January 24, 2012
#16: Mike Watt And The Missingmen - Hyphenated-Man I interviewed Mike Watt back at the beginning of 2011. He was coming through Richmond on tour for this album, and his PR people sent me a promo and offered me a phone interview. I’ve been listening to Mike Watt’s music for 20 years, and getting to interview people whose work has been that important to me was a big part of why I got into writing about music in the first place. I jumped at the chance, but in the days leading up to it, I was super-nervous. And I stayed nervous, honestly, throughout the interview. The only other longtime hero of mine that I’ve interviewed thus far has been Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips, and that interview made me nervous in advance, but ended up going really well. Wayne’s a nice guy, and he’s very easy to talk to; he put me at ease almost immediately. Mike Watt’s always come across as a nice guy who’d put you equally at ease when you talk to him, at least from what I’ve seen of him in documentaries or whatever. But my interview with him didn’t go down like that. Some of it was probably that he was in the middle of an entire day of phone interviews, one after the other. But I think some of it was also my awkwardness, combined with the fact that Watt is a pretty unique individual. He speaks his own language, and that’s only gotten more true as he’s gotten older. I had to adjust to his slow, laconic conversational pace; I’m the sort of person who talks fast and feels very uncomfortable with any pauses during conversations, and I had to try really hard to wait until I was sure he was finished before I said anything else. That stomach-clenching feeling didn’t fade until several minutes after I’d hung up the phone, and while it wasn’t obvious once our words were transcribed, at the time the conversation was taking place, there were several points during which I was thinking, “Oh god, I’m blowing this. This interview’s going to be unusable because I’m a moron.” All of that is my attempt at explaining why I didn’t listen to this album more over the course of this year. I loved it when I got the promo, and played it constantly as I prepared for my interview with Watt, but after having that kind of upsetting experience with the interview, I didn’t really want to put this album on anymore, at least not for a while. Only towards the end of the year, when I was starting to think about putting together a top 20 list, did it start to creep back into rotation. What I found at that time was that my initial impression was correct—this is a really good album. The stripped down trio format works well for Watt—a talented but not flashy guitarist (Tom Watson) and a drummer who can go nuts on his kit but knows when not to (Raul Morales) are the perfect instrumental backing for his unmistakable bass and vocal styles, and the 30 songs on here, most of which hover right around the 90 second mark, are constructed in the same unconventional way that the songs he wrote 25 to 30 years ago for the Minutemen were. These are concise songs, built around a central idea that may not have all that much to do with the songs immediately before or after, but all of which are unified by a musical thread that isn’t left over from any particular Mike Watt project, per se, but instead just kind of sounds like anything he’s done. And some things I’ve never heard him do before, like the pounding metallic dirge of “Man-shitting-man,” or the wistful balladry of “Hollowed-out-man.” The lyrics are fascinating too; each song is named after a different character from the paintings of Hieronymous Bosch, who liked to put dozens of small, grotesque people into his work. Watt’s lyrics for each song intend to capture the mindset, at least on some metaphorical level, of the character that song is named after. But then sometimes he ends up talking about himself, as on the unaccompanied spoken segment that begins “Pinned-to-the-table-man”: “Be brave, Watt,” he murmurs. “Stop never reflecting.” Then there’s the final verse of “Antlered-man,” in which Watt urges someone, perhaps himself, “Use the bass. Be old man punk!” This album never says anything too directly. But it seems like Watt is trying to sum up what it’s like to get older outside of the mainstream, to be a middle-aged man involved in a subculture that is supposedly the domain of younger people. On “Boot-Wearing-Fish-Man,” Watt sings: “Ill-fittin’ boots, notice the stagger. Yeah, that’s right—a fish out of water. Waddle about in the middle of helltown, searchin’ around for something to chow down.” Maybe those lyrics are simply about a Hieronymous Bosch character that looks like a fish wearing boots, but they strike me as a lot more universally applicable than that. The characters that inhabit each of these songs seem like they’re alone, and most of them are struggling. It seems likely that those two things relate. But all these characters can do is seek out their own place in the world, try to fit in despite their oddities or limitations. I guess that’s all any of us can do.

