“Our band could be your life.
Realnames’d be proof.
Me and Mike Watt, we played for years.
Punk rock changed our lives.”
— from “History Lesson Part II” by the Minutemen
“Where is the focus?”
That is the question that Mike Watt fired back at me when I asked him what advice he would give to aspiring musicians.
To translate, Watt is challenging a new generation of musicians by asking them, “How badly do you want it?” Watt has been answering those questions for almost 40 years, during which time he has consistently delivered music to our front door that is equal parts ass-kicking and brain-teasing.
We first came to know of Watt as part of the legendary Minutemen, who are widely considered one of the best punk rock bands of all time. Rolling Stone called the Minutemen’s classic album “Double Nickels on the Dime” one of the top 10 best punk rock albums of all time and one of the best overall albums of all time.
The influence of the Minutemen has been so great that when author Michael Azzerad wrote what is arguably one of the best books capturing the alternative-rock underground, he chose the Minutemen’s lyric “Our Band Could Be Your Life” as the book title.
After the tragic death of friend and fellow Minutemen musician D. Boon in 1985, Watt continued with his music, consistently making records and touring. He formed the bands Firehose and Mike Watt and the Secondmen, and played with Perry Farrell’s Porno for Pyros, as well as Iggy Pop’s Stooges.
Watt then recorded several solo albums and toured as a solo artist, recently releasing a live album from his 1995 “ring spiel” tour, which featured artists such as Eddie Vedder, Dave Grohl and Kathleen Hanna. Pitchfork called the album “… a tribute to his instincts as a band leader and a scene elder.”
Over time, Watt is generally considered one of the best bass players of all time. New Music Express and L.A. Weekly have both placed Watt on their lists of best all-time bass players. In 2008, Watt received the Bass Player Magazine lifetime-achievement award.
But in talking with Watt, we realize that his career is about something more than music or awards. Watt’s longevity in the field is not just about his ability to play; it’s about a no-nonsense, do-it-yourself “We Jam Econo” approach, which dictates that you keep making music with whatever resources or budget you have. And you make it happen, no matter what.
And while many people feel they have to choose between “real life” and their music, and can only achieve life balance if they stop playing or minimize the importance of music in their life, Watt has charted another path. His focus and hard-core determination to play music can paradoxically be another way to achieve a balanced life.
When Watt was growing up as a music fan, the world seemed to be split into two types of people — rock stars and people who didn’t play music. Famous bands toured the world to promote their records, in the hopes that fans would buy records and make the musicians rich.
“Something came along in the ’50s, and there was a market for young people to buy records. Record companies could supply those young buyers. Touring wasn’t an entity unto itself. It was a promotion arm of the record companies,” Watt told me. “My first gig was T-Rex when I was 14 — no merchandise, $2.50 to get in. It was just about getting people there so they would buy the records … I think there was a moment of 30, 40 years of people doing music that way.”
But from Watt’s perspective, this approach is not necessarily the way many of the artists that he admired had historically done business. His influences were often artists who took a DIY approach; that is, they made art for its own sake, rather than as a career and paid for it themselves. And Watt felt that by these artists having a “day job” to support themselves financially, they were freed up to focus on making the best art possible.
“I can tell you the DIY movement goes way back before ours. It’s part of a tradition – Woody Guthrie, Walt Whitman – stuff that goes back 100 years. Walt Whitman put out his “Leaves of Grass” himself. Franz Kafka worked at the insurance company – he called it the two desks. … Charles Ives, I think, did insurance work too,” Watt explained. “By having that job doing other work besides music, you can secure the autonomy of not having to make compromises with your artistic expression.
“You can keep your music beyond compromise.”
And so when Watt was beginning to play music himself, he went into it purely for the love of music and as part of his emerging friendship with D. Boon.
“You know, until the movement, we didn’t really know music was for expression, either. We thought it was just a way to be together — me and D. Boon — as boys,” he said. “And so you would copy songs off of records in the bedroom after school for no audience. It was sort of like building models — kind of looked like the real thing. We had no idea music could be used for other things.”
But soon, Watt found that despite the fact that he didn’t know any musicians, and saw no financial purpose to playing music, he wanted to make music anyway. And that became a form of rebellion.
“I tell people no one we knew wrote songs. They just didn’t. There was no culture for that at that time. But you know what? Like a farmer would tell you, if you want a good crop, you use a lot of manure,” Watt recalled. “You can use reactions against things. That’s why before we were the Minutemen, D. Boon picked another name for us, called ‘Reactionaries.’ We were sort of reacting against our situation coming from arena rock.”
And right away, one of the things that did not connect for Watt was the idea of being a “rock star,” whereby his music would take him away from his life. “Now, of course, we were from working families, so we were doing jobs other than music. It’s all jobs. It’s all work,” Watt said. “I hear people talk like this, ‘I want the band to be successful so I won’t have to work.’ I mean, what’s that about?”
