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September 18, 2004
Catchin' Up with Watt : Mike Watt That Is
I recently had the chance to sit down with legendary bass player Mike Watt. From his early days with the seminal outfit the Minutemen to the music on his current record, a punk rock opera recounting the details of his recent, almost fatal, stomach ailment, Watt has always been a unique and fascinating master of the low end.
We met at small, one-room Mexican restaurant in San Pedro. There were pictures of lighthouses on the wall and beef tongue on the menu. Watt pulled up in his white Ford Econoline van, aka The Boat. He still jams Econo. He still flies the flannel.
We talked until the tape ran out and the cook turned up the stereo so loud we couldn’t hear each other. Sadly, when I went back to transcribe the interview, I found that nearly three quarters of the first side of the tape were unlistenable. I have no idea what happened, but, as you can see, there was plenty left. Much of what is missing included Watt talking about playing with Iggy and the Stooges, and his preparations for his 53rd tour, in support of The Secondman’s Middle Stand. So we pick up where all good stories start – in the middle of things.
Are you doing anything political, allying with any groups?
Watt: I gave some lyrics away to the People for The American Way to auction off. I gave some lyrics away. Double Nickels On The Dime, all original, handwritten.
The election is coming up; the beauty contest. Of course I’m going to vote. I’m just telling people on tour that they don’t have to vote, because it’s important to have the right not to vote too. But, you know, at least think about it. Think about what’s up. And really, politics is more than every four years. It’s kinda weird how we reduce it down to that. If people paid more attention, maybe we wouldn’t be given these weird choices. Quote unquote choices. Sometimes it seems like it’s just two branches of the bank party.
This is what I tell people, too — it’s really weird, you get on stage, you’ve got the microphone; it’s kind of like you’re playing cop or something — hopefully the country is strong enough to survive whoever is elected. You know what I mean? They’re always throwing the threat on us of outsiders tearing us up, but if you look at history — D. Boone was big into history — the war where we lost the most dudes was the civil war. Any kind of group of human beings can get to that point, nobody’s immune. It’s a weird kind of fever that gets us.
It’s different now too, because it’s a different kind of war. People are always comparing the U.S. to the Roman Empire, and the Roman Empire wasn’t conquered by another army, it was gradually overtaken by barbarians, the modern equivalent of which is terrorists.
Watt: Yeah. They kind of lost their center, too. A little bit. They had these games of murdering people and the ruling elite got really closed off and got all corrupt. The barbarians wanted what they had. I don’t know what they wanted, really. I don’t think they knew what they wanted.
They probably wanted something to eat.
Watt: Yeah. The cities that they sacked, they wouldn’t even sleep in. The whole idea of cities to them was kind of trippy. They were people from the east. I think the Romans kind of lost it inside. They were maybe too much hooked to the material things. The barbarians, they wanted material too, it seems, maybe it was food.
The Romans set themselves up, just by going for empire. You look at the Dutch, they’re doing OK, they don’t have to run things. It’s a big burden. There’s the big danger – we have to defend ourselves. But we just made it so there is no competition but now you’re talking about, yeah, unorganized people, like terrorists. How do defend against them. We’re not talking about countries anymore.
[Raymond] Pettibone talks about, ‘What about nuke hand grenades?’ How do you defend against that anyway? Maybe the genie is out of the bottle anyway.
It’s kinda spooky. Pete Townsnd [made] this album called Who Came First, this solo album. [On the cover] he’s got combat boots on and he’s standing on all these eggs. And that’s how it is. We’re so convinced that we’ve got it all together, but really were in the most fascist situation. What’s he gonna do? Jump up and down? He’s gonna break all them eggs. It’s the greatest image, for me, to sum up this world and the hubris, the fucking arrogance that we get going. Maybe not on purpose, sometimes; it’s just near sightedness. It’s shows us what we’re all about.
Which is the purpose of good art.
Watt: At least it can show that we’re alive.
Speaking of being alive, I want to talk about your health and how good it feels to be putting out another record.
Watt: The gap between this record and the last one was actually longer than my entire career as a Minuteman. The gap is so big. Here I come from this tradition with the Minutemen, we were making records every nine months. I had to prove I was alive and I’m going to try and start making albums every year again.
It wasn’t like I wasn’t doing anything between albums. I did 11 tours in that gap, and that sickness. But there’s something about a record. A gig just goes in the air, but a record, it’s creation. In a weird way it’s like a tombstone. It can be there when you are gone. You don’t have to play in there town for people to hear you. So I want to get back into that.
