Hippies vs. Punks: Minutemen's Project: Mersh (1985)

I have developed a block about this post. I think it has something to do with a clear memory I have of playing this record, the Minutemen's Project: Mersh (1985) EP, on my 21st birthday. The summer sun was shining brightly. I drank beer from one of my high-school debate trophies. I stood in the living room of a second-story apartment near the U.C. Berkeley campus. My girlfriend was there, and so too was my father. My father had driven down from Solano County to celebrate the occasion. I was now officially a man.

Last month I finished reading Michael T. Fournier's 33 1/3 series book devoted to the Minutemen's Double Nickels on the Dime (1984) double album.

To my mind the high point of the 1980s was 1984, when, between April and July, SST Records released Meat Puppets II, Hüsker Dü's Zen Arcade double album and the Minutemen's Double Nickels on the Dime. (Of the three, Double Nickels is the only one to make the Rolling Stone 500 Greatest Albums list.)

Taken together it was as if a brand-new counterculture had been formed in the space of a summer, and I was part of it. But what was it?

It was Hardcore, but not of the clownish, reactionary, dress-coded Nazi Punk variety. The Hardcore of Double Nickels, Zen Arcade and Meat Puppets II welcomed everyone who wanted to listen. It was politically engaged, openly intellectual (Double Nickels devoted songs to Dmitri Shostakovich and James Joyce), guileless and egalitarian. Primarily, it espoused an ethic of do-it-yourself hard work.

Imagine the Hippies without all the "Summer of Love" marketing overlays and metaphysical pretensions, and the First Wave U.K. Punks without their perfunctory negativity, and you get a sense of what SST Hardcore 1984 was like. Another world is possible. So let's just do it. (Nike cashed in on "Just Do It" later in the decade. Without being preceded by the Hardcore avant-garde, I doubt the shoe company could have.)

Fournier's book reminded me of several things about Double Nickels that I had forgotten. I remembered that the double-album length was a response to Hüsker Dü's planned release of the double-album Zen Arcade ("Take that Hüsker!" appears somewhere on the gate-fold Double Nickels album cover), but it had slipped my mind that the Minutemen had copied Pink Floyd's Ummagumma (1969) in giving each band member his own side of the record. Double Nickels has a D. Boon side, a Mike Watt side and George Hurley side. The fourth side is labeled "Chaff."

Another aspect of the album that I had forgotten is that the title refers to butt rocker Sammy Hagar's 1984 smash hit "I Can't Drive 55." In Double Nickels on the Dime the Minutemen are saying "We drive 55 m.p.h. on Interstate 10. So what? Does that make us square? What does speeding have to do with making music?"

After listening to the double album again non-stop for two weeks, I realized that I couldn't do it justice. There were several years, probably 1985 to 1987, when I pretty much exclusively listened to Bob Dylan and the Minutemen at night, and Van Morrison in the morning. It was a dividing-line period in my life, a time when I came to believe that "doing-your-own-thing" in a do-it-yourself fashion was more important than status, than acquiring a four-year degree and then quickly moving on to graduate or law school.

While it's too daunting at this point to take on Double Nickels, I thought I could manage the follow-up, Project: Mersh, the six-song EP released the winter of 1985 that contains the last great Minutemen song before the death of lead singer/guitarist D. Boon in December of that year.

The EP is three A-side songs, and three B-side songs adorned with a painting by D. Boon lampooning cigar-chomping record executives, one of whom proclaims, "I got it! We'll have them write hit songs!"

The big departure from previous albums is that the songs, with the exception of the final track, "More Spiel," are more conventional in structure. Gone is the 90-second free-jazzesque deconstruction of the pop tune, like in "Polarity" off What Makes a Man Start Fires (1983). Most of the tracks on Double Nickels are approximately 90 seconds; in fact, the longest song on the double album is two minutes 55 seconds.

An important point about the Minutemen in particular, Hardcore Punk in general, and one that connects it with the psychedelic ballroom San Francisco Sound of Happy Trails (1969) and Anthem of the Sun (1968), not to mention Eno's ambient records or PiL's Metal Box , is the destruction of or attack on the three-minute pop tune.

