Review
Spiels of a/d’un minuteman
by Mike Watt
L’Oie de Cravan, 132 pp.
Almost two decades after the band cinched a self-styled "3-way tie (for last)," the minutemen revival is now on. And it’s about time.
Unlike their fellow bright lights on the SST Records 1980s roster (i.e., Hüsker Dü and the Meat Puppets), the minutemen never drew major-label attention (the band folded when singer-guitarist D.Boon was killed in a 1985 van wreck) or saw a fat Nirvana Unplugged royalty cheque. However, recent action on the cultural radar suggests these blue-collar schlubs/geniuses from San Pedro may finally get their proper due. Blip one: Michael Azzerad nicked the title of his recent book about the American ’80s music underground, Our Band Could Be Your Life, from a minutemen song. Blip two: the minutemen’s "Corona" hit a whole new generation of ears as the theme song to Jackass: The Movie. (Not an obvious pairing, that, but it kinda makes sense: who says the band’s vigorous DIY ethic – summed up by their "jam econo" mantra – can’t be applied to nonmusical pursuits... like clipping jumper-cables to your nuts?) Now comes Spiels of a/d’un minuteman, a trade paperback collection of bassist Mike Watt’s lyrics and 1983 tour diary.
Just as the trio broke new ground with herky-jerky rhythms owing as much to John Coltrane as to Wire (plus, uh, Creedence), Watt’s lyrics defied punk conventions. Sometimes he teased striking imagery out of U.S. history ("they found the body/of/general george a. custer/quilled/like a porcupine"), while other times he played it refreshingly straight ("i’ll put it in simple words:/working men are pissed!"). A lot of his writing is self-referential, without being precious. Writing words for his childhood pal to sing, Watt painted third-person self-portraits that were sharply self-critical without falling into the clichéd trap of punk angst. (On "self-referenced," he cops to "bumming real hard/on cold steel facts/i’m full of shit!" On "one reporter’s opinion," he asks, "what can be romantic to mike watt? he’s only a skeleton.") Explicit references abound to his and Boon’s idiosyncratic pantheon of musical influences, including a pleasantly surprising number of nods to Blue Öyster Cult’s Eric Bloom. Heck, Watt even lifted lines from John Huston’s decidedly unpunk Treasure of the Sierra Madre: "we don’t need/no/stinking/badges."
Added bonus: published by a Montreal small press, Spiels is dutifully bilingual, with all of Watt’s slangy "Pedro-speak" scribblings faithfully translated into French (international and Quebec compliant, no less), along with marginal notes explaining the more slippery cultural references. This feature is not only educational ("i must look like a dork" = "je dois avoir l’air d’un cave"), but makes for the kind of laughs you only get when languages collide. (In his gushing intro, infamous scribe Richard Meltzer praises Watt as "the HUMAN FACE of rock rock rock and roll" by way of a complicated reference to the flick Robot Monster, thereby earning this helpful marginal comment: ´Ro-manª, c’est-à-dire ´robot-manª, homme-robot.) All that, plus a beautifully silkscreened cover, testimonials from Joe Carducci (author of the engaging rant Rock and the Pop Narcotic) and Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, and a gallery of Raymond Pettibon’s minutemen album illustrations, make for a winning package.
Minor quibble: a few of Watt’s songs are inexplicably missing. It’s a drag for completists (and weak-eyed fans reluctant to wade thru the four-point lyrics on the back cover of the seminal Double Nickels on the Dime album), but moreso for budding bilinguals – try as I might, I can’t find the phrase "angry mo-fo" anywhere in my Berlitz.
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