In the early days, me and D. Boone talked about the whole dealy-o. We decided to divide the world into two categories. There was gigs and flyers and everything that wasn’t the gig was a flyer. You made records, you did speils, you took pictures, later on videos. All these things were to get people to the gig. As I’ve gotten a little…less younger, it seems that records have another value, too. People can get to know you musically and maybe they’ll never get a chance to go to the gig. Like D. Boone, his music can live. These kids come up to me and they’re like, ‘Oh, yeah, the Jackass song.’ They don’t even know it’s the Minutemen. Scotty, the drummer of The Stooges, we were chowing somewhere and it came on the TV. I go, ‘Who’s that Scotty?’ He goes, ‘I don’t know, I hear that song all the time.’ I said, ‘You know that’s The Minutemen?’ He says, “What?’ I said, ‘Yeah, that’s D. Boone.’ And he didn’t even know. So by making a recording, ya know? It’s not the whole dealy-o, but it is some kind of work. Like what we have left of the Romans.
And we look at them as a great society because of what they left behind.
Watt: Works. Yeah. We’ve got some traditions, like they say ‘Roman law,’ and stuff like that, but we got works, too.
What was it that you were diagnosed with?
Watt: Well, it’s called a peroneal cyst. Might have come from riding a bike, like a saddle sore, or an ingrown hair. It should have been lanced, but these clowns kept giving me pills and it just grew and grew, and it became septic. Fucker got huge and blew up. Actually, it blowing up saved my life. I went to the emergency room and it was like ‘Oh my God, there’s a huge hole in me.’ They sent me up to county and they operated on me. First they had to put a bunch of blood in me because I hadn’t been making red cells.
It’s weird, you know, it’s kind of obvious the record is about the sickness, but I wonder sometimes if you could still deal with the thing if you didn’t know that. Sometimes when I hear it, maybe because I’m so close to the sickness, when I hear it, it sounds like middle-aged punk rock.
I could have never made a record like this – for example, I had pneumonia when I was 22. The weekend Darby [Crash] died. I almost died. Had ice between my legs and arms. After I had gotten well of that, I didn’t want to write a song. Here it happens twenty years later – I mean a different thing, but it still almost killed me – and I want to write a whole opera.
This kind of goes along with what you were saying about feeling more important about a record. Do you think that the older you get the more motivated you become to leave something?
Watt: Yeah. You’re right on it. What happens is, when you’re a younger man, you’re resilient, you bounce back. Like that pneumonia, 22, bing-bing-bing, I’m up, back in the game. And it seems like, whoa, I’ve got a lot of time. As you get not as resilient, you feel more mortal. It’s also weird, too. When you’re young, I never thought of middle age. I thought of old, but I never thought of the middle. Now that’s a weird period, right? Then when you are there, in a lot of ways it’s a neat period, because, yeah, you feel blows more than you did as a young man, but you ain’t there with a cane and a wheelchair yet. You also have the advantage of having lived a life, so you have wisdom – well, in my 20’s I knew everything [laughs]. But you don’t have to theorize, you’ve actually got some miles under your belt.
Most people my age, carrying a family with the mortgage, they’re not riding around in The Boat [Watt’s name for his Ford Econoline Van that he tours in]. in a way I have like Peter Pan elements to my life. I mean I’m not a rock star or anything, but I still share this middle age thing. I mean, let’s put it this way. The average thing is for a guy in mid-life to get a divorce, get a 20 year old girlfriend, a convertible. Right? Live like a 20 year old. He’s competing with them so he tries to live like them. But me, because of my strange work, I think I leap-frogged all that and went back to nine because every morning I ride my bicycle, I’m paddling – I mean, I’m no jock, I’m no athlete. But there is something about paddling and riding a bike. It’s like little boy shit. When you just did it to do it.
It’s hard to tell people about that because we kind of, quote, grow out of it. But then why do we like gigs and stuff? There’s gonna always be a play element with humans.
You get older and make all these arrangements and responsibilities. Me, I’ve never had a manager. In a way I’m self-employed, which some people might think is the greatest thing, and I like it. But, you know what? I have to come up with all the ideas. I don’t have a boss to tell me – I know everybody thinks that’s the greatest, but also, you’re under the gun. Like ‘What am I gonna do next?’ I guess some people still have baby sitters and stuff – but not in this boat. So I guess I have a lot more responsibility.
