Upon learning that Fugazi were about to release a new album, The Argument and a related EP, Furniture, this fall as well as reissue Instrument on DVD (yay!) with bonus footage, I contacted Dischord Records by e-mail. That was mid-August. By late September, Guy Piccotto, one of the band’s two guitarist/frontmen, initially replied that an interview might not be possible with everything that was going on both in the band and in D.C. in general. Being a more understanding journalist, I told Guy in my reply, “No problem — let me know when anyone’s free.” Last Monday, Guy said Brendan was available and passed on his e-mail address.

Fugazi. The name was found by vocalist/guitarist Ian MacKaye (co-founder of Dischord Records and lead singer of the influential early 80′s punk quartet Minor Threat) in a book about Vietnam, a slang term which is actually an acronym for “F’ed up, got ambushed, zipped in.” Their music shed’s punk past in favor of meshing such disparate influences as reggae, funk, go-go and hard rock. MacKaye and the band’s other vocalist/guitarist, Guy Piccotto [pronounced "ghee"], are probably the two most distinctive vocalists in rock today — MacKaye’s Joe Cocker-influenced “melodic shouting” style (honed during the three years that Minor Threat existed and refined with various side projects between 1984 and Fugazi’s formation in 1987), and Piccotto’s one-of-a-kind, full of raw emotion vocalisations. Ian and Guy’s guitar styles — thick powerchording and searing lead lines eminating from either or both guitarists at the same time — stand out in a sea of tenth-generation Ramones/Dickies/Buzzcocks/Descendants copycats and detuned unwashed KornSmackParkVayne slackers to this day, while bassist Joe Lally and drummer Brendan Canty anchor the whole thing.

“You know what?” Brendan said, “My youngest son son is having a hard time going to sleep. Is it possible that you could call me back in about a half an hour?” It was possible, so I said no problem, thought of a few extra questions to ask in the meantime, and rang Brendan. What follows is one of the most enjoyable things I’ve ever done to date. There were literally a lot of laughs in the close to an hour we spent on the phone, as the transcription will reveal over the next couple of days… [Note: The transcription had originally been spread out at Project X by its editor over the course of a week.]

CJ Marsicano: Hello, Brendan?

Brendan Canty: Hey! How are you?

I am good.

[My youngest son] actually fell asleep about five minutes after you hung up. [CJ laughing] He was playin’ me. Where are you right now?

I’m in Pennsylvania. Hazleton, near Wilkes-Barre.

OK, yeah. Oh OK. I know the area, more or less.

Oh, you do?

Yeah, a little bit.

Oh my god! Small world.

Yeah [laughs] We’re not that far from you guys.

You’re not that much older than I am, too. I’m 34.

Oh yeah, that’s right. You are my age!. Do you work for Project X?

Yeah, I think I’ve done about half the writing so far for that site. I don’t know if you’ve been to it yet.

Yeah, I’ve looked at it.

Oh, that’s wonderful!

So, did you get a chance to listen to the record at all?

No, I didn’t hear the new record yet.

Oh, you haven’t gotten it yet?

No, not yet. What can you tell me about the new album?

Well, it was very long, and now it’s shorter. [laughter]

That’s why there’s the separate EP [Furniture].

Right. We were trying to sequence it with all the songs on it and it was just getting, it was horrendously unlistenable. And then we picked out a couple of the really harder and faster songs and one older song that we just did on the fly in the studio, this old song called “Furniture”, which we started playing back in ’87 or whatever. And we took those off, and the album just fit much better. It suddenly all clicked into place. So we just decided to have two separate entities.

I tend to feel like, if you start to just put out as many songs as possible [on an album], you put out 16 songs, it’s just unbearable, you know. I think an important aspect of the whole thing is the editing process, of getting it down and treating it like one body of work so that people can actually digest it all, as opposed to slogging their way through 16 songs. Even with those songs taken out, it’s still fifty minutes long, so it’s still plenty long.

What else about the record – it probably took more than a month to record, and we had a second drummer on quite a few of the songs, this guy Jerry Busher, who was our roadie for years, and then when we started writing songs, I started throwing double drums on some of the songs on End Hits. He started playing some of those songs live with us, just the few songs from End Hits with double drums, like “Arpeggiator.” Then we have this woman named Amy Domingues play cello on a few of the songs. And then we also put a little bit of piano on there. It gets kind of expansive. I don’t know, it’s up to you to decide, it’s up to the general population to decide what they make of it. I can’t really put a spin on it. I’m not really comfortable putting the spin on it.

Yeah, you can’t really put a spin on your own work after you spend a month recording it and however long beforehand writing it.

Yeah, it took us years to write, really. When I think about writing some of these parts three years ago…

Jeez!

