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DEEP LISTEN
The Bassman Cometh |
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By Matt Rentschler
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| MIKE WATT IS THE MOST SINCERE musician I’ve ever met. In fact, one of the most sincere persons. He has wrestled the bass for over 20 years, beginning with his power trio, The Minutemen, who alongside fellow SST bands like Husker Du, Descendents, Black Flag, and The Meat Puppets, helped trailblaze the indie tour routes of the 1980s. Presently, Watt uses multiple side projects as “units” or musical situations for the man in the van to stretch into as a bass player and grow. With over 20 records and 50 tours under his belt, the bass is still the man’s lifeblood: he makes his money, his friendships, and his sanity thru its bottom flow. Mike Watt lives in San Pedro, the port of Los Angeles, a small harbor town slightly isolated from LA’s other 150 or so regions. Mediterranean-like geography of salt water and cliffs surrounds the port’s residents, children and grandchildren of Italians, Latinos, and Slavs who mainly longshore, firefight, or fish. It has become a living, breathing backdrop for Watt and his artworks, forever bound as he describes himself to Pedro’s open harbor arms. He works the thud staff, the bottom boom, the low flow thunder broom, with a sound lighthouse lit, foghorn fit. A deep-seated anchor. The voice of country, the rhythms of jazz, the instrumentation of rock; as if punk, Creedence, and Coltrane were meshing vibrantly as one. He is a kachina fury bottled in a bristle real oh mind tube, with oars that embody and wings that thump like a pelican in performance. He pits out, his legs shake, his mouth contorts. He is a holler-hoot dervish encircling hellfire and respect, clothed in flannels mended by Fogerty and the Material Girl, dutifully suited in secondhand Levi’s and Chuck Taylor moccasins. A simple silver anchor chain dangles from his neck. Hot sauce is strapped to his punk-studded waist. A note is struck, and a post-metaphysical flannel woven from a trillion crisscrossing threads is flown, its most prominent stripes including: the momentum and confidence of Watt’s former Minuteman guitarist and ever-present soulmate, the late D. Boon; the moral oblation and spiritual flame of John Coltrane; the stream of consciousness of Joyce; Dante’s pilgrim pull. Pedro speak pulsates the Watt aura, 1st person spiel washes over and out: kundalini tales, plant and animal identification, masculine and feminine voices converge, the Zone diet, bike pedalin’ and kayak paddlin’, a vivacious interest in everything and the curiosity disease, mantras, conscious compassion. He imparts how bass is like the glue in a band, vital in moving music from one point to the next; how without your guys and their righteous pings to stick to, what can the bass do but puddle and fold? Even Watt’s stage setup is testament to the bass’s political nature, positioning he and his fellow players in way Watt has likened to a garage or an engine room, where gig-goers come to peek in and experience this conversation between compatriots. One such compatriot is avant jazz guitarist and frequent Watt collaborator, Nels Cline: “The man plays so hard . . . that every morning his hands are swollen . . . A common sight following him in his van is that of his hand out the window, flexing slowly in the wind . . . He's Mike Watt. He gives 100%. Emotion. Abuse. Love. You go out on the road with Mike Watt, you come home hurtin'.” And yet Watt himself has been purposefully instrumental in nurturing that intimacy in gigs: avoiding arena rock, touring small clubs nationwide, staying after shows to sling merch and rap with gig-goers. There are, quite radically, no middle-men between you and the man. He has seemingly transcended what musician Saul Williams so accurately termed “the process of idolization,” where Watt is over there and I am over here, and never the two shall meet. Henceforth is the idea of Watt as simply some object of admiration demolished. He connects like hell so folks can experience him genuinely as a subject in communication, with no barriers made between Watt personally and Watt artistically, no schism of public and private selves.
Guided By Voices frontman Robert Pollard (r) hangs out with Watt (l)
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©2003 The Manifest E-Zine