But in the meantime, Boon, like many members of the original SST bands, had become smitten with the incomparable Meat Puppets and their loose, trippy, neo–Neil Young style. Boon wanted to emulate their slack approach, but it couldn’t have been further from Watt’s rigorous work ethic. And on the resulting album, now titled 3-Way Tie (for Last), Boon won out. (Boon even sings a perfunctory version of the Meat Puppets’ “Lost” on the album, while the album notes thank the Meat Puppets for “obvious inspiration.”)
Even worse, the Minutemen’s busy tour schedule hadn’t allowed them to write and properly prepare the new material. While 3-Way Tie was a lot mellower than anything the Minutemen had done before, it was also underrehearsed and overprocessed. “I was really surprised when 3-Way Tie came out,” says Carducci. “There just seemed to be nothing there. They hadn’t really done much work on it.”
And five of the sixteen songs were covers. Besides the Meat Puppets number, there’s a version of Blue Öyster Cult’s “The Red and the Black” (featuring a bass duel between Watt and… Watt) close on the heels of a reverent cover of Creedence’s “Have You Ever Seen the Rain?”; “Ack Ack Ack” by key early L.A. punks the Urinals and Roky Erickson’s “Bermuda” also get the Minutemen treatment.
The album had been recorded during a down period for Boon. “He got pretty lazy and didn’t put as much into the music as he should because he had been partying a little too much,” says Spot. “So I think Watt had to pick up the slack. And I think somehow he kept D. going. There was a show I saw one time when D. had gotten to be kind of partymeister, and I was worried whether he was going to make it through the show. He had put on more weight and was drinking a lot, and I could tell he was having a hard time singing—he didn’t have the air. I was real concerned about that…. And a number of other people had noticed it, too. And I think a lot of people took him aside and said, ‘D., you’re falling behind. You’re starting to get bad. Don’t do that to yourself.’ And he snapped back and really became himself again.”
The music on 3-Way Tie is more eclectic than ever: there are odd psychedelic interludes, tidbits of Spanish guitar, visionary rap & roll, a spoken word piece, Latin rhythms, a literally telephoned-in track, and a great straightforward rocker (“Courage”). The politics are clear, the tips of the hat copious, the band chemistry obvious.
But 3-Way Tie suffers from a split personality. Boon’s numbers are strongly political: “The Price of Paradise,” besides featuring some of Boon’s best singing, is a stinging indictment of the Vietnam War and the eerie similarities with the way the U.S. seemed to be backing into confrontations in Latin America. On “The Big Stick” he rails, “This is what I’m singing about / The race war that America supports,” singing over the song’s jaunty acoustic swing. But the lyrics for Watt’s songs, written by his girlfriend, Black Flag’s Kira Roessler, largely avoided politics in favor of more abstract realms.
The whole project is a bit sluggish and underdeveloped. “But you know what?” Watt says. “We were doing the windup to come back.” They were just starting to make enough money to quit their day jobs, which meant they could concentrate on their music more than ever. “I think we were on to a new style,” Watt says. “The next album was going to be very adventurous.”
Sadly, they never got the chance to deliver it.
In late December, a few days after returning from the R.E.M. tour, the Minutemen were on the verge of a great personal triumph. Their hero Richard Meltzer was set to record with them and had given Watt ten lyrics to write music to. Watt came over to Boon’s house to discuss the record and found his friend sitting in a beanbag chair, bright red with fever. Boon said he was heading to Arizona that night to visit his girlfriend’s folks for the holidays. Watt said he looked too sick to go. Boon said not to worry—his girlfriend would drive the van and he’d lie in the back.
That same night Watt was giving a friend a ride home after a show in Hollywood when he passed a street called Willoughby. “And it was really weird—there’s this Twilight Zone where [the key phrase is] ‘Next stop, Willoughby!’ And the guy jumps off the train [and dies]—Willoughby’s no real town. I think it’s an undertaker’s service…. Well, when I passed that street Willoughby, I got this huge old chill.”
Watt’s phone rang early the following morning: December 23, 1985. It was D. Boon’s dad. Boon’s girlfriend had been driving the band’s tour van, her sister in the passenger seat and a feverish Boon sleeping in the back. At around four in the morning, Boon’s girlfriend fell asleep at the wheel. The van crashed and flipped; Boon was thrown out the back door and broke his neck. He died instantly. It was at about the same time Watt had passed Willoughby, back in California, and shuddered. Years later he would still wonder if he hadn’t somehow felt D. Boon die.
