in the past, people often told me i resembled john belushi. after the obscuring effects of joliet jake’s early death diminished his profile, people told me i instead resembled d. boon of the minutemen. d’s tragic early death due to complications from touring in a rock band put an end to the comparisons. this quiet, happy period continued until until jack black’s comparitively recent rise to prominence. now, i get confused for him a lot. it is surreal enough to be stopped by strangers and pointed at, to be genuinely mistaken for a famous person. surreal doesn’t begin to describe the feeling when that happens over decades but the famous people change.
i don’t know what jack’s more extreme habits include, but given the high mortality rate of famous people who look like me, i’d advise him to walk the straight and narrow if he wants to get old.
speaking of the dearly missed and incredible minutemen, a new docu-film on the boys from san pedro has premiered and we all need to see it.
in the spirit of this film, here’s my special minutemen story: it’s 1983, and the minutemen are playing the west end in chicago at 1170 west armitage. as was the custom for hardcore punk shows at the time, there was an all-ages show to be followed by an over 21 show. being 16 years old, i and several dozen others were checking out their all-ages set and they were just brilliant. furious, brief, soulful, absolutely meaning it and just full of great ideas and execution. i watched them brilliantly ignore the second-order rules of hardcore punk and just as brilliantly uphold the essence of hardcore punk: intensity, force, substance - they had it all. they were on stage as causally as a mutual fund manager gets on the train every morning in the suburbs. they had made their life their art and this appearance was the natural consequence of that art. my god, they were great.
out of the corner of my eye, i see a guy stand up on the bar and begin to swat at the light fixture with a drink tray. he is an older man, maybe in his late 40s or early 50s and he appears to be coked to the gills. he is utterly wasted, trashing the place and causing quite a bit of concern for the bartender, one sue miller, famously of the much-missed chicago rock club lounge ax and today the matriarch in the jeff tweedy household.
unfortunately, the yahoo standing on the bar, trashing the place is none other than sue’s boss, the owner of the west end. she can’t call the cops on him. the bouncers work for him as well. yet he keeps kicking glasses and abusing his own establishment. the crowded club forms a wide berth for his inebriated destruction. glass flies. stools are thrown. poor sue wrestles with the lose-lose nature of the situation.
d. boon, seeing all this from onstage, announces that the over 21 set is cancelled and the all-ages set is going to be extended and finished. “we’re gonna play everything we got before the place comes crashing down.” the boys crank into the extended set, challenging themselves to wrestle even more sweat out of their supercharged music. the additional urgency lent to the already incredible show made for a transcendent, irreplacable moment that i know i didnt appreciate enough at the time. d., mike and george laid it out for us in the face of real physical danger. i felt… protected, if you can believe it.
when they finally finished, the band’s urge to flee the room took over. some of us charged the stage and helped our heroes break down their gear and haul it out to their white van parked on sheffield by the back door. i got hurley’s floor tom and carried it out for them. behind me, breaking glass and chaos reigned. in the small patio behind the west end i shook watt’s, d’s and george’s hands and i know i’ve never been more personally grateful to any artist, working in any medium, ever.
long live the minutemen. long live mike watt and george hurley. long live d. boon.
