The continuing adventures of Mike Watt
by Michael Scott Moore
Mike Watt, former bassist for The Minutemen, belongs to a newish band called Three-Layer Cake, which is a twenty-first century musical venture in the sense that its members have produced two albums but never sat in a room together. “We’ve never done a gig, and I’ve never met Mike Pride in person,” says Watt, referring to the band’s drummer and lead composer, who’s based in upstate New York. Watt and guitarist Brandon Seabrook (in New York City) record their strings at home and send the files to Pride. “Mike does all the editing and mixing,” says Watt. “I don’t know what software he’s using.”
Mike Watt. Photo by Masanori Christianson
The band’s new album is Sounds the Color of Grounds, a mostly instrumental collision of free jazz, unexpected banjo, washes of guitar, and jerky, post-punk shifts in tempo. The label describes the album as “Appalachian free-jazz splatter,” but the music resists categorization. And if you know about Mike Watt, you know he loathes musical categories. “That’s all just marketing,” he says. Watt has famously refused to define the genre he and The Minutemen helped create. “Punk is a state of mind,” he says. “It was never a style of music.”
The Minutemen were a standout garage band from San Pedro, which in the ’70s and ’80s was still a rough working-class neighborhood. They were lumped in with hardcore outfits from the South Bay like The Descendents and Black Flag, but listening to their music now is an exercise in noticing how acoustic they sounded, at least compared to their friends. The Minutemen were never a wall of distorted noise. D. Boon, lead singer and guitarist — who died in a car accident in 1985 — rarely put distortion on his instrument; and no matter how hard he shouted, or how fast they played, there was always a clean, thoughtful, almost jazz-sounding bass line at the bottom: that was Watt.
He never studied jazz. But he likes to tell a story about hearing John Coltrane for the first time, thanks to his friend Raymond Pettibon, the Hermosa-born contemporary artist who designed several Minutemen album covers (and now has pieces in the Whitney and MoMA). “I remember when Pettibon first gave me a Coltrane album,” says Watt, “I thought it was punk! I didn’t know Coltrane had been dead for ten years.”
The Minutemen recorded more than one album in the South Bay, and through various punk-rock relationships Watt has maintained closer ties to the neighborhood than he might care to admit. “For Hollywood people, anything south of Hollywood is ‘the beach,’” he said on Marc Maron’s podcast in 2015. “So they think fuckin’ Hermosa Beach is the same as Pedro . . . [But] D. Boon’s half-brother Jim used to take a hammer up to the South Bay because they’d put their surfboards on the Strand, right? This was in the ’60s. He would knock holes in the fuckers! He’d call ’em ‘dappies.’ Now, we weren’t that bellidge on beach dudes. But we didn’t really know ’em. The harbor ain’t the beach.”
For this article, he was more circumspect. “No, I like the South Bay, man,” he says. “But there’s a difference.”
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Three-Layer Cake attracted him as a project because “I’ve been very interested lately in drummer-composers,” and each song is built from the bottom up: Mike Pride sends out a full drum track, Watt layers on bass, and they wait to see what Brandon Seabrook will do on guitar (or banjo, or sometimes taped samples). “Watt’s always playing the foundation of the song,” says Pride, who never expects the Watt layer to be “a bass player showing off his chops,” but a solid rhythm contribution. “I know A Love Supreme by John Coltrane is super important to him, and on that album, all four sections have immediately identifiable bass lines that just stay there the whole time. His bass lines are like that. So I always imagine I’m going to get something super solid, immediately understandable, and palatable.”
With Seabrook’s guitar, on the other hand, “I never have any idea what I’m gonna get, in the best possible way,” says Pride. “It’s always nothing I ever would have imagined.”
Pride and Seabrook have played together, off and on, for over twenty years. Seabrook has released nine of his own genre-bending albums, and Pride — whose tastes range from jazz and classical through industrial — drummed for a long-running punk band called MDC (Millions of Dead Cops). Both musicians are onetime guests of the radio program Watt From Pedro, which features anyone Mike Watt cares to interview. Pride’s conversation went so well that when they finished, he sent Watt a message suggesting a collaboration. “Talking with him is what made me want to play with him,” says Pride. “And within a matter of minutes, he was like, ‘Yeah, send me some drum tracks.’”
Carlos Guitarlos, a fellow traveler of Watt’s in the L.A. roots-punk scene of the 1980s — and lead guitarist for Top Jimmy and the Rhythm Pigs — once tried to describe The Minutemen for a 2005 documentary called We Jam Econo. “They were not avant-garde,” he said, “but kind of avant-garage,” and Sounds the Color of Grounds might be described the same way.
“God, I love that,” Seabrook says. “Yeah, I think that’s what it is.”Pride lives in upstate New York with his wife and kids, and all three musicians hope to meet there for the first time in person to record a third album in the fall. “Supposedly everybody’s coming up to my house [in the Hudson Valley],” says Pride, “and we’re gonna spend a couple days recording in my studio. My wife and kids know Brandon, and they know of Mike Watt, but it’ll be great to see everyone together.”