Yeah, it’s ridiculous. But it’s just that we’ve had a lot of things going on in our lives. We haven’t been working on it constantly for that long, but it’s certainly taken a long time to get us into the studio. Finally, we just had to say “let’s just go book the time and have done with it.” [Laughter]

I can imagine like, promoting the movie [Instrument] was taking a lot of time over the past couple of years.

Well, making the movie was. There was making the movie, and there was also, at the time when we started making the movie, I was having kids. I’ve had a couple of kids since then, and that’s sort of one of the reasons over the last few years that we’ve slowed down touring. And so, Guy [Piccotto] and Ian [MacKaye] and [filmmaker] Jem Cohen, who shot the film, they all worked together more than I did on the film. It was really kind of lucky for me that we had a project like that for them to work on, and also it was lucky for me that they were willing to work on it without me and to maintain the band through their spotty schedule over the last few years. You know what I mean. Anyway, they did a lot of that work while I was, you know, losing my mind. [laughter]

Kids.

Yep.

That’s why I don’t have any yet.

[laughter] You know what I mean, Just don’t rush it. If you don’t want ‘em, don’t feel like you have to have ‘em. [laughter] ‘Cause even if you want them more than anything in the world, they’re still a challenge.

Yeah. Jello Biafra said “they don’t give a [mandatory] class on the most important thing in life, and that’s parenting.”

Yeah. Well, actually they do give classes on that… [laughter] Jello might not be tapped into the parenting thing [laughter]

Unfortunately, he’s been divorced since the Frankenchrist trial, so that’s a moot point for him. [laughter]

Yeah, that’s right! [laughter] Yeah, but once you have kids, you realize that there’s an entire universe there that you previously knew nothing about… [laughter] thankfully! Because you’d never get pregnant if you knew about it beforehand! [laughter]

Anyway, that’s pretty much the deal with the new record. It’s called The Argument, and it’ll be out on the 17th of October. And it seems to be getting, people seem to be interested in it. That makes me happy.

I understand you’ve been doing some scoring outside of the band.

Yeah, I’ve been working for some producers that I’ve known for a long time – basically friends, there’s a few different producers that have been making documentaries for TV for the Discovery Channel. So I did [the score for] a mini-series a couple of years ago called Buildings, Bridges and Tunnels, and then I did a score for this show called High Speed Impacts, which is basically like a Butthole Surfers video [laughter] for an hour…

[laughter] Without the penile implants.

Right! Without the penile implants! It was just shit blowing up for an hour! [laughter] It was all test footage from the Sandina Rocket Test Facility in Arizona or Nevada – I can’t remember where it was. You’d think I’d know after I’d watched the damned thing a thousand times. [laughter] But it was just the greatest documentary to work on, ’cause it was literally like – my friend was at Sandina doing a different documentary and he came across all this footage of shit blowing up, and ten different camera angles running at different speeds and super high quality – and he decided to piece it all together and make a storyline out of it and make some sort of documentary out of it, but it was really just, “let’s put as many cool shots [laughter] of shit blowing up in one hour that we possibly can fit in. That was just the greatest one to score, too. It’s very easy, and as far as I’m concerned I can be me and I can rock out a little bit, you know. Don’t have to worry about appeasing people. I’m allowed to be aggressive…

You have to lock yourself in your basement and do the Danny Elfman thing for however many days you get to do the soundtrack.

Yeah, ’cause you don’t get a lot of time to do it, so you really have to cram. I don’t know if it’s exactly … sometimes I think I’d be happier selling real estate! [laughter]

Don’t let my mother hear you say that, she sells real estate!

I won’t. [laughter]. [Doing that instead of recording soundtracks] would bring me into contact with more people, anyways. [laughter]. You kinda crave it after awhile. Luckily I have both outlets in my life, I can be in the basement and I can also get out of the house with Fugazi and go and play in front of a thousand people. When we want to.

You have the luxury now, basically.

It’s pretty nice, I have to say. And the crowds have been so great in the past couple of years. Touring is an absolute pleasure. There’s no skinhead armies out there fucking with little kids, which used to happen. It used to be all messy, but not it’s not messy, it seems to be quite… I don’t know if I’d call it “tame”, but it’s pretty awesome. I think the crowds might understand what we’re going for and maybe don’t think we’re assholes. [laughter]

For awhile, people didn’t know who we were; I think [Instrument] has kinda helped people know who we are better.

People think you’re this dour band, but there’s this sense of humor coming out from all you guys [throughout the film]. I can’t understand the dour thing anyway, I don’t know why they even think that!

I don’t know either! I do understand that we stopped giving interviews a long time ago to major publications, like to Spin, and so they paint us as being stick-in-the-muds. And so, the mass media, a lot of people don’t get [adequate] information about us and they also can’t talk to us point-blank, face to face unless we’re in their town. So, if silence sort of breeds suspicion, I think definitely people get suspicious of people who don’t speak to them. So, anyways, I think the movie helped people to realize that we’re human beings [laughter], so people are relating to us better, and us to them.

