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.
“That, to me, was punk.”
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 b
ecause 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.”
“You’re not religious about God,” Watt added.
“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.
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