideas out. he had an incredible impact on us.
I got my first real bass at fifteen. it was a kay that looked kind of like a gibson eb-3—kind of. I couldn’t believe how big the fucking strings were. “no wonder there’s only four of them,” I was thinking. this bass had action like maybe william tell’s bow—terrible and gave me much hurt—but eventually it did get my fingers stronger. damn, would they fucking hurt, but I wanted to be d. boon’s bass player so I kept at it. the real problem I see looking back now was the culture or maybe I should say lack of culture when it came to composing your own stuff, using music as a form of expression. remember this is the era of arena rock—the first “concert” we went to was t-rex, and though we dug that and stuff like blue öyster cult (the band we saw live the most), it was nothing like the club gig culture we would find out about w/ the punk movement. actually we had never been to a club until our first punk gig. we graduated san pedro high school in 1976, which is right around when creem magazine had these pictures and stories about “punk” stuff. we never did gigs, just played at the pad and then later in a garage near the junior high school w/ three other pedro guys and called ourselves the bright orange band even though we didn’t have one original song (why have an original band name, why not cover that too?!). wait, we did have one gig when we were in tenth grade after a football game on a portable stage near the jetty at cabrillo beach. we were so terrible that everyone started throwing shit at us, and d. boon’s pop drove his pickup right up to the stage so we could jump in and escape. some older guys had us borrow their stuff so we didn’t lose anything except our spirit—that band was crushed. me and d. boon then started jamming w/ an old buddy named marc weiswasser at one of the barracks the army was renting out as they were closing down the lower reservation of fort macarthur (it’s been dug out, w/ boat slips put in, and now is the cabrillo marina). of course we were copying songs, stuff like “dust in the wind” and “tie your mother down,” w/ a singer-lady named erin we met one day when we stopped for a breather. outside this pad came walking by this guy w/ wild hair like in those punk pictures and what looked like a kotex around his neck. he told us there was a scene up in hollywood where people wrote their own songs. he said he was in one of the bands and we should check it out. d. boon and I did just that. we saw a band called the bags, and the first thing that fell out of my mouth w/out thinking when I saw them was to say to d. boon, “we can do that!” it was just a such a mindblow; it’s hard for me to put how clearly profound this moment was. it’s right up there w/ d. boon’s ma putting me on bass.
we started going to as many punk gigs as we could. it was a trip how these cats weren’t afraid. you could tell ‘pert-near all of them were just learning how to play, learning how to play in public, but it didn’t matter cuz it seemed the main point was to express yourself any way you could. this is why we never felt punk was a style of music—that was up to each band. what it seemed to us was the movement was more about a state of mind. maybe some kind of funny karma, cuz I do think the hippie movement had lost its humor and the insights that come w/ that. remember, we were boys during the ’60s w/ the civil rights and antiwar stuff and people taking issues into their own hands, and now in the ’70s, arena rock seemed like the nuremberg rallies to me. I really wanted to start a band that was part of this movement w/ d. boon, but he told me to hold on. I got impatient and answered an ad in the recycler, where three people were looking for a fourth to make a band. they had prac in the drummer’s pop’s electric shop on santa monica boulevard, and I brought my bass and amp in my vw bug up from pedro (about thirty miles, we’re the west part of the los angeles harbor) and jammed the stooges’ “I wanna be your dog” for like three hours w/ them. they were very kind to me, nice people. I was so excited when I got home that I immediately told d. boon, and he told me, “ok, let’s make a punk band.” whoa, I didn’t expect that—I never jammed w/ those people in hollywood again. this was the beginning of the reactionaries. d. boon picked that name from a list I had made up of all kinds of stupid shit, but he never wrote one song for the band. looking back, I think he did the band for me cuz he always had plans for another band in his mind; he just wanted to be ready for it. we never had a pad to play w/ a drummer, and this made it a blessing to find george hurley, who wanted to play drums after a bunch of years of surfing and even making surfboards. the shed where he did that across from the high school is where we did prac. another high school friend, martin tamburovich, made us a quartet. this was the first time I ever wrote songs, and they were terrible. the other guys in the band had very big hearts to let me do that to them, to foist these feeble efforts. actually, I did write one song in secret as a teenager called “mr. bass king of outer space,” where in the lyrics I blow away the rest of the band w/ a bass solo—obviously I was having inferiority issues, as discovering bass was like playing right field in little league, like