|
|
| HOME | FREE NEWS SUBMISSION | PREMIUM PR DISTRIBUTION | PR COPYWRITING | RSS FEEDS | TESTIMONIALS | CONTACT | ||
 |
Sections:
Band |
Business |
Career |
Events |
Label |
Music Releases |
Radio |
Tech |
Video |
Web Events
|  |
| Advertise | Artist Development | Submit Video | MusicDish*China | MusicDish e-Journal | MusicDish Network | Urban Music News Network | ||
Mike Watt On Pedro, Punk Rock And Playing Bass
Website: http://www.Indie-Music.com Relentlessly ethical, frighteningly intelligent, and consistently original. These are just a few words that apply to Mike Watt. Since 1980, he has managed to turn out adventurous and politically charged music, as both a solo artist and a member of the seminal bands the Minutemen and fiREHOSE. Watt shows no signs of mellowing with age, continuing to tour, release albums and even play bass for the Stooges. 2012 also marked the release of On and Off Bass (Three Roots Press), a photographic memoir of Watt's touring escapades and newfound affinity for kayaking. A few excerpts: Sam Miller: Can you explain your new book a little bit, On and Off Bass Mike Watt: It's a book of pictures I've taken in my town (San Pedro, CA), early in the morning, when I'm kayaking or riding my bicycle. I've taken thousands of these shots. This gallery in Santa Monica last year wanted to do an art show of them, and Laurie Steelink picked out 35. Then this New York Publisher, Three Roots Press, decided to do a book with them. They added 25 more pictures, and they also took parts of my diary that I write when I'm on tour. They put that in with some poems, too. So, basically that's what the book is. It's my work; my poems, my diary, and my pictures. *** SM: What was your introduction to punk rock? MW: See, I graduated high school in 1976, so it was right around when it was coming. There was a guy in Pedro named Nicky Beat, he played drums for the Weirdos, and he told us about a scene that was happening up in Hollywood where people wrote their own songs. In those days, you just copied records and stuff, and the whole thing about clubs, they went away and it turned into the arena rock shows. That was something very new to us, to see music at a smaller place. You could tell they were just learning and stuff, but they were trying their own thing. It was also very small, it was a very small scene. That's how we got turned on to it, the '70s punk up in Hollywood. SM: What were some of the bands that inspired you? MW: It included some records that we got from overseas, bands that we never even saw play. They never even came over; like Wire, the Pop Group, these bands from England had a big influence on us. There's a Wire album called Pink Flag and a Pop Group album called Y. Those were intense. There's a record store here in Long Beach that imported records, so they had the connection overseas. When punk music over there started coming out, we were able to get those records. They were only two dollars and seven inches, and you could just take a chance. A lot of stuff you didn't know who it was or anything. They didn't play gigs, magazines didn't write about them yet. We didn't have connections with the English fanzines. There were a lot of wild bands. Part of our connection was seeing bands in Hollywood, and the other was these records. It was just pure sound, or the picture on the record cover, or the name of the band. That's all we knew about these guys. It was trippy. *** SM: What contributions do you think you've made to the art of bass playing? MW: Hmm… That's hard to say without getting full of yourself. I don't know. What D Boone wanted was to get rid of the old hierarchy and put political ideas into the band, and make it less of a guitar-dominated thing and more egalitarian. So I guess D Boone helped me develop a voice to fit the band. But this was already going on with some people like John Entwistle, or Jack Bruce, and of course Geezer Butler over in England. The thing with punk was that the bass was more part of it. Composition. I've always been an advocate of that, composing on the bass, actually making parts that are full enough to make a song but empty enough to let the guys in the band express themselves. So, kind of like a launch pad. I've been a proponent of that kind of thing so maybe that's a contribution. I think that's the future of bass; it's not something you add on last in a band or leave out like some of these two-piece bands. It's something you can't actually start the whole process with. SM: Who would you say is your biggest overall influence as a musician? MW: Well, of course, D Boone. I wouldn't be doing any of this without him. He's the biggest influence on my life; but after that, you said musicians, so Richard Hell. I put a picture of him on my bass in 1977. He was my first punk rock hero, and I just thought the idea where the bass guy could be important in a band, not better than anyone but right up there with everyone else, was very key to me. Before punk, the way I looked at bass was pretty bottom end of the totem pole, or like the guy who plays right field in little league. So, people like John Doe and Tony Nineteen from the Dils, great bass players. I like to see myself as a student in a way, even though I've been doing this for a while. I think everybody's got something to teach me, like Dave Alexander's bass lines from the Stooges albums. SM: I know you're a huge Coltrane fan, and that he's had a big impact on you. How did he influence your approach to making music? MW: Yeah, I didn't know about him until Pettibon played me Coltrane. I grew up in Navy housing, I didn't know about jazz or anything. In fact, when he played me that stuff, I thought those were older dudes playing punk. I didn't know he was already dead. I had no idea. I just got caught up in it. It seemed to me, emotionally on the same level as the stuff I was seeing at the gigs, and getting those trippy little records from overseas, even though it had been done years before. It was so much different from the arena rock stuff I was hearing. You know, T-Rex, Blue Oyster Cult, Alice Cooper. His life story, it seemed he was after some truth, he even talked about musicians being after some kind of truth. I just thought that this was great. The main reason I got into music was to be with my friend, but my friend got killed. So this was another thing to help me focus on music. A truth. For sure that was a truth about D Boone, I really wanted to be with him. His mom wanted me on bass, I said "okay, no problem." So Coltrane kind of brought music to me for music 's sake, as a higher level of understanding. A meaning, that's real close to your spirit, your heart. *** Read the full interview NOW at Indie-Music.com: http://www.indie-music.com/ee/index.php/blog/comments/mike_watt_on_pedro_punk_rock_and_playing_bass
|
|
Order an Mi2N Music PR package for an opportunity to submit a song for FREE to one of the hundreds of industry opportunities available through Music Xray
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| HOME | FREE NEWS SUBMISSION | PREMIUM PR DISTRIBUTION | PR COPYWRITING | RSS FEEDS | TESTIMONIALS | CONTACT | ||||
|
|
Sections:
Band |
Business |
Career |
Events |
Label |
Music Releases |
Radio |
Tech |
Video |
Web Events
| |
||
| Advertise | Artist Development | Submit Video | MusicDish*China | MusicDish e-Journal | MusicDish Network | Urban Music News Network | ||||
| ||||