Everything is up to you. It’s both a blessing and a curse.
Watt: You see a lot of rock n roll bands, they all go for some kind of day care center. They have a baby sitter. For me, maybe ‘cause I come from old punk, I just want to do stuff that’s kind of crazy. It doesn’t matter if I have a thing to show on Cribs.
But you are on Columbia Records.
Watt: Yeah.
Do they give you a long leash? I mean, do you have to pitch your ideas to the suits?
Watt: The deal I made was, I didn’t take a bunch of money. The contract I made with them was like with SST, I deliver the finished masters. I give them a lot of credit for being open minded. I’m making a song about three guys in a boat. Now I’m making one about a sickness. They’re not the most commercial things. But then I don’t take any tour support. I don’t try to live like the other bands. I come from punk.
I have a lot of respect for them for giving me autonomy. But most of my money comes from touring; playing for people. That’s how I make a living.
It does matter to some people, though. They see a major label and think it’s evil.
Watt: If I want to call you long distance [I would use] AT&T – not too indie of a company. But as long as they don’t jump on the line and tell me what to say, I’m not gonna hang up. Life is about striking bargains. What are your priorities? Do you want to be a rock star and have some guy take you to dinner, stay in some fancy hotel? I konk on people’s floor. It’s what you’re willing to do for your music, your art, your endeavor.
Pettibone, you go to his pad, and his work’s allover the place. He’s not living like some mooch but his work gets into big gallerys. I guarantee you we don’t have magic wands, we’re not tricking any boby. We’re just working our hardest.
I’m lucky, I think, coming from punk, I never wanted to ride on a tour bus and all that. I never wanted to. No. The way I look at Columbia is, they’ve got a lot of different acts. What I can give them is maybe something they don’t have somewhere else, I don’t know. I never wanted to be a Xerox machine, a cookie cutter. There’s prettier guys. I wasn’t really a musician. I got into this stuff to be with my friend. I just loved D. Boone. His mother put me on bass. He’s been gone 19 years and it’s trippy playing without him. When people ask me what kind of bass player are you, I tell them, ‘I’m D. Boone’s bass player.’
I’m trying to learn about music.Thurston [Moore of Sonic Youth] has got a lot of knowledge. The Stooges, Perry, Raymond, all these people I’m trying to learn from. I haven’t got anything by the balls, but I try my hardest. But I can give back a little. I’m taking this young man on tour with us.
Would you ever go back to an indie? Greg Ginn still has SST going on 4th Street.
Watt: Yeah. Of course. I would do records with anybody who respected my artistic control. I spent 11 years at SST and 13 with Columbia and I don’t really know if I could make commercial records, you know? They’ve got plenty of other people doing that. I like the tradition that the Minutemen started. You know some people use punk rock as a way to start and then they wanna grow up and be a big rock n roll band. I kinda liked what we started doing, I never really felt the need to grow out of it. So I’m gonna try my hardest. Gonna jam econo.
Did you have health insurance when you got sick?
Watt: No. That’s very heavy. I just finished paying off my doctor bill. I never regretted paying one penny because they saved my life. And now I do have health insurance. I got it through the musicians union.
Yeah, I had the van, The Boat, insured all this time, but I never was. It costs me about $2200 a year. It’s a lotta bones, but if you go in the hospital for a few days, it’s incredible how much it costs. I mean the County [Hospital] people, they did great work and saved my life, so I never regret it, but man, it took me some years, and lots of work to pay that off.
Last time I spoke with you, you said you were listening to almost nothing but John Coltrane, what are you listening to nowadays?
Watt: I love John Coltrane. I usually wear a John Coltrane button. I ripped my shirt at practice and the button fell off. But, yeah, I love it, it inspires me a lot. I had never heard that as a kid, Pettibone turned me on to that stuff. I actually thought he was playing punk, too. He was just older. It was trippy. I didn’t know what he was playing. I grew up more with Cream, Credence, T Rex. My first gig was T Rex in 1971, in Long Beach. Wow.
I got a radio show that I do once a week when I can. When I’m not touring. It’s called The Watt From Pedro Show, twfps.com. I play a lot of stuff the kids give me after gigs. The only rule is I start every show with a Coltrane song.
Posted by Ms. Jen at September 18, 2004 5:15 PM
