Thinking About an American Musical Legend…
Today would have been the 51st birthday of an American Musical Legend…
Dennes Dale Boon, known to most music fans as D. Boon, was born on this day. D. Boon was the guitarist and frontman for the mighty trio known as the Minutemen.
It is pretty much inconceivable to think of how the American music scene would have been without the Minutemen. The Minutemen would probably have been just another short-term band from California had Black Flag not taken the initiative to invite them to make a record – the Paranoid Time seven-song 7″ EP – for Black Flag’s SST Records label. Had that initiative not been taken – or had been turned down by the Minutemen, we probably would not have been blessed with The Meat Puppets, Saccharine Trust, Husker Du, Sonic Youth, or Dinosaur Jr. And American independent music itself would have been drastically different.
But thankfully, the Minutemen did go into the studio with Black Flag’s Greg Ginn one hot California night to record Paranoid Time, and the rest was an important part of music history. For the next six years, the Minutemen would create a wide body of material, all of it now considered classic and influential. Their 1984 double album Double Nickels On The Dime is considered to be a must-own, must-hear, classic album.
The first Minutemen album I ever bought, sight unheard, was their second full-length album What Makes A Man Start Fires? I was inspired to check it out (for six bucks, direct from SST Records – my second ever mail order with them) after reading a review of the album in Trouser Press magazine. I became a fan for life afterward. (20 years later, I would have Mike Watt sign that very same copy of the album.)
I don’t think I could ever put into words how much the Minutemen mean to me, then and now. Wherever I went, I always carried a Minutemen tape with me – and in 1985, that Minutemen tape, My First Bells happened to have all of their recorded output between 1980 and 1983 on it – three 7″ EPs, two albums, one 12″ EP and a few compilation cuts. (Nowadays, of course, their entire discography is one of a few permanent residents on my 60GB iPod.) When I was playing semi-professionally in a cover band after high school, the band’s drummer was a jazz fusion snob who turned up his nose at my Minutemen tapes (as well as my Black Flag tapes, my Flipper tape, etc….) and kept telling me that all it would take was ten minutes of exposure to Return To Forever or Mahavishnu Orchestra to get me to throw away all of my punk rock tapes. Those ended up being ten wasted minutes on his part. I kept playing in several other bands through the years – still inspired by the Minutemen and friends – while he sold his kit, got married, and never played again.
The last weekend of 1985, I was hanging out at a local all-ages club when an MTV News Report came on and announced that D. Boon had died in an automobile accident on December 22nd. Time immediately stood still that very moment. A few weeks later at the same club, a few acquaintances had gone to Philadelphia to see Husker Du and came back reporting excitedly, amongst other things, that nothing but Minutemen music had been played over the PA between acts.
The rest of the Minutemen – Mike Watt and George Hurley – would later form fIREHOSE, an equally influential trio with an equally fine catalog. In a strange way, too, there would have been no fIREHOSE without the Minutemen.
There would not have been a Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soul Asylum, or any other of the great bands from when punk finally “broke” in the early 90′s without the Minutemen, and many of those bands got to pay back for the influence when an all-star cast joined Mike Watt on his first solo album, Ball Hog Or Tugboat?, ten years after D. Boon joined rock ‘n’ roll heaven’s helluva band.
Despite both my love of the Minutemen and my wriitng talents. I don’t think I could ever write enough about the Minutemen to do them justice. I would say to the curious, go read Michael Azerrad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life, go buy Double Nickels On The Dime, and go watch We Jam Econo, the documentary on the Minutemen that is easily found on DVD on the Plexifilm label and on iTunes.
Simply put, punk rock changed my life and millions of others, and all for the better. D. Boon is one of the men responsible for that change.
Thank you, D.
