MINUTEMEN

"Buzz or Howl is 2 different sessions. One is with Ethan James. It’s just us and Ethan. An 8-track recording. D. Boon overdubbed guitars. We loved the way it sounded. We liked Spot’s (recording) too. His is live to 2-track, with only two mics and two piezos. And we’d just learned the song, so we didn’t even have an ending for “Little Man…” yet. And that’s why we had to fade out. I used Jeff MacDonald’s (Redd Kross) SVT amp. We would work with Georgie to develop parts. It wasn’t all about just getting a backbeat going. We wanted him just like he was a guitar or bass, doing interplay. You know, like having specific stuff written out. It’s funny, a lot of people thought the Minutemen was just jammin’, but it was all very much worked out. We spent a long time…like on “…Fires,” we were practicing with Black Flag in the old SST in downtown Torrance. But the cops came in and there was a whole nightmare over that. So we were practicing in Long Beach; at that time sharing a place with a band called Secret Hate. After work and stuff we’d come in there every day we’d go in there and show Georgie the fuckin’ dealios. Even if they were Georgie’s words, we still had to work out the parts. Cuz with me and d. Boon it was really like osmosis, it was so easy, cuz we had grown up and learned."

"Even from Paranoid Time we had got the template in our head, how much to give a song. How much time to give a part; to do it four times, or eight times, and that’s’ about it, move on to the next part or to end the song. So what it was was to get different feelings that would describe what we’re singing about. The basic goal of the Minutemen was—we talked about this much—no matter what we played, we wanted you to know it was us. We didn’t want to be tied to one kind of thing; a certain sound, so much as maybe structurally having a signature. But not so much with the licks and stuff. If we wanted to play slow, fast, if we wanted a lot of chords, or just a few chords…we didn’t want to be hemmed in that way. But we did have a structure as far as the economy of…hemming in the parts. There were songs like “The Product,” with one part. But we still knew…and that one was a three minute song, which was a fuckin’ opus for us. But still we wanted you to know it was the Minutemen. Same with the lyrics. If you talked to us before or after the gig, you could tell it was the same guys as up on stage."

"If you listen to the song, (“The Product”) the one riff guy is mainly the bass., There’s this huge interchange between d. Boon and Georgie. After the words there’s this whole thing between the guitar and the drums. Georgie double-timing it up. I’m the guy with the traditional “holdin’ it down” role. It happens in the middle of “Little Man With A Gun In His Hand” too. They have the interplay. I’m doing the third and the sixth (notes of the scale). Setting up this aural thing that d. Boon can jam all inside. We were very influenced to by a band in L.A. called The Urinals. A song like “Surfin’ With the Shah.” There’s this huge jam-out in the middle; they’re just in one chord."

"That’s a big part of the middle of “Little Man With A Gun In His Hand” We were influenced by all of the punk bands that we saw and played with. Thing was though, we didn’t copy them. You can be influenced, but don’t copy. Though I would never be afraid to acknowledge any of the debt about the influence, I still think it went through the Minutemen strainer enough that it became our sound. It took time to develop. Me and d. Boon did not write any songs as kids. I wrote one whole song before Reactionaries."

The Minutemen were the heart and soul of an early '80s punk revolution dominated by blistering three-chord punk. Eschewing that particular sound for the stripped down three-piece groove, their truncated sketches provided a perfect backdrop for no-nonsense political and personal outcries of social panache. Flying in the face of the prevailing trendy punk ethos, they carved an enduring monument to individualism and integrity.

To try and crystallize their career into a one-dimension presentation of opinion and circumstance would be an insult to their total score. So for this tribute we have ballooned our phone bill to take a couple of days chatting with bass player and founding member Mike Watt. In an effort to tell the story of the Minutemen as an historical document, we have chosen to take on their career album by album; portrayed anecdotally, to try and best bring the zeitgeist to you, the reader.