FIREHOSE

FIREHOSE

by

Steve Peters

If'n You Don’t

Know By Now

To an out-of-towner, San Pedro would probably seem like one of the least likely places in California to spawn a seminal punk rock band. Situated 10 miles south of Los Angeles proper, this quiet region was known locally for years as the site of L.A. County’s biggest harbor, as well as being one of the major departure points for nearby Catalina Island.

Then in 1980, a couple of self-acknowledged “nerd dudes” named D. Boon and Mike Watt formed a band with surfer/drummer George Hurley. With Watt playing bass and Boon on guitar and vocals, the trio clumsily scratched out raw, original tunes that were the antithesis of the cover band mentality of other local groups. When their debut EP, Paranoid Time, was released on fledgling indie label SST that year, San Pedro started getting newfound recognition—as the home of the Minutemen.

“We always said Pedro (in our Songs) because it’s funny that we were even playing here,” says Watt, a Virginiaborn Navy brat who moved to the area when he was nine. “It isn’t like this was a fertile breeding ground for bands or something. The only gigs we could get were opening for Black Flag. Greg Ginn (Black Flag guitarist and co-founder of SST) saw our second gig and signed us. We were the second SST band! It was intense. We never thought you could do that; you know, make your own records. That really blew our minds.”

Over the next five years, the Minutemen’s quirky mix of rock, folk, funk and jazz, initially delivered in 30 to 60 second blasts of noise that reflected the band’s name, stretched the self-destructive limitations of punk rock and helped establish a healthy alternative scene in L.A. But just as the perennial acclaim the group had been receiving was beginning to translate into moderate commercial success with the release of Three Way Tie For Last in 1985, D. Boon was killed in an auto accident in the Arizona desert, bringing the Minutemen legacy to an abrupt and shocking end. For Watt, who had been best friends with Boon since before the two first picked up their instruments at 13, the loss was devastating. He couldn’t bring himself to attend the guitarist’s funeral and didn’t play the bass for months.

“I didn’t even want to make music,” the usually-animated Watt says solemnly. “F— that shit. I didn’t want to be a part—I wouldn’t carry D. Boon’s casket. I wouldn’t put him in the ground. He was too strong a man. I didn’t want to put him to rest.”

Around the same time, a 21-year-old busboy from Columbus named Ed Crawford was discovering the off-center grooves of Three Way Tie and kicking around the idea of forming a band of his own. A classically-trained trumpet player who had been noodling on acoustic guitar since he was 12, Crawford was a big Minutemen fan and had bought an electric guitar just a few weeks before he learned of D. Boon’s death.

“First time I saw the Minutemen was in this little club called Stache’s,” Ed remembers. “The place was just about packed. I didn’t know what to expect—I’d heard one tape of theirs, and I was just totally into it.”

The Stache’s show turned out to be a typical Minutemen blow-out, with Hurley and Watt (the only bassist I’ve ever seen who breaks strings when he plays) holding down the bottom end while the portly Boon, an unlikely frontman if ever there was one, took command of the stage, frantically bouncing off the floor and spewing his sharply-worded anti-war diatribes and tales of life in Pedro. “Rarely have I been so moved by a live show,” Ed smiles. “I got up on top of this damn bar railing, because I wanted to see this. To watch D. Boon up there like that... I thought, ‘Man, if he can do that, I can do that.’ They really inspired me to think about rock ’n’ roll in realistic terms.”

A few months later, a member of Camper Van Beethoven, another California-based group, erroneously told Ed that Hurley and Watt were auditioning guitar players. Watt had since lent his talents to a couple of projects, largely due to the coaxing of former Black Flag bassist Kira Roessler, with whom he recorded an LP of double-barreled bass attacks under the moniker of Dos. But a couple of informal jams with Hurley and exSaccharine Trust guitarist Joe Baiza had failed to generate the necessary spark, and when a friend of Ed’s convinced him to give Watt a call, Watt was more interested in recording a Madonna cover that forming another band.

"1 was just getting peopie to laugh again with me,” Watt says of that period. “It was a bad time. My big, bold thing was to make a Madonna single, man! To me, that was going out on a limb. Everything else beyond that didn’t matter.”