where you put your ‘tard friend in the band, that hierarchy shit that, happily, I didn’t have to deal w/ so much w/ the punk movement cuz of a much more level playing field. everyone was learning, drummers and guitarists too. this band really didn’t play that many gigs; most were a few times w/ the suburban lawns at their prac pad in long beach, but the first one was very important to us, big time. it was in pedro at a “teen post,” which were these places set up for young people that a guy from a band called black flag, the bassman chuck dukowski, rented out for a gig. it was a trip how we got the gig. a band from england called the clash were finally playing so cal near the beginning of 1979, and we went to see them, bo diddley, and the dils at the santa monica civic center. in the parking lot were these dudes handing out flyers. the gig on the flyers was gonna be in pedro, and we couldn’t believe this was gonna happen. when these guys handing out the flyers asked why (obviously they were in this band black flag), we told them that we lived in pedro. “you do?” they said, w/ us replying, “yeah, and besides that, we’re the only punk band in pedro.” they could not believe there was such a thing as a “pedro punk band” and asked us to open up. can you believe that shit? I think it was their third gig, but also on the bill were two bands we saw a bunch up in hollywood, the alley cats and the plugz. right after us doing their first gig were the descendents, drummer billy just having broken his collarbone. the lapd (harbor division) actually had to lock everyone in the venue cuz the neighborhood, which was a kind of rough part of pedro, didn’t have any idea of “this punk stuff,” and one gig-goer w/ the words “white riot” on his jacket (the name of a tune by the clash) really got things boiling. man, that was a nightmare, but everyone made it out safe. after those gigs w/ the lawns, d. boon bailed, but he did find a replacement, a nice man named todd. however, I didn’t wanna be in the band w/out d. boon, so it soon crumbled.
in january 1980 d. boon had just found an apartment in the alley between 19th and 20th. turns out joe baiza (originally from wilmington, the other part of the l.a. harbor) was living in the apartment downstairs. understand the old punk scene in late-’70s so cal was pretty tiny. you would see the same cats at the gigs week after week, and though you didn’t really know these people, actually you kind of did. there really wasn’t a “uniform” yet, and lots of folks from the old days were very individual about both their dress and their character—yeah, there were a lot of characters in those days, and I loved it. old punk was about people. if you fly over so cal, you think it’s all one connected trip, but the reality is there’s some very big-time balkanization, so we ain’t in reality all that connected; it’s all down to little neighborhoods. the movement for someone like me and d. boon transcended all that. we now had connections w/ folks who knew nothing about our pedro town, the only world I knew since virginia. and now I was meeting people from the valley, inland empire, orange county, downtown, west side—even the beach towns. yeah it was funny how some people at the hollywood gigs thought anything south of ktown was “the beach” and that we were all kind of from the same tribe. the black flag guys from hermosa beach and us in pedro—actually the alley cats were from lomita but they never got the same kind of tag, but it was geography that brought us together unless you count flag having their third gig in pedro maybe—we’re both by the water, but they’re definitely beach and we’re definitely harbor. gotta say that billy from the descendents was fishing for work as a teenager is pretty pedro, and he was there in redondo beach—things ain’t ever black and white or simple like maybe people would like, but hey, that’s the reality on the dealio. I will say the man who had and still does have much impact on me, second only to d. boon, is a man from hermosa beach named raymond pettibon. he’s the first one to play john coltrane for me, learned me about all kinds of stuff. that’s the thing about those days—the movement had lots of trippy people, but they were deep and intense about stuff. they just didn’t fit in w/ the square-john world. the cats in the bands too—gigs were like people taking turns playing for each other. I never saw anything like it. the slash editor (zines were a big fabric of our scene) kickboy didn’t mind a bit to talk w/ a total mook from pedro (me) about anything. you could rap to darby or pat or lorna or whoever from whichever band was playing. since I’m mentioning germs, don bolles could tell you tons about all kinds of esoteric music released and realized. I asked pat if he listened to anyone cuz I found him so original, and he told me he listened to queen! once at the hong kong café I was bourboned up and got darby to holler “pedro!” at the end of one of their gigs. I later wrote a tune about that called “drove up from pedro.” but anyway, the point is this whole bunch of people I kind of knew but kind of didn’t (which means they had tons they could teach me) were incredibly profound for us, both me and d. boon. we found the movement very empowering, so when it came time to do the “real band,” we were raring to go.
