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| PHOTO: MURRAY BOWLES |
At The Minutemen's Rat gig, their set was preceeded by the ingenious satire of Brother A. West & The World Salivation Ministry. The Brother is the ultimate evangelical conservative, the man who makes Wally George look like a pinko, gloriously pissing off several closed-minded audience members, exactly the intent. As the Brother points out, "No one has a sense of humor anymore." Combining this spectacle with the brash, direct onslaught of The Minutemen made it an evening of co-conspiracy not to be soon forgotten. The Minutemen are D. Boon (vocals, guitar), Mike Watt (bass, vocals) and Geroge Hurley (drums)...
SV: Last time you were through, you were handing out "US Out Of Central America" stickers. It's obvious there's a political emphasis to a lot of your lyrics. Do you really think you're reaching the audience?
Boon: Yeah. They took 'em, they grabbed 'em. This one girl grabbed on and said, "I love it. My father works for the CIA and he'll love this." Then I had one guy come up to me as I was passing them out and I gave him one and he goes "I don't want one--I'm stationed in Andreas." I have a lot of people come up to me and they ask me about it and tell me they're happy to hear me say it. I wrote a really good song about that on the next record, "3 Way Tie For Last."
SV: Where did you get Brother A. West from? He said that in one place they got shot at or something.
Boon: He baptised a whole audience of punkers and they bombarded him with horse manure.
A West: Bags of piss.
Boon: Used condoms...
SV: About how many songs do you guys think you know at this point?
Boon: Maybe 80. We're going to do a triple album during the summer. 3 dudes doing 6 sides, 3 live, 3 studio and we're passing out this ballot where our compatriots in music can vote on what songs to put on the live records.
SV: What's the inspiration behind Brother A. West?
Mike: The Minutemen's kind of a dry, one dimensional thing. Covers, different styles of music, but, as far as our political stance, it's pretty cut and dried so Brother A. West has a sarcastic point of view to get people think another way. We're all trying to tell the same story, just from different angles. We use rock, he uses, uh, subversion.
SV: You said punk rock changed your life (on "History Lesson"). Do you still believe in it bringing about any social change?
Boon: In that song, it didn't really mean social change. In the song, it means, here I was working a job, going to college 2 or 3 years ago and now I'm travelling around the country in a band, playing music, something I never thought I'd do. It changed my life. I don't know about punk music trying to change society. Society has to change and music should be one of the means. What rock music has done for me is show me that people could actually not hate each other.
Mike: We want people confronting issues, whatever they're going to pick. At least they're confronting them. Me and Boon are very personal about our beliefs. We just want to point out the issue more than our opinion. The music is the catalyst. We're forcing them to confront things and come up with their own opinion. A lot of people believe things because they're told to. We're not into brainwashing.
SV: I remember reading that you guys believe in the Democratic party. Do you think they can get the momentum going again?
Boon: Well, they better. I don't want to have Bush as president!
Mike: We've got to shame 'em into being real Democrats.
(Someone asks if they consider themselves "legitimate" in their social message)
Boon: What we try to do is change our music and change people's ideas, maybe reaching a larger audience, without selling out. All this is kind of hit and miss, but I love it. I've never gotten to see the east coast in the autumn. I've never seen red and lime green and purple--it's beautiful. I can see why people paint it!
SV: Do you aim more for the college areas when planning a tour?
Boon: Yeah, we're pretty much a college band. If you went to a bigger show, it seems there's a wider audience.
Mike: We're 28 years old. We hope some of our peers would see us, especially in the smaller towns. It's open for everybody. No job's too small for The Minutemen!
SV: What's "Mersh"?
Mike: Career move. The lowest common denominator.
Boon: Commercial. We were sitting around and talking, "Oh, this next record, we want to do something different." We're good friends with many different types of radio personalities and they're always telling us "all you have to do is put a little more midrange in, cut down the EQ, put in this and that and you guys could be played right next to Thompson Twins on college radio," so we said to oursleves, "Let's try to do that." And, in doing it, it was kind of a joke, in a way, but it was also a wholesome try.
Mike: How can you calculate mersh? It sold half as much as the art record "Double Nickels."
SV: Anything to close with?
Mike: The idea is to touch people. Convince them that their heart beats. Everything's a device to get that across...
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