In Project: Mersh the Minutemen embrace the three-minute pop tune. The two first cuts "The Cheerleaders" and "King of the Hill" are both overtly political.

The third and last cut on the A-side is a cover of Steppenwolf's "Hey Lawdy Mama."

The Minutemen were always reaching back and covering bands like Creedence Clearwater Revival, Steppenwolf and Blue Öyster Cult -- politically-engaged rock bands from the Hippie era. (If you don't think Steppenwolf was political, listen to Steppenwolf Live (1970) again sometime.)

These bands provide a clue into who the Minutemen were emulating among the Hippies. In choosing "Hey Lawdy Mama," a sexist rant about coitus with groupies on the road, the band is poking fun at its flavor-of-the-month status as top of the heap left of the dial.

The B-side starts with "Take Our Test," before arriving at the best song of the EP, and the last great song the Minutemen produced, "Tour-Spiel," performed by bassist Mike Watt. (The final studio album, 3-Way Tie (For Last), released the same month as D. Boon's death, is not that good.)

I've been reading No Simple Highway: A Cultural History of the Grateful Dead by Peter Richardson. One thing Richardson makes plain is that the Dead were a continuation of the Beats, of Kerouac and Cassady and On the Road (1957). The Hippies and the Beats are organically connected. (We visited this subject before.)

If "Hey Lawdy Mama" is Steppenwolf's tribute to life on the road, and "Truckin'" is the Grateful Dead's, then I would say that the Hippies had lost their way as early as 1970. But with a song like "Tour-Spiel," a song about life on the road that is much truer to the Beats, I think we can say that Hardcore Punks had rediscovered Ground Zero:

Now you got your guitar
And your practice amp
You travel the USA in a van
And Troccoli's counting on some situation
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

From there the song segues into a five-minute acid rave, the last cut, "More Spiel," part of an emerging rave or neo-paisley psychedelic scene.

If you had to neatly encapsulate the message of the counterculture -- from Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception (1954) to the Beats, the Merry Pranksters and the Acid Tests and Trips Festival, including Easy Rider, on up to George Harrison's Dark Horse and Patti Smith's Horses, before arriving at Project: Mersh -- it's those two lines: "And to really find me/I've got to look inside me."

The Colt 45 Chronicle #6

As I completed the Lake Union Loop this morning, the sun punching through the chilly fog, Femi Kuti's "Beng Beng Beng" shuffled on my iPod:

Fitting since the letter below, number six taken from a packet of epistles pried out of storage during the second half of the Seahawks-Falcons playoff game last month, is a paean to music and sex.

Stacey was my last Berkeley girlfriend prior to my marriage (in Reno on our way across the country to New York City and the married student housing located at 60 Haven Avenue). I conceived of the idea of a Reno marriage thanks to a trip I had taken there with Stacey, at her suggestion, a couple months before; in fact, we flirted with idea of getting married there ourselves (I remember being more up for it than Stacey). We got a room at Circus Circus; made love fully clothed on top of the bed; showered; saw a real life dog and pony show in the theater downstairs; walked the main drag downtown; watched people gamble; bought some drinks at a bar that had a wonderful old mural and a Dallas Mavericks playoff game on a TV mounted high up on the wall. We returned to our room early after Stacey started to feel sick. She woke up a couple of times during the night to go to the bathroom and puke. She communicated to me the next morning that she was upset that I had slept through her illness and hadn't got up with her. I apologized. We drove back to Berkeley a roundabout way that took us through Carson City.

I had met Stacey the previous winter at a hipster hang out in the Lower Haight one night on the town with the boys. It was a Saturday and everyone was drunk. The guys danced with each other and the girls did likewise, but we all were really dancing together. It was one of those rare perfect evenings. I drank with Stacey at the bar until last call when she wrote her telephone number with lipstick on a cocktail napkin and gave it to me.

I never called, but I did run into Stacey walking her ten-speed bike one afternoon a month or two later near the Class of 1914 Fountain. I had been working on my honors thesis on the analytic a posteriori (which now describes this blog). I was jittery from too much espresso and too little to eat. We decided to go to "Cafe Be Seen" on the corner of College and Bancroft; I called her many times after that. Our spring romance had begun.