Ed takes up the story: “I called him up and he said, ‘Well, you know, Mike’s not playing, but send me a tape.’ And I said, ‘Well, I know somebody I can stay with. I’ll be out there first plane I can get.’ ”

Within a week, Crawford had arrived in Southern California and was leaving countless messages on Watt’s answering machine. “One day he got sick of listening to them, I; think, and he called me back. By this time, I had been out here for about two weeks, and I was all out of money and I had to go back home. I called up and said, ‘Hi Mike, gotta go back home!’ And he called me the next day and said, ‘Well, come on down and we’ll play some songs.’ ”

If Watt had any misgivings about inviting Crawford over, they were confirmed when he arrived home from his pool cleaning job for their first meeting. “My neighbor was across the hall,” he remembers with a smile, “and Ed went there. I was coming back from pools and I see him, and the kid’s got bleached hair—”

“Bubblegum yellow,” Hurley interrupts, his own long shoe* of blond hair tucked underneath a British racing cap. “It was horrible. I used to have the same color!”

“I was like, ‘Oh my f—ing God,’ ” Watt grows semi-serious. “I didn’t know what to think, ’cause this guy knew me.” He addresses Ed. “See, you picked me, you knew me, but I didn’t know you, and it was like ‘Oh shit.’

“So I get the guitar, put him through the four-track, ’cause he didn’t have an amp. We start playing these songs, and I could tell he never played electric guitar!”

Despite Ed’s lack of experience, Watt was impressed by the spirit and courage that had brought Crawford halfway across the country to meet him. Watching the young guitarist stumble through some of the unorthodox fingerings and chord structures Boon had devised, he was reminded of the days he and his buddy had spent holed away in Boon’s bedroom, playing riffs to songs like “American Woman and Smoke On The Water for hours on end. The look of determination in Ed’s eyes as he grappled with the instrument probably seemed vaguely familiar...

“D. Boon played that f—er with authority,” Watt says. “Even when he was out of tune, he would ram it down your throat. And to me, this guy comes all the way from Ohio, and he’s gonna play a lame in front of me? I mean, what the f—’s up, man? I knew he must obviously have a hankering to do it. So I could really start over, you know what I mean? I knew I’d have a chance.

“He was worse than D. Boon, in a way. At least we played electric guitar! I didn’t even know how he sang, but to me it didn’t matter. Punk is funky, man. People see what they want. It’s not like you overcome some universal musical laws, which I like. So with that, I knew I could start again—start honest. And he was tough enough to try it. That was the main thing that impressed me.”

. Just over two months later, with the newly-crowned ed fROMOHIO on guitar and Watt and Hurley at their familiar posts, fIREHOSE played their inaugural gig. Watt broke a string on the first note, and a new chapter in Pedro music lore had begun.

There’s a former military compound near the beach in Pedro, a wide expanse of land where huge cannons once protected the venerable harbor. Today, L.A.’s S.W.A.T. team is running through its routines in the warm California sun as fIREHOSE, cloistered in a room that measures a claustrophobic 15’ x 20’, rehearses a set of songs in preparation for their upcoming “Searchin’ The Shed For Pliers Tour.”

Since that first gig back in ’85 and the release of a debut album, Ragin’ Full On on SST later that year, fIREHOSE has emerged from the shadow of its former incarnation as a band with its own identity. Some elements remain intact, such as an occasional jazzy bent or unexpected rhythm change. But Ed’s throaty warbles bear more resemblance to Michael Stipe than D. Boon, and Watt, the band’s main lyricist, has edged away from Boon’s straightforward political leanings in favor of a slightly more oblique poetic twist. The whole project, while retaining a certain level of minimalism and adherence to the punk ideal, is decidedly more “mersh”— Watt’s slang term for commercial—than the Minutemen ever were.

