Maximum Wattage

To speak with Mike Watt, you wouldn't necessarily know that he is one of few working and living musicians who is credited with the invention of American punk rock. This 41-year-old bass player and prolific performer still lives in San Pedro, CA, and plays with some of the biggest names in the business-Jane's Addiction's Stephen Perkins, Money Mark Nishita and Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore, just to name a few-but is one of the most down-to-earth, open, honest and endearing people you could have the good fortune to meet.

As the bass player in The Minutemen, Watt came up in the company of other legendary bands like Black Flag, The Meat Puppets, Hüsker Dü and many others, all of whom fostered and exploded the Los Angeles punk rock scene in the early 1980s. As an old hand at punk rock-Watt and Minutemen partner D. Boon graduated from high school in 1976-Watt didn't have anything like MTV to tell them what was cool, and perhaps that's why their music was so unique.

Watt's second band, fIREHOSE, was an extension of the stuff Watt was doing in The Minutemen. Another power trio that set benchmarks for quality and musical inspiration, fIREHOSE disbanded in 1993, and Watt embarked on a solo career that has seen the release of two solo records and at least a half a dozen side projects, ranging from open-ended rock freeform to softer, more restrained music with Watt playing a standup.

His last release, Contemplating the Engine Room, was a rock opera, the tale of three men in the engine room of a naval ship throughout the course of a day. The idea is an amalgamation of stories his father used to tell him about his naval service (which his father joined after running away from home in Red Bluff, CA) and his coming of age in the L.A. punk scene. The album is a tribute to both Watt's father and D. Boon, the lead singer of The Minutemen who died an untimely death in 1985, and really says a lot about Watt as a storyteller, a musician and a man.

I discovered upon meeting him that his one-on-one persona is as forthcoming as his songs are. He is honest, candid and eager to talk. In fact, due to space constraints, the following interview is drastically truncated. Through the course of our conversation, we discussed everything from the effects of aging to the inherent youth orientation and small size of thriving punk scenes, and how not much has changed since he was just starting out.

He talked about his degree in electronics, and about touring with Black Flag across the country in only one van. His stories and descriptions about the old days were pretty damn inspiring, and his commentary on the current state of all things-from music to life to Watt-is unassuming and quietly confident. To it simply, Mike Watt is an interesting man, and one hell of a musician.

I'm at home in Pedro. I leave for tour a week from Tuesday. You guys in Chico are gig number three. In the fall I try to tour the country clockwise. The west isn't so bad but you wanna get out of the north before late fall comes, and hit the south while it's still cooling off. In the spring, I like to go counterclockwise, 'cause the south thaws first, and north starts to heat up.

Yeah, you know, it's from vaudeville. It think a lot of the vaudeville laws, things that were invented 70, 90 years ago, hold true for the "econo" way of touring with the three-piece in the van. I look at it like in the old days, when there were sailing ships, you couldn't tell the wind how to go, you just had to get a feel for it.

What I like to do is be out in the spring and the fall-the weather is calmer. And also, all the cats are in school, and I do play for a lot of people of school age, and Chico might be hip to that. In fact, I've played the school there before, with fIREHOSE, I think it was in '92, like seven years ago. It was great. I also played up there when there was a pad call the Burro Room-did a couple of gigs there. Then The Brick Works came along and asked me to play last year. I did the opera there-very heavy gig. Bob Lee [drummer at the time] and I wrote about it in the tour diary. Bob's dad was there and it was the first time he had ever seen his son play, and we did the opera. He was this biker-lookin' guy with a pot belly who was kind of dancing around in front of the stage. When we started playing, it sort of tripped him out and he ended up sitting in front of the kick drum all night. It was trippy shit. My father never really saw me play and didn't really know about my music and what I was into, but the opera was kind of for him, and D. Boon. It must have been trippy for Bob's pop, though. The opera is this huge piece with no stops, and on that whole tour, I never really explained it to the crowd, we just started playing it.

