Hippies vs. Punks: We Jam Econo, The Story of the Minutemen

I saw the full-length Minutemen documentary, We Jam Econo: The Story of the Minutemen (2005), the year of its release. I went to my neighborhood art-house theater, Northwest Film Forum, with a girlfriend. One of the filmmakers gave a brief talk before the screening. The Minutemen are universally revered by those who know the band's music and story. So the filmmaker was appropriately penitential, in the Christian sense of a reconciliation with God, when he described the labor of love of putting the film's archival footage together and working with the great Mike Watt.

What struck me about the documentary the first time around was how unusual the band was in the early days. The footage from the Paranoid Time (1980) and The Punch Line (1981) period shows a band of clean young normal men playing truly unique music. There was no crafted persona, no buzz cuts and beards. Just totally real young guys playing short, fast, politically radical songs that didn't sound like anything anyone else was doing.

I saw the film again probably three or four years later. I checked out a DVD from the library. What I took away from that screening on my 13-inch color television is what a kick-ass song "Little Man with a Gun in His Hand" is.

Last night, after a rainy overcast day spent indoors puttering around not doing much of anything (I didn't even go out for a run), by happenstance I ended up watching on YouTube We Jam Econo again. The documentary is so good that once started it is difficult for a Minutemen-devotee like myself to stop.

What I picked up this time, which sort of slipped by me the first two viewings, is how important the year 1976 is for the Minutemen. That is the year that D. Boon, Mike Watt and George Hurley graduate from San Pedro High School. It is also the year, as Watt explains, that Punk breaks into popular consciousness. 

Boon and Watt are immediately attracted to Punk and its "Do It Yourself" (DIY) sensibility as well as its celebration of the misfit. They had grown up during the heyday of arena rock where rock stars were elevated as avatars and demigods. Boon and Watt thought there should be a band on every neighborhood block, a nightclub on the block after that, and a record label on the block after that. Music should be accessible to all and played by all.

Watt acknowledges, as the camera, positioned on the floor of the passenger-side front seat of his van, absorbs his face, that the Minutemen were a creation of circumstance. The band benefited from its position in the temporal slipstream at a time when the Hippie traded in his "Age of Aquarius" aspirations for a place on the corporate spreadsheet, while the young Punks graduated from secondary school to say "Bollocks to all that!"