Mike Watt Interviewed

If you are in Los Angeles and take the 110 Freeway South past downtown, you will more than likely come to a point on the highway where the Mercedes Benz's turn into late model Chevys. Thirty miles south of LA is San Pedro, a Navy town that is home to among other things, a giant smoke stack welcoming you to the city, the embarking point for expensive cruise ships like Carnival Cruise Lines, and the notorious Terminal Island prison just off the mainland.

But go deeper into San Pedro, past nautical storefronts with names like the Rusty Hook and Seven Seas Tropical Fish, and you’ll find the home of Mike Watt, a monster on the bass and one of the few old school punk rockers who remain true to their school. Watt’s famous white Ford Econoline touring van sits in his driveway like a boat dry-docked just a few miles from the harbor.

As the founding member of the legendary Minutemen and fIREHOSE, Mike Watt has been jamming econo* on his thunder stick* since 1981. Of late, Watt's boom tube* has been heard sidemousing* for Porno for Pyros, J. Mascis and the Fog, the Wylde Ratts (which includes Scott Asheton of The Stooges & Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth), Banyan (a rotating cast of musicians anchored by Stephen Perkins from Jane’s Addiction/Porno For Pyros), Hell-Ride (with Perkins & Peter Distefano of Porno for Pyros), and dos (a dual-bass outfit with Watt and his ex-wife Kira Roessler, formerly of Black Flag), to name but a few. The most high profile of these has seen Watt taking the place of the late Dave Alexander in the newly reformed Stooges. And in the middle of all this activity, he’s managed to carve out a respectable career as a solo performer (backed of late by The Secondmen), with two CDs to his name (1995’s Ball-Hog or Tugboat? and 1997’s Contemplating the Engine Room, both on Columbia) and a third, a punk rock opera based on Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy and titled The Secondman’s Middle Stand, out August 24, 2004 (on Columbia/Red Ink).

Watt is as interesting a linguist as he is a musician. He peppers his conversation with “Pedro-speak” (*see our Watt-to-English sidebar), a mishmash of butchered English, Navy jargon and musician lingo. In the course of a single conversation, Watt will reference Noam Chomsky and Darby Crash and then explain his motivation for participating in Pedro’s annual Polar Bear Run, a New Year’s Day dip in the Pacific Ocean.

Mike Watt: For New Year’s Eve, I did my radio show. I have a radio show now.

Joshua Mills: What station?

Mike: It’s an Internet show. There’s a link for it on my web page. I had a pirate radio show for two years in Silver Lake (KBLT). But that got shut down. So the Internet stuff…I do it basically the same way. A friend, brother Matt from down here in Pedro, spins records, DJs—two turntables, CD players, a little deck and I got a Mac. He’s got a Mac too, so we go right to the hard disc for three hours and I do it basically like I did it live on the air on KBLT. But we go to the hard disc, I burn a few discs and I have a friend up in Portland who runs a company doing website hosting and he streams it from there. So if you go to the Hootpage (Watt’s home page), I got a link to it right there. They’re at Siteworks. Go there, there’s links you click on and you can plug the link into a streamer, like iTunes, Winamp or RealAudio or you click on the thing and if you haven’t installed it, it pops up and it’ll play. So in a way, even though I am not live on the air, I reach a lot more people because you had to be in Silver Lake to get KBLT. You couldn’t even get it in Pedro. It was strange. They asked me to have a show there. I wasn’t familiar with Silver Lake but I thought that was very nice of them. I thought it was a station for their community. Basically, I’d bring my records.

Watt at Puter

Josh: You’d bring them all in?

Mike: No, not all of them. But every week I’d bring a bunch. I got records in the seventies, early eighties and then later on people gave me the CDs, right? I haven’t really bought records but from my old collection, a lot of the records have stories. I can remember back to what I was doing at the time and I spiel* too. It’s not just the top of the head stuff but it’s going down memory lane. And how it relates to stuff going on today.

Josh: And how did the Polar Bear Run come about?

Mike: Well, they’ve had it for fifty years here (in San Pedro) and I’ve known about it for a long time but never actually thought of doing it until that night I was doing the radio show. It was in the paper so it came into my mind. I said to Brother Matt, “Brother Matt, I’m gonna do that tomorrow morning,” It was like two in the morning. I said “I’m gonna pop* early and I’m gonna go run.” You know, I got a car when I was 16.

I used to ride my bike a lot as a teenager and I stopped for 22 years. This guy was moving and he sold me his ten-speed for $5 and I end up writing the opera on the bike. It’s part of my ritual every morning. I’m not really a jock or an athlete or anything, but I am 44 and uh…there is a certain physicalness (laughs)…I mean, I feel a change in me. Like, gigs are really intense. When I’m playing a song, it’s okay. But when the song’s over, I kinda have to hold on to the amp. I feel a physicalness bearing on me. I have to do some things to head that off.

