Punk Prophet

By Scott Thill, AlterNet. Posted July 19, 2004.

"What is peace/To the people/Who work the land/And die in wars?/It was learned in a game/That was played by us all/Who held the top of the hill/From the rest was called the king /And I can't believe it all/Was good for humankind" – The Minutemen, "King of the Hill"

Back before Ronald Reagan was being regularly deified by Fox, CNN, NBC, CBS, ABC and the political establishment, he was piloting a fighter plane and trying to bomb the living daylights out of the punk rock trio The Minutemen – through some clever image manipulation – in the band's video for "This Ain't No Picnic." Because, back in the very early '80s, perhaps no other punk outfit besides The Dead Kennedys crafted so articulate a resistance to the political encroachment of Reagan's supply-side cronyism. The Minutemen were that rare musical phenomenon, a three-piece revolution on amps whose songs, though they rarely topped the two-minute mark, were scathing in their condemnation of everything from the Contras, voodoo economics, Ollie North, Michael Jackson, to the Teflon President himself.

But the dream ended early when Minutemen vocalist and guitarist D. Boon, bassist Mike Watt's childhood friend and artistic counterpart, was killed in a car accident. But the legacy of the band has only increased over the years, and that's mostly due to the tireless effort of Mike Watt, a man the All Music Guide correctly dubbed "the living embodiment of the punk rock spirit."

Watt and Minutemen drummer George Hurley regrouped as fIREHOSE in 1986, adding Ed Crawford in Boon's place. They released Ragin' Full-On, an album they dedicated to Boon. By the time fIREHOSE disbanded in 1994, Watt was already a legend in the punk community and was summarily invited by everyone in the biz to join their bands. But instead, he brought them all on board for his solo album, Ball-Hog or Tugboat? – a release that featured heavyweights from Nirvana, Beastie Boys, Pixies, Soul Asylum, Screaming Trees, Sonic Youth and more.

Yet, as Watt might say, you gotta have the sweet with the sour. Watt was stricken in 2000 with a month-long fever that resulted in a near-fatal abcess. Watt, always the insatiable reader, grabbed a copy of Dante's Divine Comedy and found a literary companion of sorts for his trauma. When he emerged from his sickness, he quickly set about crafting his latest, strangest effort, The Secondman's Middle Stand, a jazz-punk concept album expressing his kinship with Dante and that author's equally scary mid-life trip through Hell.

Mike Watt is still very much alive – and still a champion of the working class. Since back in the day, when "fair and balanced" had an entirely different meaning, Watt has been clamoring for progress. He's still hard at work.

Let's talk about your new album. I heard that you were reading Dante while you were sick, and those dual moments became the concept behind The Secondman's Middle Stand.

You hit it on the head; it's about the sickness. Which is a trip because I caught pneumonia at 22 and almost died, and a week after coming out of that I wasn't in any mood to write an album or even a song about it. But when another sickness comes along 20 years later, I write a whole opera about it! Life changes you, you know? It was an intense hell ride, very heavy on me. It seems I have to be inspired to write about things that strike me, and that sickness definitely struck the hell out of me. As for The Divine Comedy, I had read it as a teenager, and then again after I got sick, because it seemed like I was going through something similar. The sickness itself was definitely Hell; Purgatory was the healing stage, and just getting to play my bass and ride my bicycle again was definitely Heaven. I know it sounds silly, but things get really simple when you're down, weak and dying. Everything else seems overly complicated.

I think it also shows the wonder of creativity, how it blossoms even in the face of death.

Well, a farmer will tell you that if you want a good crop, use a lot of manure. And I definitely had a good crop going. But it goes to show you that, considering how long ago Dante wrote that text and no matter how much the machines may have changed, there are still certain human constants that transcend our technologies. We all go through our hells, and our literature lives on through the years. As far back as The Minutemen, I was using books like Ulysses to help me write songs. It was a huge influence on me; there's even a Minutemen song called "June 16th," which is Bloomsday. I wrote a lot of songs about Ulysses.

Scott Thill, a media fanatic who finds the time to write on everything that does not include the words boy band, is a gainfully employed dot.com editor currently looking for some lunatic to publish his first novel, 'The Dangerous Perhaps.'

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