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Inspired by his San Pedro working-class roots, punk rock hero Mike Watt calls his bass a "thunder broom" and uses other working man terms to describe what he does. "What are we? We’re working people. We’re gonna work at this!" he said of his life's work. And in the new collection of his Minutemen-era lyrics called Spiels Of A Minuteman, Watt’s life’s work is laid bare. Watt’s particular blend of political righteousness, personal searching and free thinking is documented in the book, which has the text in English and French in the same volume. "A book, in a way, is something physical of those days," Watt said. "There’s no record of it really, no tombstone, except these objects like records and books." Watt said the band—which ended with guitarist/singer D. Boon’s death in 1985—wasn’t concerned with documenting itself historically. "In a lot of ways, we thought we were doing it for our own little sub-culture. We didn’t know how long it was going to last. I would never have imagined the punk scene would have morphed and changed into what it did. It seemed like it was this great enabler, this fire that you could glaze your pots with as fast as you could spin them on the wheel. But you didn’t know how long it was going to last, so you didn’t think so much about the future. Or about the past, either. It was really an in-the-moment thing," Watt said. "It was trippy to put those words down. It has been so many years. In fact some of them I couldn’t even remember, they were never recorded," Watt said. "That was the thing about the Minutemen. We were so much in the moment we didn’t think about that stuff. We didn’t have a culture to fall back on. It was being made as we did it. Our friends in Black Flag and the Meat Puppets and Hüsker Dü, they were interested in doing gigs and making music—creating. We were caught up in that, too." Some of that was dictated by the punk rock economy of the time, which was fueled by relentless touring and equally prolific recording. The purpose of the records, Watt said, was to bring people to shows. "Everything was based on trying to bring people to gigs. It’s much different than touring to support a record. It’s the other way around," Watt said.
The lyrics are a time capsule into the bleak worldview of the Reagan era. "Sometimes it could just be questions, or a rant—‘Working men are pissed,’ you know—just kind of add it up here, a little bit," Watt said. "It never felt forced coming out of us. It never felt like a theatrical move. "I would also sing about little torments in my mind," Watt said. "I guess I’m still singing about torments in my mind, but it was a younger mind. It’s that whole heal myself—or somebody help me heal myself—kind of thing." Some of the verses draw inspiration from some of the other great political and artistic movements of the 20th century. "(Punk rock artist) Raymond Pettibon taught me about Dada and Surrealists and Futurists, these movements that were like punk movements but 80 years earlier. This had influence on me too, the way they wrote words," Watt said. It’s that connection to those movements that runs like a thread between Watt’s work and the work of the book’s Quebecois publishing house, L’oie de Caravan. "My big inspiration for this were the Surrealists: I dig their poetry and even more their idea that poetry was much more important than literature, that poetry was to be found everywhere," said Benoît Chaput, who founded the imprint and translated the text into French. "Actually in the early ’80s, I discovered punk music pretty much at the same time that I discovered Surrealism and the Situationists. So all this for me was coming out of an interest for a different life, for a life invested with something richer and crazier—a poetry I guess!" Early on, Chaput said, he was struck by the richness of the Minutemen’s lyrics. So a few years ago, after seeing one of Watt’s shows, he e-mailed the bass player and asked him if he’d be interested in doing a book. "From the start the project was to make it bilingual, French-English, because I see myself as a mainly Francophone publisher," Chaput said, adding that Watt was immediately interested, but a protracted illness delayed the project. Spiels Of A Minuteman also features a tour diary of the band’s first European hitch. It was Watt’s first tour diary—a practice he follows religiously now. In it, he chronicles the resistance the band received from people who didn’t think the Minutemen fit in to the proper punk aesthetic. "In those days there were a lot of confrontations—people throwing shit on you. There was stuff I left out in that diary that was incredible. At a gig in Vienna, they were throwing bags of shit, bags of puke, used rubbers. Somebody threw a glass full of piss at D. Boon’s face in Geneva," Watt said. Those experiences forced a level of self-confidence that’s evident throughout. When compared to Watt’s voluminous tour diaries that are posted on his Web site (www.hootpage.com), the bassist seems a lot more self-confident but perhaps a bit less wise. "You would build in this kind of self-confidence because you were getting attacked a lot. What do you do? Do you bend to their wishes and play what they want to hear, or do you stick to your guns? We ended up sticking to our guns," Watt said.
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—Brian J. Bowe June 2003 |
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Photo by Robert Matheu
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