That's what I miss about the old punk days. Punk was a little newer, there were fewer bands and the gigs were more like events. People were wondering what was going to happen, and to keep that going, you gotta kind of invent things in your songs. The movement now is...God, it's like pop!

It's just a style now. I think I came from the days when it was more of a state of mind-there were a lot more artistic people in it, not as much rock 'n' roll. Nothing against rock 'n' roll or more people knowing about it, but it seems like, back then, the ideas were more important than the form. It was just a blank canvas to put things on. But now, the idea of the fast guitar just kind of took over the whole movement. Now, when you say punk, that's what people think of. The first band I ever saw in Hollywood that could sell out the Whiskey was this band called The Screamers. They didn't have a guitar. It was some guy on drums with a rhythm machine and two guys on keyboards. They were like a Devo-type group, but they never even recorded because they though that was old-fashioned. This kind of thing had a big effect on The Minutemen, as well as Black Flag, Hüsker Dü, The Meat Puppets and some of the other bands that we hung with. They were all really bent on getting their own sounds, and we thought, 'well, we gotta get ours too.'

When I think back about things-and I get asked lot because I've been in the game for a while, back in the day, the old-school-I want the ideas to live longer than the memories, because if ideas are being used in the moment, they aren't memories. Some of these ideas are really old, way older than Watt, so if you put it all in perspective, I'm like a new guy in the scene... Well, I'm not a beginner, but I'm certainly not at the end. I'm somewhere in the middle. I'm gonna be 42 in December, with 20 years of doing this, and maybe 20, 30, 40 even 50 more to go. It's just a question of me against me.

The thing that makes this fun is that I meet all these cats on the way, people I would never meet otherwise, and besides, it's a fun way to discover America. Me and D. Boon and George, right from the beginning, didn't just look at it as playing gigs, it was a neat way to do the journey and check out the shit we just couldn't in Pedro.

I did that last in the summer. You know, I like the idea of kids coming up and singing. Hell, I'm not writing any for it, and I do love them old songs. In those days, everybody was lame, so the bass player was equal. Before that, in rock, bass was where you put the lame guy, but in punk everybody was lame, and they were all equal. And in a lot of those old punk songs, the bass lines are really strong and great to play, not background at all, but a backbone. That was something that attracted me to punk in the first place.

Oh yeah. For the last six years-since fIREHOSE-that has been the strategy. I've been playing with different people to try and keep me young [chuckles], because I have to keep scrambling, I have to keep reinventing myself. Like this band I'm bringing out with me this time-The Pair of Pliers.

No, the opera's asleep, I'm not playing any of those tunes. We got a pretty good set, a lot of songs that people are going to be surprised about.

Well I've always played a couple, but it's hard for me to play songs from those bands without those guys, just out of respect for Edward and George, D. Boon. But you know, on the other hand, I don't want people to forget about those guys, and I do like people to know about that stuff...

You know, I'll tell you about one thing this summer that was heavy on me: My cat, The Man, passed away. I had that cat for 17 years, all the way back when I was in The Minutemen, and it was very heavy for me. He's on all my tour shirts, was a good friend to me. In a way, I'm celebrating him with this tour, and I do have a Minuteman song I'm playing for The Man. But like I said, it's weird to play those songs without the guys, but I haven't played them in so long that playing them was very strange, just in the hands. I started thinking about Edward too, so I picked one tune out of the fIREHOSE group too, one we never played in front of people, actually the last song on the last album, something that I wrote for him and that band.

It's trippy, listening to Minutemen. I really never listen to it because, especially before, I would just think of D. Boon and get sad, big-time. But now I'm listening to it-and it's my best album, 16 years ago-and these little parts of these little songs just keep running into each other... trippy shit. See, when I used to hear it, D. Boon would be there, but now I can listen to it more as songs on a record, and it's intense. In fact, one reason I made the opera was to look back and say to myself, 'Hey, this is why you're here.' And I am working on another record, but this next one is about Watt in the moment, which means its not really about the past.

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