Stacey was the apotheosis of undergraduate cool -- an art history major who had been a drummer in a short-lived garage band; an aspiring writer (now published with a couple books under her belt) who had transferred from Wesleyan. Our romance was leavened by Stacey's concern that she might be HIV-positive due to the obligatory hipster ritual of shooting smack (which she blamed on the influence of her last boyfriend). I loved Stacey (part of the reason I decided to get with my last girlfriend, the predator, was she was named Stacy -- without the "e"). One of the best things I ever did was to wrap up my university career by being Stacey's lover. She didn't want me to leave. But I left. I had to get to the metropolis.

This letter is addressed to my friend Oliver, who was not only a partner in 49ers fandom but a music aficionado who taught me a lot about listening to bands.

Summer 1989

Get this Oliver -- I too am now a proofreader at a law office. And you know what? It's the best job I've had since I've been in New York. My supervisor, who is twenty-six year old paralegal, is a true music "liver" (we exchanged MEAT PUPPETS II quotes my first day: mine was: "Holy ghosts and talkshow hosts lie planted in the sand"; but the deal is, now that I look it up at this very moment, the deal is that it is not "lie" but "are," and I kinda secretly suspected this, or some such aberration, the whole time; his was: "And an illustrated book about birds" -- from the same tune; and even though mine is embellished and therefore fucked up and his is A-1 absolutely correct, I still think mine is tastier than his, but probably and only because I snatched thebest one first). Anyway, he was shocked that I didn't know The Stooges. So he lent me two of their albums for the weekend, along€ with HUEVOS, which is one of those Meat Puppett albums we never bought. The "Dog" song -- "I'll be your Dog" or "I Wanna be Your Dog" -- on the first album, THE STOOGES, is truly great, and side two is also very good -- Iggy sounds a lot like Jonathan Richman; but I don't like the second one that much, FUN HOUSE -- they're trying to be The Doors, too muddled long and boring; as for the Meat Puppets, well, that's why I gave up on them after UP ON THE SUN -- no three-cup-of-coffee burn, none of those long & waving & scratchy licks, just that burbling Chick Korea jazz-fusion guitar and that jig step drum beat, boring -- it misses the mark; you know, and I know, that Curt Kirkwood is an asshole; oh hell, it happens everywhere, 3-WAY TIE (FOR LAST) was a piece of shit too.

But the reason why I write this now is something that doesn't have a whole helluva lot to do with that preceding paragraph other than that tonight was the night that I made my supervisor (the aforementioned) a tape. He wanted GENERIC FLIPPER (by all means an excellent album), and after I finished that I had a whole B side of quality Maxell left to fill. I ran out of the Coors and headed into the Gordon's gin. The gin was warm and tasted like puke but it was all there was in the apartment. Anyway, the song I finished the tape with was a song I heard over at a girlfriend's apartment (the girlfriend who wasn't Maura) one morning when the Oakland sun came powering its way through a second-story kitchen window on 63rd Street (I always used to say to myself  when I was over there, "My, how close I am to Oliver and Lyn's"), and I was just rising from sordid beermares. She had one those Murphy beds, those beds that collapse back into a closet, except this one didn't collapse because she had it nailed to her wall. The bed itself was nothing but a bunch of metal coils. So I got up and trotted into the living room and she was already up and sitting on the couch in one of those 1940's housewife flower-patterned dresses. She was drinking a mug of coffee and was smiling big and heavy. On the stereo she had this song -- "Start The Clock" by the Silos -- and though it couldn't've been past Eight in the morning the stereo was blasting like I was at a DAY ON THE GREEN back when who knows what. I was still dizzy from the previous night's beer and pussy eating, and I said: "This is a great morning song." And she replied, with a cherished beauty, "You're right, it is." I sat down and listened, right next to her. And I wrapped my arm around her hip -- a waist as soft and as warm and well-slept as a favorite bedtime pillow -- and I smelled flapjacks with syrup and clean sheets after a hot shower. Oh God, the sun was pouring through the window and Ashley was alone somewhere and I was in love and dizzy hungover and the music was so fine. And tonight brought it all back.

There was a time when Bob Dylan and the Minutemen solved all my problems and I was on track. -- Thanks for listening Oliver, you're the only one who could.