Josh: We all do.

Mike: I know I’m not alone. I mean, I’m middle-aged or whatever. So yeah, jumping in the water on New Years Day, even though it was Cali, it was still an eye-popper. It was a trip too, putting on the trunks. I don’t wear swim trunks much. In fact, these are trunks that were given to me by Perry [Farrell] when I helped out Porno for a tour and we went to Australia (Watt hands me a photo album). Here are some pictures. And they got me some trunks as we were in Australian and all this. It was in February, but that’s their summer. And I put these trunks on and they were gigantic (laughs)! I had to tie them up with rope. But I have to say that aside from the biking, the (illness) almost killed me.

Josh: I was going to ask you about that (Watt suffered from an abscess that burst in his perineum).

Mike: It’s been a couple years now. It was January of 2000. I laid right there (pointing to where I’m sitting) for 38 straight days of fever. I had this picture of D. Boon when he was five and I have a picture of my father. We were all here. All three of us. I was laying there, boiling, watching them, and saying, “Wait for me, I’m coming soon.” I was under the doctor’s care and they were feeding me these pills, but the fever would not go away. Well, the first week, I was with (Stephen) Perkins and Nels (Cline, guitar player) up in Utah. I was all white and dying every gig. So I came home and the doctor gave me these pills.

Josh: What did you think it was originally?

Mike: I had this battery of tests. “I got a pain in the groin area,” I was telling them. And this fucking thing was growing in me and growing in me to, you know, the size of a grapefruit. And it just blew up finally. The first day of February. When it blows up, it blows a hole in you and a gallon of pus come out of you (Watt screams).

Josh: Was this here?

Mike: Right here. Not on this couch, I just got this couch. My mother got me this couch. Weirdest birthday present I ever got. Usually she gets me Levis. My birthday is right around Christmas.

Josh: So mom thought it was time?

Mike: Yeah. Well, actually this furniture is from Melinda, my sister. She cuts hair for these old ladies on the hill and they donated, through her, these things.

Josh: Now, is she the one who took care of you?

Mike: Yeah, she absolutely did. She was a saint. Because after I blew the hole…okay…I go to the hospital. I mean, I have a hole in me.

Ears On—Watt At Work

Josh: I was gonna ask you, because I was reading this on the Hootpage…you were here alone. What did you do, call an ambulance?

Mike: I called Melinda. There was this hole and I was putting newspapers all over, it was all coming like tomato soup, it smelled like fucking death. I called Melinda and luckily she was home and I said, “You gotta get me to the emergency room.” I have bad knees, so I know about shock. I was going into shock and I said “Melinda, you gotta get me to the hospital.” So, I went into shock. I go in there and the doctor almost faints. He couldn’t believe I wasn’t under doctor’s care.

Josh: How long did they check you out?

Mike: This is about six or seven hours, and that’s just insane. I mean, these are young guys, right out of med school, doing their internships. There’s a big difference between the private doctors and new guys. Like in music, very passionate. So they got through all this talking and all these meetings with all these different opinions…[they thought it was] gangrene, flesh-eating bacteria, but the head of urology, this Dr. Hopkins guy, he thought it was a gigantic abscess. They can’t really tell where it’s from but they have to cut it.

Josh: They just have to get this thing out.

Mike: Yeah. They gave me really strong antibiotics. See, if it’s [a] staph [infection] and shit, you can get rid of it in one place and it will pop right up in another area, same as the flesh-eating bacteria. It’s just a matter of time. So they had to go inside of me and get all this fucking shit out. But the problem is, that all this time, I’m boiling away. I mean I had a water bottle and was literally melting bags of ice cubes. Believe me…I was on Percodan—it’s real strong, like heroin. The only thing that took the pain away was a hot bath. This thing was fucking growing in me! It hurt…whatever.

The problem was that my immune system was down. My body had stopped making red (blood) cells. My white (blood) count was over 40,000. I mean, you are supposed to be at 8-10,000. I had no red blood in me. So they had to put blood in me. It went right to work, you know? They cut on me and when they were getting me out of the surgery I had a high fever and they would lay me on a table, naked, for hours.

You know. When I had the fevers and shit, every couple of hours I would go into these shakes and yell (loud groan), because your nervous system is shot. You feel like you are freezing to death but you’re actually boiling. Fever’s a weird thing like that. That was the hugest thing, right after the surgery, my tongue felt like the size of a sleeping bag, lips all chapped up, because they couldn’t give me any water. I had to get through this shit and it broke. I had to give them permission to cut everything out. All these doctors, from all over the world [were examining me]—these Russian guys, Middle Eastern guys. One guy turns to me and says he needs permission to cut it (his genitalia) off me if they go in there. So I says, “Okay.” And he goes, “Wow, that’s amazing that you are so willing to do that.” And I’m thinking in my mind, “Well, what would you say, buddy?”