joe baiza later would tell me he heard all this stomping around when we were putting together the first batch of minutemen tunes—actually he thought we were dancing like crazy for hours at a time! see, there was no drummer, though d. boon had a plan: he’d met a welderman named frank tonche, and we’d work w/ him as soon as we both got our shit together. So we’re up in his apartment, and of course we don’t wanna make too much noise, so were using our electric guitar and bass w/out amplifiers. we’re stomping on the deck to hold time—that’s what joe baiza was hearing, the stomping but not the spiel (we’d whisper it) or the unplugged instruments. we didn’t realize you could hear that stomping—we thought we were being so careful! anyway, like some of these cats at the gigs, we became friends just cuz we saw each other so much. I think it was easier to trust punk people in the old days cuz it was such a hated movement by so many, so many rock ‘n’ roll people especially—maybe more than square-johns! we painted on our clothes like richard hell (my first punk hero, a bassman who led his band!) and had them all wild, but then went back to high school clothes after so much hell from peckers—we decided to keep punk “up in the head” and not get added grief cuz of the clothes. gotta say, though, we loved the clothes, we really did, especially the unique and really wild stuff. oh well. at least we were gonna use music as expression and not compromise that a bit. it was big decision time for us. I remember me and d. boon doing one of our many “thinking sessions” and deciding to divide the world up into two categories: flyers and gigs. everything that wasn’t a gig was a flyer to get people to the gig. because punk gigs first and foremost for us were total mind-blows reacting to nuremberg rally arena rock, why not make that our focus? now, there was lots that was punk we found out about, such as making records, fanzines, and stuff like that, but our first focus was on gigs and, of course, jamming econo—remember we’re from working people. but the good thing about the movement was that econo was ok and not something to be embarrassed about. the main mission was to find our voice and bring it to people at gigs.
one last thing I like to explain is our idea of what econo meant. of course we got it from the old ford econoline vans we did out-of-town gigs in; the first one we did, we borrowed black flag’s. but what econo meant to us was not just finding what, at the time, might seem the least amount of coin. econo to us was finding the most bang for buck, look down the road at what we had to get done and find the way that made most sense—the “econo” way that guaranteed our autonomy and, at the same time, helped us work as many gigs as we could cuz that what’s we loved doing. it was about not letting the lack of coin dictate to us what could and could not be done. of course, there’s material stuff, and that’s the reality on the dealio, but c’mon, we were from working families: we knew the score on that kind of scene, no prob! in this way we never had to “fake” our way, not one second, in the movement—like what popeye said, “I am what I am.” hear hear. econo was not a slogan but a way of life for the minutemen, inspired by the movement. we got our first minutemen tunes together—oh, we got minutemen for a name cuz d. boon picked it from a list again I made for him. actually I had down “minute men,” as we were way tiny compared to an arena rock band, so minute as in very small (pronounced my-noot). but d. boon liked the name cuz he heard of some extremist kind of people using patriotic stuff to shill, so he thought if we used words or a name like that, then it would confuse things and give those people maybe less power. I liked his reasoning. I have to say we were very influenced by these gigs we were seeing up in hollywood in the late ’70s, bands like nervous gender and screamers who didn’t have a guitar (didn’t need one!), as well as records we’d get at zed of london in long beach. two dollars for seven-inch singles of bands we’d never heard (and never seen) like the pop group, wire, the fall, alternative television, cabaret voltaire, the lemon kittens, birthday party—stuff like that. we’d buy them cuz of the band name, cuz of the record art—just roll dice and take a chance. we’d wait ’till we had time off from work and stuff (at this period I was working three different low-paying jobs while putting myself through college—I ended up w/ an electronics degree I never used!) and then eat so we could hear these records for the first time while frying our brains out. I would do this on saturdays late when richard meltzer had his hepcats from hell show on kpfk—that was a trip—as well as on the Fridays, when I could, during imaginary landscape w/ carl stone on the same station (great resource). d. boon and I really found our minutemen voice actually and it big-time opened our minds. we learned about the movements and connections w/ older stuff like futurism, dadaism, and surrealism—all this went into our idea of the band. definitely the shortness of the tunes was a wire influence. and the pop group gave us the confidence to put parliament-funkadelic w/ captain beefheart—fuck, we could do whatever we wanted to: it was our band—let the freak flag fly!
