Our Band Could Be Your Life

The Minutemen of San Pedro, California, were paragons of the subversive idea that you didn’t have to be a star to be a success. Their hard work and relentless, uncompromising pursuit of their unique artistic vision have inspired countless bands. “We didn’t want to be just a rock band,” says singer-bassist Mike Watt. “We wanted to be us—our band.” In the process D. Boon, George Hurley, and Watt proved that regular Joes could make great art, a concept that reverberated throughout indie rock ever after. They also helped to originate the idea that a punk rock band could be worthy of respect.

In their music the Minutemen told stories, postulated theories, held debates, aired grievances, and celebrated victories—and did it in a direct, intimate way that flattered the intelligence as well as the soul. Music journalist Chris Nelson once wrote, “Their friendship formed the living core of the Minutemen, while their loyalty to each other and San Pedro informed the overarching theme of brotherhood that permeates the band’s catalog.”

Although they were certainly capable of byzantine riffing and spine-tingling runs down the fretboard, the Minutemen’s brilliance lay not in their songwriting or chops but in their radical approach to their medium. They worked up a concept that encompassed the yin of popular/populist bands such as Creedence Clearwater Revival and Van Halen, and the yang of the intellectual wing of the English punk rock explosion. Daringly incorporating such genres as funk and jazz, the Minutemen struck a blow for originality, a perennially endangered quality in punk rock.

Their songs were jarring jolts that barely cracked the one-minute mark, but the ideas and the emotions that were conveyed in those songs were anything but fleeting. Often they were profound. Like Gang of Four, many of their songs are about the way private thoughts are affected by political systems—“Pure Joy,” for instance, is about how capitalism depends on the nuclear family and, ultimately, on everyone’s sense of their own mortality. Not bad for a tune that lasts less than a minute and a half.

If you’re working class, you don’t start a band to just scrape by; you start a band to get rich. So art bands, with their inherently limited commercial prospects, were mainly the province of the affluent. Which makes the Minutemen all the braver—they had no hope of commercial success, and yet they soldiered on through twelve records in five years, an amazing seventy-five songs in 1984 alone.

Outspokenly working class, they demonstrated that political consciousness was a social necessity, introducing a cerebral element to the nascent Southern California hardcore scene. They were the band that was good for you, like dietary fiber. The only thing was most people wanted a cheeseburger instead. “I think one of our problems with radio is that we don’t write songs, we write rivers,” Watt once said.

San Pedro, California, is a blue-collar tendril of Los Angeles thirty long miles from Tinseltown. Touting itself as “Gateway to the World!” San Pedro once hosted a major army base and is now the biggest cruise ship port in the country and one of the busiest ports of any kind on the Pacific. Its ethnic working-class population is installed in the flats at the bottom of the town, below the downright alien affluence of the rambling houses up in the hills. On one side of San Pedro, cliffs at the edge of the Palos Verdes Peninsula command sweeping views of the ocean, suggesting endless possibility; from the other side of town, a sweeping view of the town’s towering cranes and loading docks, not to mention the notorious Terminal Island federal prison, reveals suffocating realities.

Mike Watt and his family moved to San Pedro from Newport News, Virginia, in 1967, when he was ten; his dad was a career navy man and had gotten a transfer to San Pedro’s naval station. They moved into navy housing, a small neighborhood of tract homes across the street from Green Hills Memorial Park cemetery.

One day in his fourteenth year, Watt went looking for some kids to hang out with in nearby Peck Park, a sprawling, leafy oasis that was a popular after-school destination. Watt was walking around the park when, out of nowhere, a chubby kid jumped out of a tree and landed with a thump right in front of him. The kid looked at him, surprised, and said, “You’re not Eskimo.” “No, I’m not Eskimo,” Watt replied, a bit puzzled. But the two hit it off and strode around the park, talking.

The chubby kid introduced himself as Dennes Boon and soon began to reel off lengthy monologues that astounded Watt with their wit and intelligence. “He’d say these little bits over and over,” Watt says. “The way they were set up, they had punch lines and everything. I couldn’t believe it.

“I was such a fuckin’ idiot,” Watt continues. “I didn’t know until we went to his house and he started playing them that it was George Carlin routines.”

Boon had virtually no rock & roll records—“D. Boon’s daddy,” Watt explains, “brought him up country”—and had never heard of the Who or Cream. Watt was flabbergasted. Boon did have some albums by Creedence Clearwater Revival, though, and the band was to have a powerful influence on Boon and Watt.

Boon’s dad, a navy veteran, worked putting radios into Buicks. The Boons lived in former World War II navy barracks that had been converted into a public housing project for, as Watt puts it, “econo people.” Guns had not yet entered the picture, but it was still a rough neighborhood and Boon’s mom didn’t want the boys on the streets after school; within weeks of their meeting, she encouraged them to start a rock band. Watt wasn’t sure he could play an instrument but was ready to give it a try for the sake of his friend.

They didn’t know bass guitars were different from regular ones, so Watt just put four strings on a regular guitar; he didn’t even know it was supposed to be tuned lower. In fact, they didn’t even know about tuning at all. “We thought tightness of the strings was a personal thing—like, ‘I like my strings loose,’ ” Watt says. “We didn’t know it had to do with pitch.” As Watt puts it, “It must have made your asshole pucker from a mile away.”

Eventually they got the hang of the finer points of musical technique and started a cover band of hard rock staples like Alice Cooper, Blue Öyster Cult, and Black Sabbath.

Music wasn’t their only outlet. Boon began painting in his early teens and signed his work “D. Boon,” partly for the joke about Daniel Boone, partly because “D” was his slang for pot, but mostly because it sounded like “E. Bloom,” Blue Öyster Cult’s singer-guitarist. But for all their music and art, Boon and Watt were serious nerds. Boon was a history buff and both were big fans of geopolitical board games like Risk. Watt graduated near the top of his class. Boon was quite heavyset; Watt resembled Jerry Lewis, and his mom was so worried about his lack of coordination that she gave him clay to squeeze in his hands.

The two became interested in politics very early. Although Watt’s interests lay in fiction, he’d keep up with Boon’s historical explorations. “D. Boon would talk about the English civil war or something,” Watt says, “so I would read up on Cromwell, just to know what he was fuckin’ talking about.” Pretty soon they started comparing the events of the past with the present, especially as seen through the eyes of their working-man dads.

Watt’s first rock concert, the legendary T. Rex at Long Beach Auditorium in 1971, was very daunting. “They were ethereal,” Watt recalls. “They were a different class of people or something, like Martians.” Rock musicians seemed unapproachable, otherworldly; like T. Rex’s Marc Bolan, they were often fey little British men who wore spangled outfits and pranced around the stages of cavernous arenas. The lesson was clear: “Being famous was for other people,” Watt says. “I thought it was something like the navy. It’s something you’re born into—they got it all set up for you, they tell you where to live, they tell you where to chow.”

In San Pedro everyone played in cover bands, without any thought of writing their own songs or getting signed because, of course, those were things that other people did. The best band was simply the one that could play “Black Dog” just like the original, and that was the peak of their ambition—when all you know is painting by numbers, you’re not thinking about getting into the Museum of Modern Art. So Watt and Boon would happily play “American Woman” over and over again, never thinking they could write their own songs or make their own records. “We didn’t have the idea that you could go get signed; we didn’t have the idea that you could write your own song,” Watt says, shaking his head. “We didn’t have that. Just did not have it.”

Boon and Watt had the bad—or perhaps good—fortune to come of age during one of rock’s most abject periods. “That Seventies stuff, the Journey, Boston, Foreigner stuff, it was lame,” Watt says. “If it weren’t for those type of bands we never would have had the nerve to be a band. But I guess you need bad things to make good things. It’s like with farming—if you want to grow a good crop, you need a lot of manure.”

And both young men yearned to learn of the world beyond San Pedro. Despite being technically part of Los Angeles, San Pedro was very provincial; Watt knew plenty of people who had never even been out of state and even some who’d never been out of town. Boon and Watt were not very worldly either. On a whim, Watt answered a classified ad for a bassist and drove down L.A.’s Santa Monica Boulevard, then a popular gay cruising strip. “There’s a thousand guys ‘hitchhiking’ up there,” Watt says. “And I was like, where are all these guys going? And they were all whores, you see. I didn’t know! I was like, why don’t these guys charter a bus? They look like they’re all going to the same place. That’s how out of touch I was in Pedro. I just did not know.”

