Minutemen - Double Nickels on the Dime

Pitchfork 95

When hardcore punk emerged in the early ’80s, it was partially a reaction to the tired old rules of bloated commercial rock’n’roll. But it didn’t take long for hardcore to start devising its own rules, which is why the Minutemen were such a welcome jolt to the scene. They weren’t outsiders; formed in 1980 in the southern Los Angeles community of San Pedro, they often opened for neighboring hardcore trailblazers Black Flag, whose guitarist Greg Ginn signed the Minutemen to his SST label after the first time he saw them play. They had punk bona fides, too: bassist Mike Watt, guitarist D. Boon, and drummer George Hurley were working-class kids, sons of a sailor, a mechanic, and a machinist. They all held onto day jobs and stayed loyal to San Pedro throughout the band’s existence.

In outline, the Minutemen’s sound fit with punk’s minimal, straight-to-the-point ethos. One of their most quoted lyrics—“We jam econo,” later used as the title for a 2005 Minutemen documentary—referred literally to the cheap Econoline van that they drove and slept in to save money. But it perfectly characterized their taut, efficient music, doled out in quick jolts —most tunes lasted less than two minutes—in order to move onto new ideas as fast as possible. Even the short, sharp sound of the five-syllable “we jam econo,” which the band would sometimes shorten further to simply “econo,” demonstrates its own point.

Yet as compact as they were, Minutemen songs sounded nothing like hardcore punk. Boon’s guitar was scratchy and wiry; Watt’s bass was busy and melodic; Hurley’s drumming was polyrhythmic and syncopated. Some tracks were like fractured jazz, some like moody folk, some like off-speed funk. They weren’t interested in pure volume or aggression; what drew the trio to punk was the chance to play anything they wanted. “Punk rock doesn’t have to mean hardcore or one style of music,” Watt told Flipside in 1985. “It can mean freedom and going crazy and being personal with your art….it really blows people’s minds because here we are the most hardcore-looking bunch out there and our music is the furthest from it.” In a scene that was already drawing lines in the sand about what was and wasn’t hardcore, declaring that kind of liberation was pretty rebellious.

One of the most famous Minutemen songs, “History Lesson (Part II),” sounds like a homage to the hardcore milieu that birthed them. “Me and Mike Watt played for years/and punk rock changed our lives,” Boon sings matter-of-factly, over a gentle melody inspired by the Velvet Underground’s “Here She Comes Now.” But the tune was also a plea for acceptance into hardcore circles that didn’t know what to make of the Minutemen. As fan Mike Brady said in Craig Ibarra's San Pedro punk oral history A Wailing of a Town, “The Minutemen shocked everybody when they first saw them, because you went to punk gigs expecting poor music. A lot of the bands weren’t that good back then, they could barely play.” Or as Erik Korte of fellow punk band Throbbing Members bluntly put it, “They just weren’t that hardcore.” That opinion was often shared by audiences. The first time they opened for Black Flag, the Minutemen were showered with spit from the crowd; even two years later, during a headlining set in their own hometown, they were booed off the stage.

“I wrote (History Lesson - Part II) to try to humanize us,” Watt said in Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991, Michael Azerrad’s book on punk history who title comes from a “History Lesson - Part II” lyric. “People thought we were spacemen, but we were just Pedro corndogs... You could be us, this could be you. We’re not that much different from you cats.”

“History Lesson - Part II” appeared on the Minutemen’s third album, 1984’s Double Nickels on the Dime, a two-record set that showed this band actually was pretty different, even when they fit in. Most of the album’s 45 songs were fast and short, but Double Nickels as a whole is not really “econo.” It’s as much an art record as a punk record, using found sounds, off-the-cuff experiments, cut-and-paste lyrics, radical politics, and references to all kinds of art that influenced the trio. It reveals a band eager to try things even if they don’t work out (one side is self-deprecatingly called “Side Chaff”). Double Nickels’ closest parallel isn’t any punk album, but the alternately tight/loose sprawl of Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band’s Trout Mask Replica.