Josh: (exaggerated) No, no….

Mike: Nah, nah…I can’t fuck, so…I’ll die. So I was afraid to even look down for the first couple days. They were watching it real close, you know, all these IVs. So then they had to cut two more holes in me. It was very deep in me but it didn’t get to any organs. It was all in the soft flesh but there was tubes in the dick and I was pissing in the bag. Anyway, they put a hospital bed right here (in the apartment) because I had to have my fucking leg in the air. Literally, like, I had holes in me. I couldn’t heal over or it would get infected again. So I had to heal from the inside out. It’s like starting up the fucking lawnmower and loading the musket, basically. That meant Melinda had to pull out all the gauze…

Josh: Oh, so they thought…

Mike: You know, music and this big mustache, so I’m obviously a homosexual prostitute. I don’t know what they were thinking in their mind but I know this is the only avenue they are looking at. All of the treatment…even all the hope…they wrote me off. I don’t fucking know. I don’t know what the fuck they thought. Luckily, Doc Hopkins, I wrote a song for him…the new record’s all about the, uh…(laughs) this illness.

Josh: Is it?

Mike: Yeah it’s kind of mixed in with the Divine Comedy, with the Inferno. Yeah, the Inferno is the sickness, the Purgatory is the healing and the Paradise is getting to play my bass and riding my bike again. With these giant holes in me, I’m gonna need plastic surgery again, to close these shits, because Melinda was so clean, I was so paranoid, I even made Mindy wear a mask, for protection. I healed. My body closed and I didn’t need the surgery.

Josh: That’s amazing.

Mike: You know, I’m not all the way, the same…obviously, there are scars in there. It feels like there’s cardboard in there.

Josh: Now, you also had a near death experience in Sweden.

Mike: Yeah, that was in 2002.

Josh: What’s it like having two pretty intense…

Mike: That one was a lot quicker.

Josh: Did you know what was going on?

Mike: To get back to the sickness, because I had the tubes in me, I couldn’t play bass. I was all weak and I was like…it’s weird when you’re hurting so hard (moans)…anyway, I didn’t play for five months. When they get the tubes out of me, I start playing again, but I couldn’t—I couldn’t fucking play. I couldn’t make scales, I couldn’t make rhythm, and I was really scared. I started at thirteen with D. Boon and never stopped playing. Obviously, I’m not a natural. I started to play Stooges [songs] to try and get back, slowly. And I asked J. [Mascis] to do some gigs in New York City. Just to do Stooges songs. I had done this with (Stephen) Perkins. You know, there’s not a lot of chord changes in the Stooges.

Josh: But a lot of emotion.

Mike: So he helps me out in New York City and uh, it was a very emotional time for me, I just let all my feelings out and stuff. Not just with the Stooges, but with females and stuff. Coming close to dying like that…you know, you always think you have time. I know to a 20-year old, I seem old, but I’m only in my middle years. So J. asked me if I would tour with him, doing the Stooges. We did a bunch of shows, in the Unites States, in Asia, in Japan and the final ones in Europe. You know, I’ve done a lot of tours on my own, but I think it’s important to help out. Ya can’t learn everything being the boss. I’m kinda paranoid about seat belts and driving fast.

Josh: That’s understandable.

Mike: When we do a lot of driving, I’m the one who does all the driving but on this tour, I didn’t drive cuz I wanted to be the sidemouse*. In fact, you can read about this, I put diaries on the site. Anyway, sure enough--it was a freak how that happened--but we’re about 100 miles from Gottenberg in Sweden, where those riots were over the WTO…and we’re passing a vehicle and this other asshole passes at the exact same time. So we swerved to avoid him and of course the big van—their vans are narrower because of the roads—we lose control, flip, and luckily all the gear was in the back. It almost came through the metal compartment. But there was some shit with us, a Marshall head and a hardware case for the drums and of course in normal time, gravity is holding you on the floor but when you’re flying, I mean, that’s why they keep those baby seats because babies were literally killing people, they turned into projectiles. So I see J. fly….

Josh: Where were you in the van?

Watt in the studio: (l-r) Petra Haden, Pete Mazich, Watt, Jerry Trebotic

Mike: Me and J. are just sitting together in the back on the bench seats and he flies right in front of me while we are flipping. And another thing, we had lost the gas cap two weeks before and I didn’t know this and the tour manager did, but he didn’t tell anybody. There were sparks all over. It could have killed us but diesel doesn’t ignite. We almost went through the center divider cuz it’s just a cable! But luckily, she skidded on the side, slowing us down enough and nobody plows into us from behind. Oh man. But I wasn’t touched. I was barefoot and no shirt, I was sweaty.

Josh: Yeah, I saw the photos.

