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.
MARTIN LYON
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.”
D. BOON AND MIKE WATT IN ACTION AT THE WHISKY-A-GO-GO, CIRCA 1982.
© 1981 GLEN E. FRIEDMAN. REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION FROM THE BURNING FLAGS PHOTOZINE, MY RULES
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 ass
holes. 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.”
Our Band Could Be Your Life Page 9