Q&A: Mike Watt

Mike Watt’s Missingmen trio headlines night one of the Austin Corn Lover’s Fiesta on Friday. The other ACL Fest gig – free – lands at the Gatsby (708 E. Sixth Street) with Hamell on Trial, Churchwood, Gay Sportscasters, and Microscopic Telescope gearing up.

The 57-year-old Minutemen founder fielded a call at his home in San Pedro, Calif., last week to discuss the Stooges, literary inspirations, Austin’s vaunted punk scene, and his multifaceted musical mentality.

Austin Chronicle: Do you remember the first time you played in Austin?

Mike Watt: The first time the Minutemen played Austin was at the Continental Club back when Terry Pearson and Mark Pratt ran it. Mark later ran Liberty Lunch and Terry went on to be a soundman for Sonic Youth. We’re talking 35 years ago. I remember, fuck was it the Tailgators? It was the Tailgators. It was Keith – that great bass man from the [Fabulous] Thunderbirds.

AC: Keith Ferguson.

MW: Keith Ferguson. Oh man, I loved that guy’s style and stuff. Yeah, he wore a bandana and he had an old P-Bass, played backwards. He was left-handed or something. It was the old P-Bass like a ’55 or ’56. It wasn’t the slab, but it wasn’t the newer kind either. But he was bad! They had a trio, right? I remember one guy playing a fuckin’ metal vest and keys – that kind of shit: washboard rock.

Keith was trippin’ on our tiny songs. He goes, “I come up with stuff like that. I come up with a thing and move on to another little thing.”

AC: What were your early impressions of Austin?

MW: I knew about the bands before I ever got there. I knew about the Dicks, the Big Boys from that record Live at Raul’s. We were very excited about that. The scene seemed as vital as New York or Hollywood, but it was like it took more balls to be a punk rocker in Texas at that time. So we had a respect for these cats. There’s the old saying about the farmer who wanted good crops using a lot of manure, well that was fuckin’ Austin.

The way we knew about a lot of that stuff, these great bands from different cities, was fanzines. We knew Austin was the music town of Texas.

AC: Do you hold that dedicated underground culture – the fanzine types – as responsible for your long career in music?

MW: Yeah absolutely, in fact, what I was thinking was gonna happen was that the fanzine kind of mentality would transfer over to the Internet with dudes setting up their own websites. I didn’t know that everyone would flock to “FakeLook.” I thought everyone would take those ethics from fanzines and go into websites. There’s some of that, but people want gatekeepers or tollbooths.

But my career in music has a lot to do with the underground. You know in the old days punk was about people. I think these days it’s about people too. It’s not a style of music – it’s a mentality. The style of music is up to each band. It’s like my best friend Raymond Pettibon. You don’t have to be in a band: You can write, you can be a poet, you can be an artist. Expression is expression and that’s what the movement is like for me.

When we started, joining the movement was a reaction to arena rock, so I think our experience is a lot different than some of the younger cats who came later with hardcore and stuff. I don’t feel that separate from them, in a way. Anybody who’s getting digged down on, you have some empathy for them .... Unless you’re a total dick.

AC: There are plenty of people who’ll stand in line to suck Mike Watt’s dick as a bass player.

MW: I’m D. Boon’s bass player. When people ask me what kind of bass player I am, that’s what I tell em.

AC: I want to talk about you as a lyricist.

MW: I only wrote one song as a teenager. I can’t remember all the words, but I remember the title. That’s how I write, I start with the title. It was called “Mr. Bass King of Outer Space.” It was about playing some fucking bass solo where it blew all the other guys off the stage. Obviously I had issues with the hierarchy thing.

D. Boon called lyrics “speaking out loud” and I like that idea. Actually, he said the politics weren’t in the words. He put it in the band by playing really trebly so the bass guitar and the drums could come up. He wanted to make us more equal.

The words are really important for me. I use a lot of Georgy’s [Minutemen drummer George Hurley] words and D. Boon’s words. If D. Boon’s words rhymed, he’d keep ‘em, but if they didn’t rhyme and they were just talk – then I could make songs out of them.

AC: What about non-musical reference points? Are there authors that inform the spoken word kind of thing you do?

MW: Well, it’s harder to be a rip-off. With other dudes playing, you can steal their chords and their riffs. I’m not into that shit. But if you get inspired by a book or movie or painting, there’s a level of abstraction that keeps you from being a blatant fuckin’ thief.

So my first album, I used James Joyce’s Ulysses. For the second opera, I used Dante’s [Divina] Commedia for that sickness that almost killed me [an infection in 2000]. For this third opera, I used Hieronymus Bosch’s little creatures to talk about being a middle-aged punk rocker.

So I do like to use things that ain’t musical to inspire.

AC: Tell me about your new 7-inch with bassist Howie Reeve.

MW: It’s not the first two-bass project I’ve done. Dos, with Kira [Roessler] from Black Flag, is two basses as well. It was an invite. Howie’s 21 years younger than me. He’s from London, but lives in Glasgow. He plays one of those basses that’s acoustic, but it’s not a stand up. It doesn’t look like a violin. It looks like an acoustic guitar. He’s the one who initiated it. He asked if I wanted to do a recording that was bass on bass.

AC: Compositionally, does it take a different approach to write songs with two bass lines going throughout?