Mike: I got a little glass but not even a cut. The Swedish people were very nice. He (J.) cracked his back but not his spine, just a cracked vertebrae. The first thing he says is, “Are you alright?? I said. “Yeah,” and he says, “I can’t move,” because of his back. That was a lot quicker, I have to say, for looking down the barrel of the death gun. It was a little easier to handle because it happened so fast. The other one was so fucking slow motion, so slow motion. I gotta say though, up to the explosion [inside my body], in the emergency room, that was the worst, because I didn’t know. And the doctors didn’t seem worried, they wouldn’t look me in the eye. I remember one time when they were reading my test results, they bring me in the wait room and there is this paintin’ of a Mexican funeral and I said, “What the fuck is that about?” And the guy goes, “Don’t look at it!” (laughs) They wouldn’t make eye contact with me, so I didn’t have hope. You lose hope. I was thinking that maybe it was me, you know? They’re not worried, they’re giving me the pills and I’m feeling like I’m not getting any better and I’m going down.

Josh: I’m sure your perception is totally off, you’re not thinking right.

Mike: No fucking sleep! I didn’t sleep, even during the entire first few months. All time gets weird, when you are always inside. I gotta tell ya, Dr. Hopkins, that’s why I wrote a song for him because once he said, “We’re gonna fix you,” and they look you in the eye, cut me, did something, I had hope again—even though I was hurt like a little motherfuck.

Lemme tell you, I was only on morphine three days. It gave me these huge nightmares, and then motion sickness. It made me feel like a junkie even though I never really got into that. I was more into the methamphetamines. I was never on the opiate side. For sure, it was proof I could not handle the nights. I would have the most horrible nightmare and then the drug wouldn’t let you wake up (screams).

Josh: This sounds horrible.

Mike: So I said, “Fuck this shit.” I don’t care about the clicker machine, actually it’s called the IV push, it puts the morphine right in your blood. I don’t care, I’ll go with the pain. The other fucking thing is that the opiate constipates you. Yeah and that’s where all the action’s going! My asshole was the size of a strand of spaghetti (laughs). It won’t open because the fucking end of that [surgery] was right there! It’s not even voluntary. I’m pushing turds through a little fucking pinhole. So I said, “Fuck this.” I didn’t care. I went on codeine and it’s still an opiate but not as bad as the morphine. I even went off that and I was only on Advil (screams again) The pain was incredible. See, there’s tubes and plastic and I got a bladder infection [once] and there’s nothing like that. That was only eight days but that was like pissing fishhooks. I used to laugh at my sister as a teenager cuz they have a smaller urethra so they get bladder infections much easier. They’d be in the bathtub crying. I’d say, “Ah, you sissies!” but I would never do that again. They give you this shit called Pyridium that makes you piss bright orange but it’s also pieces of your fucking bladder! See, you’re using a piss bag, you know? And the pus is building up. So you have to force yourself to piss. I’m in the head and I’m on my toes and I’m screaming my brains out. There’s piss all over, there’s orange on the wall….you know, my neighbors, I had to tell them because they thought I was insane. I was just screaming my head off. There’s no way around it. I just had to go through this shit. Luckily, it was only eight days. They gave me the antibiotic and you know, but they wanted me off the antibiotic and it killed all the [infection] I had in me. I had so much in me that it got in my muscle tissue and gave me cramps, and so I had to have someone actually push it out of me. The whole thing was a nightmare but I can’t hate all doctors. They did try and save my life. It’s like anything else, mechanics, musicians…which guys are punching the clock…so this was a big lesson for me, dying almost quick with the van thing.

I mean, after J’s tour, I drove almost every mile—maybe 95%, 14,400 miles—I was almost killed a couple of times. A trailer comes into the lane in Pennsylvania and luckily I saw him coming and I eased up and I let him fishtail in and just miss us, with both hands on the wheel. In Utah, a tire comes off a semi, a big hunk, I straddle it and that mother fuckin’…it’s a scary thing. You just have to be aware the entire moment. You really have to play down the risks.

I went to this family thing and these three great-uncles…(he points to his lower leg) that’s the top of my fucking shins and I’d never seen this before and it blew me away. I said, ‘What do you call that? Knot-kneed or something?” Mine were so bad by my early twenties that I had to get them [replaced]…they’ve only fallen out twice since then, both on stage in front of people. Anyway, the vibrations on the wheel help me.

Josh: Really?

Mike: So I like driving for that reason. It used to help my grandfather too. He was a real prick though. He used to beat my pop. He (Watt’s dad) had dreams of killing him. But then later, in my grandfather’s golden years, my father’s the one who takes care of him and his brothers and sisters were like, “That guy was a motherfucker to you, what the fuck?” And my pop was like, “So what?”

So part of the driving, yeah, there’s a responsibility but actually the vibrations help me out. Also my mind, you know? It keeps me focused. You can say a lot of things about the United States but for sure, it’s big. There’s not a lot of that black ribbon in between towns. There’s hell rides* involved, especially if you live out in Cali.