But Boon and Watt began to get a sense of the outside world from the great early rock magazines Creem and Crawdaddy. “The journalists had a big effect on us,” Watts says. “It was a world of ideas.” Through music magazines they discovered the original wave of punk rock bands, like the Ramones and the Clash. “There was pictures of these guys for a few months before we heard the records,” Watt recalls, “and they had these modern haircuts and everything. And it blew our minds when we first heard the actual music. We thought it was going to be synthesizers and modern shit. But it wasn’t modern. It turned out to be guitar music like the Who! That’s what blew our minds. When we heard that, we said, ‘We can do this!’ ”

Fired up by the punk explosion, they wrote their first song—“Storming Tarragona.” Named after the down-at-heel housing development where Boon lived, the song was about tearing down the projects and building real houses for people to live in. Boon and Watt, it turned out, had a powerful populist streak. “D. Boon didn’t think our dads got a fair shake,” Watt says, “and I think he was kind of railing against that ever since.”

Boon and Watt began hitting the punk clubs in Hollywood in the winter of ’77–’78, when they were nineteen. At first Boon thought the bands were “lame,” breaking strings and playing out of tune. “Yeah, they were lame,” Watt concedes. “But that wasn’t the main point that I saw—I saw hey, these guys are actually playing gigs. And some of them made records! People didn’t do that in Pedro.”

Unlike the arena rock they’d been raised on, punk placed no premium on technique or production values. Boon and Watt fit right in with the outcasts who were forming punk rock bands. “See, me and D. Boon were the guys who were not supposed to be in bands,” Watt says. “We looked like bozos, so if we’re going to be bozos, then let’s go with it. And then going to Hollywood and finding out there’s other cats like this, it wasn’t so lonely.”

George Hurley’s dad worked on the San Pedro docks as a machinist. Boon and Watt knew of Hurley in high school, but only from afar—“He was,” Watt explains, “a happening guy.” Hurley had been a surfer and even went to Hawaii and, says Watt, “lived on the beach eating coconuts.” Then, after nearly drowning in the gargantuan Hawaiian surf, Hurley, nineteen, came back to San Pedro and traded his surfboards for drums. He also had a practice space—a shed behind his house—not something Boon and Watt could take lightly. That shed was the site of many a keg party; Watt recalls that the grass outside turned preternaturally green because so many guys peed on it. It was a perfect place to practice—Hurley’s mom was rarely home, since she had remarried to a man in a neighboring town and spent most of her time there. The house had descended into such anarchy that there was a sticker on the front door that read “U.S. Olympic Bong team.”

Boon and Watt bravely asked Hurley to join their punk rock band the Reactionaries. “Georgie was not afraid—liked this punk stuff, in fact,” says Watt. “For a Pedro guy, that was one in a million. And for Georgie, a popular guy, to like punk was incredible. Everybody knew me and D. Boon were weirdos—when punk came, of course those assholes would be into it. But Georgie, he took blows for that.” But those blows were only verbal (“comments about fags and shit,” says Watt), since Hurley’s pugilistic talents were legendary.

Boon, Watt, and Reactionaries singer Martin Tamburovich had been at a local punk show when they met a tall, intense-looking guy handing out flyers for a San Pedro gig by his band, Black Flag. It was Greg Ginn, and he invited the Reactionaries onto the bill. The show—the Reactionaries’ first and Black Flag’s second—almost erupted into a riot when kids began vandalizing the youth center where the show took place.

The Reactionaries lasted only seven months—Boon and Watt decided that having a traditional frontman was too “rock & roll” and “bourgeois” and in early 1980 brainstormed a new band called the Minutemen. Boon picked “the Minutemen” from a long list of names Watt had made. The name appealed to Boon not only because of the fabled Revolutionary War militia, but because it had also been used by a right-wing reactionary group of the Sixties. “They’d send these notes to Angela Davis like they were going to bomb her but they never did,” Watt says. “Mao had this quote which said all reactionaries are paper tigers—they’re phonies. And he thought the [Sixties] Minutemen were big phonies.” Contrary to legend, the band was not named for the brevity of their songs.

They started writing songs in early 1980 at Boon’s tiny San Pedro apartment. As it happened, Joe Baiza of future SST band Saccharine Trust lived directly downstairs. (“He and his roommate lived like giant hamsters,” Watt says. “They’d take all this newspaper and wad it up on their floor. Their pad was a gigantic hamster cage, man.”) Baiza was baffled by what they were doing up there—he’d hear them playing and tapping their feet, but it would never last for more than thirty or forty seconds. “He didn’t know what the hell we were doing up there,” Watt says, chuckling.

The eye-blink brevity of their new material came from English art-punks Wire, whose classic debut Pink Flag featured twenty-one songs in thirty-five minutes. The approach also compensated for the Minutemen’s musical shortcomings. “With the short rhythms you’d be out faster; you wouldn’t have to groove on it,” Watt says. “We were trying to find our sound. We weren’t comfortable with saying, here’s our groove. So we just said let’s go the other way and just stop ’em up really big time.”

The other main ingredient in the Minutemen sound was the Pop Group. The English post-punk band’s caustic guitars and elemental dance rhythms supported explicit harangues about racial prejudice, repression, and corporate greed in the most didactic terms—one album was titled For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder? The iconoclasm of Wire and the Pop Group taught Watt and Boon a powerful lesson: “You didn’t have to have choruses, you didn’t have to have lead guitar solos, you didn’t have to have anything,” said Watt.

The lyrics were basically rants by both Watt and Boon that they dubbed “spiels.” “We just say what we say,” D. Boon once explained to Flipside. Other inside lingo began creeping into their vocabulary. “Boozh” was short for bourgeois—a no-no. “Mersh” meant commercial. “Econo” meant thrifty, efficient; it became a way of life for the Minutemen.

Unfortunately, Hurley had joined another band after the Reactionaries split, so they enlisted local welder Frank Tonche and played their first gig in March ’80, opening for Black Flag in L.A. At their second gig, in May, Greg Ginn asked if they’d like to record for his new label, SST. But then Tonche, in Watt’s words, “got scared of punk rock”—actually, he walked offstage at the band’s second gig after punks spat on him. Hurley soon reunited with Boon and Watt.

A SERIES OF PORTRAITS TAKEN IN 1980, IN FRONT OF THE SST OFFICES IN TORRANCE AFTER PRACTICE. LEFT TO RIGHT: D. BOON, MIKE WATT, GEORGE HURLEY.

On July 20, 1980, they recorded the seven-song EP Paranoid Time. It was SST’s second release, all six minutes and forty-one seconds of it. Although the agile, skittering drums, trebly guitar, and twanky bass had nothing to do with hardcore punk, the relatively straight-up rhythms and hyper tempos did. Already the band’s left-wing political consciousness was at the fore. At the time, nuclear dread was making a sweeping comeback: the hawkish Reagan was to take office exactly six months later, and it was hard to forget that his shaky finger could press The Button at any time. Boon defined the moment on “Paranoid Chant” when he hollers, “I try to talk to girls and I keep thinking of World War III!”

By November ’80, when they played their first club show at L.A.’s Starwood, they’d become a different band. They’d lost the use of Hurley’s shed and moved into Black Flag’s practice space in nearby Torrance. Sharing a space with Black Flag profoundly affected their music in unexpected ways. “When you play with a band like that, you don’t want to sound like them,” Watt told Flipside. “If they were going to play that fast heavy metal, then we couldn’t do it. So we got this other stuff going.”

In those days it was particularly hip to appropriate African American dance musics like funk and disco, à la Talking Heads. And that’s how the Minutemen defied Black Flag’s metallism. As Watt explains, “They were going for Dio and Black Sabbath and that stuff. But we’d already been there! We grew up on copying records. They hadn’t.”

Boon studied art in college and dropped out because he didn’t want to end up using his art for commercial purposes. Watt studied electronics and never did it for a living because the only electronics jobs were in the defense industry. Punk rock was a godsend for their ethics. Maybe even a reward. “Sometimes you have to act out your dreams, because circumstances can get you crammed down,” says Watt. “And instead of getting angry and jealous of what they got, why not get artistic about it and create a little work site, a little fiefdom. As long as it don’t oppress anybody or something, I think it’s kind of healthy.”

Watt felt tainted by the experience of learning cover tunes and envied the younger punks for their purity. The Minutemen spent much artistic energy trying to unlearn the stifling archetypes that had been foisted on them in the Seventies; to their credit, they celebrated that process and the exciting discoveries they made along the way.

