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!"
Every Friday evening we've been exploring that short period of time in the 1970's -- 1975 to 1979 -- when the Hippies were wiped out as the avant-garde in the West by the Punks. The hope is that by understanding why it happened -- and happened so quickly -- we might gain insight into how it is that the larger paradigm, what we have named neoliberalism, has us in a chokehold today. What's the connection you ask? Because neoliberalism was launched at the same time that the Hippies were wiped out by the Punks.
Tonight a digression; we're going to jump a decade forward to the late 1980's, the last hurrah of the Punks. I say Punk but what I'm really talking about here is underground rock'n'roll, and in particular hardcore as practiced by those bands featured on SST Records. If ever I considered myself belonging to an avant-garde it was when I was a young man in the late 1980's listening to hardcore.
I forgot how passionately I felt about guys like Mike Watt and George Hurley until I posted a letter that described seeing them play at Columbia in the spring of 1990. D. Boon had died at the end of 1985, but Watt and Hurley carried on as fIREHOSE with ed fROMOHIO handling the lead guitar and most of the singing. I considered them true artists, pure and above reproach. They were blazing the trail, and I was dutifully trying to follow along.
When I had a record player I owned a copy of If'n. It came out while I still lived in Berkeley, but I didn't get into it until I moved to New York City in 1988. The album cover represents everything about that time for me. I look at the album cover and I remember what it feels like to be of the avant-garde.
The kachina dolls, the flannel shirts, the pictorial homage to Hüsker -- add Surfer Rosa, drunken devotion to Neil Young's Ditch Trilogy and Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation and you get an idea of where I and a lot of other people were at; the same place that provided the last rock'n'roll "Great Barbeque" for the corporate Leviathan; the place that created Grunge.
It's painful to contemplate.
But before Grunge, and its corporate excess and crass commercialism, there was a hardcore vanguard in this country. Yes, it was predominantly white. Yes, it was urban and university-oriented. But it was a vanguard nonetheless. To hear what it sounded like listen to the last track off If'n, "Thunder Child," sung by Watt:
I find it hard to believe that I mailed this letter, number 11 from a collection of New York City epistles that are arranged in no order (I'm taking them straight off the top). Addressed to my college friend Shale, who I doubt appreciated it, I was obviously very drunk. The first story referred to was a going-away night-on-the-town thrown for me by my supervisor at Deloitte Touche, which was then located on one of the top floors of the north tower of the World Trade Center (this was before the basement 1993 truck bombing). What I remember about that going-away night (I was leaving for the Emerald City) is that we stayed until the strip club shut down, and at that point all the men who were in there, besides a large bouncer, started wrestling with each other (hence, the "stupid homoerotic men").
Story number two refers to a Saturday morning that fIREHOUSE oddly played on the grass at the center of Columbia University's campus. Ed fROMOHIO, Watt and Hurley sounded great. I talked to both Watt and Hurley; I gave Hurley a sheet of paper for the set list. I ended up drinking three quarts of beer quickly. This impeded me in story three, going to see a Peter Greenaway film with my buddy Gary's wife, Eleni. The movie was so intense and I was so drunk I excused myself and hung out in the Men's Room for about 15 minutes.
Story four is an ancient complaint that a son has against his father. We watched Super Bowl XXIII together (Joe Montana to John Taylor with 34 seconds to go!) and had a great time. No drinking, no hostility. I was very relaxed, nursing wounds from a Saturday night fight on Haight Street. I don't know why I'm beefing about my father here in the context of Super Bowl XXIII. Maybe I'm figuring out that there's a familial connection to drunkenness and insanity.
Spring 1990
Shale, as they say in the sports page, here's the skinny.
I'm flying out of here the 1st. Ashley's got an apartment down at 116th and Morningside right next door to Columbia University (we're subletting our apartment through September).
Friday April 20th was my last day at the accounting firm. I celebrated by heading to a strip joint with my boss and this gay word processor from the Report Department where I work.
We dropped down 21 stories to the 78th floor, what's called the SKYLOBBY. Here's an explanation of drinking and writing: ecstasy is too easy; you've got to make a profession of it; and the key is to do it over and over again until you get used to it so you can capture the pith of it, the fiber of it; drinking and writing is done out of complete respect for the ecstatic -- the excrement of joy.
Four stories: 1) strip joint on the corner of Rector Street and Trinity Place (ink wet black hyperbolic young stupid men old streets drizzling like a plague; the great visitation like an atom bomb nuclear nightmare; Hobbes' man as errant wolf bubonic leviathan, when push comes to shove, the soiled and skinned-ness and hate of stupid homoerotic men); 2) fIREHOUSE and the magic of time and the beauty of greatness, of heroism, and the simplicity and wholesomeness of the world, and the perfection of rain green grass and mud wrapped in clear thick plastic in the paradise of academy's pasture (and me, with a quart of Miller, the only one drinking), but more than anything, the greatness goodness the strength the magnanimity and wealth of decency that makes Mike Watt and George Hurley who they were and still abide to be to me and you (heroism can't be beat; it can beat time; that's the key ----- after all that's been said and done, that I should shake hands (me with bloodied cat-scratched palm) and talk with tongue to men that to me are my hope for life, brings philosophy to a standstill); 3) movie: THE COOK, THE THIEF, HIS WIFE & HER LOVER -- total and complete indulgence in violence and gratuity and excessiveness of life, that light is bound to shit and the black (they make the archangel gynecologist eat his transcendence and lightness (the feminine principle is in between, having to reconcile both forces, light and dark)) -- anyway, the perfectness of man and wife seeing this film together, not my wife, but another man's, and this my philosophy, my point of view, thoroughly represented, Bataille's world on screen without the obligatory optimism that always accompanies philosophical writing/representation, but the full-bellied nausea that is synonymous with overeating and the too much of life, the dark dream, the dark forces that you will always have to encounter no matter what; 4) my Dad is crazy and disrespectful (but that's what happens when you're a drunk and don't have anything else going on -- you look to enliven people at all costs -- interaction no holds barred), but what does it mean to have a crazy father, a crazy castrator? It means you have total freedom to do whatever you want to do (and at the same time a complete burden), and that's rare. So I should really make the best of it, and do everything that's in my power to follow hardship's course, which means buying truck and working, writing and working labor, and when you're staid and sober -- read and read and read and write down your thoughts about the reading.
I started this story before I ever thought of it. Superbowl Sunday and I went into my father's bedroom in my grandmother's house and grabbed down out of the bookshelf one of my old books, Lucretius, and I kept it by me the whole game on a stand with a lamp (high five with my Dad's crippled hand) and it was a bad game until the 4th quarter (oh my god, the synchronicity, during the Christmas game Gary and I coming back uptown to this place and smoking our homegrown dope and watching the last game of the regular season, the Cincinnati Begals and Minnesota Vikings, Rick Fenney) and the 49ers came back and won thanks to the all-ness of Joe Montana (and once again I'm right) -- anyway, it's all wrapped up in ON THE NATURE OF THE UNIVERSE, -- and what happened from there?
