What makes a man start fires? Madness? Rage? Simple pyromania? Reduced gray matter in the regions of the brain associated with emotional processing, behavioral control and social cognition? Or, in the case of the Minutemen, righteous anger at the injustice of a world where a moral abyss separates the haves from the have nots. It was the dilemma of protest singers and first-world denizens D. Boon (guitar/vocals) and Mike Watt (bassist/vocals) that they found themselves uncomfortably on the side of the haves, and they did their best to expiate their guilt by writing songs that put them instead on the side of the angels.
The San Pedro, California hardcore champions’ 1983 LP What Makes a Man Start Fires? is a damn fine LP, but I prefer that same year’s follow-up EP “Buzz or Howl Under the Influence of Heat,” simply because it marked a subtle evolution in their sound. A three-minute song? Unthinkable for a band whose name was their method. A trumpet? What kind of hardcore song includes a trumpet? And it makes me happy to think they deliberately opted to go lo-fi and managed to record the album for the princely sum of fifty bucks. Talk about jamming econo.
Both Boon and Watt were thinkers and feelers, hardcore political theoreticians of intuitive bent whose response to the wrongs of the Reagan years came straight from the heart. And the Minutemen had the biggest heart in rock ’n’ roll. Their anger was real, but their shorthand, stream-of-consciousness commentaries on what they saw going on all around them were informed by a seemingly bottomless well of compassion.
They were not cynics, although some of their songs about the complacency of their hardcore peers had real bite. No, the Minutemen were an empathy collective. They didn’t truck in withering sarcasm and Swiftian satire like the Dead Kennedys’ Jello Biafra and so many others. And unlike The Clash, their revolutionary impulses never carried the whiff of shtik and commercial expediency. They weren’t poseurs. They believed, naively perhaps, in the possibility of positive change. They simply soaked up the world’s pain and wrote agit-prop songs about it. Their “Bob Dylan Wrote Propaganda Songs” was autobiographical.
Musically, the Minutemen were the most radically unique of all hardcore bands. They played a self-tutored species of furious sprung jazz/punk/funk that seemed to have no predecessors and betrayed their status as musicians who knew their way around their instruments. And they came at their music with a wider frame of musical references than most hardcore musicians, whose knowledge of musical history seems to have begun with the Sex Pistols and the Germs.
The Minutemen’s taste in covers—which weren’t ironic in-jokes—is illustrative. They extended to Steely Dan, Blue Öyster Cult, Van Halen, and Creedence Clearwater Revival. That’s an amazing assortment of influences—hardcore heresy almost. You would have to have been mad to talk up Steely Dan to your average hardcore fan. In their autobiography in song “History Lesson Part 2″ from 1984’s seminal double-LP Double Nickels on the Dime Boon summed it all up—their protest bent (“Mr. Narrator/This is Bob Dylan to me/My story could be his songs/I’m his soldier child”), singular style (“Our band is scientist rock”), and heroes, who included Blue Öyster Cult’s Eric Bloom, X’s John Doe, and The Clash’s Joe Strummer. Even the flannel shirts they favored were a tribute to John Fogerty, another protest singer they admired.
But to the EP. “Self-Referenced” is a herky-jerky Rube Goldberg contraption of a funk tune with mucho guitar fray and D. Boon tossing off self-deprecating lines telegraph style: “Bumming real hard/On cold steel facts/I’m full of shit.” The driving “Cut” is a Mike Watt homage to the crazed guitar playing of Black Flag’s Greg Ginn, although you would never know it by the lyrics, which run along the cryptic lines of (they remind me of the Fall’s Mark E. Smith in this respect) “Hey, ice machine/Will you cut me?/Thin line/Cut!”
Watt’s jazzy bass line and Boon’s guitar shred make “Dream Told by Mojo” a nerve-fraying proposition. Meanwhile Boon lets us know his plans for the end of the world: “When those bombs start falling/On the first day of World War III/I’m gonna grab me a girl/And go and fuck her/Yeah, yeah, World War III.” The fact that the world didn’t come to an apocalyptic end during the Reagan years must have come as a shock to just about everyone on the hardcore scene—the Minutemen themselves mined the same ground on 1980’s “Paranoid Chant,” on which an overwrought Boon sings, “I try to talk to girls and I keep thinking of World War III!” And ends the song with a note of pure dread: “Paranoid, scared shitless!”
“Dreams Are Free Motherfucker!” (title by one Henry Rollins) is an instrumental foray into noise, with D. Boon shredding free-form to the accompaniment of the recorder of guest trumpet player Crane. It was recorded during a warm-up jam recorded at a previous session, as was the lurching and drunken stagger that is “The Toe Jam,” a slice of improvisatory silliness that features drummer George Hurley making noise on a trumpet he’s obviously picked up for the first time, while Crane scat sings and an unnamed female talks about wanting to get married and wear her wedding ring on her toe. Anyone prepared to write off the Minutemen as a too-serious proposition is directed to this one.
Watt wrote “I Felt Like a Gringo” after the band took a day trip to Mexico—the same day trip that would inspire D. Boon to write the band’s best known composition (thanks to its becoming the theme song of the MTV reality television series Jackass) “Corona.” The former is a straight-up slice of mutant funk, over which Boon sings “A ton of white boy guilt, that’s my problem – Obstacle to joy (one reason for drugs).” Exploiting the poverty of our neighbor to the South to have a low-budget good time is the subject of both songs, But political awareness is an obstacle to joy indeed, and the Minutemen know just enough to feel shitty about it all (“Why can’t you buy/A good time?/Why are there soldiers in the streets?”).
“The Product” is a loud, clamorous and propulsive rocker, and features Boon strangling his words and railing “the product the product the product the product the product the product—the product of capitalism!” to the accompaniment of Crane’s trumpet. “Little Man with a Gun in His Hand” is a straightforward example of instrumental smash and dash until Boon sings a bit, the band jams econo for a moment or two, then Boon repeats the phrase “Little Man with a gun in his hand,” growing angrier as he goes on. The album closes with the brief throwaway “Untitled,” which opens with a woman shouting, after which someone shouts “Big blow jobs/Was that good enough?” and a huge chord comes crashing down. After which you get some meaningless chatter. It’s pure studio tomfuckery, and only the Minutemen would have thought to end an album with it.
D. Boon’s tragic death in an automobile accident in December 1985 (at just age 27) put an end to a band whose thrillingly sui generis songs were always passionately honest and inward and outward looking at the same time. They were a band with a message, and their songs were fearless challenges to both the powers that be (who never heard them) and the complacency of their peers (see “Do You Want New Wave or Do You Want the Truth?”). But the best part about the Minutemen—and what keeps me going back to them—was their sense of humor. They weren’t scolds or straightedge puritans. And they were never holier than thou—in the song “Maybe Partying Will Help” D. Boon is addressing himself. I listen to the songs and I think and I smile and I laugh, often at the same time. What makes a man start fires? The Minutemen’s surprising answer: simple empathy.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