Ginn gave them all menial jobs at SST’s ham radio operation; later they worked for the label itself. Watt’s job, for instance, was liaison to record stores, pestering them to buy and sell SST product. It wouldn’t do to have the label’s artists doing such work, so Watt adopted the name Spaceman, and his indefatigable energy and gift for gab suited the job perfectly.

Paranoid Time sold out its 300-copy pressing, so Ginn invited them to make another record. That fall they recorded Punch Line—eighteen songs in fifteen minutes. On the face of it, the music was skeletal, but with Boon’s skronk guitar, Watt’s chordal bass, Hurley’s busy percussing, it was more than the sum of its parts. While the music was eccentrically funky, like a highly caffeinated Captain Beefheart running down James Brown tunes, the songs railed against injustice, materialism, ignorance, and war; the lyrics could have been written by an idealistic young intern at The Nation. And this is while most forward-thinking youths were listening to English mopemasters like Echo & the Bunnymen and the Cure.

Punch Line attracted much more critical comment, notably from Craig Lee at the L.A. Times. College radio was beginning to notice the band and Rodney Bingenheimer was playing them on his influential Rodney on the ROQ show. They were soon playing out of town, mostly touring with Black Flag and other SST compadres like Hüsker Dü or the Meat Puppets. They often borrowed Black Flag’s van, which had been dubbed “the Prayer.” “The door wouldn’t even open all the way,” Watt says. “It had a big old gap, so the driver would have to wear all these scarves and sunglasses because this big gale force wind would be blowing in on you. The dash didn’t work, the clutch was all burned out, smelling, it was terrible, it was a nightmare. One time the catalytic converter clogged up and all the fumes came into the van—it was us and Saccharine [Trust]; there was ten of us in that van—and these guys started tearing big ol’ holes in the dash with screwdrivers just to let some air in.”

They also began to learn other harsh realities of touring. “D. Boon had to take a shit twenty minutes after we ate—I mean, to the minute,” Watt says. “We’d be on the freeway and he’d be, ‘PULL OVER!’ And just go pfffft! Right out there, he didn’t care. D. Boon did not have shame. He was eating a lot of spirulina and shit like that. And the mule would be kicking down the door every time. He told me he had a theory about how you knew if you were going to be artistic as a kid. You’re either going to be packin’ it in or spreadin’ it out. He said that determined you, how you dealt with your shit. He said, ‘Man, I smeared it all over the place.’ And I said, ‘You still do!’ ”

By 1982 they’d built a modest local following, headlining small L.A. clubs on off nights. L.A.’s premier hardcore venue was the Whiskey, but the Minutemen couldn’t play the Whiskey because the SST bands’ violent reputation had gotten them banned there. (Eventually the band Fear got the Minutemen booked at the club—“You know, the nonviolent band Fear,” Watt jokes. Right afterward they rushed home to San Pedro for what they thought would be a triumphant home-town gig later that night, only to get egged and fire-extinguishered off the stage.)

The band was now a formidable, if idiosyncratic, live act. “They were just one of the oddest bands you ever could have seen,” Spot says, still marveling. “Here’s these three goofy-looking guys playing—in this totally stripped-down manner—these really, really short songs. So maybe at first you’re not really sure if they’re playing them well. Because it’s not like you have a few verses and choruses and solos—they were doing stuff completely outside of normal structure. Then the way they looked—D. Boon would just get up onstage and he would just shake. You wondered if he had some kind of congenital nerve disease. The only one in the band that looked as if he had anything to do with punk rock was D. Boon—the first time I ever saw him, he had a mohawk. He was this big guy wearing mechanic’s coveralls and he looked like a football with a mohawk. You looked at him the first time and you were like, ‘Huh? What the hell is this?’

“But after about four or five songs,” Spot continues, “you were like, ‘Yeah, this is cool! This is really neat! Why didn’t I think of that?’ ”

The band’s sense of indie altruism was so strong that they would donate songs to seemingly any of the myriad cassette fanzines that had begun to spring up in the early Eighties. SST’s Joe Carducci finally had to step in and tell Watt he thought the band was being used. But since SST couldn’t accommodate all of the band’s prodigious output, Carducci released the Bean Spill EP, a collection of odds and ends, on his Thermidor label; SST released a similar collection, The Politics of Time, a couple of years later.

The Minutemen began to hit their stride with the Spot-produced What Makes a Man Start Fires?, recorded in July ’82. The ensemble playing is crisp and utterly unique, firmly establishing what Watt once called the band’s “devices”—“little songs, high-end guitar, melodic bass, lots of toms.” Boon’s pins-and-needles guitar tone opened up plenty of sonic real estate for Watt’s bass, and Watt seized the opportunity, plunking out busy melodic figures or dense chords with a playful but assertive twang; Hurley bashed out wholly original mutated funk riffs that seemed to splash out in all directions at once and yet still propelled the music with a headlong rush.

The band’s irregular rhythms emulated their idol Captain Beefheart on a very deep level. “Rock & roll is a fixation on that bom-bom-bom mother heartbeat,” Beefheart once said. “I don’t want to hypnotize, I’m doing a non-hypnotic music to break up the catatonic state.” America was in nothing if not a catatonic state through the Eighties, and the Minutemen’s music—all angular stops and starts, challenging lyrics, and blink-and-you-missed-’em songs—was a metaphor for the kind of alertness required to fight back against the encroaching mediocrity. Short songs not only reflect a state of dissatisfaction and noncomplacency; they simulate it. The band’s very name suggests vigilance.

“Music can inspire people to wake up and say, ‘Somebody’s lying.’ This is the point I’d like to make with my music,” Watt told Rolling Stone in 1985. “Make you think about what’s expected of you, of your friends. What’s expected of you by your boss. Challenge those expectations. And your own expectations. Man, you should challenge your own ideas about the world every day.”

The lyrics integrate the personal and the political, asserting that the two are inseparable. And for Boon and Watt, who debated political points endlessly, the two realms were truly inseparable. “The stuff we thought about and the stuff we sang about was the same thing,” Watt says. “It just became part of your tunes. We decided to sing about what we know.”

A lot of what they knew was the oppression of the working man. “They own the land / We work the land / We fight their wars / They think we’re whores,” Boon spits out in the frantic funk sprint “The Only Minority.” In the Watt-penned “Fake Contest,” Boon announces, “Industry, industry / We’re tools for the industry.”

The album occasioned the band’s first major tour, opening for Black Flag in Europe and America in the winter of ’83. “It was ten of us in one van, the equipment in the trailer,” Watt recalls. “It was head-to-toe slave-ship action. It was hilarious. At least we were getting to tour and going to other towns. It was amazing.”

European punks turned out to be far more disgusting than their American counterparts. In Austria the Minutemen were pelted with used condoms, cups of piss, bags of shit, bags of vomit, even a toilet seat. “It was kind of funny,” Watt says. “We couldn’t believe it.” They didn’t take it personally, however, figuring that anyone who would throw a bag of vomit at a band probably wasn’t listening to the music anyway. There was only one downside, really. “The spitting was really gross because when you’re playing an instrument, you can’t put your hands in front of your mouth when you have to holler,” Watt says, “so you take all these fuckin’ loogies in the mouth. It was really nasty.”

Even the band’s tourmates turned against them. Black Flag would take particular delight in egging Boon and Watt into one of their epic arguments. When one would make a statement, any kind of statement at all, someone in Black Flag would invariably say to the other, “Are you going to let him get away with that? Or are you that scared of him? I guess I see who really wears the pants in this band!” And that would be enough to set Boon and Watt to fighting like cats and dogs.

But eventually it was things like the toilet seat that really got to the Minutemen. “When I think back on it, I wonder what that shit was about,” says Watt. “But it was a small price to pay for getting out there and playing; it really was.”

Unlike most SST bands, the Minutemen did only one tour with Black Flag before moving on. “You’ve got to do more than just be an opening band for a big band,” Watt says. “We liked them very much, but no man’s a hero to his valet.”

The Minutemen toured incessantly on their own, becoming as legendary for their relentless itineraries and thrifty modus operandi as they were for their live shows. They’d usually sleep at someone’s house, lugged their own equipment, and learned how to maintain their own van. Everything was done “econo”; despite meager pay, Minutemen tours always turned a profit.

Setting up and breaking down their equipment quickly and efficiently appealed to Watt’s military mind-set, but like he says, “It was a respect thing, too. You wanted to look like you knew what you were doing. Because guys were always giving you shit like you were assholes. It was a way of getting respect, especially if you were playing with a mersh band that had a crew and stuff. Then we’d really put it on.”