Josh: That’s the hell ride.

Mike: It’s major to get across the deserts. It’s hard to sit and stuff. Like with Perry, he was doing three gigs a week. So I read Don Quixote, I mean, fuck, 700 pages. Lotta cats, I bring on tour, especially the first tour [they go on with Watt] can’t read (in the van.) They have to learn how to bounce. I like the vibrations in the vehicle. Yeah, it’s probably a control issue too. But it also gives me focus, gives me vibrations on the joints…it is my boat*, so I don’t have to worry about somebody else. I remember twice that Vince Meghrouni ran...I don’t like going lower than a quarter of a tank, cuz we had a boat and we sucked fucking rust out. It’s never the same after that. [It] Fuckin’ conks out on you, you have to blow the jets out. It’s a nightmare, so I don’t like going below a quarter of a tank. Vince twice did it. You get oblivious and you don’t watch the gauge. Then again, Vince is a super guy. He’s in the Pair of Pliers (Watt toured with drummer Meghrouni and guitarist Tom Watson on the “Searchin’ the Shed for Pliers” tour, which supported Contemplating the Engine Room) and he’s also in the Crew of the Flying Saucer where I tried the two drummer thing. That was a total nightmare.

Josh: Was that with Bob Lee (drummer for Backbiter and Clawhammer)?

Mike: No that was Mike Pruessner (and Meghrouni on the 1995 “Clam Blow” tour). It was right after the wrestling record (Ball-Hog or Tugboat?) and I went on tour with Primus and then on my own. With Nels Cline on guitar. Nels did some tour diaries about this and the two drummers hated each other. Georgie (George Hurley, Minutemen and fIREHOSE drummer) used to tell me I always gave him too much to do, which is probably correct. Drummers have all these things going. For me, the main drum for me is the kick drum. That’s my note. But like Georgie used to say, “The kick drum is just something I just put in between.” So I thought maybe I’ll have two drummers and put it back in focus, that way there’s no burden on the high hat. But it turned out, personality wise, these guys didn’t dig each other, so it was a nightmare. It was a good experiment. I do like trios.

Josh: But even before that you were doing this.

Mike: Yeah. My first side project, other than my band, cuz I was a Minuteman, right? I actually got near, at the end of the Minutemen, I tried my first side band and I still have it, it’s called dos, seventeen years I’ve had this band. But that was really my only side project until after the Minutemen, I tried a few things. Bootstrappers was Elliott’s idea. Crimony was my idea. I started trying…you know, I didn’t even know Edward (Ed Crawford, a.k.a edfromohio, guitarist and singer for fIREHOSE). He just found my number in the phone book. I didn’t know what I was really gonna do after D. Boon got killed. I kinda started playing bass again with the Sonics (Sonic Youth). They had me play on EVOL and then we did Ciccone Youth (a Madonna-inspired cover band featuring members of SY and Watt).

Josh: Yeah, The Whitey Album.

Mike: Then we did Crimony. [Ciccone Youth] actually did a single, “Into the Groove” on one side and “Burning Up” in the other. I’m not really part of The Whitey Album, they used my demo that I made in the apartment. I don’t play on any others. I used my little four-track mix which was quite a surprise. Then they had me do the liner notes years later. But, I’m not really part of that album except for that. But Ciccone Youth was the thing that helped me get back into music. Then Edward comes to my house and I do fIREHOSE.

Josh: So it is a true story that Ed found your name in the phone book?

Mike: I didn’t know you had to pay to be unlisted. So here I’m in the phone book and Edward just calls me from Ohio. He had a friend who was way into Double Nickels on the Dime (the seminal 1984 Minutemen album) and went to college. Edward went to college at Ohio State. And his friend told him about the Minutemen and about D. Boon getting killed. Edward was more into R.E.M. I also met a guy, Camper Van Beethoven came through town and that guy said that Watt doesn’t have a band and stuff?

From the Hoot Gallery Website

san pedro, ca - june 14, 1986
(from left) ed crawford, george hurley, mike watt
first gig ever - a benefit at the angel's gate cultural center

Josh: Dave Lowery?

Mike: The bass player, Victor [Krummenacher]. I met him a couple of times back then. We played with them.

Josh: He was also in the Monks of Doom

Mike: Oh yeah, that’s right. Anyway, this is what Edward tells me later. These guys, they give him the spark to actually call me. He says, “Yeah, I’m gonna come over.” (laughs) He was a trumpet player you know? I bought him his first amp, you know? I lived on 14th street, in a little one-room apartment. I made my desk out of some wood in the alley and I said, you can sleep under there. I thought he had so much chutzpah to come to my house. I thought it was natural. I was very afraid of somebody, you know, exaggerating it, sticking a pillow under their shirt and pretending they are D. Boon. How else would you play with Watt or something?

