by JOHNSON CUMMINS

During the birth of hardcore in L.A. in the early ’80s, bands were largely judged on the punk rock measuring stick by their speed. The aptly-named trio the Minutemen definitely knew how to pack a song in at under a minute (and 11 albums into six years!), but stuck out from the cookie-cutter hardcore crew due to a sound that had as much to do with CCR and jazz as it did with punk rock. The Minutemen’s passion, integrity, intensity and originality would only be fully appreciated in hindsight, when punk rock had grown up enough to recognize the band’s fierce brilliance.

After the tragic death of guitarist/singer D. Boon in a van accident in 1985, bassist Mike Watt and drummer George Hurley nearly quit music, until a keener from Ohio named Ed Crawford convinced them to sign him and his six-string on and reform as fIREHOSE. All three continue to be active in indie music to this day. It was Boon who drew Watt to music, and when asked what kind of bass player he is, Watt still says, “I’m D. Boon’s bass player.”

Having just finished his 49th tour, Watt is now releasing a book with lyrics and tour diaries culled from his Minutemen days—and get this, it’s Quebec publisher l’Oie de Cravan handling it (last week’s launch at la Sala Rossa saw Watt jamming with a number of locals). The Mirror talked to Watt from his San Pedro, CA, home about the book, about Boon and about what punk was and is.

Mirror: Tell us about your new book that is coming out, Spiels of a Minuteman.

Mike Watt: It’s a book of lyrics I wrote in the Minutemen and some tour spiel I wrote when the Minutemen were on tour with Black Flag at the beginning of ’83. I was approached by this publishing company in Quebec. It’s in both English and French, which should be interesting because there is a lot of ’Pedro slang in there. I’m really curious on how that is going to turn out.

M: Do you remember when the Minutemen played at Concordia University with My Dog Popper in ’83?

MW: That’s right! The singer put on the gig. They were a great band. They had a great song called “I Lost My Job to a Guy Named Gino.”

M: Wow, how do you remember all of this stuff?

MW: Touring just leaves indelible impressions on my mind. It’s not just gigs, it’s visiting towns and learning about them and meeting the people.

M: Can you tell us some snippets from the diary section of the book?

MW: It was the first time I ever went overseas. One part of the diary is when we were playing Austria and the power went out on the first note of the first song. When the power came back on we were getting vomit, used condoms and bags of piss thrown at us. The punkers in Europe at that time were really orthodox and conservative and wanted everybody to play the same song the same way. There were 10 people in one van on that tour, all of Black Flag and the Minutemen in one van. It was a hard tour. Henry [Rollins] from Black Flag would have people beating him up and putting cigarettes out on his back every night. In Holland the first band got chased off the stage by Nazis and I figured, we came all of this way to play and there is no way that these fuckers were going to chase us off the stage. D. Boon was never afraid and when you’re on a stage with D. Boon, you can’t be afraid. That guy played with such a passion, you couldn’t run him off. They tried their best that night but they couldn’t run us off because we wouldn’t give them any ground.

Boon boosting

M: What do you think about when you read the book?

MW: When I put myself in the mind frame of those days of when I wrote all those songs, almost all of the songs were inspired by D. Boon. The lyrics were a really personal experience. I wasn’t really writing them thinking other people would be listening to them so much. There was one song I wrote called “History Lesson Pt. II,” because at that time it was only hardcore kids coming to the shows. They kind of thought of us as Martians from planet Jazz. I wrote that song to tell them that we are just like them but we had to go for our own sound.

M: “History Lesson” is probably my favourite Minutemen song.

MW: Well, the music for “History Lesson” I kind of got from “If She Ever Comes Now,” by the Velvet Underground. I look back at it now and it’s probably one of the best songs I ever wrote. That song had a big connection with D. Boon. He used to tell me that I wrote too abstract and that I had to write things that are real for people. I never had the knack for it like he did. That “History Lesson” song was a song I wrote so everybody could understand where we were coming from.

M: So D. Boon was always one of your biggest influences.

MW: Oh yeah, it was D. Boon’s mother that made me play bass. With all of this renewed interest in the Minutemen, I get to talk about him a lot now. I want people to think about him, y’know. I don’t want him to die in people’s minds.

Whence cometh punk

M: There has been a glut of books coming out on the early L.A. punk and hardcore scenes, like We Got the Neutron Bomb and American Hardcore. What was your personal take on the early L.A. scene?

MW: When I look back at punk, especially how the Minutemen identified with it, I just think of it as a form of folk music.

M: Why do you think there is this sudden interest to document the early punk and hardcore scenes?

MW: There were all of these academic critics who had this kind of revisionist thought where it was the Sex Pistols and then Nirvana and nothing in between. People have to write about that period because it really happened. I mean, c’mon, Black Flag built the circuit that we all now tour on and they never got any credit. Kids now have green hair and it’s considered normal but they want to find out where it came from. They want to know if it was manufactured on MTV or did it really happen. At the time, punk and hardcore never really got any respect. I don’t think that what Black Flag, the Minutemen, D.O.A. or any of those cats did was a failure just because it wasn’t a commercial success. Those bands did what they set out to do, which was find their own sound and find out about different parts of the country and the world through music. Music before that was this thing in the background that you couldn’t put your finger on. After punk, things changed and it was possible for anybody to tour and put out records. I am still doing that exact same thing today. :

Spiels of a Minuteman by Mike Watt, l’Oie de cravan, 130pp, $15