Talk:Mike Watt

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Growing up the way we did, (Minutemen lead singer/guitarist) D. Boon and I never heard jazz until we heard punk, and then we thought it was the same thing, because the jazz we were hearing really wasn't Stan Getz, it was the fuckin' John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Eric Dolphy, Ornette Coleman, it was wild and it made us crazy! We thought it was the same thing, just in an earlier time! For us, not being sophisticated and not knowing the chronologies and coming from Alice Cooper and Blue Oyster Cult, we really didn't understand this. The passion and all of that, we thought it was the same! We didn't see the color lines or whatever in the music, to us it was the same vibe!

I actually do think that these kids are smarter than we were in the '70s. It's funny how people call them lame or slackers or whatever, but I don't think so. They know they're getting hustled, they feel it in their gut. But they don't know how to articulate it. And that problem is the reason why punk came into being the first place.

I have to say in some ways that we were really reactionaries, especially with the rock-and-rollers. They really hated us! We couldn't go in their studios or play their clubs, the whole deal. They just did not like punk rockers in those days, Jesus Christ! Them and the cops were the worst enemies; they were not open-minded about anything we were trying to do!

I think punk rock, especially for me, was a big middle finger to this whole talent thing. You're talking jazz fusion, that was the big music in 1976 when I graduated — you know the more notes and the faster solos and all this — and then here comes these guys who never really played before! They're writing their own songs, and I had to confront myself and say, 'Why do you like it?' And I had to look at myself in the mirror and say, 'Well, maybe I just do! I'll decide upon why later, but this has got me fired up to write a lot of songs.'

I'm really lucky that I've got open-minded people out there who listen and come check out my gig. I wish the people in the audience would realize that they have so much more power than they think they have. They think it's just lights and smoke hypnotizing everybody, but really, the guy on that stage doesn't have the world by the balls or the tail — he's there by the audience's whim, they have the power. They put him there, they can take him out. I wish they'd realize that they have a low esteem, confidence problem about that. They think its all being run by marionette people — but only if they let that happen.

I'm still proud to be called a punk. I didn't say, "Oh, that's just a stage of my childhood and I grew out of that" — I just became a little older, that's all!

Making a record for Columbia is kind of like using a phone from AT&T — as long as they don't jump on the line and tell me what to say, I won't hang up.

Punk is not really a style of music. It was more like a state of mind. So there are punk painters like Raymond Pettibon. It’s anybody who doesn’t feel embraced by the big herd so they set up their own little world outside of that. If people think it sucks, then so fucking what? You're going to keep going.

When we started the idea was to have one big song and it would have little parts. We kinda got the idea from Wire. And we were trying to purge the Blue Oyster Cult and Creedence so we wouldn’t be derivative. We felt tainted because a lot of these punk rockers had just started playing and wrote their songs immediately; they didn’t have the years in the bedroom copying records like us. And then there were the punk rockers singing their songs and it dawned on us that they were trying to tell us something that was on their minds. We grew up during the ’60s, although our teen years were all in the ’70s, and I think part of the ’60s was that this is a country born out of protest, so it’s traditional to embrace the idea that things might not be working out so right, and ask what does it all mean? So a lot of times the songs are kind of little weird summaries of the discussions we had with each other.