Secret History of Rock. The Most Influential Bands You've Never Heard (56 page)

Michael Franti, Spearhead:

I always admired the fact that he was doing things for himself, and kept that spirit alive. He tries to balance making music that people want to listen to and music that’s saying something.

After the DK’s breakup, Biafra appeared on talk shows, gave lectures about his court battle, and recorded a number of spoken-word albums on that and other subjects. In addition, he has continued to make music with a variety of groups – including members of Ministry (as Lard), D.O.A., NoMeansNo, and Mojo Nixon – and to run Alternative Tentacles. Both Klaus Flouride and D. H. Peligro made solo records, while East Bay Ray plays in a band called Candy ASS.

DISCOGRAPHY

Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables
(Alternative Tentacles, 1980); a classic debut, containing early singles
California über alles
and
Holiday in Cambodia
.

In God We Trust, Inc.
EP (Alternative Tentacles, 1981); a faster, more hardcore eight-song collection included on the CD version of
Plastic Surgery Disasters
.

Plastic Surgery Disasters
(Alternative Tentacles, 1982); a less successful blend of hardcore with outside styles.

Frankenchrist
(Alternative Tentacles, 1985); originally containing the H.R. Giger artwork that spurred an obscenity trial, this is the DKs’ best latter-day record.

Bedtime for Democracy
(Alternative Tentacles, 1986); a studio finale with typically topical songs, though lacking the color of earlier records.

Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death
(Alternative Tentacles, 1987); a posthumous collection of their best singles and less-than-essential rarities.

TRIBUTE: Various Artists,
Virus 100
(Alternative Tentacles, 1992); for AT’s 100
^th
release, artists such as L7, Kramer, Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, and Mojo Nixon record Dead Kennedys’ songs.

THE MINUTEMEN

Mike Watt, Minutemen:

“In the late ‘80s, early ‘90s I thought music had sunk pretty low. But hearing Superchunk, I heard our whole scene in them, and I realized that this thing will never die.”

In the SST dynasty that produced the greatest documents of ‘80s hardcore,
Black Flag
ruled the roost while the Minutemen were always next in line for the throne. In many ways, though, the Minutemen were American punk’s most endearing band, hardcore’s great populists. Their intimate sound and nonflashy appearance made them favorites of the “regular guy” punks drawn into the music not by its sense of danger or spectacle, but rather by the camaraderie of the scene. The Minutemen came across as the kind of band you wanted to be friends with. After all, the band always functioned as an extension of its members’ friendships.

Doug Martsch, Built to Spill:

It could be said the Minutemen were the most important band ever. In so many ways they were perfect to me. They were the band I thought all punk bands were like. They seemed like completely decent people who understood priorities the way I did, and the importance of love. They were totally people I wanted to know.

Though the Minutemen didn’t actually form until 1979, their roots go back to 1970, the year 12-year-olds Dennes Dale (D.) Boon and Mike Watt met on a playground in San Pedro, the blue-collar port town on the Los Angeles harbor. In a case of mistaken identity, D. Boon pounced down from a tree onto Watt – a military brat who’d recently moved to town – and soon they were best friends. Years later, when D.’s mom bought her son a guitar to keep him off San Pedro’s increasingly dangerous streets, she arranged for Mike to take up the bass. Soon the two were learning Creedence Clearwater Revival songs off records.

In high school, Mike and D. started hearing about a new music called “punk,” and when they discovered punk was not much different than the amateurish guitar rock they’d been playing at home, it became clear that their music could be more than something to pass the time. After graduating in 1976, they started checking out the Hollywood punk scene that was developing around bands like the Weirdos and the
Germs
, where they found misfit kids like themselves transforming the accepted notions of rock. Inspired and empowered, Boon and Watt decided to form a band.