MW: To play a bass line and do the scale over it, it’s fuckin’ difficult. I usually just have to force it on myself – you can’t really think about it. You have to be totally ambidextrous. You know, where you have two things going on at the same time, and if you check or stop any one of them, you mess it up. I do a lot of prac and just force it on myself.

AC: What’s going on with the Stooges right now?

MW: I don’t know if there’s still a Stooges, Kevin. Both the Asheton brothers are gone now. Ig’s doing some Ig gigs, but I don’t think he’s gonna do any more. That was rough loosing both of them.

AC: After Ron’s death, the band still sounded great.

MW: Well, James Williamson, he was very nice. The Ashton brothers, he started the band with them. Now they’re both gone. I don’t know. I sure liked playing with them.

J. Mascis is the guy who got that together. In fact, I think you guys – the Chronicle – put me on the fuckin’ cover! I was playing in J. Masic & the Fog. We played Emo’s. It was Jay, George Berz was the drummer, Ron Asheton, and myself. Maybe it was South by Southwest or something. [Ed note: It was.] We’re talkin’ 2001.

AC: Being asked to join the band must have been a huge honor.

MW: I don’t think we’d have had a punk scene if not for the Stooges. Especially in SoCal, where there’s 150 towns and nobody knew each other. All the punks meet up in Hollywood and the one thing in common: the fuckin’ Stooges. Even more than the Velvet Underground or the Ramones.

It was so intense when I got the call from Ig. He says, “Hey Mike, Ronnie says you’re the man!” I fuckin’ couldn’t believe it. I looked at the phone like, what the fuck? He said, “You want to do me a favor? Wear a t-shirt instead of a flannel?” I said, “No problem. What about Levi’s and Converse?” He said: “That’s strong.”

It was such an intense call. He started talking about lighting onstage and him having nightmares about the drummer wearing bright orange and the bass player in lime green. I’ve run into that before with lead singers. Perry Farrell too. They’re the bridge to the people, so they have a different angle.

After going on and on about the look, he gets to the music and says, “Look Mike, however we get to the end of the songs, that’s how we’re going to end them.” Thinking back, a lot of the first Stooges album had fade-outs, so that might be what he meant. At the time, I didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about.

Then I flew out to Coachella, had a prac, and that began the next 10 years.

AC: You mentioned Perry Farrell. I remember buying Porno for Pyro’s Good God’s Urge when it came out and being surprised you’d played on it.

MW: I played on a couple songs on that album. When Perry teaches you a song, he don’t give you the chords or the rhythms or stops and starts. He tells you the story. He goes, “Okay Mike, this one is about how Pete’s dad – Pete’s the guitar man – has cancer. Pete’s saying, ‘God, you can take my life, if you save my pops.’”

I said, “Okay.”

“That’s the first part. For the second part, you’re surfing Mike, and there are some big-ass waves and there are even some sharks out there, but you’re going to be a hard charger and you’re not afraid!”

That’s why the bass line kind of goes into the sand, because I didn’t know where the song was going! I just follow Perry, look over at Peter and make sure I’m in the right key – lotta A’s and E’s – and I’m thumpin’ on the fifth and making sure the minor/major thing isn’t too clammed up. Then it goes to this surf part and then grows into this big heart-wrencher.

Then, they all stop and look at me and I have to bring in a lick. I did some rockabilly thing because I didn’t know what to play and they jumped on that. We’re surfin’ and there’s sharks and it’s such a trip.

One take. I’ve never recorded like that before. You get a fanatical instruction, then you jump on it as a team.

Perry, D. Boon, J. Mascis – I’ve been lucky to play with them. Some of them were one-off gigs. I guess everybody’s a one-off. If look at your thumb, everybody’s got a different fingerprint. But these cats, they totally freak out as a one-off and I’ve been lucky in that way. It’s hard to be a sideman in a way, but I think it’s important – especially if you’re gonna ask people to do it for you, too.

You can’t learn everything being the boss. You’re gonna miss out on shit, always getting your way, never learning to compromise. That’s not real life! You end up like Citizen Kane. I like taking turns: not always a sideman, not always a frontman, not always a collaboration man. I think that’s the three ways of working: you give directions, you take directions, or you collaborate. They all have their place. I’ve been able to do all three and I see dudes who go too far in any one of those and they get cynical because they’re locked in.

AC: Tell us about Friday’s gig in Austin. You’re doing it with your band the Missingmen. What can we expect?

MW: I’ve done the third opera [Hyphenated-man] there twice, I ain’t gonna do it again. It’ll be all Mike Watt stuff, but I want to surprise ya. It ain’t gonna be other people’s shit and it ain’t gonna be one of the operas. It’s totally Missingmen oriented.

AC: What’s your connection to Hickoids singer Jeff Smith, who’s organizing Austin Corn Lovers Fiesta?

MW: It was purely on the music. I got this radio show, the Watt from Pedro show, for almost 15 years now. He started sending me some Saustex Records music and I just loved it. I knew about the Hickoids a while ago, but a lot of those bands I didn’t know of! There was a time where I knew every fuckin’ punk band, but that was quite a while ago.

So brother Jeff turns me on to all this fuckin’ music and I start playing it on my show and, to me, he seems like the spirit of old days without being sentimental or nostalgic. Knowing by doing. When you find cats like that, it’s happening because there’s a lot of jive. There always has been. I just thought, “Wow, a kindred spirit."

D. Boon would say “Co-conspirator!”