Howlin Wuelf Media :: Mike Watt ::

From his earliest years performing with D. Boon and the Minutemen while helping to establish the American indie rock scene through the then-fledgling SST scene, Mike Watt has had a deep sense of purpose although, as he admits, "It's hard to describe the mission, what makes me put almost everything else secondary. When I tour, I conk at people's pads. I play every day. I'm not using it as a means to a lifestyle. I don't really know what the mission is exactly except to do this as intense as I can. It's like being a sailor or something. Sometimes, it does feel as if I've been given orders, a bizarre spin on the minstrel or troubadour scenario, the town crier, the guy that goes between the towns to let the other towns know about each other."

His upcoming recording plans include an opera called "ten and tweny don't make fifty" to be done by his “missingmen” line-up and a separate project to be done with “the black gang” (Nels Cline from Wilco and Bob Bee), about what he calls "my autumn." Much of his time in recent years has been occupied touring and recording with the reformed Iggy & The Stooges.

An inveterate road dog (not unlike Saint Bernard in the Paradise section of the "Divine Comedy"), Mike Watt has spent an incalculable percentage of the past quarter century touring in numerous ensembles and configurations. Beginning with the Minutemen in the early 1980s, Watt helped define the "econo-tour," a road warrior-style approach to touring that involved performing the most gigs possible in the fewest days with the lowest possible overhead. Sharing a van with SST labelmates Black Flag, the Minutemen unknowingly created the roadmap of national club routes that the budding Punk Rock Nation would later adopt as its own. Finally, after four years of watching the tour van odometer flip over to zeros, the Minutemen came to an end on December 23, 1985 when a tragic van accident took D. Boon's life.

Watt retreated from music after the loss, though not for long. An avid Ohio-based Minutemen fan named Ed "fROMOHIO" Crawford found Watt's number in the phone book and announced that he was moving to San Pedro to start a new band with Watt and drummer George Hurley. Ever the enthusiast of the path-less-traveled, Watt conceded, and the trio launched fIREHOSE in June 1986 going on to create five studio albums and a live EP, indulging in seven-and-a-half years of non-stop econo-touring (without ever taking label tour support). fIREHOSE signed to Columbia Records, who released the group's final three records before they dissolved in January 1994.

In the spring of 1995, he released his first solo album, Ball-Hog or Tugboat? The album enlisted no less than 48 different participants including members of Nirvana, Pearl Jam, the Beastie Boys, Soul Asylum, the Lemonheads, and the Screaming Trees. In fact, the tour line-up for Watt's first solo outing included Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder on vocals, the Germ's Pat Smear on guitar, and Nirvana's David Grohl on drums, with Grohl's then-new group, the Foo Fighters, delivering their very first live performances in the support slot. After this tour, he did two more with Nels Cline and two drummers as the Crew Of The Flying Saucer. He then toured for a year as a sideman on bass for Perry Farrell's Porno for Pyros and recorded two songs for their second album. Then Watt trimmed his caravan back to a three-man team and recorded his 1997 follow-up, the punk opera Contemplating The Engine Room. The thematic effort revolved around three seamen in the engine room of a naval vessel, in sum creating a powerful metaphor for the Minutemen and their road lives in "the boat" (Watt's name for the van he tours in). He brought this around the towns for fourteen months with the Black Gang, a trio that had the album's Nels Cline and Stephen Hodges at different times along with Bob Lee and Joe Baiza.

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The Secondman's Middle Stand was Mike Watt's third solo album and the first to be recorded San Pedro, California, Watt's home-base since childhood (he was born in Portsmouth, Virginia, on December 20, 1957), and first to be recorded with a bass (Watt), organ (Pete Mazich), and drums (Jerry Trebotic) line-up. (Mazich and Petra Haden both contribute back-up singing to Watt's salty growl). There are nine (three times three) songs on The Secondman's Middle Stand and, like the "Divine Comedy," Watt's new album is the saga of a pilgrim going through his own inferno ("boilin' blazes," "puked to high heaven," "burstedman") and purgatory ("tied a reed 'round my waist," "pissbags and tubing," "beltsandedman") before experiencing a reconnect to paradise ("the angels gate," "pluckin', pedalin' and paddlin'," "pelicanman"). This project stemmed from a critical illness in 2000 with a fever lasting 38 days, its climax an abscess bursting in his perineum. During his recuperation, Watt poured over all kinds of books ranging from Manly P. Hall's "Twelve World Teachers" to the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John to Margaret Cheney's "Tesla: Man Out of Time," a biography of the eccentric enigmatic 19th century inventor, probably best-known for discovering the rotating magnetic field that gives rise to alternating currents, who favored numbers divisible by three. Watt also used his recovery period to re-read Dante Alighieri's "Divine Comedy," (he first read it as a teenager) which is divided into three sections: "Inferno," "Purgatorio," and "Paradiso." Both "Purgatorio" and "Paradiso" are divided into 33 cantos ("Inferno" has 34) with each section divided into groups of 3 lines called tercets.

