George Hurley's liner note that accompanied "Dreams Are Free, Motherfucker! on Ballot Result (1986) -- the song originally appeared on Buzz or Howl Under the Influence of Heat (1983) -- was something to the effect of "Try believing this one."
Meaning of course that dreams are not free. But I appreciate Henry Rollins' insistence that they are. Without dreams we couldn't sleep; we'd be dead. Dreams give us our direction, our hope; that they are bought and sold is a sad truth. But it is imperative that we act as if our dreams are free and our own.
Every song on this eight-track EP is timeless, from the first cut, "Self-Referenced" -- "[H]ow can I believe in books/When my heart lies to me?/I'm full of shit! -- to the last, "Little Man With a Gun in His Hand."
The story is that Buzz or Howl was recorded for $50, which has to be the most meaningful $50 ever spent.
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!"
My first coming to anything approaching "critical consciousness" was as a young man reading philosophy at U.C. Berkeley and listening to Minutemen repeatedly, every day, to the point where my identity was indistinguishable from the band.
This, for me, is a large issue -- Minutemen and their music, their weltanschuuang -- and cannot be addressed in one fell swoop. Yesterday, toiling at my desk in usual Bartleby fashion, I happened upon the video above of an acoustic performance of the band recorded for public access television. The year is 1985. The band's zenith. The year of the SST Tour where I was lucky enough to see them.
This morning I downloaded Post-Mersh Vol. 2 and Post-Mersh Vol. 3. I never owned the albums in digital form, only vinyl and cassette. Listening to "The Product" this morning I was in awe. Again. My old heroes were truly heroic:
Product the product the product the product the product the product the product the product -- I'M THE PRODUCT OF CAPITALISM!
That cannot be improved upon. It says it all.
There are many gems in the video of the acoustic performance, not least of which is Watt's performance of "Tour Spiel." Lyrics to that song taught me plenty about the writing process:
are you going to write the song I demand?
and with the guitar turned off
and the gas tank empty
and the typewriter on
but my head is empty
and to really find me
i've got to look inside me
Minutemen were enormously influential. Frontman D. Boon died at the end of 1985. There hasn't been a working class radical consciousness musically gifted and inventive rock'n'roll band of equal stature since.
Drinking and fighting (with friends), the cruel story of youth. But this is after all the "Colt 45 Chronicle." Not a lot of pyrotechnics in this letter though, which is to my college buddy Shale. A lot about fellow Berkeley man Matt Biondi who had just won a number of gold medals at the Seoul Olympics that summer and who I gush about drunkenly (and laughably) based on a momentary glance he cast in my direction one sunny Sunday afternoon. But I catch myself mid-epistle, leaning heavily on Nietzsche in the process. Shale was a Nietzsche man all the way.
The fantasy, the palm at the end of my drunken young-man mind, that closes the communication is a recurring one -- the full house, the children asleep, etc. Now it's obvious to me that, like a lot of people from broken homes, I was trying to restore some sort of idealized lost unity; that, and, living in a high rise and working in the megalopolis, I was feeling isolated.
Autumn 1988
Oh, my God, you wrote! With tapes no less. The clouds part and a single dove descends, lighting on my brow and filling me with the Spirit -------------- Diogenes marches into Athens; the Pig spits banquet brew in a whore's face; we all dance on D. Boon's grave.
A lot of water under the bridge since we last talked, too much to recapitulate here. Suffice it to say that we rambled out of Berkeley on a Saturday afternoon and were married in Reno on a Saturday night; drove across USA and then into NY; Ashley is going to school, and I have a boring/shitty job. Terri was here when we arrived but soon went to Guatemala to see Colum. Now she's back. Colum was here for a brief time doing a story on crack with a friend of his from Columbia. The last night he was here I drank too much. Terri and I, Johnny Walker Red label and a case of ol' Adolph. We got into a fight, Colum and I that is. I don't remember what I said. I feel pretty crummy about the whole thing. I puked later on that evening. One thing's for sure, this place is plenty overrated. I'm ready to climb back into the driver's seat and rediscover the West. Biondi and all those gold medals started me thinking about Berkeley again. I used to walk by that gym every day. You had to look up. The pool was on my route to campus. Once, when I was on my way down from the fire trail during one of my seasonal displays of physical assiduity -- I had run the fire trail three days in a row, or something like that -- I had an encounter with Biondi. Harmon pool was straight ahead and I was feeling good, turning on the speed and shining that shine you can only beam after five-plus miles. Biondi shot me a look, which was simply the look of humble and beneficent respect from a colossal and world-historic athlete. I had forgotten all about this until I was watching TV. So I started rooting for him. He became Berkeley and Berkeley became him. -- Oh, man, I know, beer-tear waxing over now-jaundiced adolescence. I'm not pumping atavism, no "Use and Abuse" herds-feeding-yonder(ism) here; it's just that it beats anything else, truth-value wise, at this juncture. Anyway, I came home Friday evening after performing the 9-to-5 eternal return, and I see your package on the table. I rip it open and read the letter, and bam! I do the reverse hermeneutic and shoot into the future. You said something about a commune. So I immediately started thinking about the time when Ashley and I have the full-blown manor house, behind which is an austere chalet, the one with your name plate always polished. Ashley is at the hospital, the kids are in bed, and, tossing my head up to a big fat clock on the wall, seeing that it's a quarter 'til, I dart out the door and down the path -- to Uncle Shale's. I hit the door, but before even touching wood, the fridge case-full and the stereo speaker-loud, are calling me in. I stride in and your just slurping down your last drop of java, text still in hand. Alright! Where's the beer?
Who the fuck fights the good fight anymore? Thank God for you, man. Toadies, featherweights, that's the shit filling the box seats, let alone general admission.
To get a jump on tomorrow night's "Hippies vs. Punks Fridays" I happened to listen to two songs on my walk home from work that capture the titanic clash and cultural shift in the 1970's and early 1980's. In this case the timeline isn't compact because Kiln House was recorded and released in 1970, while What Makes a Man Start Fires? was recorded the summer of 1982 and released January 1983 (my freshman year at the university). But I'm getting ahead myself.
A song ahead of its time I would say; it prefigures the mid-1970's California sound of Buckingham Nicks and The Eagles ascendant. Towards the end of "Earl Gray" one can even hear Explosions in the Sky. I like it; I think it's a good song. Christgau gave Kiln House an A-minus. But there's no Krishna Consciousness or rock revolution; no emancipatory lunge for social justice. It's just a pretty song.
Then, since I'm listening to songs alphabetically on my iPod touch, comes the Minutemen's "East Wind/Faith" off what What Makes a Man Starts Fires? and it just kicks ass. The first half of the two-minute song is a George Hurley percussion solo; then D. Boon's high-treble guitar kicks in, followed by Watt's bass; then the singing:
And don't forget that time
Is still ticking
Run through halls
Pass doors
Like lines
White lines on the freeway
Stop like a roulette ball
Reach fr the door
Beyond
There's a drawer
Hope fr hope is really a prayer
Hope fr hope is really a prayer
A complete contrast to the instrumental "Earl Gray." The Punks, in this case, wipe out the Hippies.
I can't find "East Wind/Faith" on YouTube, only the complete What Makes a Man Starts Fires? album:
