Musically, the ’80s were a lost decade. There was Thriller, Born in the USA, War, Jackson Browne’s arc was in decline, Joni Mitchell had gone all Mingusy. Okay, that is a gross generalization, the sort of sentence I hate in Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, anywhere. But, I’m trying to think, what music truly moved me in the ’80s.
Carol and I were living in Middlebury, CT, teaching at Westover, a girl’s boarding school, and there was John Mellencamp, and from my neck of the woods, The Young Fresh Fellows, of whom, more later, the Roches, The McGarrigles, Warren Zevon, Nick Lowe, John Hiatt and Bruce Cockburn, shedding his Christian piety and getting all pissy political. Okay, the ’80s weren’t all that bad, and I’m forgetting Public Enemy, Husker Du, The Replacements, but most importantly there was the Minutemen. I am thinking of them after hearing Mike Watt, the guitarist for the group interviewed on Sound Opinions. You have to check out that interview. Watt is something else and I mean that in the best possible way. It is a thoroughly engaging interview.
I came to the Minutemen after Double Nickels on the Dime, which I have come to in the last few years and holy fuckamoley, it is one of the essential albums for any serious collector.
So I came to the Minutemen a year after D. Boone died–another piece I need to write about discovering groups just after they disbanded or a key member died. I bought Three-way Tie for Last and I thought it was the best thing since sliced bread. The Minutemen are timeless, one of those groups you will be able to listen to and not pin point the era, a truly amazing group. I put that album on the turntable and it still rocks the joint. When it comes to the ’80s the group that defined that decade is, to my way of thinking, the Minutemen (And then Public Enemy, Husker Du, The Replacements, and hell, I like Bruce then, now and forever) and I defy you to claim another.