All that Watt could think was, how? He flashed back to an image of his childhood friend, strong as an ox, playing football back in Peck Park. D. Boon wasn’t quick, but it took two or three guys to tackle him. “He just seemed unkillable,” Watt says, shaking his head in disbelief. “He just did.”
“That was the worst, that was the worst,” Watt says. “No more of him. No more Minutemen. I had really come to lean on him. I was numb. I was weirded out. It was hard for me. Boy, that was hard. I miss him.”
D. Boon was buried in Green Hills Memorial Park in San Pedro, right across the street from where Watt grew up.
The next night Watt had a dream about Boon, the most vivid he’d ever had about his friend. The two were alone in a bank lobby covered floor to ceiling in orange carpet. “I’m ten feet away from him and he’s studying this big rectangular painting and it’s got like six or seven Abe Lincolns in it and they’re like Peter Max Abe Lincoln heads with the big stovepipe hat and the beard, but in psychedelic colors,” says Watt. “And I’m standing back there and I’m thinking, ‘This is so fucked up, I have to tell him he’s dead and he can’t be here anymore.’ And there was this horrible dilemma. And I wake up.”
“I’ve never been able to figure that dream out. But I do know why I had to tell him he was dead—because D. Boon was such a fucking fierce dude, I don’t think he knew he was dead. In a weird way, he did not know. I don’t think you know you’re dead; I think it’s like the equator—somebody has to tell you you’ve crossed it.”
The indie community was staggered by the tragedy, too. For many, it was one of those things where you remember where you were when you heard the news.
D. Boon’s death broke up one of the last major indie bands who harbored the idealism of earlier times and carried it into the new music. The new crop of musicians was younger and had essentially never known a world without punk rock; maybe they detested their ex-hippie parents’ hypocrisy and had grown cynical. After a friend called Big Black leader Steve Albini to break the news, Albini opened up his diary. “So there’s nobody left who’s been doing it since the beginning and doing it all the way right,” he wrote. “Fuck. It’s like Buddy Holly or something. Sure it’s kind of pathetic to get all worked up over it but hell, they meant it, and that means something to me…. Man, what do we do now?”
D. BOON HANDING OUT BALLOTS FOR THEIR UPCOMING LIVE ALBUM AT A SHOW IN CHICAGO, 1985.
GAIL BUTENSKY
3-Way Tie (for Last) had included a mail-in ballot for fans to vote on which live tracks they wanted on an upcoming album, tentatively titled “Three Dudes, Six Sides, Half Studio, Half Live.” So while the nation reeled in horror from the explosion of the Challenger shuttle, Watt grieved for his friend and cobbled together Ballot Result from soundboard tapes, radio shows, rehearsal tapes, studio outtakes, and even fans’ live bootlegs.
In early 1985, when Sonic Youth played their first L.A. show, the band’s Thurston Moore introduced himself to Watt. “He knew about Richard Hell and New York Dolls and Johnny Thunders,” Watt says, “and I just listened to him spieling.” Moore remembers it differently: “He approached us and he was this really vociferous kind of guy,” he says. “He had brought the album co
vers of [Sonic Youth’s] Confusion Is Sex and the first album, and he was throwing them in front of us and having us sign them and stuff. I was like, ‘This is insane—Mike Watt [is asking us for our autographs].’ ” (Watt later wrote a song about the eventful meeting, “Me and You, Rememberin’ ” for the fIREHOSE album If’n.)
Moore and the rest of Sonic Youth were intensely interested in networking. “That’s totally what it was about,” Watt says. “And Thurston knew that. It was all about communications.”
About a year later Watt found himself on the East Coast, still distraught over Boon’s death, and Moore and Sonic Youth bassist Kim Gordon had him stay at their place on the Lower East Side. Although Watt hadn’t picked up a bass since his friend died, they persuaded him to play on a track they were recording, Sonic Youth guitarist Lee Ranaldo’s cataclysmic “In the Kingdom #19” (which was, ironically, about a car crash). “It was so weird,” Watt says of the experience. “But then I started figuring out that everything they do is weird—they have the weird tunings, the guitars. I thought we were very outrageous and adventurous, but we were like ol’ Chuck Berry compared to their stuff.”