"That sickness hellride was definitely memorable - it was profound on me," Watt confesses. "It took so much from me, I figured I could take a record from it. It's a journey, like being on the raft with Jim (from "Huckleberry Finn"), going down the river, or Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus walking through Dublin (from James Joyce's "Ulysses") or being with Virgil (author of 'The Aeneid') and Beatrice (Dante's dead love) and going through those crazy things. There's something to be said for being a pilgrim, you keep moving. I'm in the middle of my life. I'm definitely not a beginner and, hopefully, I'm not at the end of the road. The cliche is 'last stand,' but I just couldn't see it being my 'last stand.' Another reason I took to paralleling Dante's 'Comedy,' he wrote that in the middle of his life too. When I read it again, after the sickness, in my 40s, I saw it as a kind of vehicle for him to talk about the intense stuff in his life."

In addition to his primary efforts, Watt's yearnings for creative output have resulted in numerous side projects beginning with the double bass duo Dos with ex-Black Flag bassist Kira Roessler. In the time since "...Engine Room," Watt has played bass and toured with J Mascis + the Fog and recorded three albums with Banyan, an experimental alt-jazz project with Pyro/Jane's Addiction member Stephen Perkins. Watt also was part of the Wylde Rattz with the Stooges' Ron Asheton, Mudhoney's Mark Arm, Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore and Steve Shelley to cover the Stooges' classic "TV Eye" for the soundtrack to the Todd Haynes film "Velvet Goldmine."

In 2003, Watt was invited by Iggy Pop to fill in on bass for the late Dave Alexander on a series of Stooges reunion concert dates with the other two original members, Ron and Scott Asheton, throughout North America, Asia and Europe in which he continues with today as the youngest member of the band both on stage and in the studio, handling bass duties on their 2007 comeback album, The Sickness.

Watt's list of side bands includes Watts' Material Girl tribute band the Madonnabes, Hellride, Li'l Pit, Pair Of Pliers, the Jom & Terry Show, Crimony, Bootstrappers and the original Punk Rock Karaoke with Eric Melvin of NOFX and Greg Hetson of Bad Religion. He's recently even done some gigs with old friend drummer George Hurley as a duet doing songs they did together in the early Minutemen days. Our man in Pedro also stays busy with a weekly web radio program, The Watt From Pedro Show (twfps.com), and his own site, hootpage.com, both of which provide outlets for his many political interests, including the fight against FFC regulations on low power FM stations and web radio channels. He also loves pedaling his bike around his town four days a week while paddling his kayak the other three - all at the crack of dawn.

But there is a thread that connects all of Watt's concerns. "Art and music mirrors nature in a lot of ways," Watt says. "Nature's a lot about resonances and cycles and rhythms. Nature has no ethics or morality. Neither does music. It operates on a level where words aren't. There's always going to be a hankering to get connections on a non-word level. Can we have ideas that don't have words for them? You can't know anything, you can only believe. The way you describe what you believe is a prison. Music is a way to get around that. In the comedy, Dante is talking about free will and all these things, bizarre things, big big questions. The mind's going to float, the mind's going to wander. The whole idea of journeys and stuff is such a metaphor for the way the mind is in life. The whole dilemma of what is the mind and what is the brain. One is conscious of the other, a total mystery in total flux. Good art touches on that stuff. I think that the brain/mind connect is every heavier than life/death. Free will, behavior, culture, memory, hopes, all based on this big crux on the connection of the brain and the mind. And music plays on this too..."