something I was aware of then and still am now if not even more grateful for was the openness we had found in the movement, the fact that all these creative people had no prob letting me and d. boon take something that was so personal like making music together and letting us be part of their scene. as I already described, they’d let us interact as gig-goers w/ no prob, talking to us before/after they played, or just gig-goers themselves who weren’t playing that night or whenever but didn’t feel part of the mersh world so much, like us. I can’t relate how big-time empowering this was to us, and in fact, I don’t believe there would’ve been a minutemen w/out the movement that came out of hollywood in the later ’70s. sure, there would’ve been the fact that two guys growing up in pedro shared making music as part of being together, but I don’t ever think we would’ve been inspired to make a band, write songs, and do gigs/make records w/out the influence of the movement; I just don’t, and I have to acknowledge that. the minutemen did not come out of a vacuum; they were a product of the movement. of course, a big tenet of this movement was no rubber-stamp cookie-cutter xerox shit (or like what raymond taught me emma goldman said: “no coercion”), so we weren’t clones being pumped out of a shill machine, but it was the idea that we had permission to be all crazy regarding expression that we took to heart by seeing it firsthand as an example that propelled us, fucking corndogs, as we were looking for their voice.
we worked out our first batch of tunes w/ the welderman frank tonche and did our first gig opening for black flag in the spring of 1980. we had still had the connect w/ them from a year before w/ the reactionaries at the teen post. man, it was a pants-shitter, but we did it. this was not the reactionaries; you could tell d. boon was involved at a whole other level. he was singing his songs (mine too) for the first time. it was very inspiring. d. boon called his lyrics “thinking out loud,” and I dug that cuz in fact that’s what we were doing. he also didn’t like the hierarchy of where he saw rock ‘n’ roll going, the domination of the electric guitar, so he wanted to do something “political” w/ our band’s makeup and decided to play really trebly like we learned from the r&b guys when we were younger. that way it opened it up for the bass and drums to come through more. d. boon said that real politics ain’t really just using words, and he wanted to put into action some egalitarian ideas in our band structure. we did our second gig, and the drummerman said maybe that’s enough for him, so when that gig ended, he left the band. now, at this gig was sst records’ greg ginn, and wouldn’t you know it, but he asked us to be sst-002—he wanted us to make a record! luckily george hurley had left the band hey taxi!, which is who he had joined when the reactionaries were finished. georgie joined us and learned the tunes we wanted to record, and damn if in july we didn’t do the whole paranoid time ep in one night, recorded and mixed. me and d. boon were very grateful to frank tonche for helping us get off the ground but also to george hurley for doing like he did also. two great drummermen helped us much, let me tell you.
we got closer w/ the black flag people. I started working there at sst in old downtown torrance and the minutemen started doing prac there. first I wound antenna tuner toroidal transformers (sst stood for “solid state transmitter”; it was not a record company at first), and then they had me calling college stations to get the label’s records played. they had me use the name “spaceman” so the stations wouldn’t know I was one of the guys from one of the bands. we were harassed so much by the local police. flag had been dealing w/ this since the church (where they first practiced in hermosa beach), and we eventually got ran out. sst and black flag tried some deal w/ unicorn in hollywood, and we ended up practicing in long beach w/ nice cats in secret hate and outer circle, us sharing a space w/ them. of course, the label thing was a punk part of punk, so we did one called “new alliance records,” and d. boon did a zine called the prole (he had me do a column called nitt’s picks w/ record reviews!) d. boon also put on gigs in pedro at the star theatre, which he would rename the union and have the gigs start earlier for us cuz we had to work early the next day. we had just finished our second seven-inch (joy) and first twelve-inch (the punch line) and even started to do our own club gigs. we had been labeled a “violent sst band” and could not play the whisky or the roxy—the former we finally got to play cuz of fear and the latter cuz of x. I tell you, old punk was about people.