Sometimes the Minutemen got grief for being their own road crew. “But I never thought that you should play up to ‘the princeling,’ ” says Watt, referring to the prototypical pampered rock star. “So what if nobody sees you playing the fuckin’ hero or the star. I never fancied myself like that.”

There was another good reason to set up their own stuff—with his 220-plus-pound bulk and nonchalant attitude toward personal grooming, D. Boon did not look like a rock musician, especially in those days of Spandex and poofy hair. Security often tried to pull him off the stage before the band began playing. “They figured he was some goon,” Watt says, “just getting up there and bum rushing.” It also used to happen to Watt—he’d be getting onstage and suddenly some side of beef in a black T-shirt was tugging on his arm. That’s partly why the band would remain onstage after they’d set up their own equipment, a chore they did for their entire existence.

“We just could never see mass acceptance of our music,” Watt says. “But that didn’t make it little to us—it still was important. But if we were going to do it, we had to make sure the dream fit the tent. A massive bourgeois tent would be too much deadweight. Let’s just carry enough to get us there, and on top of that, we’ll be playing songs and ideas.”

But back then, in the greedy, materialistic Reagan era, making the most of meager resources was positively rebellious. For the Minutemen, “jamming econo” meant parsimonious recording budgets, short songs, and being their own crew. Overdubs were limited to occasional lead guitar lines, studio time was booked for the graveyard shift, and they avoided doing multiple takes, recorded on used tape, and played the songs in the order they were to appear on the album so they didn’t have to spend money on editing the songs into the right sequence.

In the best sense of the word, the Minutemen were conservative, a time-honored concept in American thought going back at least to Thoreau. “Econo is an old concept,” Watt agrees. “The punk rockers picked up on that, the idea of scarcity and just using what you got. And maybe more of you comes through because there’s less outside stuff you’re sticking on—all you got is you, so you have to make something out of it.”

Watt acknowledges that the band’s econo approach was based not only on the limited commercial appeal of their music or ideological grounds, but also had roots in their humble backgrounds—coming from working-class stock, they simply weren’t comfortable with extravagance. And they’d never known anyone who made a living off of art. “It’s bizarre to think that people live like that, so you’re always thinking about what if everything goes to shit,” Watt says. “You have to be econo so maybe when the hard times hit, you can weather them.” The band members held on to their day jobs: Watt worked as a paralegal, Hurley was a machinist like his dad, and Boon got a general teaching degree.

And they backed it all up with a thrilling live show. At peak moments—which was most of the set—Boon’s face would go beet red; he’d grin widely and start jumping up and down, a big, heavy man hopping around like a bunny rabbit. It was part confrontation and part celebration, daring you to laugh at his intensity, part caring and part not caring. “He was trying, like some guy trying to stock the shelves or something,” Watt recalls. “You wanted to root for him. I wanted to root for him. It was intense, the way he played.” In the early days, that was precisely what the stage-shy Watt needed. “I was petrified,” Watt says. “But D. Boon was the guy who brought you on board.”

Boon’s intense conviction won him and the Minutemen the respect and affection of the other SST bands, and eventually the indie community in general. “The guy would give you half of anything he had,” recalls Henry Rollins. “He was just a big, burly, big-hearted, jolly guy. Everyone loved him.” “There is not one piece of rock star,” says Watt, “not one bit of phony pose in this guy.”

Yet Black Flag, the Meat Puppets, the Descendents, and Hüsker Dü all outsold the Minutemen. The Minutemen’s effect was more like the old metaphor of throwing a pebble into a pond and watching the ripples widen and widen. While the Minutemen’s ripple never did come close to reaching the shore, they did make those influential first few rings, where the real sophisticates and musicians were. The Minutemen were a band’s band.

Hardcore attracted a very young audience, so instead of bars, hardcore shows took place at Elks Lodges and VFW halls and even bingo halls. “Those were teenagers at those gigs—little kids on skateboards,” Watt says. “They had a real vigor and energy in them. It wasn’t you, but hey, that’s the way it was.” The hardcore kids hadn’t been as scarred by the scourge of corporate arena rock, and they were a lot more nihilistic, jocky, and aggressive than Boon, Watt, and even Hurley. “They were going fast,” Watt says. “You wanted to go fast with them.”

Consequently, the Minutemen kicked the tempo up a notch. Their speed had something to do with hardcore, but after that, the comparisons cease. While politically oriented hardcore bands relied on shallow, sloganeering lyrics about Reagan—the neutron bomb was a particular favorite topic—the Minutemen mustered an informed, passionate, and poetic reply to the conservatism that had swept the country. And while hardcore bands favored traditional song structures and sing-along vocal melodies, the Minutemen’s music was wordy and gnarled, their music full of confounding breaks and leaps. And then there were those uncool funk and jazz influences. “It had an intensity like hardcore,” Watt says. “But if you ask the hardcore kids, they didn’t think we were hardcore. They didn’t know what the fuck we were.”

The funk, jazz, and Captain Beefheart sounds set them up for no small amount of grief from the doctrinaire hardcore community. “They wanted one song—very fast, quick,” Watt says. “A lot of these cats, they were teenagers, it was very social for them—it was not musical. We were music punk; they were social punk. We were punk against rock & roll and restrictive categories—it was natural that we would want to make music that was a little different because that, for us, made a punk band.”

So the Minutemen challenged punk rockers as much as they challenged the bourgeoisie. “One of the reasons we play all these different kinds of musics is for them—to see how seriously they take ‘No Rules’ and ‘Anarchy,’ ” said Watt. “We throw all this soft music, folk music, jazz, et cetera, not only to avoid getting caught in just one style, but also to show them that ‘See, you didn’t want any rules… this is what you wanted. You didn’t want to be told what to listen to.’ ”

While Watt didn’t think most of the young hardcore audience was getting their political message, he hoped they were getting another, deeper message. “We hope to shake up the young guys because punk rock doesn’t have to mean hardcore or one style of music or just singing the same lyrics,” he said. “It can mean freedom and going crazy and being personal with your art.”

The hardcore scene was the only place the Minutemen could thrive. L.A.’s Paisley Underground scene was beginning, but not only was it typified by naked careerism, but its rigid Sixties genre exercises were precisely the kind of orthodoxy the Minutemen abhorred. The band’s outspoken politics and bargain-basement production values meant they couldn’t thrive in the progressive rock scene, either. “Put yourself in our place and what else could you be but a punk band?” Watt says. “There was nothing else. No other scene was like that. We would have explored it if there was.”

The Minutemen felt DIY was intrinsic to the punk ethos. And yet the key punk bands—the Ramones, Television, the Sex Pistols, the Clash, Wire, et al.—had been on major labels and did little themselves besides make the music. So why did the Minutemen equate DIY with punk? “Because that was our version of punk,” Watt says simply. For the Minutemen, punk was a fluid concept—it was things like noticing an ad in Creem for a record by Richard Hell and the Voidoids on the tiny New York indie label Ork Records and calling the number listed. “I called him,” says Watt. “I said, ‘Is this Hell?’ And he said, ‘Yeah.’ And I got scared and I hung up.

And an underground music network was starting up: record stores that championed independent labels were beginning to appear in major cities and college towns, college radio was noticing the music, fanzines were flourishing, and an underground railroad of venues was assembling. “The scene was like a big boat,” Watt says, summoning up a favorite analogy. “It’s really strange what held it together. There was no commander; there was no sound you had to follow. You had to play fast—I think that was the only requirement. Fast and loud. Beyond that, you could do almost anything you wanted.”

The band’s first published interview appeared in Flipside #32, just before the release of the Bean Spill EP. Calling them “L.A.’s best kept secret weapon,” Al Flipside bubbled, “We just had to give them the cover!”

Watt used the interview to dispense classic Minutemen wisdom: “We don’t have a leader in our band—no leader, no laggers”; “Politics is guns if you really get down to it”; “Music can bind people in weird ways—socially, information—a lot of people get everything they know from songs and groups.”

Asked point-blank whether they were a punk rock band, Watt recalled their cover band days. “Then Johnny Rotten came,” he said, “and woooo, and we wrote our own songs. In that way we’re a punk rock band because it gave us the spark to write our own damn songs!” (Soon afterward, though, their Rotten bubble was burst when the Minutemen opened for Public Image, Ltd. “We were on our second song and the motherfucker is on the side of the stage, tapping on his watch,” Watt says. “And we were like, c’mon, guy! Because we were not dawdlers at all.” Tellingly, the liner notes of 1987’s Ballot Result thank “John Rotten or our idea of him.”)

