Our Band Could Be Your Life

by Michael Azerrad

  Even the crew was kind of loopy. After he and roadie Joe Cole drove a hundred miles in the wrong direction, chief roadie Ratman had to surrender the wheel to Cole because he was too upset to drive. “Then he spray-painted his face white and took all the garbage on the floor of the cab and lit it on fire,” wrote Cole in his tour diary, later published as Planet Joe. “We drove down the highway with a fire on the floor of the cab and when it became too big to control he opened the door and kicked it out. He shouted and slobbered for about 50 miles.”

  Rollins withdrew further from the rest of the band and most of the crew. “It is becoming very important that I keep to myself around the others,” he wrote in his diary. “I’m a jerk when I enter into their conversations.”

  In Louisville Cole detained a mohawked punk who had spat on Rollins. After the show Rollins escorted the punk backstage, slammed his head against the wall, punched him in the chest, slapped his face, then asked why he had spat on him. “The punker answered that he thought Rollins liked to be spat on, so Rollins spat on his face as hard as he could until the guy started to cry,” Cole wrote in his diary. “He was crying and apologizing and Rollins told him to leave before he really got mad. The punker left the room in tears and everybody just stood there shaking their heads.”

  Then again, Ginn apparently wasn’t helping matters either. For years the band didn’t even smoke pot, partly so the police wouldn’t have anything to pin on them. But in 1985 Ginn had “resumed with a vengeance,” says Rollins. “By ’86 it was ‘Cannot separate the man from his Anvil case with a big-ass stash.’ ” Rollins says Ginn began carrying a road case with him on tour that usually held about a half pound of pot. “That’s when he went away and you couldn’t talk to him anymore,” Rollins said.

  There were outside forces cleaving the band, too. By 1986 the underground scene had changed profoundly, mainly due to R.E.M. and U2, who had started in the post-punk underground and were now conquering commercial radio. As a touring musician and label head, Ginn had a ringside seat to the effect this had on many underground bands. “They started out with the ambition ‘If we could just be a touring band and go around and do this, that would be cool,’ ” Ginn says. “Then R.E.M. came into it and it was like, ‘Wow, we can make a career out of this.’ There was a sharp turn.” Many bands, sensing success was just a hit record away, toned down their sound and made records that would appeal to radio and the press. The transition from underground to “alternative” was under way.

  And Ginn saw that that mentality was about to infect Black Flag. Although the band had prided itself on being one or two steps ahead of their peers, Rollins was beginning to have second thoughts about that approach. According to Ginn, one day Rollins just blurted out, “Why don’t we make a record that was like the last one so people won’t always be trying to catch up with what we’re doing?”

  “And he had never said that before,” Ginn says. “He had always trusted me to go in directions musicwise that he might not understand at first, but then in the long run they made sense with him. But he understood that that was against the grain commercially.”

  They could have used the money, too—they still owed a small fortune, about $200,000, to their lawyer for the Unicorn debacle and were still living in communal squalor. But Ginn wasn’t about to sell out, not after ten years of fighting to do it his way.

  The alternative was simply to fire Rollins and get a new lead singer, but Ginn decided against it for two reasons. One was that Rollins had long since become synonymous with Black Flag and had made himself into an underground star in the process, hobnobbing with the likes of Michael Stipe, Lydia Lunch, and Nick Cave; corresponding with Charles Manson; writing magazine articles and publishing books of poetry; and, of course, doing most of the band’s press. Besides, Ginn, having seen how Rollins could make life so miserable for people he didn’t like, feared the inevitable reprisals if he fired Rollins.

  After returning from the 1986 tour, Ginn contemplated the situation. And he decided to pull the plug on Black Flag. “It wasn’t like a pissed-off kind of thing; I wasn’t mad at anything,” says Ginn. “It just took a couple of months and I thought about it, and I thought it’s not going to be the same anymore.”

  “So I was in Washington, D.C.,” Rollins recalls, “and Greg called me and said, ‘I quit Black Flag.’ So I said OK… OK… and since me and Greg were Black Flag toward the end, that was it.

  “My only regret,” Rollins says, “is that I didn’t join them earlier, so we could have done it more years. I had a great time and it was an honor playing with someone like Greg Ginn. I mean, they don’t make them like that anymore.”

  Just a few weeks later, Rollins was in the studio with a new band that just happened to include Andrew Weiss and Sim Cain of Ginn’s side project Gone.

  Ginn says he’s glad he pulled the plug when he did. “I was real proud of what Black Flag had done from the beginning to the end,” he says, “and I thought, ‘I have been fortunate enough to never have played a note of music that I didn’t really want to play at the time,’ and I wasn’t going to change that.

  “The songs,” Ginn continues, “are more what the band is about, rather than riots and police and tough-guy attitudes of lead singers and this and that. It’s lyrics and the feeling of the music…. That’s the main thing. In terms of the peripherals, the attitude of do-it-yourself, that kind of thing, not being a remote rock star and having layers of management and record labels and all that—instead, booking your own shows, doing your own publicity if necessary. Not everything has to be so home industry, but being willing to do whatever is necessary and not considering one’s self remote, dealing with the guy at the distributor and respecting people for the job that they’re doing, not thinking they should conform to some narrow aspect.

  “I think,” Ginn concludes, “Black Flag promoted the idea of just jumping off the ledge and doing it.”

  CHAPTER 2

  THE MINUTEMEN

  I AM THE TIDE, THE RISE AND THE FALL THE REALITY SOLDIER, THE LAUGH CHILD, THE ONE OF THE MANY, THE FLAME CHILD

  —THE MINUTEMEN, “THE GLORY OF MAN”

  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 m
odern 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.”