greg ginn did ham radio when he was younger, and, hence sst. I also think this gave him ideas about getting outside your locality, and by that, I mean touring. I once heard only the dils had a van in hollywood, though that might not be true. I do know black flag liked to tour and taught it to us. in early 1983 they took us through europe and the u.s. in what was our first big tour—and our first time in europe. we took a lot of hell. that wild and crazy late-’70s punk, where anything goes kind of got stomped out or at the least not tolerated. there were now a lot of “rules” to be correctly w/ the movement. what? we couldn’t believe this shit. now, I gotta say a lot of the people in the older days were older—it wasn’t really a kid movement, maybe more like runaways—but by the early ’80s a lot of the “folks who were first” were burning out and from the suburbs came younger and younger cats, like out of high school and younger. how many of the old hollywood bands had ladies in them? tons. later the movement had fewer and fewer, and that even went for the audience. my early take on the first influences of the movement was glitter and glam, which ladies always were strong in, even if it wasn’t a huge scene. even the dancing changed from up-and-down pogo into side-to-side slamming—no more personal space, even if it was kind of vertical—things were definitely going horizontal, w/ fight after fight making what was called “the pit,” and of course, the desired “background sound” to this was faster and faster, added to more of the same ol’ same ol’. all that “no coercion” talk was over and “uniform” was very much in. I didn’t totally get bummed cuz at least there was some scene, but damn if so much wasn’t squandered like it was and all warped up. but hey, that’s humans. hell, pat boone sold more copies of “tutti frutti” than little richard did, and how long ago was that? stuff gets twisted up, dumbed down w/ knuckleheads, and all the reasons involved for the movement getting started in the first place get forgot and stomped. damn.
in some ways the minutemen turned inward, recording “what makes a man start fires?” and then “buzz or howl under the influence of heat” (w/ the latter we made more than fifty dollars!). but I addressed some of this stuff w/ a tune like “fake contest,” where some letter-writing thing in the flipside fanzine (letters from readers) was pitting us against t.s.o.l., which was crazy cuz I love jack, mike, and ron. the next album we did was actually a double one cuz the huskers (hüsker dü) had come to town and did one, prompting us to write more tunes to turn our just-recorded single into two. it came w/in only a year and then left for the band, which though unknownst to us—I think it was our high point. I paid the eleven hundred dollars to do it myself, but damn if ethan james didn’t mix the whole baby in one night! yep, forty-five tunes, but yeah, they were little ones. there’s a song on it I wrote called “history lesson, part II” where I call out john doe from x’s name, again trying to deal w/ this weird thing w/ no tolerance creeping into our movement, which was at times so frustrating. we did a big two-month tour for it, all minutemen—headlining all through the u.s., “the campaign trail 1984” tour. after this, though, georgie stopped writing words for the band. I always counted on him for that cuz it helped me be a little more original w/ my writing cuz I’d get into ruts, and both his and d. boon’s words would help me bust out. but the next two recordings were missing his lyrics. musically I don’t know how strong project: mersh and 3-way tie (for last) were except for the d. boon tunes, which I really dig, but I definitely was in kind of a not-too-interesting place as far as my tunes when I look back at what we did. oh well. I think we were headed for a second wind anyway; we had some big plans coming up: a triple album w/ half of it live to fight the bootleggers! I was writing better too, being inspired by the first side band I ever had, dos w/ k.
our last tour turned out to be w/ these guys from georgia called rem. when we got asked, we had to buy one of their records to see what they sounded like. it was sure kind of them to have us aboard. when we met them it was easy to tell they knew about a lot of music, that they were deep like dudes in the old days. the crew and the label w/ them, though, didn’t dig us at all, and we got much disrespect. well, that’s the way it goes—that’s why we got in the movement in the first place! the four guys in the band, though, they were righteous. respect to them. the last tune I ever played w/ d. boon was w/ them in north carolina. it was us all doing television’s “see no evil,” and damn if me and d. boon weren’t both on guitar, laughing at the whole trip. a few days or so after that tour ended, d. boon passed away in a van accident in arizona. our equipment was still aboard. I had just given d. boon some lyrics richard meltzer had written for us—ten of them. he was collaborating w/ us, doing singing and sax—a dream come true for us! I gave him those words and asked him to think of music for them. he was so red from fever; he had a flu. oh man, it’s hard for me to write any more about this, but I will say the minutemen ended like it began: w/ d. boon. big huge love to him.
on bass, watt