Edward was coming from such a different thing, even naturally, not trying to affect anything. Affecting D. Boon, a pose or anything. I thought, “This is kinda punk to me.” Maybe he’s not from the punk scene, so much but what he did was pretty balls-out. I mean, I don’t think I would have moved out to Ohio to start a band with this crazy man. And here Edward comes over to this guy’s house. And I told George, I played with him (Ed) a couple of months, and George was like, “What do you mean some guy just came to your house?”

I said, “Yeah.” I mean, he wrote a couple of songs the first couple of days he came to my house. All those songs from the first record (1986’s Ragin’ Full-On), they were Edward’s, and so it sparked. Edward helped me get back on the horse, more than the Sonics. Of course, all I really knew about music was doing it the Minutemen way. So in a way, fIREHOSE had a lot of Minutemen…

Josh: …influences?

Mike: Yeah. It was the only way we knew how to do it.

Josh: And two original members.

Mike: But what most people would consider the back-up members. It was a bizarre thing. It was like Edward on top of his train. But Edward did great. Edward had a lot of nerve.

Josh: Was it weird for him to just join with you guys? Obviously you and George had a lot of history.

Mike: Yeah but he’s a musician. His parents were musicians, he knew how to read music. Me and George were more like thugs. D. Boon was kind of more the artist/musician. We just wanted to play with him. Well, we got Georgie after high school. But going back as a kid, D. Boon was the man who knew how to play. He was a painter and all this and that. This is just part of our friendship, I wanted to play too, even though I naturally didn’t have it. It’s sorta like a bike. After a while, you don’t fall down even though you aren’t the greatest bike rider but you can ride along with your friends. That’s what happened with D. Boon.

I had kinda learned all this. But Edward could adapt, no problem. And he could do it without me and D. Boon. He really didn’t know D. Boon. He didn’t know his stuff. He just knew of him, so it was a natural coming together. He has a love of sureness on stage. He was like D. Boon in that way. D. Boon had a lot of confidence. I mean, you could not be scared on stage with D. Boon. I mean, I was petrified. Still am, you know? Still reminds me of school, where you had to get in front of the class and read the paper, ‘Please like me, please like me.” It’s like I never fucking grew out of that. But D. Boon, nobody was going to stop him. He had so much charisma and confidence. Edward too, in his own way, was like this. Me and Georgie were always looking down. Me and Georgie are kinda scared guys.

fIREHOSE's Ragin' Full On

Josh: I never got to see the Minutemen but I saw fIREHOSE many times. And I always got the feeling that Ed was always trying to fit in but also that he was ballsy enough that it was going to work simply because he was there.

Mike: Yeah. Well, we were the ones who couldn’t adjust. Edward had to do all the adjusting. Edward, being fresh, being new to bands and stuff, he was finding his own way too. No matter who he was playing with, he was figuring out what he wanted to do. It was quite interesting to see it over the years. We did fIREHOSE seven and a half years, so it was interesting to see how Edward felt and changed. Quite a good guitarist and singer. Incredible, I think. Me and Georgie….I think in some ways we went downhill a little bit. If you’re around long enough, there’s hills and valleys, there’s cycles. Me and Georgie talked about recently. We did this thing….

Josh: …at the El Rey?

Mike: Right, where we did Minutemen songs. Just a duet between us two. We were listening to the songs and playing them 16, 17 years later and we were really amazed at what we did. And how it was hard to do nowadays. I’ve been playing around and stuff but even using a pick, J’s got me used to playing with those and I hadn’t used a pick in all those years and it was really difficult. It was still really difficult. Georgie too, we were talking about this and things are like this. Just because you’re older doesn’t mean everything is mastered. Some of the things you can do in your younger days, not just on an athletic level but just cuz you’ve poured so much fucking time…Minutemen practice everyday, fIREHOSE practice every day and also inspiration wise, you know? It’s hard to call it up like it’s shtick. So you change as the scenery changes as you go on. We were very impressed at what those younger Minutemen did musically. It blew us away that you could almost look at those guys as two different people (laughs).

Josh: Well, you were in your twenties, you were different people.

Mike: Yeah, and the scene was different and the music. You gotta understand that the SST (Records) scene was very fertile. You had Black Flag, Husker Du, Meat Puppets, all of these guys coming up with these sounds. We just felt indebted to fucking throwing in our best. It was very intense. You didn’t have all this, “Oh, you’re a legend, you can just rest now.” It was like you have to prove yourself and I think that’s really healthy.

What Makes a Man Start Fires?

Josh: Well, that was what breaking down the arena rock was all about.

