Posted on November 17th, 2004 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Albums, Musicians.
On another online forum, I was asked what my favorite album of the 1980s was.
The odd thing is, my knowledge of 1980s music is relatively weak. I'm much stronger on the 1970s and the 1990s. At least half the people in this conference know 1980s music better than I do. In the early eighties, I worked in a big record store -- the Seattle outlet of a chain called Peaches. It was an interesting experience in many ways, and I'm not sorry I did it, but it burned me out on popular music for years. It's astonishing to me now, but I went half a dozen years without following new music at all. I doubt that will ever happen to me again. I missed the advent of the Pixies, for crying out loud. By the time I knew I loved them, they were breaking up. Which means I was seriously getting back into music around 1990, 1991.
Just because I'm not qualified doesn't mean I don't have opinions, of course. So:
The Minutemen, DOUBLE NICKELS ON THE DIME (vinyl version; both cd reissues cut songs -- though if cd is all you can find, get it anyway).
Not a famous album, perhaps -- certainly not a bestseller -- but beloved by many; probably the greatest American punk rock album, and one of the albums that signaled how far punk had traveled. The Minutemen were three musicians: bassist Mike Watt, drummer George Hurley, and guitarist D. Boon. Each of them was a terrific player, and you wouldn't get bored listening through the entire record one musician at a time. But what made them a great band was their peculiar fusion. They were self-described "disciples of the three-way," and their songs were perfectly balanced, each of the three of them contributing in equal measure; no band has ever sounded as free of ego as the Minutemen.
The Minutemen were charming in many ways that could have been annoying, if they weren't so intelligent and sincere. For example, they were self-mythologizing, singing of their lives and their past and their subculture and their homespun philosophies (condensed to their own specialized catchphrases); they were famously from San Pedro, working class, garrulous, political, not afraid of their brains but not overbearing. They swung effortlessly from social and international stridency to songs about their punk childhoods to songs about showers needing to be repaired. They somehow managed to be unique without being merely eccentric, self-conscious but not painfully so, friendly but bracing, like the most interesting regulars at your local bar. They were cool as only people who don't give a shit about cool can be. They covered Creedence, and Steely Dan, and Van Halen, not from irony but from love, and believe me, when they did that, they were the only punks that did.
The Minutemen chapter in Michael Azerrad's Our Band Could Be Your Life (the book's title comes from a song on Double Nickels) is my favorite, because D. Boon and Mike Watt come across exactly as I thought they would: two opinionated friends who can't stop arguing.
Boon [proudly]: I'm just the average Joe, the guy who has been a janitor, a restaurant manager--
Watt [impatiently]: But the average Joe doesn't write songs. He... doesn't... write... songs.
Boon: Well, this one did.
Watt: You're not an average Joe.
Boon: This one did.
Watt: You're a special Joe.
Boon: I was borne out of being average because of my rock band.
Watt: No, no, because of these tunes. D. Boon, you're special and you've got to cop to it. You've got to cop to it, you're special.
Boon [exasperated]: All right! Ever since I was five years old, people said I could draw! Let him draw!
Watt [triumphant]: That's right. That's why I'm in a band with him. He's special.
Double Nickels on the Dime was a touchstone for those who saw punk not as a set of empty attitudes and posturings but as a point of view toward life, a constant questioning, a do-it-yourself ethic, a valuing of everyday experience, a championing of making your life what it ought to be and not in some other model. It's the stone-cold truth that Double Nickels changed lives, opened people up. It was the last great thing the Minutemen would do; during the making of their next album, Boon died in a van crash when his girlfriend fell asleep at the wheel.
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