Watt felt the Minutemen were a punk band by default. “Where were the gigs happening?” he explains. “Where were the records coming out? It was all the punk scene.” But weren’t they punk because of their ideas? “Well, the scene is where we learned a lot of the ideas,” he replies. “Now, we weren’t like a lot of punk bands, but we were a punk band because we were in the punk scene. I don’t know what else to call it. I’m not ashamed of it. I mean, it was silly in some parts and in some parts it was really good, it was very empowering. We got to make our dream real. And in those days, punk could do that for the Minutemen.”

With inspirational lines like “I live sweat but I dream light-years,” the Minutemen felt their music was by, for, and about the working person. “The first thing is to give workers confidence,” Watt said. “That’s what we try to do with our songs. It’s not to show them ‘the way’ but to say, ‘Look at us, we’re working guys and we write songs and play in a band.’ It’s not like that’s the only thing to do in life, but at least we’re doing something—confidence. You can hear some song that the guy next to you at the plant wrote.”

The working-person idea ran deep. Between 1982 and 1984, Boon published a fanzine called the Prole, which lasted for six issues. Boon wrote politically oriented articles and cartoons; Watt did record reviews. And on select nights, Boon booked local underground bands at San Pedro’s 300-capacity Star Theatre, renaming it the Union Theatre. Shows started early so working people could get home at a reasonable hour. “D. Boon believed that working men should have culture in their life—music and art—and not have it make you adopt a rock & roll lifestyle lie,” Watt says. “See, that’s punk. Having a set-up paradigm and then coming along and saying, ‘I’m going to change this with my art.’ ”

Boon’s political philosophy, as outlined in an interview at the time, was simple. “It always comes down to ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ And I’m not religious—you can ask him,” Boon said, nodding toward Watt. “I just think killing people is the wrong thing to do.”

“I’m not religious about God,” Boon agreed, “I’m religious about Man.”

“We believe in average guys,” said Watt. “What happens is, the system makes them all fuckheads.”

“And I want to try to snap them out of that,” said Boon. “That’s why I write these songs, OK?”

But Hurley was the only guy in the band whose dad actually belonged to a union. Watt and Boon wrestled with the problem all the time, and one fanzine interviewer managed to catch a typically contentious exchange on tape.

BOON [proudly]: I’m just the average Joe, the guy who has been a janitor, a restaurant manager—

WATT [impatient]: But the average Joe doesn’t write songs.

He… doesn’t… write…songs.

BOON: Well, this one did.

WATT: You’re not an average Joe.

BOON: This one did.

WATT: You’re a special Joe.

BOON: I was borne out of being average because of my rock band.

WATT: No, no, because of these tunes. D. Boon, you’re special and you’ve got to cop to it. You’ve got to cop to it, you’re special.

BOON [exasperated]: All right! Ever since I was five years old, people said I could draw! Let him draw!

WATT [triumphant]: That’s right. That’s why I’m in a band with him—he’s special.

Besides the Prole and the Union Theatre, the band had established their own label, New Alliance, in the fall of ’80. Early releases included various compilations, records by local underground bands, and the 1981 Minutemen EP Joy. The Mighty Feeble compilation included the Seattle new wave band Mr. Epp and the Calculations, which featured future Mudhoney singer Mark Arm.

When asked what had inspired the label, Boon had replied simply, “Black Flag.” “Part of being a punk band was also making a label,” Watt explains. “We never thought the label would get bigger; we just wanted to have it so if you saw the band you could get the record.” New Alliance soon began paying for itself, with all the profits going right back into the label.

One early New Alliance release was Land Speed Record by Hüsker Dü, a burly threesome from Minneapolis whose music lived up to the album title. The two trios hit it off at once. “They were on the same wavelength as us, totally,” Watt says. “It seemed like the same thing—make a band, try to get your own sound, and then play it all over the place and keep making records as fast as you could.” They wound up doing a couple of short tours together, and the Minutemen also released their Tour Spiel EP on Reflex, the Hüskers’ label.

Another early New Alliance release was Milo Goes to College by the Descendents. Again, there was an instant affinity. “Billy and Frank were fishermen, Tony was a mailman, Milo went to college,” Watt says. “[They were] very hands-on, knuckles to the ground, salt of the earth—same thing, same paradigm. Anybody who was in that scene with Flag was kind of like that. Not too many bourgeois bands. Everybody was into the van, very close to the earth.”

The Minutemen’s themes of imperialism, exploitation of cheap labor, and the horror of the battlefield were “totally from Creedence,” Watt says. “Creedence, for the Minutemen, was a political band.” Creedence Clearwater Revival’s 1969 hit “Bad Moon Rising” was an allegorical condemnation of the Vietnam War, as was “Who’ll Stop the Rain,” while “Fortunate Son” pulled even less punches, explicitly pointing out class inequities in the draft. CCR’s populist influence on the Minutemen was sartorial as well—Creedence favored plaid flannel shirts, which became Watt’s trademark. A few years later, the look would be called “grunge.”

Another early political influence was Bob Dylan. “Bob Dylan was probably the only person who I listened to the words in the Seventies,” Watt told Flipside. “My dad was a sailor and he was always away and Dylan seemed like a surrogate dad to me.” Boon and Watt later picked up crucial ideas from KPFK, a radio station on the left-leaning Pacifica network that hosted everybody from Noam Chomsky to pioneering rock critic and Blue Öyster Cult lyricist Richard Meltzer.

But their political thinking was also profoundly influenced by punk rock’s egalitarian ethos, in which they found a very powerful metaphor for the world at large. Ideas about redistribution of artistic power were a powerful analogy for redistribution of political power. “When you talk about the people who are disenfranchised, and then you look at the guys who can’t get in bands… I mean, it’s kind of close,” Watt says. “The thing about having a say in your workplace, having a say in your economics, is the same idea as having a say in your music. The way we jammed econo was the same way we talked about issues. I don’t want to separate them so much. We didn’t have the political rap and the band rap. They were the rap.”

So instead of spending their entire working lives as pawns in a bureaucracy that most benefited those at the top, Boon, Watt, and Hurley found a way of being their own boss. “Getting to make decisions about our own band, at least we were in charge of something,” says Watt. “Everywhere else in our lives, we were the little tiny men, but this one, this could be us.”

Still, the Minutemen realized there was no way they were going to realign the politics of even their own limited audience. The best they could hope for was dialogue—thinking about the issues was better than apathy and ignorance. “What we could do onstage is kick up a little crisis, a little ballyhoo in your mind,” Watt says. “And maybe then they can articulate their own ideas about it. Maybe they’ll find out they’re more right wing after hearing us, I don’t know. D. Boon was into that—just trying to flesh them out, see if they know what they’re about.”

Recorded in January and May ’83, Buzz or Howl under the Influence of Heat boasts some genuinely catchy rock songs, like Boon’s amped-up sea chanty “The Product” and Watt’s “Cut,” with Boon’s stuttering chicken-squawk guitar accenting a bold foursquare rhythm. The EP’s title is a collage of two lines from Scientific American articles, reflecting the dual nature of the record itself: all but three songs were recorded on a humble two-track recorder for the princely sum of $50; the rest were recorded for free. The cover was going to be a Scientific American photo of tree frogs but color separations cost $1,000, so their SST labelmate Joe Baiza of Saccharine Trust did a pen-and-ink drawing of Boon and Watt locked in one of their epic arguments while, behind them, hell spews forth material objects like watches, shoes, and calculators.

They did a full album’s worth of recording in November ’83, but then Hüsker Dü blew into town and recorded the double album Zen Arcade in three days. The Minutemen took this as a challenge and furiously wrote and recorded almost two dozen more songs within a month. “See how healthy the competition was, the community of it?” Watt says. “That’s where it was a movement. And not a scene. It was a healthy, thriving thing.”

Zen Arcade had been an ambitious concept album. “We didn’t have a concept to unite it all like they did,” Watt admits. “We didn’t sound like them. But trying to stretch like they did, we came out with something that wasn’t like anything we ever did again. Best record I ever played on.” The Minutemen’s unifying concept was simply their cars—the album started with the sound of an engine turning over and ended with “Three Car Jam,” which is about thirty seconds of all three Minutemen casually revving their car engines.

The two-record, forty-five-song Double Nickels on the Dime stands as one of the greatest achievements of the indie era—an inspired Whitman’s sampler of left-wing politics, moving autobiographical vignettes, and twisted Beefheartian twang. The album cost a mere $1,100 to record; they mixed it all on an eight-track machine in one night with producer/engineer Ethan James. The album sold fifteen thousand copies in its first year and is the band’s best seller to this day.

