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!”
THE MINUTEMEN PROUDLY STANDING IN FRONT OF THEIR TRUSTY VAN, CHICAGO, 1985.
GAIL BUTENSKY
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.
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