Watt rejected the sense of the duality between “real life” and being a musician. He described the influence of spiritual guru and writer Rupert Spira. And in rejecting that duality, Watt embraced a view that he does not have to give up or compromise his life or music.
“Mr. Spira talked about duality, as opposed to this new thinking — which is kind of old — non-duality. See all these kind of binary systems we put ourselves in — either/or,” Watt said. “[T]hat’s the trippy dance of life. How do you integrate things? Not how do you pick one over the other. That’s just another form of hierarchy. Things that seem to keep us so down – binary.
“Why can’t it be part of the whole enchilada?”
Soon after Watt began playing, he started to learn that there were other musicians who shared his ethos in the punk rock movement. “Like, for example, talking to Richard Hell … we were talking about the idea of making a scene. And he said he was very inspired by the New York Dolls,” he recalled. “What they did was — at the Mercer Arts Center in Lower Manhattan — have a regular show there, once a week. So people knew, on Tuesday, we’re going to go see the New York Dolls. A way of doing things. Finding out what your own scene’s about and catering to that.”
But soon Watt learned of the hard core punk movement, which took the DIY ethos to a whole new level. In the absence of any real support from popular culture, artists such as Gregg Ginn of Black Flag, Ian MacKaye of Minor Threat and Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys started their own labels, booked their own shows and created a culture where art rather than commercialism was the primary goal.
“The punk music in the U.S. was very small. Most people hated it. So if you wanted to be into it, you invested yourself and your buddies. I guess the target was making yourself happy playing for each other,” he said. “And the punk movement — especially in the United States — was do it yourself. It wasn’t really looking for big labels and stuff. And in fact, you put out records to let people know about tours. It was completely backward.”
Watt was particularly influenced by Ginn and Ginn’s record label, SST Records, which was the label that put out both the Minutemen’s and Firehose’s records.
“Black Flag, they were the first dudes in [Southern California] to get themselves into this touring thing. You couldn’t be looking at it as something that was going to deliver you a career. But us coming from arena rock gigs, you had no idea you could do stuff like play in front of people. It was pretty profound,” Watt explained. “Then this kind of lifestyle and endeavor became more and more known, especially through the hard core scene and Black Flag touring around, and young people starting their own bands.”
And in the absence of the promise of popular acclaim and money, Watt recognized that the key to the hard core DIY lifestyle was hard work, plain and simple. “All of this stuff is about, ‘How bad do you want it? And how much responsibility do you want to take?’” Watt explained. “And where we were coming from, it was the whole enchilada. We never thought of sacrificing anything. Number one, because it seemed like that was the model of that little scene … there were enough people who were into it that it was kind of infectious.”
And this hard work and dedication was something that Watt wanted to (and has) motivated him for a lifetime career, rather than a moment in time. “Now some people, it might not be their life calling. I can understand the other thing, too – where it was just a moment in their lives, and they never went back to it. Arthur Rimbaud, I think he only did two or three years … . He wasn’t even in his 20s, He was in his teens. Van Gogh only painted for his last 10 years,” Watt said. “Other guys, Elvin Jones, he’s got the oxygen mask on stage … I’m more inspired by that.
“That’s stuff that he just had to do.”
And what Watt soon found was a way to make music a permanent part of your life. In the Minutemen song “The Politics of Time,” they coined the phrase “we jam econo,’ which refers to the importance of personal and financial responsibility in making music.
“The ‘we jam econo’ philosophy — you gotta do what it takes to make [music] — not the other way around. We need this and this and this, and we can’t get our thing out. Oh, no – you get your thing out by all means necessary. Which might mean small tent. Don’t make the dream too big for the tent. But you still get it out there,” Watt explained. “Econo doesn’t mean the cheapest. It means the most bang for the buck … We’re not even talking about music yet.”
Echoing the punk spirit of the New York Dolls, Watt described how the Minutemen would organize their shows to make sure that they could still work their day jobs. “For example, D. Boon here in San Pedro, we’re 30 miles south of Hollywood. We gotta work and play some show on the weekday. It’s going to go on late. We gotta get back home,” Watt explained. “So D. Boon was, like, ‘fuck it.’ We found this theatre in San Pedro called the Star Theatre. D. Boon renames it the Union. We start the shows at 7:30 at night. All this practical, pragmatic stuff. It has no bearing on the expression, except to kind of make it happen, to facilitate the autonomy so that we don’t have to make compromises that water down our expression. You make your lifestyle around what you’ve got to jam econo.
“You’re using a lifestyle to service this expression, instead of making decisions about your art to service your lifestyle.”
Soon, Watt found that he became part of a movement that germinated and grew for years outside of mainstream culture. And with others supporting the same “we jam econo,” DIY ethic, the hard core punk movement grew into many different bands supporting each other.
