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Watt’s World
A few weeks ago, while suffering an acute case of freelancer’s vapours (it happens!), I received a phone call from Mike Watt. We talked about his new album, Hieronymous Bosch, and The Wizard of Oz. Then everything was okay.
Here’s what happened:
When Mike Watt speaks, he screws his face upward, darts his eyes away, and raises his forearm to his brow, as if he’s about to close a flannel cloak around him. We see him do this throughout We Jam Econo, the 2005 documentary about his first band, ’80s art-core legends the Minutemen. But he isn’t hiding. Far from it. He’s inviting us into a world of his own making. It’s this place — his fertile imagination — that has fostered some of the most fascinating punk rock ever pressed to vinyl.
Startling mental connections abound in Watt, a 53-year-old from San Pedro. In his world, a Sammy Hagar record can inspire a punk rock koan (the title of the record Watt calls his best, Double Nickels on the Dime, which he recorded with the Minutemen in 1984); a burst perineal abscess can summon the spirit of Dante (as it did on Watt’s 2004 album, The Secondman’s Middle Stand); and people don’t talk, they “spiel” instead.
Read the entire article in the latest SF Weekly.
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