Watt says the title is a poke at mainstream rocker Sammy Hagar, who had recently proclaimed his incredible rebelliousness with the Top 40 hit “Can’t Drive 55.” “You’re such a wild guy, you’ll break the speed limit,” Watt says, chortling. “How about your tunes, though, buddy? We were making fun of him. The title means fifty-five miles an hour on the button, like we were Johnny Conservative.

“No one knew what the fuck we were talking about,” Watt continues. “We’d explain it to people and they’d say, ‘I don’t get it, what’s so funny about that?’ And we couldn’t tell them because it was our whole angle on rock & roll, our worldview on the music scene.”

Watt knew exactly what he needed to do for the cover shot. He drove out onto the Harbor Freeway in his ’63 Volkswagen bug with his buddy and upstairs neighbor Dirk Vandenberg, who sat with a camera in the backseat. It took four passes before they successfully lined up a shot with Watt’s smiling eyes in the rearview mirror, the sign for Route 10 to San Pedro in the windshield, and the speedometer exactly at 55.

Watt also says that Double Nickels is a takeoff on Pink Floyd’s 1969 double album Ummagumma, where each band member had their own featured side. Each Minuteman programmed one side of the album, with the rejects going on the fourth side, labeled “chaff.”

Watt and Boon yearned to purge themselves of all the bad music in their past, like the jazz fusion they endured in high school (although vestiges of fusion remained in the Minutemen’s gnarled rhythms and jazzy chords). So they chased out those demons with ideas from folk music, specifically the realistic, autobiographical nature of it.

Perhaps the ultimate expression of that idea was the oddly moving “Take 5, D.” Boon felt Watt’s original lyrics were “too spacey,” and Watt agreed. “There ain’t nothing going to be more real,” Watt promised him, and found a new set of lyrics—an actual note from a friend’s landlady that begins, “Hope we can rely on you not to use shower / You’re not keeping tub caulked…” It doesn’t get realer than that.

Loosely based on the riff from the Velvet Underground’s “Here She Comes Now,” “History Lesson (Part II)” is both sweetly nostalgic and delivered with the understated fervency of a pledge of allegiance: “Me and Mike Watt played for years / but punk rock changed our lives / we learned punk rock in Hollywood / drove up from Pedro / we were fuckin’ corn-dogs / we’d go drink and pogo.” The song also includes the immortal line “Our band could be your life,” a rallying call that has reverberated in underground music circles ever since. The line crystallized it better than anything—the Minutemen’s sense of musical liberation, their political engagement, and even their frugality were metaphors for a whole mode of living. Punk rock was an idea, not a musical style.

Plenty of punks thought the Minutemen were mocking them and their scene (and sometimes they were). But as “History Lesson (Part II)” made clear, they were just three guys who had grown up together and were making music they thought was good. “I wrote that song to try to humanize us,” says Watt. “People thought we were spacemen, but we were just Pedro corndogs—our band could be your life! You could be us, this could be you. We’re not that much different from you cats.”

The album also included a song called “Untitled Song for Latin America.” Boon had become a member of CISPES, or the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador, an activist group dedicated to helping Marxist rebels overthrow the country’s repressive U.S.-installed puppet government. It was not a hip issue to get behind at the time—most rockers were then dedicated to smashing apartheid in South Africa.

Although Watt wrote more songs, Boon tended to write the band’s “hits.” “He could write these songs that spoke to people,” Watt says. “And those are the words that people are always going to remember us for. D. Boon didn’t have the greatest vocabulary, but he could put things together that took a lot of courage.” Boon wrote “This Ain’t No Picnic,” which swiftly became one of the band’s most popular numbers, when he was working at an auto parts outlet and a supervisor wouldn’t let him play jazz and soul music on the radio, claiming it was “nigger shit.” (“I think he also got caught chowin’,” Watt confides.) Boon couldn’t quit because he needed the income, and his bitterness and frustration fueled a Minutemen classic.

While Watt preferred a fairly complex lyrical approach, Boon tended toward slogans, which worked better in a rock context: plenty of their fans didn’t know that “This Ain’t No Picnic” is about racism, but they sure sang along on the chorus. But the differing approaches were a constant source of friction between the two young men, and Watt would often scold Boon for being simplistic. “You know how Nixon destroyed the hippie movement?” Watt asked Boon during a fanzine interview. “He just ended the war. Because that’s all it was—‘End the war, end the war!’ So he ends the war and everything falls apart. Because it was so simple-minded, they never had any goals—[it was just] some rock dude saying ‘Get out of Vietnam.’ ”

But later, when Boon left to get a soda, Watt confided to the interviewer, “I’m really afraid—he’s got a lot of really important things to say and I wouldn’t want him to get reduced to Jack Shit, know what I mean?”

The ravings of Jack Shit or not, “This Ain’t No Picnic” was the band’s first video. Made for $440, it was nominated for an award by MTV, which had begun to air low-budget videos from indie labels. The Minutemen lost to fey English fop-poppers Kajagoogoo.

Most indie bands at that time didn’t make videos. “We did,” Watt says. “That was the whole idea—so people can know about the gigs. That’s where we had the most control was at the gigs. So the idea was to get people to the gig. We had divided the whole world into two categories: there was flyers and there was the gig. You’re either doing the gig, which is like one hour of your life, or everything else to get people to the gig. Interviews were flyers, videos were flyers, even records were flyers. We didn’t tour to promote records, we made records to promote the tours, because the gig was where you could make the money.”

Except for dinosaur acts like the Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd, major label bands usually lost money on the road in order to promote their records. But in indie rock, the reverse is true—if a band keeps its expenses low. “That’s the reality, why be in denial?” Watt says. “We didn’t have to live up to any rock paradigm. If it would get people to the gig, we would do it. If it wouldn’t, it was boozh, an adornment, spangle, accoutrement, accessory, ballast.”

The band toured relentlessly after Double Nickels—one 1984 tour had the band playing fifty-seven dates in sixty-three days.

The loquacious Watt tended to dominate interviews; Boon would usually just noodle on his guitar and interject only when he felt he had to, usually to spar with Watt or denounce fascism. Hurley, a man of few words, was rarely even present. Not being book-learned, Hurley was a bit reluctant to try to express his thought in words, but he was still a Pedro boy, with much in common with Boon and Watt. “He was very much into exploring art, pushing it, expression,” Watt says.

With Watt and Boon as boyhood friends, Hurley must have felt like the odd man out; since he’d been out surfing while Boon and Watt were studying Bismarck and Napoleon, he couldn’t participate in the political back-and-forth. But besides being a powerful, deeply inventive drummer, he did have some invaluable political instincts, albeit not political in the usual sense. “Georgie could size shit up,” Watt says. “Georgie was a guy you would want in a day-to-day situation that might be scary or dangerous. To me, that’s a very political person—they’re seeing where the power is stacked up. Georgie is very aware of this. He knew how to take care of things, watching your shit, CYA. To me, that’s politics in a way. You can do it on a big national level, but you can do it with your van and your equipment.”

But the intellectual core of the band was Boon and Watt, and the two challenged each other constantly. In a 1985 interview with an unknown fanzine writer in Minneapolis, the two argued constantly, not in a hostile way, but as if they were sparring, testing each other’s conviction.

WATT: You listen to [Boon’s] songs, it sounds like he’s singing about the same thing in every fucking song.

BOON: I have something to say.

WATT: I guess. I don’t think you have that much to say. Some other dude said it.

BOON: Well, it’s got to keep being said until it’s done.

Earlier, they argued—at length—whether there was a guitar solo in “Boiling” from Punch Line (there isn’t). Then Watt took Boon to task for reducing the situations in El Salvador and Nicaragua to a simplistic slogan that was then popular in left-wing politics: “U.S. Out of Central America,” which Boon often wrote out on a signboard and propped up onstage.

WATT: I can’t see just saying that—“Get the United States out of Central America,” just that simple. That’s being simpleminded about something that’s very complicated—people dying, trying to make their own destiny.

BOON: Can’t you see why the people are dying there?

WATT: People who are using this as just a slogan so they can enhance their rock career.

BOON: Can’t you see why people are dying there?

WATT: There’s many, many reasons.

INTERVIEWER: Because our government is sending aid?

BOON: No, because of imperialism. And it’s always existed there.

WATT: That’s one of the reasons. No, there’s many reasons.

BOON: Like what?

WATT: Racism.

BOON: There’s racism against the imperialist powers?

WATT: No, there’s racism. When the Spanish went over there.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah—

WATT: They were racist against the Indians.