The concepts underpinning Double Nickels came about partially by accident. In early 1983, the Minutemen had recorded enough songs to make a single album. But before they finished it, their friends and SST labelmates, Minneapolis trio Hüsker Dü, came to town and recorded the two-LP set Zen Arcade in less than a week. Watt took this as a dare: if their pals could make a double album, why couldn’t the Minutemen? (He would later add a playful “take that, Hüskers!” to the liner notes of Double Nickels).

They were certainly up to the task. They had already made seven records in just three years as a band—two full lengths and five EPs—and songs continued to pour out of them. They wrote and recorded 20 more in just a few weeks, with all three band members contributing music and lyrics, though Boon sang on most tracks. In total, Double Nickels took just six days of recording and one all-night mixing session. But because the double-album idea emerged in the middle of the process, finding a unifying concept was a tougher job. Zen Arcade had an overarching story—that of a young boy running away from home—but the most the Minutemen could come up with was two smaller schemes.

First, Watt borrowed a concept from Pink Floyd’s 1969 double album Ummagumma: each side included a solo song by one band member, and the rest of that side’s songs were chosen by that person (side four got all the leftover songs, and was thus deemed the “chaff” side). Second, Watt chose the album title and artwork as a response to Sammy Hagar’s insipid 1984 hit “I Can’t Drive 55.” “Double nickels” meant the 55 mph national speed limit that Watt is seen driving on the album cover—a way to say he’d rather live safely and play radical music than the other way around. The two concepts overlapped in snippets of car engine sounds at the head of each side—a suggestion from SST’s Joe Carducci—which were recorded directly from each band members’ own vehicle.

These ideas were clever but perhaps too subtle (Watt has admitted that few outside of the group caught onto either reference). The Minutemen’s aesthetic was never about grand concepts anyway, but about curiosity and openness and hunger for something new. They were interested in highbrow and lowbrow, mainstream and underground, influenced as much by Blue Oyster Cult and Creedence Clearwater Revival as Wire and the Pop Group. They were also as political as any punk band at the time, but their songs were more about complex issues that you had to research than generic anti-Reagan rants.

Take the opening lines of Double Nickels’ “Viet Nam”: “Let’s say I got a number/That number’s 50,000/That’s 10% of 500,000.” As Michael Fournier points out in his 33/3 book on the album, that sounds at first like random math, but it turns out that roughly 50,000 Americans were killed in the Vietnam War, as opposed to over 500,000 North Vietnamese. These kind of granular details were the work of homegrown intellectuals, DIY aesthetes: when the Minutemen argued about history or culture during band practice, they’d jump in their van and drive to the library to settle the conflict.

On Double Nickels, this mindset produces songs that are concrete and abstract, bold and subtle, workmanlike and postmodern. “Shit From an Old Notebook” sounds like a blunt screed: “Let the products sell themselves!/Fuck advertising and commercial psychology!” screams Boon over a circling Watt/Hurley rhythm. Yet its creation was less about protest than chance technique: Watt pieced together the song’s words from scraps of notebook pages he found in Boon’s van. Similar juxtapositions arise in “One Reporter’s Opinion,” which at first seems to be Boon’s critique of Watt: “What can be romantic to Mike Watt?/He’s only a skeleton!” But Watt wrote the song himself, inspired by the perspective-switching narrative voice in James Joyce’s ultra-dense classic Ulysses. (Watt’s obsession with Joyce also emerges in the instrumental “June 16th,” titled after the date on which Ulysses takes place).

Throughout Double Nickels, chance experiments and artistic influences abound. “Do You Want New Wave or Do You Want the Truth?,” a slow acoustic song with hard-biting lyrics, is a study of how words are manipulated —“should a word have two meanings? Should a word serve the truth?”—inspired by the semiotics theories of Umberto Eco. Watt’s solo song, “Take 5, D.,” was a response to Boon thinking his lyrics were too far out. To be more “real,” Watt read words from a note that a landlady left for a friend—“Hope we can rely on you not to use the shower”—followed by passages of improvised guitar. Hurley’s solo tune—which he chose to open his side, to the surprise of Watt and Boon—is a smattering of cycling percussion and wordless scatting.

