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HISTORY LESSON (PART I)
Mike Fournier takes on the Minutemen
By MICHAEL BRODEUR
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The story goes that Mike Watt met D. Boon when the latter fell out of a tree onto the former, Tigger-style. For legions of skate rats, unadorned punks and bedroom rockstars of the mid-'80s, the Minutemen arrived on the scene with much the same bumbling brute force. Unlike the seeds of showboating punk that were being sown up and down the burgeoning West Coast punk scene, the Minutemen had to them an ineffable dorkiness, a fondness for the Pop Group and an unflinching honesty that either separated, alienated or protected them from a wave of looming sameyness, depending on how you look at it.
"I bought Double Nickels on the Dime after taking the SATs for the sixth time," says Mike Fournier, whose chronicle of the Minutemen's seminal double album was just released as part of the 33 1/3 series of rock books. An oddly belated inclusion for the series' impressive backlog of titles (fastidiously exploring/exploding minor-canon classics ranging from Meat Is Murder and ABBA Gold to Kick Out the Jams and Endtroducing), the sudden warm reception that has found the Minutemen may, in part, be due to Tim Irwin's 2005 documentary, We Jam Econo. Then again, it may just be that the Minutemen, with their strange alchemy of Joe Shmoe dumpiness and fiery experimentalism, represent the complete opposite of the hyper-affected, mascara-streaked, irony-flattened punk that gluts today's young ears. Or it could be something simpler than all that:
"It was just so weird," Fournier says. "I had never heard anything like it. And you still don't hear anything like it." Fournier grew up listening to "stuff like Boston hardcore and the Dead Kennedys," so the conceptual twists and turns that comprise the 45 tracks of Double Nickels threw him for a loop-especially since he had that shit on cassette. They couldn't even fit the song titles on there.
Fournier's book reads like a personal repair mission for all the unexplored nooks and crannies of the band's masterwork. He goes song by song, interviewing many of the same folks who made it into Irwin's documentary, but with less focus on fellating the band's truncated legacy (Boon died in an auto wreck in 1985) and more on the intricate (if sometimes goofy) scaffolding that the group hoped would raise their opus to the esteemed double-album ranks of, say, Hüsker Dü's Zen Arcade. Far from enacting the Minutemen's trademark brevity, Fournier's investigations are careful, nuanced and entertaining-the kind of a story a true fan would turn out.
"I didn't write this book to be, like, 'Check my shit out,' " Fournier says, anticipating exasperation. "I wrote it so people would check the Minutemen's shit out. I mean, listen to 'History Lesson (Part II)'-they did it better than any emo kids could ever do."
MIKE FOURNIER
READS FROM THE MINUTEMEN: DOUBLE NICKELS ON THE DIME
WEDNESDAY, 8.1.07
BROOKLINE BOOKSMITH
279 HARVARD ST., BROOKLINE
617.566.6660
7PM/FREE