BOON: That’s not true though! They weren’t very racist against the Indians.

WATT: Bullshit.

BOON: It was the whites who were very—

WATT: In fact, the indigenous populations of Guatemala are being murdered off by the Spanish-surnamed people.

BOON: By the people in power.

WATT: Racism.

BOON: But they weren’t the Spanish. The Spanish married all the women and had all the children. They just killed all the braves and married the women.

WATT: That’s not racism, huh?

BOON: Well, the English did it a lot better. They just murdered everybody in front of them.

This sort of debate went on all the time. “The Minutemen would just rank on each other all the time—they didn’t harbor anything,” says Joe Carducci, chuckling. “They had two perspectives, but usually they’d be arguing about the Civil War.” Boon and Watt’s arguments sometimes got so heated that they alarmed the people around them. Mostly they kept the squabbling on a verbal level, but inevitably tensions sometimes exploded, especially in the cramped crucible of the tour van. “You know how we handled it?” Watt says. “We’d fight. We’d roll around and wrestle. We’d pull that van over in the middle of the road.”

Sometimes the fisticuffs radiated outward, like when Boon had some stickers made that said “Get Out of Central America” and was handing them out at a show at Tulane College when some jocks started picking a fight with the Minutemen about it. “They had just gone through some basketball point-shaving scandal and they were all pissed off and they were ready to fight us,” Watt says. “And we were ready. ‘C’mon, assholes!’ And it got really, really heavy.”

The double album put the Minutemen on the map. But what next? Joe Carducci had noticed how college radio had taken to Buzz or Howl, both for its accessibility and its brevity, which allowed listeners to grasp the whole record fairly easily, to get to know five or six songs instead of forty-five. So he suggested another EP, but with more mainstream production values and standard song lengths, in order to win more airplay and sales. “And Watt’s instinct to cover his ass is then to ridicule it as ‘Project: Mersh,’ ” says Carducci.

Carducci suggested that since he knew exactly what he wanted, he produce with engineer Mike Lardie at his side and Ethan James kicking in some “technical advice.” The Minutemen agreed and they recorded the album in February ’85.

The studio bill came to $2,400, a king’s ransom by Minutemen standards, especially for a mere six songs. The tracks featured ornate trumpet parts on three tracks, relatively slick production values, and even fade-outs.

By this point the Minutemen could afford such a move both financially and professionally—they’d amassed such integrity and respect that anyone the slightest bit familiar with the band would see Project: Mersh for the experiment it was. “We wanted to see if it would fuck with people’s, critics’ heads, our fans’ heads, the radio people’s heads, yeah, because they pigeonhole you and then they’ll leave you there forever,” Watt said. “We think we should be competing with all the bands and not be relegated to any area, so we’ll show ’em, you want choruses and fade-outs, huh?” And besides, it was their tenth record. It was time to mix things up a little.

It was also part of the band’s continuing effort to bridge the gulf between performer and audience. After all, their roots were in proletarian rock, not obscure art-song. “We’re trying to show people, hey, we’re not cosmonauts from Planet Jazz, we’re just like you,” Watt said.

But they were not intent only on demystifying themselves; they were intent on demystifying the mainstream music business. By mimicking the “mersh” form and yet clearly destined to sell few records, they were making a point about music biz chicanery: Any band could sound like this if they had enough money, but that wouldn’t mean they were any good. And of course, consciously setting themselves up to fail held a strong underdog charm.

And while the music was slicker, the lyrics remained pure Minutemen. The guitar on “The Cheerleaders” might recall Hendrix’s “Foxy Lady,” but Boon is singing lines like “Can you count the lives they take / Do you have to see the body bags before you make a stand?” “Tour Spiel” was another part of the gag. “We wanted to be like the ‘rock band’ and write the ‘road song,’ ” Watt says, chuckling at the absurdity. “It was like something a guy in a boardroom would dream up, not the guy in the van. But the whole thing about SST was the guy in the boardroom was the guy in the van!”

If the point was that a commercial sound doesn’t mean commercial success, Project: Mersh succeeded admirably: it sold only half what Double Nickels did.

Sometime in ’84 they had done an interview in Georgia with, in Watt’s words, “some longhaired guy” who did his own fanzine. They eventually found out the longhaired guy was Michael Stipe, the singer of a hot new band called R.E.M. It’s remarkable that the Minutemen hadn’t heard R.E.M. by 1985. “Ostriches,” Watt concedes. “I only knew bands by playing with them.” The Stipe interview must have gone fairly well, because R.E.M. invited the Minutemen on their U.S. tour of 2,000-to 3,000-seat venues in December of the following year. “And we didn’t even know who R.E.M. was,” Watt says. “We went and bought their record—it was folk music; it was like a vocal band. They turned out to be really educated music guys. They’d worked in record stores.”

But the tour was no picnic for the Minutemen. “The whole crew hated us, didn’t want us on the tour, the record company—I.R.S.—wouldn’t put us on the posters,” Watt says. “The only four guys who liked us was the band.”

According to Watt, R.E.M.’s crew wanted them off the tour after the very first gig. (Perhaps they were put off by the fact that Watt often dressed up like Fidel Castro, a getup that had gotten him a thorough frisking at Newark Airport earlier that year.) “They didn’t know what we were,” says Watt. “They gave us a half hour and we played forty songs. They didn’t know what the fuck was hittin’ ’em. Plus, the music was made for little clubs so the echo was longer than the tunes!”

The tour also provided the Minutemen with solid affirmation of their econo approach, for R.E.M. had already met with one of the pitfalls of graduating from cult status to nascent fame—they had to put up with professional tour crews. “These guys were assholes,” Watt recalls. “They’d put a line of gaffing tape on the floor of the stage that said ‘Geek line’ and we weren’t allowed to cross. They would switch our rooms, fuck with us constantly.” After the band played an entire set of Creedence songs at the Fox Theatre in Atlanta, the tour’s production manager demanded they clear all cover songs with him first.

No doubt about it, it was a tough tour. In Florida Watt got food poisoning and suffered from chronic diarrhea for days afterward. “It got useless to keep changing my pants,” Watt wrote in the tour story anthology Hell on Wheels, “so I tied a shirt around my waist and rags around the bottoms of my pant legs and just said fuck it. After three days my pants were full to the knees. Luckily, my condition improved.”

On the last show of the tour, R.E.M. playfully hurled corn dogs at the Minutemen during “History Lesson.” For the encores, the Minutemen joined R.E.M. for a version of Television’s “See No Evil,” with Watt playing one of Peter Buck’s Rickenbacker guitars, Hurley pounding a tomtom, and Boon on guitar. It was a fitting number: Television had been one of the pioneering indie punk bands who fired up Boon and Watt; the New York band had done the same for R.E.M. The jam also symbolized a passing of the torch from the hardcore-associated pioneers of the indie scene to what Watt calls “college rock,” a less desperate strain of music for a whole new group of kids.

Watt had been making noises that after Project: Mersh they were going to come out with a very uncompromising album with the working title “No Mysteries.” They recorded in late August and early September ’85 at L.A.’s Radio Tokyo (“now 16 track at $25/hour!” the liner notes proudly note) with Ethan James.

But in the meantime, Boon, like many members of the original SST bands, had become smitten with the incomparable Meat Puppets and their loose, trippy, neo–Neil Young style. Boon wanted to emulate their slack approach, but it couldn’t have been further from Watt’s rigorous work ethic. And on the resulting album, now titled 3-Way Tie (for Last), Boon won out. (Boon even sings a perfunctory version of the Meat Puppets’ “Lost” on the album, while the album notes thank the Meat Puppets for “obvious inspiration.”)

Even worse, the Minutemen’s busy tour schedule hadn’t allowed them to write and properly prepare the new material. While 3-Way Tie was a lot mellower than anything the Minutemen had done before, it was also underrehearsed and overprocessed. “I was really surprised when 3-Way Tie came out,” says Carducci. “There just seemed to be nothing there. They hadn’t really done much work on it.”

And five of the sixteen songs were covers. Besides the Meat Puppets number, there’s a version of Blue Öyster Cult’s “The Red and the Black” (featuring a bass duel between Watt and… Watt) close on the heels of a reverent cover of Creedence’s “Have You Ever Seen the Rain?”; “Ack Ack Ack” by key early L.A. punks the Urinals and Roky Erickson’s “Bermuda” also get the Minutemen treatment.