Some of the experimentation on Double Nickels was born from necessity. Forced to generate lots of songs quickly, the Minutemen turned to San Pedro comrades for help. Some lyrics were written by non-band-members (Watt admitted that the band never even met one of the contributors, Joe Brewer, cousin of fellow San Pedro musician and Saccharine Trust singer Jack Brewer). They took other input, too. Though they had recorded a version of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Don’t Look Now” in the studio, Carducci suggested including a live version instead. He liked its field-recording quality, particularly the way the crowd chattered casually throughout. Watt agreed without even hearing the tape first.

The Minutemen’s use of outside contributions on Double Nickels wasn’t just about experimentation. It was also an attempt to foster community. Watt wanted the band to be, as he put it, “a prism” for the whole San Pedro punk scene. “Mike was asking everybody for lyrics,” explained Jack Brewer, who contributed a lyric to Double Nickels. “It made people feel like they were a part of it. ‘Hey, I have some lyrics on the Minutemen record!’ They were sharing their success; they didn’t just keep it to themselves.’ ”

If Double Nickels had been nothing but experiments and collaborations, it would have still been interesting, but it wouldn’t have sold out of its original 10,000-copy run nor gotten near-universal acclaim for decades. Most of the album’s 45 songs are tight, catchy, and infinitely repeatable, with D. Boon’s knifing guitar and untethered vocals reacting to Watt and Hurley’s complex yet pogo-ready rhythms. The music is spoken with a vocabulary the Minutemen created themselves and were fully fluent in by just their third full-length. That’s perhaps clearest when they take on other bands’ songs: on the “chaff” side they translate Van Halen’s “Ain’t Talkin’ ’Bout Love” and Steely Dan’s “Dr. Wu” into a new language.

That language was so developed and distinct that it’s proven hard to mimic in the three decades since Double Nickels came out. Watt predicted this a bit in his 1985 Flipside interview, discussing why the Minutemen don’t get airplay. “I think one of our problems with radio is that we don’t write songs, we write rivers,” he said. “We play against each other, guitar and bass; we don’t set up a background for our narrative.”

As a result, few bands who’ve come along in the decades since actually sound much like the Minutemen. (The band would go on to make two more full lengths and a handful of EPs—including one Project: Mersh that somewhat-jokingly tried to exploit some of the poppier sides of their songwriting on Double Nickels—before D. Boon died tragically in an automobile accident in late 1985). They have influenced many: the Red Hot Chili Peppers dedicated Blood Sugar Sex Magik to Watt, Pavement was named after a line in the Minutemen song “Fake Contest,” Unwound and Sebadoh recorded Minutemen covers, and Jeff Tweedy wrote a song called “D. Boon” for Uncle Tupelo’s Still Feel Gone.

They’ve likely inspired more people with their ethics and attitude than their sound. As a model, they are one of the purest DIY punk bands, on a par with groups famous for independence like Minor Threat and Fugazi, Beat Happening, and the Minutemen’s godfathers Black Flag. But the legacy of Double Nickels on the Dime isn’t just that the Minutemen did things themselves. It’s also that they tried everything, ignoring artificial barriers between forms of art, classes of culture, and kinds of influence. “One of the reasons we play all these kinds of musics is for them—to see how seriously they take ‘No Rules’ and ‘Anarchy,’” Watt said to Maximum Rock’n’Roll in 1984. “We throw all this soft music, folk music, jazz, etc. not only to avoid getting caught in just one style, but also to show them that ‘see, you didn’t want any rules— this is what you wanted.’ I know it’s hard for them. It’s easier when it’s all set up for you.”