Mike: Yeah, but I still really want to live that way. It shouldn’t have been just this part in my early days. I still want to be that way. And that is getting back to your original question about playing with all these people. That’s one reason I do this to fucking reinvent myself. It’s like the virgin thing. I can’t really pretend I’m starting over. But when I play with guys, I kinda am. Although with Edward, it was like, “This is the way I do it, now can you hop on board?” (laughs)

And sometimes they have to come to me. And that’s why the Porno (for Pyros) thing and the (J. Mascis and) The Fog thing was very important for me; I had to take direction, so I don’t always fucking force people to do my thing. But this is the closest I can get to trying to put my situations next to having me come up with the Double Nickels with D. Boon and Georgie. Or What Makes a Man Start Fires? (1982 Minutemen EP). Fires is the weird Minutemen record, see, because I wrote all the music. I didn’t write all the words. Like I said, I have this problem with tract homes, tract housing. I wrote all the music for that. If you look at music…this guy in Canada, in Quebec, is putting out a book of my lyrics.

Josh: I heard about this.

Mike: And in fact, I wrote, sixty lyrics, funny for being a Minuteman. It made me think again about Minutemen songs and stuff. I wrote a lot of the Minutemen music. I couldn’t have done it without that situation, that culture and of course those two men, especially D. Boon. Georgie too. Georgie had a job where he would get up at four in the morning, work the lathe. So these words would come very abstract, because he would work on the job. I’d love the way they were so non-linear. Like the Joy EP. I loved his words--they were so abstract and I could get out of my thinking that D. Boon’s songs were so natural…

Josh: and political.

Mike: Well, to me, that’s very natural. How power comes down, how it’s divvied up.

Josh: That’s not very natural. I don’t think a lot of people think about that.

Mike: I think people wonder about why shit happens. Why didn’t that neighbor do something about that dog barking? That to me is very political. Politics to me is just power and how it’s dealt with. It’s not a beauty contest every four years. The first Tuesday after the first Monday. That’s one tiny abstract part of politics. Politics is about power and how its being handled and dealt with. And so D. Boon had a very natural way presenting these things. He kinda used the same words a lot, over and over again but always a different angle. Georgie worried about that stuff too but had a more abstract way of dealing with it. And here’s Watt trying to deal with all that. With all their ways of doing it. I would try to make political songs too but D. Boon would say, “You write too spacey, too spacey, you know?” So on Double Nickels—well, that was a couple of jokes that no one got. Well, one joke was against Sammy Hagar, right? And one joke was on Pink Floyd’s Ummagumma, where each guy got a side [of the record]. So each of us have a solo song on Double Nickels. My solo song is “I’m Reading the Land Lady’s Note About the Tubs Leaking.” (According to the track listing for Double Nickels, the actual title is “Take 5”)

I have other guys playing guitar [on the track]—John Rocknowski (from Tragic Comedy), Joe Baiza (Saccharine Trust/Melcolodiacs/Universal Congress Of), because this is a solo song without D. Boon playing—ha ha, what a joke. And then I was reading the landlady’s note…when she’s talking about the shower and the water is coming through. I said to D Boon, “Is this real enough, D. Boon?” (laughs) Nobody got it, I was writing some abstract, surreal poem. It’s a fucking landlady joke. And no one got the thing about double nickels on the dime. It’s about doing the speed limit exactly.

Josh: On the 10 freeway? That’s what I always got from it.

Mike: The 110 freeway used to be called the 10. The Santa Monica freeway and the 110 is where we took the picture. It means exactly going 55 mph because Sammy Hagar had a record called “I Can’t Drive 55.” He had the red line through the 55, so we did it without the red line because we thought, “This guy is taking chances driving but his music is the tamest shit ever!” So we thought we’d go real crazy with the music and then drive real safe (laughs). It was like, nobody got it.

Josh: You had a very definite idea.

Mike: Then we put a Van Halen song on there, “Ain’t Talkin ‘Bout Love,” because a lot of people said our songs sounded like Martians because we didn’t sing about love and all that. So we thought, “Van Halen ain’t singing about love—maybe we’re like them.” No one got that joke, either. We put a Steely Dan song on…but to us, cover songs were about having your own sound and juxtaposing it.

Josh: But there was Creedence Clearwater Revival (the Minutemen covered several CCR tunes both live and on record, including “Fortunate Son,” “Don’t Look Now (It Ain’t You Or Me),” “Green River” and “Have You Ever Seen The Rain?”)

From the Hoot Gallery Website

D. Boon
somewhere in america - 1984
w/the minutemen

Mike: Well Creedence was me and D. Boon. He had not heard of Cream, the Who and T. Rex. The only rock band he ever heard of was Creedence. Well, the Beatles. But I didn’t really like them.

Josh: I’m actually with you on that.

Mike: But rock and roll…he only heard Creedence. That’s why we’re fans. I liked them. But D. Boon, that’s all he could play. That’s all he wanted to play. So I learned all those songs with him so we could play those Creedence songs. It was a huge part of us learning how to play. Then after Creedence, it was Blue Oyster Cult. Those were our main two bands, learning how to play. Because in those days, that’s how you learned, you copied records.