After D. Boon died, Watt found it difficult to run New Alliance by himself and finally sold it to Greg Ginn in 1986. He and Hurley formed a new band called fIREHOSE with guitarist Ed Crawford, a Minutemen fan who traveled all the way from Ohio to convince Watt to start playing again. Their SST debut did well on college radio and the band eventually signed with Columbia Records. George Hurley kicked around in various bands after the demise of fIREHOSE; in the Nineties he drummed with the legendary experimental band Red Krayola. Watt, still a beloved, respected, and hardworking figure on the underground scene, is currently at work on his third solo album for Columbia. He still jams econo.
Although Watt doesn’t think they changed very many minds politically, he’s sure the Minutemen were successful at whatever they tried. They never compromised their music (well, maybe once…) and exposed a lot of people to a fairly difficult vision. They rocked in a way that no one else had done before (or since). They inspired countless bands. “We weren’t a lot of hot air—we almost did everything we set out to do,” Watt says. “And in some ways it’s because we kept our sights small. We’re not going to be the biggest band—we’re going to put on little shows, put out a little magazine, have a little label. We made it small enough that we could do it. And we held down jobs, paid our rent, and made a living.
“I just hope that maybe some people will read about us and see how we weren’t manufactured,” Watt says, “that we were just three dudes from Pedro and that maybe they could do the same thing themselves.”
CHAPTER 3
MISSION OF BURMA
“MISSION OF BURMA PLAYED A NOISILY AGGRESSIVE BRAND OF GUITAR POP THAT WAS ALWAYS REAL FUCKIN’ CLOSE TO JUST-WHAT-THE-DOCTOR-ORDERED, BUT MOST OF THE TIME IT SEEMED LIKE NOBODY CARED. WHY? WELL, PEOPLE ARE ASSHOLES, I GUESS.”
—BYRON COLEY AND JIMMY JOHNSON, FORCED EXPOSURE, 1985
Mission of Burma’s only sin was bad timing—the support system that would spring up for underground bands later in the decade largely didn’t exist yet. No matter how brilliant Mission of Burma was, nationally there were relatively few clubs they could play, few radio stations to air their music, few magazines to write about it, and few stores to sell it. And yet what little network that existed was able to sustain the band for several years, until their bittersweet end.
Mission of Burma’s determination against the odds was not lost on the generations of indie bands who followed. Nor was their music. Mission of Burma took elements of free jazz, psychedelia, and experimental music and injected them into often anthemic punk rock. It was, in the words of one critic, “avant-garde music you could shake your fist to,” a concept Sonic Youth would take to greater commercial heights a few short years later. And in the meantime, bands like Hüsker Dü and R.E.M. were also listening to the band’s bracing amalgam of power, brains, and mystery.
In fact, mystery was a great deal of Burma’s strange allure. “Reading between the lines, there’s something there that’s unsettling,” says drummer Peter Prescott. “You couldn’t put your finger on us sometimes. I think there’s nothing that galls people more than when they say, ‘Just entertain me, don’t make me work for this.’ Our intent, I don’t think, was to make people work, but that’s the way it came out.”
Incorporating the avant-rock of underground Cleveland bands like Pere Ubu, the angular slash-and-burn of the English post-punks, the trancey repetition of German bands like Can and Neu, and the aggressive propulsion of the Ramones, Mission of Burma “invented a new way to snarl,” wrote critic Rob Sheffield, “the sound that American indie bands have been tinkering with ever since.”
Clint Conley grew up in tony Darien, Connecticut. An avid music hound, he explored everything from the cutting-edge jazz of Ornette Coleman to the proto-punk New York Dolls. He moved to Boston in the fall of ’77 to found a quirky, cerebral art-rock band called Moving Parts.
Roger Miller was born and raised in Ann Arbor, Michigan, just in time to see local bands like the Stooges and the MC5. He began playing rock music not long after the British Invasion peaked—he was fourteen—and with his two brothers soon formed Sproton Layer, an amazing band that sounded like Syd Barrett fronting Cream. (SST later released a Sproton Layer album.) Miller later explored free jazz, then pursued a music degree, studying piano and composition, but never got his diploma.
