The point is just try and get away with whatever you can, you don’t have to be a part of any machine…except maybe your own. –Mike Watt
For a while, the Minutemen were my favorite band. I went through a brief hardcore phase when I was a freshman in high school that lasted about thirteen months, into my sophomore year. This was not a result of a new environment; I never changed schools. A friend merely played me Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death by the Dead Kennedys and that was it: I researched, mainly by coolness of t-shirts on interpunk.com, and bought a lot of used CDs. I stumbled on the Minutemen when I bought a shitload of used CDs at a flea market. I thought the name was cool.
By the time I was getting into them, the Minutemen had already been around for over two decades, with singer D Boon having been dead for 90% of them. The albums for me were Ballot Result and Post Mersh Volume 2. I listened to the “classic,” Double Nickels on the Dime, a few times. For me the songs were Tour-Spiel, Cohesion, It’s Expected I’m Gone, History Lesson pt. II, Cut, and Boiling. They were an amazing band to me. My AIM screen name and email was DBoonLivesOn for over three years. I listened to History Lesson pt. II on repeat for an embarrassing amount of time when my first girlfriend broke up with me, over a pay phone.
I haven’t listened to the Minutemen in awhile. I have Double Nickels playing in the background as I write this. I received the film We Jam Econo from netflix, because I wanted to learn more about the band, not just the facts of its singer’s death. I wanted to know more about a band that meant a great deal to me during some very formative years in my life.
The first impression one gets from We Jam Econo is that the focus, when everything else is stripped away, is on a friendship. All three Minutemen went to them same high school and graduated the same year, 1976. 1985 Footage of Mike Watt (bass) and D. Boon (guitar, vocals) explaining how they met is juxtaposed with Mike Watt in 2003 returning to the very spot. This occurs frequently, as about a third of the documentary is Mike Watt driving around showing the band and the scene’s historical landmarks which have all changed: an old hole-in-the-wall venue is a Petsmart, a recording site is an abandoned shack. Yet the film and its participants manage to avoid the trappings of nostalgia, it is told with a historian’s care for detail. Interviews with a who’s who of hardcore players of the late eighties coupled with those most familiar with the Minutemen band members as youngsters, such as parents, furthers the documentary’s mix of intimacy and history.
History plays an extremely important part in the Minutemen, and particularly in the relationship between Mike Watt and D. Boon. “The first thing he turned me on to was history,” Watt recalls. D. Boon injected history into all of his lyrics, from songs paranoid and alarmist to aggressive and revolutionary. D. Boon seemed to inhale knowledge, perpetually reading and learning, and passing that along to his bandmate, who recalls getting into Dada and Ornette Coleman. Concepts other than history and politics would infiltrate Minutemen songs, such as insecurities, dream imagery, inside jokes. Mike Watt describes the band as “insular,” We Jam Econo breaks that boundary down.
All the talking and reminiscing would be nothing without the music. We Jam Econo is able to splice entire songs into itself, as the average minutemen song is under two minutes, that practice does not smack of filler. The song choice often goes hand in hand with prior topics. The topic amongst the talking heads is mostly laudatory, with many hardcore notables of the time praising the Minutemen, but that backslapping drives home one of the documentary’s other points, that this was no ordinary punk band. That they were “great players, bringing a level of musicianship to the scene” seems to be the consensus. They covered Blue Oyster Cult and Creedence Clearwater Revival, which ensured they were not pigeonholed. Amongst the congratulatory remarks are encased the type of stories that can only come from people who were present at the time, intimately involved with the subjects. We learn about everything, from super-supportive parents to live show tics and habits. The ample amount of live footage ensures that the audience is both shown and told.
Although We Jam Econo has the typical extolling peers on the greatness of its subject, it also has an intimate, low-key quality where the viewer feels as though they are the one being talked to, being told the story. The archetypal rise and abrupt fall storyline has a unique poignancy when D. Boon’s death is finally arrived at. Brilliantly, it is only briefly focused on. The particulars of his death are only shown in a handwritten note to Ian MacKaye of Minor Threat. Instead of excessive eulogizing, the film ends with a simple acoustic performance of History Lesson pt. II and brief words from George Hurley and Mike Watt. “December 22nd, 1985 man…heavy day for me,” is all Mike Watt is able to say. “It’s like having a hole where your heart was,” drummer George Hurley says, with an expression of pure emotion. We Jam Econo is more celebration of a life then depiction of a death, and is far more moving for it.