#16: Mike Watt And The Missingmen - Hyphenated-Man

I interviewed Mike Watt back at the beginning of 2011. He was coming through Richmond on tour for this album, and his PR people sent me a promo and offered me a phone interview. I’ve been listening to Mike Watt’s music for 20 years, and getting to interview people whose work has been that important to me was a big part of why I got into writing about music in the first place. I jumped at the chance, but in the days leading up to it, I was super-nervous. And I stayed nervous, honestly, throughout the interview. The only other longtime hero of mine that I’ve interviewed thus far has been Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips, and that interview made me nervous in advance, but ended up going really well. Wayne’s a nice guy, and he’s very easy to talk to; he put me at ease almost immediately. Mike Watt’s always come across as a nice guy who’d put you equally at ease when you talk to him, at least from what I’ve seen of him in documentaries or whatever. But my interview with him didn’t go down like that.

Some of it was probably that he was in the middle of an entire day of phone interviews, one after the other. But I think some of it was also my awkwardness, combined with the fact that Watt is a pretty unique individual. He speaks his own language, and that’s only gotten more true as he’s gotten older. I had to adjust to his slow, laconic conversational pace; I’m the sort of person who talks fast and feels very uncomfortable with any pauses during conversations, and I had to try really hard to wait until I was sure he was finished before I said anything else. That stomach-clenching feeling didn’t fade until several minutes after I’d hung up the phone, and while it wasn’t obvious once our words were transcribed, at the time the conversation was taking place, there were several points during which I was thinking, “Oh god, I’m blowing this. This interview’s going to be unusable because I’m a moron.”

All of that is my attempt at explaining why I didn’t listen to this album more over the course of this year. I loved it when I got the promo, and played it constantly as I prepared for my interview with Watt, but after having that kind of upsetting experience with the interview, I didn’t really want to put this album on anymore, at least not for a while. Only towards the end of the year, when I was starting to think about putting together a top 20 list, did it start to creep back into rotation. What I found at that time was that my initial impression was correct—this is a really good album.

The stripped down trio format works well for Watt—a talented but not flashy guitarist (Tom Watson) and a drummer who can go nuts on his kit but knows when not to (Raul Morales) are the perfect instrumental backing for his unmistakable bass and vocal styles, and the 30 songs on here, most of which hover right around the 90 second mark, are constructed in the same unconventional way that the songs he wrote 25 to 30 years ago for the Minutemen were. These are concise songs, built around a central idea that may not have all that much to do with the songs immediately before or after, but all of which are unified by a musical thread that isn’t left over from any particular Mike Watt project, per se, but instead just kind of sounds like anything he’s done. And some things I’ve never heard him do before, like the pounding metallic dirge of “Man-shitting-man,” or the wistful balladry of “Hollowed-out-man.”

The lyrics are fascinating too; each song is named after a different character from the paintings of Hieronymous Bosch, who liked to put dozens of small, grotesque people into his work. Watt’s lyrics for each song intend to capture the mindset, at least on some metaphorical level, of the character that song is named after. But then sometimes he ends up talking about himself, as on the unaccompanied spoken segment that begins “Pinned-to-the-table-man”: “Be brave, Watt,” he murmurs. “Stop never reflecting.” Then there’s the final verse of “Antlered-man,” in which Watt urges someone, perhaps himself, “Use the bass. Be old man punk!”

This album never says anything too directly. But it seems like Watt is trying to sum up what it’s like to get older outside of the mainstream, to be a middle-aged man involved in a subculture that is supposedly the domain of younger people. On “Boot-Wearing-Fish-Man,” Watt sings: “Ill-fittin’ boots, notice the stagger. Yeah, that’s right—a fish out of water. Waddle about in the middle of helltown, searchin’ around for something to chow down.” Maybe those lyrics are simply about a Hieronymous Bosch character that looks like a fish wearing boots, but they strike me as a lot more universally applicable than that. The characters that inhabit each of these songs seem like they’re alone, and most of them are struggling. It seems likely that those two things relate. But all these characters can do is seek out their own place in the world, try to fit in despite their oddities or limitations. I guess that’s all any of us can do.

12:45pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/Z-FUayFILbxd
Filed under: Top 20 of 2011