Josh: In the fIREHOSE days, I always thought that was great (fIREHOSE’s covers ranged from Public Enemy’s “Sophisticated Bitch” to Blue Oyster Cult’s “The Red and the Black”).

Mike: That goes even before that. In fact, me and D. Boon started doing that song when were thirteen. I’ve been doing that song (“The Red and the Black”) for over 30 years. It’s intense. We didn’t know what the lyrics were about. In those days, we didn’t know what any lyrics were about. We thought they were about lead guitars and “Smoke On The Water”—I mean, what’s that about? But punk rockers, we graduated in 1976, don’t know how to play very well. The words are all different. You’re talking about, you were asking me about politics, but this is really where we would get awakened about “Oh, words mean things.” You know, D. Boon was really into reading about history. My favorite book in high school was The Divine Comedy. Then I got into Ulysses, you know? James Joyce. But D. Boon liked history. He got me reading about history. The thing about history is that the writer is trying to give you facts. He’s trying to say why things happen. This went over to our songwriting, when you hear about punk rockers sing about other bands. Like the Dils’ “I Hate The Rich.”

You know, our dads were kind of working guys. My dad and his dad. My dad was a sailor, his dad worked in a car dealership putting in radios. So our thing wasn’t really about rebelling about middle class values. We didn’t really seem to have a lot to be upset with our parents with. Period. It seemed the things that upset us most were the systems like rock and roll. They didn’t want punk rockers to play in clubs. Political systems. It seems like we were marginalized.

The part where D. Boon lived in was Park Pedro was called Park Western and he was thrown out of there. They put in these rich tract homes. In fact, they renamed the street—it was old Navy housing that they never tore down and made low-income housing so it had old sailor names. They changed the street names to Via Tarragona and all this shit. All this stuff was just taken from us. In fact, D. Boon had a song called “Storming Tarragona.”

From the Hoot Gallery Website

torrance, ca - 1980
w/the minutemen
inside the sst offices
photo by marty lyon

Josh: Was that the first song you wrote?

Mike: One of them. We don’t write songs for punk rock. I wrote one song as a teenager called “Mister Bass, King of Outer Space,” and it was about…(laughs). Yeah, I know it’s terrible. But you have to understand that bass, in the old days before punk, was like playing right field. That’s where you put the lame guy. So I had a huge inferiority complex and I wrote this song where somehow I was going to come out of the bass solo and blow everyone away (laughs). So of course, the first bass players I was influenced by were John Entwistle and Jack Bruce. I couldn’t even hear bass on records. Like the Creedence guy (Stu Cook), you could never hear his bass line. James Jamerson, who did all the Motown records, I could hear him. Some of the funk stuff like Larry Graham and the cat (Robert “Kool” Bell) in Kool and the Gang. We didn’t have older brothers, you know? Music was not accessible like it is now, as far as learning it. There were no instructional videos.

Josh: And there were no stores that would stock that stuff.

Mike: Yeah, in fact, a lot of that stuff you would buy in record stores. Chuck’s Sound of Music sold records and instruments. Hardly any Fenders or Gibsons. And pawn shops. $5 and $10 guitars. It was a lot different than nowadays in terms of the accessibility--you were fuckin’ out in the boonies in a lot of ways. In fact, tuning-- we didn’t know that your A string had to be the other guy’s A string. We thought tightness was a personal thing—“I like my strings loose.” We didn’t know how. There are a couple tapes of us, but this is later, toward the end of high school, but I can’t imagine what it sounded like. You didn’t know…

Josh: So how did you learn about that?

Mike: Well, we did meet people who were older. I remember we played this gig in high school at the Jetty here and there were some older guys who used our gear, and that’s how we got to play the gig. We got beat bad by this band and we were in a bad mood. We were sucking out loud and they were literally throwing stuff, they wanted to kill us. So D Boon’s daddy drives up in a pick-up truck and he saves us. We jump in the truck and then I have to go to school the next day. We didn’t really know everyone, but I wore this big coat and we were called The Bright Orange Band, of course, because we loved Blue Oyster Cult. So my mother sewed the big letters on the jacket but didn’t put dots there. People thought my name was BOB, so in high school I kept low. See, I didn’t know a bass actually had big strings. You know, gigs were arena rock and you were really far away. I knew they had four strings, but I thought they had thinner necks. I played guitar, one of D. Boon’s guitars without two of the strings. And Chuck’s Sound of Music got a bass a few days after I told this guy in school, “Yeah, I play.” So he sees me foaming on this thing, tripping on it and he can’t believe those big cables (strings): “What the fuck is this thing?”

He says, “I thought you said you play bass.” I said, “I do,” and he says, “Well, that’s a bass.” I said, “I know.” But I didn’t know it was the first time I laid hands on it. I couldn’t believe how big the strings were. No wonder why there were only four of them.