“And then you have ethical and aesthetic revolutions. Like you know what? We don’t care what you think about what we’re playing. We like doing it. There might be a community. Or it might grow a community. But we’re not going to subscribe to what you got going. And we don’t have to, because there are some parallel universes” Watt said. “And when you toured, that guy was going to find the Italian-American club or the gay disco or the VFW hall. His band was probably going to open up. You’re going to conk at his pad. The old days was about people. So are the new days. It’s always going to be about people.”
Eventually, even skeptics began to see the value in Watt’s approach. Watt’s father, who was a sailor, was initially skeptical about Watt playing music with little financial reward, but eventually felt a kinship with Watt’s workmanlike approach.
“My dad said, ‘There’s only so long you can piss in the wind.’ He knew I did music to be with D. Boon, but he could not understand why I was still doing music when D. Boon got killed,” Watt recalled. “So I start sending him postcards from tour. And he couldn’t believe I’m playing all these places … . And in his mind, he started thinking, ‘Wow, you’re kind of like a sailor.’
“And he could relate to my life.”
Eventually, as Watt embarked on a solo career, he made several albums working with Columbia Records, including “Ball-Hog or Tugboat?” Just as he did not feel constrained by other people’s notion of being a rock star, he was not constrained by punk rock orthodoxy that often preaches not signing to a major label. For Watt, he was simply doing what he wanted to do to continue his music.
“When we made a decision to go with Columbia, I thought maybe they had better distribution. I still thought it was more like using a payphone where you just put the money in the slot, and they didn’t come on the line and tell you what to say,” he described. “I saw it as a means to get through expression. I’m looking at that more than I’m looking at a record company taking care of me. I was on a major label for 14 years … and I never had to submit a demo, I never had to take tour support. I did the same thing I did for 11 years with SST. So I think there are different experiences.
“I wasn’t thinking about servicing a lifestyle.”
And Watt similarly does not judge others who do what they need to do in order to play music and provide for their families. “Every time I’m in a club, and I see posters of friends of mine posing with Budweiser beer bottles, I’m always thinking, ‘Their kids need to eat. They’ve got a family,’” Watt said. “You notice my life. I don’t have a family. I live econo. There are certain kinds of compromises and reconciliations with the reality …”
More, Watt continues to take the same approach to his current music – including touring in his Ford Econoline 250 van called “the boat.”
“I don’t think it’s a defeat to keep touring in the boat. I like touring in the boat. There’s a lot of practical reasons I like touring in the boat,” he said. “I want somewhere easy to park. Everybody can share in the driving.”
To be sure, not everyone has jumped on the boat, so to speak. Watt recognizes that many musicians still hope for a career in which they take little responsibility for their professional development. When given the opportunity, Watt shares his wisdom with up-and-coming musicians.
“All along, there’s still this old paradigm that’s still Elvis Presley signed to Sun Records, signed to RCA, and ends up making movies. I was with Columbia for 14 years. My product manager, Peter Fletcher, would want me to give talks to these young men who thought just getting signed was enough. I see these kids sign to the label and tie the puppet strings to their hands,” he said.
And in keeping with his Minutemen roots, his fellow musicians in the band Mike Watt and Secondmen keep their day jobs as longshoremen. “Both of these guys are longshoremen. They’re dockworkers. And I plan things to make sure that can happen. They can raise their families,” Watt explained.
“That was great about this movement. They were going to make it happen and build their own little parallel universe. And keep it open enough so that these guys from the harbor have a shot,” he continued. “Who knows? The future might be more about what I might call a straight job — having enough flexibility that it can facilitate people’s expression and autonomy. A guy who’s a dockworker – loading and unloading boats – but he can find time to play organ or drums with this son of a sailor.”
Watt may not be alone. He described Black Flag’s Henry Rollins seeing a similar future. “Hank Rollins was on my radio show, and I asked him if a young person wanted advice, what would you tell him?” Watt recalled. “And he said, ‘Don’t quit the day job. But then be bold with your expression.’”
Regardless of who gets in the boat with Watt, he will keep jamming econo. And he encourages others to keep an open mind about the possibilities in their lives and careers.
“Punk, the word, really isn’t a style of music. It’s a state of mind. It’s the way of doing things. That’s why it can never die. At the bottom of it is an openness and a tolerance,” Watt explained. “And these words like ‘normal’ and ‘regular,’ they’re really kind of sick. Man, I get nervous when I hear those words. Now ‘decent’ and ‘happening’ and ‘interesting,’ I like those words.
“The Berlin Wall inside the head — if you think that’s the way shit is — you’re doomed. It was just a physical thing. Take a hammer to it. But actually, they’re in our heads. People think it’s the way it is. Bullshit! Nothing’s the way it is,” he said.
“You want to know where the wall is? Push against it.”