With their friend Martin Tamburovich as singer and San Pedro High classmate George Hurley on drums, Boon and Watt formed the Reactionaries. Though Hurley was wary of punk (as Watt explains, “In Pedro, ‘punk’ was what you called someone who let some guy fuck him in jail for cigarettes”) he was quick to pick up on the energy. As punk began to reach outlying towns like San Pedro, the group identified with the populism of hardcore bands like
Black Flag
, which was very different from Hollywood punk’s insularity. They decided to apply democratic principles to everything they did and got rid of their singer, who they felt took too much of the limelight and didn’t contribute enough musically. As a trio, they renamed themselves the Minutemen to reflect the length of their songs.

Scott Kanriberg, Pavement:

Minutemen were a band for the masses. They should’ve been huge. I saw them like ten times in high school. They made you feel like yelling – yelling anything they said to yell. They had passion and great songs, too. We had a Minutemen party on the tour bus a couple weeks ago where we listened to
Ballot Result
. It was so fun, we hadn’t heard it in so long. We were just bouncing off the walls.

After opening for
Black Flag
, the Minutemen were invited in early 1980 to release a record on
Black Flag
’s SST label; they made
Paranoid Time
in one day for $300. With seven songs in less than seven minutes, the single perfectly delineated the Minutemen’s early approach: short bursts of energy, with jerky riffs and politically charged haiku lyrics. The following year’s debut album
The Punch Line
made even more clear that while the band was hardcore in spirit and association, the music eschewed overpowering guitar chords for a sound that better expressed the equality of the band’s three members.

Boon’s guitar combined punk’s speed with the angularity of
Captain Beefheart
, while it respected the other instruments’ territory by staying in treble range and never getting too rhythmic. As Watt explains, “D. Boon was very political about the music. He wanted three fiefdoms, and nobody in the way. He thought the heavy guitar bogarted the bass.” Watt’s bass, in turn, held its own with a springy, melodic style. With the sonic landscape divided, and Watt and Boon sharing vocals, the trio created an amazingly dynamic sound that was sometimes labeled “jazz-punk.”

Kristin Hersh, Throwing Muses:

D. Boon’s guitar style was influential in showing you didn’t have to take up so much space. If you have a great rhythm section the song will keep going.

Eric Wilson, Sublime:

I’d never heard anybody play bass like Mike Watt before. He’d just go off. He wouldn’t be doing the slap thing – I hated how everyone was into slap bass – Mike Watt would just lay into it with his fingers, playing the real shit. I pretty much picked up that style listening to him.

With an EP on the Thermidor label and the formation of their own New Alliance Records, the Minutemen asserted an identity apart from SST. They returned, though, for
What Makes a Man Start Fires?
and the
Buzz or Howl under the Influence of Heat
EP, both of which retained the group’s character while pushing them into new stylistic territory. In 1984, as labelmates
Hüsker Dü
offered their definitive musical statement with the double album Zen Arcade, the Minutemen set about creating a similarly sprawling and powerful work. The result, a 75-minute 46-song opus called
Double Nickles on the Dime
, was the ultimate expression of the band’s personality. Political and personal, anthemic and jokey, acoustic and psychedelic, the record touched on styles from garage and country rock to moody avant jazz and at the same time was a completely unified slice of San Pedro no wave funk.

Lou Barlow, Sebadoh / Folk Implosion:

They were part of that hardcore proto-indie thing, when hardcore could mean anything. It had nothing to do with the mainstream, just with people discovering their own style, making the most of what they had and stretching the boundaries of their influences in a way that wasn’t precious or pretentious or condescending. As far as full-bodied inspiration, the Minutemen were totally it for me.

In 1985, the Minutemen released
Project: Mersh
, a self-parody of a band on the verge of going commercial (or “mersh”). But with arrangements of horns, synths, backing vocals, fadeouts, and slower tempos, the EP veered dangerously close to becoming everything it ridiculed. After a tour with R.E.M. offered another taste of where greater accessibility might lead them, the group’s
3-Way Tie (For Last)
indicated a more pop-oriented approach was not necessarily a joke. Within days of the album’s release, though, questions whether the Minutemen were destined for the mainstream became irrelevant. D. Boon’s van crashed in the Arizona desert, and he died at age 27. The Minutemen were suddenly a thing of the past.

