Watt Goes on Record

It’s autumn in New England, 1985, but the club where the Minutemen are playing is suddenly warmed by a glowing gesture of friendship.

Guitarist D. Boon has just sung “History Lesson (Part II),” a tender, homespun anthem about how he and bassist Mike Watt, a couple of “corn dogs” from San Pedro, stumbled upon punk-rock and learned to think and create for themselves.

“Me and Mike Watt, playing guitar,” goes the final, affirming line. Whereupon Watt, a smile in eyes speaking utmost affection, sidles up behind Boon and gently head-butts him in the back.

A little over a year later, Watt is talking quietly in the dressing room of the same club, his voice reduced by sadness. The Minutemen are gone. So is D. Boon, killed in a highway wreck less than two months after the night of Watt’s fond head butt.

Watt and George Hurley, the Minutemen drummer, carry on in Firehose. The band is on its inaugural tour, which Watt regards as a substitute funeral for Boon because he couldn’t bring himself to attend the actual one. An interviewer wonders whether Watt has considered writing a song in memory of his friend. Watt has trouble getting his answer out.

“I can’t write a song for D. Boon yet. It’ll come to me, but I just can’t yet.”

Move ahead 11 years and skip across a continent to last Saturday in Costa Mesa, and there was Watt, on stage at the Tiki Bar, singing a whole rock opera’s worth of songs for D. Boon--and for the Minutemen and what they meant as one of the definitive bands of ‘80s true-alternative rock.

The work also is for his father, a career Navy man whose days firing up ships’ engines and plying the seas parallel, in his son’s mind, the Minutemen’s voyages in a van. Dick Watt is gone too, dead of cancer in 1991.

The Orange County premiere of “Contemplating the Engine Room” went just as a punk-rock opera should. (Watt and his band, drummer Stephen Hodges and guitarist Joe Baiza, will repeat it Thursday at Linda’s Doll Hut in Anaheim.)

With the first moshable beat, a fight broke out in front of the stage. Midway through the 54-minute piece, somebody jostled Watt’s microphone stand, and the mike bonked him painfully in the face. Moving into a long, final stretch, bouncing or brightly gurgling funk, punk and folk-rock rhythms recounting wayfaring days gave way to floating, contemplative, dreamlike music, like sea swells in the dark against the side of a ship.

Watt sang with his eyes closed, and the audience, rowdies and all, was held by a raspy, drawling voice shining softly with sadness and love.

The unforgiving sea tore you from me

Left me here pullin’ shore duty.

Your body gone

But your spirit bird’s still sailing on,

Shore duty.

Sure, I’m a lucky man

But how I miss you, man,

All alone and pulling shore duty.

Seems there’s always more duty

Maybe that’s the beauty.

Earlier in the day, Watt, who turns 40 next week, sat in a waterlogged restaurant dining room in Newport Beach, telling how he finally discharged his artistic duty to D. Boon’s memory.

There was no sadness in him this time. His voice husky from more than a month of concerts around the country supporting the recent release of the recorded version and interviews, Watt launched animatedly into his wide-ranging, zigzagging discourse (or “spiel” in Watt-speak for any public communication), arms swinging like a conductor driving home Beethoven’s Ninth, as if they could propel his meanings and translate his enthusiasm for the new album he refers to--not quite winkingly--as “the opera.”

*

Watt says that touring last year in an unaccustomed sideman’s role in Porno for Pyros prepared him to grapple musically with the ghosts of his father and D. Boon.

Watt was struck by the emotional openness of bandleader Perry Farrell; it made him think he could follow suit. And, feeling bored and becalmed by Porno’s leisurely, three-shows-a-week touring pace, Watt read hungrily.

In a used-book store, he spotted a copy of “The Sand Pebbles” and remembered how he and D. Boon, buddies from the age of 13, had loved the 1966 movie version starring Steve McQueen.

Watt read the novel and saw parallels between his father and its hero, a Navy engine man. He also felt that the character’s independent, self-reliant ethic was like the do-it-yourself punk spirit of the Minutemen.

Back in San Pedro (just Pedro in Watt-speak), while taking his daily early-morning bike rides, Watt listened to the harbor sounds and composed a nautical opera in his head. He didn’t take a tape recorder on his excursions, figuring anything he couldn’t remember wouldn’t be worth using.

Watt drew on another literary source, James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” for his opera’s structure: the songs would narrate a day in his father’s life aboard ship, but the image would keep shifting--one moment it would be Dick Watt’s story, the next, the saga of the Minutemen shipping out with their comrades on SST Records, the seminal ‘80s alternative label.

Watt said he didn’t lack for good, detailed material about his dad: Each time Dick Watt returned from sea, he would gobble large amounts of fresh perishables, then take his son for long drives and “go on and on” about ship life. Watt also got to see the engine room firsthand on “family days,” when the crewmen could bring their kids along for a cruise.

“Contemplating the Engine Room” also seeks to bridge a gulf between father and son.

“He never heard me play, he never heard my records. He never knew we were making a living out of this,” Watt said, even though he would send his father postcards from tour stops to prove his rocking vessel was afloat and sturdy.

“He’d say, ‘One day, you’ll have to pull some regular duty,’ ” meaning a real job. “But toward the end, when he was dying, he goes, ‘Ya know, you’re kind of like a sailor.’ It was cool what he said. I think he did understand me.”

As for Boon, Watt says he still tries to imagine what his old buddy would say in a given situation.

“That’s what I really miss, ‘cause D. Boon liked to think about [stuff]. D. Boon was a curious [expletive], never a cat who thought he had it all figured out. When you’re with somebody like that, you know how much enthusiasm that is? It’s never jaded, never stale.”

Watt carries on now as a sort of working-man’s conscience, tugging at the highfalutin,’ hit-festooned ways of erstwhile “alternative rock.” He is esteemed for his songs’ earthy intelligence and disregard for formulas, and for his nimble, thunderous, sweet-toned bass playing.

He hasn’t had hits, but in a sign of the respect he commands, everyone from Eddie Vedder and the surviving members of Nirvana to members of the Beastie Boys and Sonic Youth contributed to his 1995 solo debut, “Ball-Hog or Tugboat?”

*

Sailing on, Watt aims to delve into the political commentary that was fundamental to the Minutemen. (He says he worries about the social divisions he sees around him and wonders whether Bosnia-like balkanization could happen here.)

He also thinks he owes a musical tribute to his faithful, 17-year-old tabby cat, who began life named Boy but graduated to Man. For that one, Watt plans to have an organist in his trio in lieu of a guitar player because guitars bark and organs purr.

As ballast, he carries what his opera taught him.

“You’re going to lose people. That’s the hard thing to learn,” he said. “But if you have your art, you’re a lucky man. You get to tell another story. But you can never take any of this for granted.”

*

* Mike Watt, No Knife, Freakdaddy and Dis. Inc. play Thursday at Linda’s Doll Hut, 107 S. Adams St., Anaheim. 9 p.m. $8. (714) 533-1286.