Miller had begun experiencing tinnitus, a persistent ringing in his ears due to excessive noise exposure, back in Ann Arbor. He moved to Boston in early 1978 and, realizing he’d injured his ears, planned on avoiding rock entirely by making music with prepared piano and tape loops. But when he saw Moving Parts’ ad for someone who could play rock and read music, he couldn’t resist.
At the time anything seemed possible; simplistic but powerful punk groups like the Ramones, Dead Boys, and Sex Pistols had cleared away rock’s deadwood, opening a path for countless new bands. “I knew this would be my last chance to be part of a revolution,” Miller says. “In the Seventies, you couldn’t do anything because there was no revolution. But in the immediate post-punk era, all of a sudden everything was wide open.”
Miller joined Moving Parts that March, but the band would not last much longer. Keyboardist Eric Lindgren wrote complex music, while Miller and Conley, although accomplished musicians, noticed they both preferred the simple pleasure of banging on a basic E chord at top volume. They had also hit it off personally, starting the moment Miller arrived for the Moving Parts audition and, hearing the Ramones on the stereo, started doing a punky dance. “And then Clint came out of the kitchen and he was doing the same dance,” says Miller. “Right then, I knew, ‘This is cool, I’m tight with this guy.’ ”
With his long hair, beret, clove cigarettes, and trademark bottle green velvet coat straight out of early Pink Floyd, Miller clung to his Sixties roots, so much so that Conley nicknamed him “Lovebead.” “He was a very ‘everything’s groovy’ kind of guy, just open to any and all ideas,” Conley says of Miller.
Miller and Conley left Moving Parts later that year and began auditioning drummers. Often they’d screen applicants by blasting records of “out” music like Sun Ra, the No New York no wave compilation, and James Brown until, Miller says, “finally the guy left.”
Eventually Peter Prescott asked for an audition. He’d cut his musical teeth on Seventies dinosaurs like Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, and Pink Floyd but eventually saw the light with Eno, Television, and the Ramones. Prescott had played in a band called the Molls, which emulated genteel Seventies English art bands like King Crimson and Roxy Music; the lead singer played bassoon. Then Prescott saw Moving Parts. “I liked them,” Prescott says. “But I loved Clint and Roger. Something about them was, like, pretty compelling.”
The feeling was mutual. “He played unusually,” Conley says of Prescott. “He played upside-down beats.” They tried out the ex-Molls drummer three
times before asking him to join in February ’79.
The trio went nameless until one day Conley was walking around New York’s diplomatic district and saw a plaque on a building that read “Mission of Burma.” Conley liked it—“It was sort of murky and disturbing,” he says. Mission of Burma’s first show was on April Fools’ Day 1979 at the Modern Theatre in Boston, a funky, decrepit old movie house. The show featured only bands making their debut; Boston hipsters whole-heartedly supported local music and the show was respectably filled.
Some time that summer, Martin Swope began his association with the band. Swope, a self-described “retiring guy,” was a very cerebral person, slight of build and studious of appearance. “It would always be very hard to picture him being very physical with an instrument on a stage,” Prescott says. “But he enjoyed doing sound.”
Swope had known Miller back in Ann Arbor; influenced by avant-garde composers such as John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen, they’d cowritten some compositions for piano and tape loops. Swope had come out to Boston and moved in with Miller and Conley around the time Mission of Burma was forming. One day Miller came up with a song called “New Disco” that seemed to demand a tape loop. “And that,” Miller says, “was kind of the start of it.”
Swope began playing tape loops over a few songs in the band’s set. And once he started doing that, it made sense for him to do the band’s live sound, too. He began working loops into more and more songs until they became a distinctive element of the band’s sound. “Then,” says Conley with mock indignance, “he started showing up on our album covers!”
During the show, from his spot at the mixing board out in the club, Swope would record a few seconds of sound from a particular instrument onto a tape loop, manipulate it, and send the signal out into the PA. Nothing was prerecorded; he did it all on the fly. This was particularly difficult with tape and not a sampler, which hadn’t been invented yet. On “Mica,” for instance, Swope recorded the vocal and overdubbed it onto itself several times, then manually spun the tape very fast so it sounded like a demonic munchkin. A lot of people never knew about Swope’s contribution and were mystified by how the musicians onstage could wring such amazing phantom sounds from their instruments.
Our Band Could Be Your Life Page 12