Jeff Tweedy, Wilco:

I was really a huge fan. I feel lucky that I got to see them before D. Boon died. Those records meant a lot to me and I think early Uncle Tupelo [Tweedy’s first band] took a lot from the Minutemen.

After D.’s death, Watt and Hurley remained largely inactive (though Watt was part of Sonic Youth’s Ciccone Youth project), until a devoted fan named Ed Crawford (Edfromohio) convinced them to form fIREHOSE with him. Though the group made a number of memorable albums before disbanding in 1994, they remained in the shadow of the Minutemen. Hurley has since played part-time with the
Red Krayola
and other groups, while Watt continued his side project DOS with then-wife (and former
Black Flag
bassist) Kira.

Watt’s 1995 solo album, Ball – Hog or Tugboat? – which featured appearances by members of Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soul Asylum, Sonic Youth, the Beastie Boys, Dinosaur Jr., Screaming Trees, and Geraldine Fibbers – underscored the Minutemen’s influence on ‘80s rock. More recently, Watt toured as a member of Porno for Pyros and released a “punk opera,” Contemplating the Engine Room, that brings his career full circle. A celebration of three sailors’ camaraderie, it’s an obvious allegory for the Minutemen. Of Boon (cast as “the boilerman”), Watt sings, “I’m a lucky man, to know that man / a hell of a man, the boilerman.”

David Yow, Jesus Lizard / Scratch Acid:

It seemed like jazz-punk, all the syncopation and odd times were influential. I know with [Yow’s first band] Scratch Acid, [drummer] Rey Washam had a truckload of respect for George Hurley. Their song
Cut
drove me fucking nuts. I remember the Minutemen played Tacoland in San Antonio – this really small place with a low stage – and I was really drunk, right in Mike Watt’s face all night going, “PLAY
CUT
! PLAY
CUT
! PLAY
CUT
!” I felt like a fool when I found out what I’d done. I talked to Mike Watt years later and he remembered some stupid little idiot in his face in San Antonio.

DISCOGRAPHY

Paranoid Time
EP
(SST, 1980)
; the band’s seven-song-in-under-seven-minutes burst of passion.

The Punch Line
(SST, 1981)
; a mini-album along the lines of the debut.

Bean Spill
EP
(Thermidor, 1982)
, a five-song extended single.

What Makes a Man Start Fires?
(SST, 1982)
; the album where the Minutemen begin to stretch out songs and hone their eclectic sound.

Buzz or Howl under the Influence of Heat
EP
(SST, 1983)
; an eight-song collection that shows the band’s expanded sound.

Double Nickels on the Dime
(SST, 1984)
; a sprawling masterpiece of a double record that captures everything great about the Minutemen.

The Politics of Time
(New Alliance, 1984)
; a compilation of outtakes and obscure early recordings.

My First Bells 1980-1983
(SST cassette, 1985)
; collects everything up through
What Makes a Man Start Fires?

Project: Mersh
EP
(SST, 1985)
; a six-song, tongue-in-cheek stab at writing mainstream rock songs.

3-Way Tie (For Last)
(SST, 1985)
; a final studio album that further shifts the band toward accessibility.

(w/
Black Flag
)
Minute
/
Flag
EP
(SST, 1986)
; a mostly instrumental four-song collaboration featuring the members of
Black Flag
.

Ballot Result
(SST, 1987)
; a double live album whose tracks were voted on by fans.

Post-Mersh, Vols. 1-3
(SST, 1987)
; the first volume collects
The Punch Line
and
What Makes a Man Start Fires?
; the second includes
Buzz or Howl
and
Project Mersh
; while the third compiles
Paranoid Time
, the
Joy
single,
Bean Spill
,
The Politics of Time
, and
Tour Spiel
.

TRIBUTE: Various Artists,
Our Band Could Be Your Life
(Little Brother, 1994)
; features Tsunami, Meat Puppets, Dos, Jawbox, and members of the Beastie Boys, Sebadoh, and Sonic Youth doing Minutemen songs.