In a lot of ways, we carry on the same ideas,” Watt says after the rehearsal, pulling on one of his trademark plaid shirts—this one given to him by Ed’s mother. ‘‘Like gettin’ up there and having your say whether you’re good or not. The spirit was the same, the idea of people already having a fixed idea in their minds, and you having to confront that. That’s how we did it in the Minutemen, not just with the hardcores, but with the Hollywooders. flREHOSE, here we gotta go up against our Minutemen people who knew us from that, and Bono, R.E M , whatever, go up against all of that in the same way. When we were doing Minutemen, I was just thinking of getting off the stage, man!. ’We’ve gotta get through this, they can’t run us off.’ I mean, all these other people were trying to relate and stuff, and here 1 was thinking about surviving. In a way, Ragin’ Fuff On was like that. ’Am I gonna survive this?’ ”

They did survive it, gathering accolades from fans and critics alike. And if Watt and Hurley had any doubts as to the immediate success of flREHOSE being a sympathetic fluke in the wake of the Minutemen’s unfortunate demise, their new album, “if’n”, has quelled them. Where Ragin’ featured six songs cowritten by Watt and Kira (who has since become Mrs. Mike Watt) before flREHOSE was formed, “if’n” is more of a team effort, with all three bandmembers sharing songwriting duties as Ed starts to really come into his own as a guitarist. Tunes ranging from “Thunder Child” (with Watt providing the growling Beefheartesque vocal) to “In Memory Of Elizabeth Cotton,” a lovely acoustic duet consisting solely of Ed and local female folksinger Phranc, indicate a quickly-maturing group. And as of this writing, the album is firmly lodged in the #1 spot on the College Media Journal charts, only the third independent label release ever to do so (the other two, for trivia buffs, were the Hoodoo Gurus’ Mars Needs Guitars in 1985 and flREHOSE labelmates Husker Du’s Flip Your Wig in 1986). But the band realizes there is still plenty of room for artistic growth.

“You know, we’ve gotta be very careful,” Watt speculates, “because we are flREHOSE. We’re not Minutemen. There’s no expectations, in a way. I’ve got some of Ed, but I’ve tried to be liberal bn that, ’cause it ain’t fair. ’Cause he ain’t D. Boon. He didn’t grow up with me, he don’t know me that way. But in another way, it’s kind of good, you know. He gave me a f—in’ kick in the butt. And George was always kicking me in the butt.”

“Except I was kicking and missing,” George retorts, chuckling.

“We're missing D. Boon,” Watt continues, staring at the ground. “He ain’t here. In fact, it would be neat if it was a big joke and he came over here and played lead guitar. It would be great, man, But then; D. Boon would have to change his songs, too, ’Cause Edward’s gonna sing and he’s gonna play guitar, you know what I mean?”

fIREHOSE’s sense of humor harks back to the Minutemen days, when Boon and Watt first described themselves as “corn dogs” in a song called “History lesson (Part II). The current tour (retitled the “Little Big Tour” at presstime—£d.) was preceded by the “James Worthy Tour” (so named after the Los Angeles Lakers star forward autographed Watt’s bass), and the humorous vein penetrates songs like “Relatin’ Dudes To Jazz” and “if’n” ’s “For The Singer Of REM,” a riotous, on-target send-up of Athens, Georgia’s favorite sons.

“BMI Songwriter’s Convention would probably tell you not to do that,” Watt says of the latter song. “I probably wouldn’t have done it before punk rock. It’s flREHOSE, but you get the idea. It’s just trying to get you to stop and listen to what you’re listening to.”

And though flREHOSE appear to be heading toward the mersh success that eluded the Minutemen, they know the road might be rough.

“There’s this thing in engineering, ’Build a good bridge, it won’t fail down,’ ” Watt says. “But with art, it doesn’t matter whether it will fall down. In fact, a bridge failing down might make a great piece! There was this idea, especially in the ’70s, that if you just work at it, copy ‘Black Dog,’ get ‘Black Dog’ down, you're gonna be rewarded. The thing is, there’s a million guys in line before you that get paid. So you gotta come in the side door and grab the mike.

“I don’t have to worry about Eddie. This guy’s got fire enough, you know. And I’ve got a lot of stuff I can give him, a lot of years of experience and a lot of shit. But he’s in this band that’s supposedly new music, on the cutting edge, and they’re asking him to deliver tomorrow’s sound today. And here the guy’s just learning to play the guitar!

“We didn’t expect to be tomorrow today. We were into tomorrow, we’ll be there tomorrow, but I don’t know if we’re going to deliver tomorrow’s sounds.” The amiable bassist takes a swig from a large bottle of Perrier and smiles broadly. “We’ve still gotta figure out what we’re doing!”