The album had been recorded during a down period for Boon. “He got pretty lazy and didn’t put as much into the music as he should because he had been partying a little too much,” says Spot. “So I think Watt had to pick up the slack. And I think somehow he kept D. going. There was a show I saw one time when D. had gotten to be kind of partymeister, and I was worried whether he was going to make it through the show. He had put on more weight and was drinking a lot, and I could tell he was having a hard time singing—he didn’t have the air. I was real concerned about that…. And a number of other people had noticed it, too. And I think a lot of people took him aside and said, ‘D., you’re falling behind. You’re starting to get bad. Don’t do that to yourself.’ And he snapped back and really became himself again.”

The music on 3-Way Tie is more eclectic than ever: there are odd psychedelic interludes, tidbits of Spanish guitar, visionary rap & roll, a spoken word piece, Latin rhythms, a literally telephoned-in track, and a great straightforward rocker (“Courage”). The politics are clear, the tips of the hat copious, the band chemistry obvious.

But 3-Way Tie suffers from a split personality. Boon’s numbers are strongly political: “The Price of Paradise,” besides featuring some of Boon’s best singing, is a stinging indictment of the Vietnam War and the eerie similarities with the way the U.S. seemed to be backing into confrontations in Latin America. On “The Big Stick” he rails, “This is what I’m singing about / The race war that America supports,” singing over the song’s jaunty acoustic swing. But the lyrics for Watt’s songs, written by his girlfriend, Black Flag’s Kira Roessler, largely avoided politics in favor of more abstract realms.

The whole project is a bit sluggish and underdeveloped. “But you know what?” Watt says. “We were doing the windup to come back.” They were just starting to make enough money to quit their day jobs, which meant they could concentrate on their music more than ever. “I think we were on to a new style,” Watt says. “The next album was going to be very adventurous.”

In late December, a few days after returning from the R.E.M. tour, the Minutemen were on the verge of a great personal triumph. Their hero Richard Meltzer was set to record with them and had given Watt ten lyrics to write music to. Watt came over to Boon’s house to discuss the record and found his friend sitting in a beanbag chair, bright red with fever. Boon said he was heading to Arizona that night to visit his girlfriend’s folks for the holidays. Watt said he looked too sick to go. Boon said not to worry—his girlfriend would drive the van and he’d lie in the back.

That same night Watt was giving a friend a ride home after a show in Hollywood when he passed a street called Willoughby. “And it was really weird—there’s this Twilight Zone where [the key phrase is] ‘Next stop, Willoughby!’ And the guy jumps off the train [and dies]—Willoughby’s no real town. I think it’s an undertaker’s service…. Well, when I passed that street Willoughby, I got this huge old chill.”

Watt’s phone rang early the following morning: December 23, 1985. It was D. Boon’s dad. Boon’s girlfriend had been driving the band’s tour van, her sister in the passenger seat and a feverish Boon sleeping in the back. At around four in the morning, Boon’s girlfriend fell asleep at the wheel. The van crashed and flipped; Boon was thrown out the back door and broke his neck. He died instantly. It was at about the same time Watt had passed Willoughby, back in California, and shuddered. Years later he would still wonder if he hadn’t somehow felt D. Boon die.

All that Watt could think was, how? He flashed back to an image of his childhood friend, strong as an ox, playing football back in Peck Park. D. Boon wasn’t quick, but it took two or three guys to tackle him. “He just seemed unkillable,” Watt says, shaking his head in disbelief. “He just did.”

“That was the worst, that was the worst,” Watt says. “No more of him. No more Minutemen. I had really come to lean on him. I was numb. I was weirded out. It was hard for me. Boy, that was hard. I miss him.”

D. Boon was buried in Green Hills Memorial Park in San Pedro, right across the street from where Watt grew up.

The next night Watt had a dream about Boon, the most vivid he’d ever had about his friend. The two were alone in a bank lobby covered floor to ceiling in orange carpet. “I’m ten feet away from him and he’s studying this big rectangular painting and it’s got like six or seven Abe Lincolns in it and they’re like Peter Max Abe Lincoln heads with the big stovepipe hat and the beard, but in psychedelic colors,” says Watt. “And I’m standing back there and I’m thinking, ‘This is so fucked up, I have to tell him he’s dead and he can’t be here anymore.’ And there was this horrible dilemma. And I wake up.”

“I’ve never been able to figure that dream out. But I do know why I had to tell him he was dead—because D. Boon was such a fucking fierce dude, I don’t think he knew he was dead. In a weird way, he did not know. I don’t think you know you’re dead; I think it’s like the equator—somebody has to tell you you’ve crossed it.”

The indie community was staggered by the tragedy, too. For many, it was one of those things where you remember where you were when you heard the news.

D. Boon’s death broke up one of the last major indie bands who harbored the idealism of earlier times and carried it into the new music. The new crop of musicians was younger and had essentially never known a world without punk rock; maybe they detested their ex-hippie parents’ hypocrisy and had grown cynical. After a friend called Big Black leader Steve Albini to break the news, Albini opened up his diary. “So there’s nobody left who’s been doing it since the beginning and doing it all the way right,” he wrote. “Fuck. It’s like Buddy Holly or something. Sure it’s kind of pathetic to get all worked up over it but hell, they meant it, and that means something to me…. Man, what do we do now?”

D. BOON HANDING OUT BALLOTS FOR THEIR UPCOMING LIVE ALBUM AT A SHOW IN CHICAGO, 1985.

3-Way Tie (for Last) had included a mail-in ballot for fans to vote on which live tracks they wanted on an upcoming album, tentatively titled “Three Dudes, Six Sides, Half Studio, Half Live.” So while the nation reeled in horror from the explosion of the Challenger shuttle, Watt grieved for his friend and cobbled together Ballot Result from soundboard tapes, radio shows, rehearsal tapes, studio outtakes, and even fans’ live bootlegs.

In early 1985, when Sonic Youth played their first L.A. show, the band’s Thurston Moore introduced himself to Watt. “He knew about Richard Hell and New York Dolls and Johnny Thunders,” Watt says, “and I just listened to him spieling.” Moore remembers it differently: “He approached us and he was this really vociferous kind of guy,” he says. “He had brought the album covers of [Sonic Youth’s] Confusion Is Sex and the first album, and he was throwing them in front of us and having us sign them and stuff. I was like, ‘This is insane—Mike Watt [is asking us for our autographs].’ ” (Watt later wrote a song about the eventful meeting, “Me and You, Rememberin’ ” for the fIREHOSE album If’n.)

Moore and the rest of Sonic Youth were intensely interested in networking. “That’s totally what it was about,” Watt says. “And Thurston knew that. It was all about communications.”

About a year later Watt found himself on the East Coast, still distraught over Boon’s death, and Moore and Sonic Youth bassist Kim Gordon had him stay at their place on the Lower East Side. Although Watt hadn’t picked up a bass since his friend died, they persuaded him to play on a track they were recording, Sonic Youth guitarist Lee Ranaldo’s cataclysmic “In the Kingdom #19” (which was, ironically, about a car crash). “It was so weird,” Watt says of the experience. “But then I started figuring out that everything they do is weird—they have the weird tunings, the guitars. I thought we were very outrageous and adventurous, but we were like ol’ Chuck Berry compared to their stuff.”

After D. Boon died, Watt found it difficult to run New Alliance by himself and finally sold it to Greg Ginn in 1986. He and Hurley formed a new band called fIREHOSE with guitarist Ed Crawford, a Minutemen fan who traveled all the way from Ohio to convince Watt to start playing again. Their SST debut did well on college radio and the band eventually signed with Columbia Records. George Hurley kicked around in various bands after the demise of fIREHOSE; in the Nineties he drummed with the legendary experimental band Red Krayola. Watt, still a beloved, respected, and hardworking figure on the underground scene, is currently at work on his third solo album for Columbia. He still jams econo.

Although Watt doesn’t think they changed very many minds politically, he’s sure the Minutemen were successful at whatever they tried. They never compromised their music (well, maybe once…) and exposed a lot of people to a fairly difficult vision. They rocked in a way that no one else had done before (or since). They inspired countless bands. “We weren’t a lot of hot air—we almost did everything we set out to do,” Watt says. “And in some ways it’s because we kept our sights small. We’re not going to be the biggest band—we’re going to put on little shows, put out a little magazine, have a little label. We made it small enough that we could do it. And we held down jobs, paid our rent, and made a living.

“I just hope that maybe some people will read about us and see how we weren’t manufactured,” Watt says, “that we were just three dudes from Pedro and that maybe they could do the same thing themselves.”

CHAPTER 2

THE MINUTEMEN