I’m looking forward to the DVD of Instrument coming out, ’cause one of these days, I’m gonna stick the videotape of Instrument into the VCR, and the VCR’s gonna spit the tape out of the machine and say, “Fuck you! Play something else!” [laughter]

I appreciate that. [laughter] DVD is actually a great format, isn’t it?

I got about 100 DVD’s right here in my office, I love them!

It’s not a real expanded DVD of ours, but it does have about five extras things on it. There’s the first thing we collaborated with Jem on, which was this movie called Glue Man [based on the closing track of the same name from the band's first record], which I think we did, I can’t remember, exactly, ’88?

Wait a second, the record’s right here. [I had the vinyl editions of all of Fugazi's albums on my desk handy as reference for the whole interview. I grab the first self-titled 12" EP and turn it over to check the copyright date.] 1988.

It is ’88?

Yeah.

I would think it was ’88. I think Ian and Guy actually some of those lyrics together, and then we recorded, the music of it was from an earlier, dubbed-out version of “Glue Man”. [Jem] had released it previously through C-100, which is Mike Stipe’s film company out of Athens. [Editor's Note: Yes, it's that "Mike" Stipe from R.E.M.] But we figured we’d include it because most people probably haven’t seen it. And then it’s got a couple of live things, and there’s another film that Jem made about the Gulf War “celebrations” [laughter] – I don’t know if it’s about them, it’s maybe about humans more than that, but it’s got a slowed down soundtrack from a four-track [recording] that we actually put on it very recently. Yeah, and I guess the other three things are live, just more live music.

Yeah, ’cause you get through the two hours of the [original] movie and you’re like, “That’s it?” [i.e., you're disappointed that it's over.]

Aw, c’mon! [laughter] It’s the longest fucking movie ever made! [laughter]

It’s not!

It is!

[NOTE: Brendan and I were both chuckling through the above sentences, I don't want anyone to get the incorrect impression that the conversation turned into an argument.]

It’s not! [laughter] It’s not The Longest Day, Brendan! The Longest Day is like, four hours!

The Longest what? [still chuckling]

The Longest Day, that war movie with John Wayne and like, sixty other people [in the cast] that took three directors just to make the damn movie!

Oh yeah, that’s right. [laughter] Ever see Shoah? Shoah was ten hours long, that was a movie about recollections of holocaust survivors.

I don’t think I’ve ever heard of it.

That’s a great movie. If you ever see it – I saw it in sitting down in a theater, it was just brilliant. That was the longest film I’d ever seen! Ten hours! [laughter]

I don’t think I could sit through ten hours…

You could! I tell ya, if you see Shoah in a theater, you could sit through ten hours, you just get totally into it, totally captivated. I tend to think that there is a point past an hour and a half where every minute seems like an hour, but then if you know that you’re gonna sit there for ten hours, then it never feels like that, because you’re just adjusting to a completely editing time frame, a different aesthetic completely. So I don’t think you actually ever fall into that. Anyway, that’s my recommended movie of the day. [laughter]

I’ve been on an Asian foreign film kick lately.

Oh yeah?

Yeah, I’ve been finding all these obscure Asian films from Netflix and just renting them, eight at a time.

What, more like, kung-fu things?

Not just kung-fu things, but there’s stuff like this Japanese movie called Tampopo which is all about food.

Oh yeah! That’s a great movie. There’s that funny scene in the noodle bar there where [Tsutomu Yamazaki, playing the male hero] flips that fish cake in the guy’s face.

I think that was a vegetable, actually…

A radish?

Yeah!

That’s pretty brilliant… [Brendan wanted to mention this famous Iranian director but he couldn't remember his name.] Next time you go to the video store, you have to ask him about it, because I’m sure they’ll know who you’re talking about.

I’m trying to think what else is going on in Fugazi world… You know our bass player [Joe Lally] just had a baby?

Yeah, Guy told me over the E-mail. Two [members] down and two to go. [laughter]. I can only imagine how an offspring of Ian MacKaye would be like. [laughter].

Yeah [laughter]

He’d probably have Henry Rollins for a godfather. [laughter] [NOTE: Ian MacKaye and Henry Rollins grew up together in Washington D.C. and are still friends to this day. Henry used to roadie for Ian's first band, The Teen Idles, and Henry's first recording was a 7" EP with his first band S.O.A., released in early 1981 on Dischord!]

He probably would [laughter]. Those guys are still pretty tight. That’s D.C. for you. D.C.’s like Mayberry R.F.D. [CJ laughing even harder] It is, it’s just a dinky town, you know everybody here. A sleepy southern town… with a massive target on it.

Oh god! We’re not even going to go there. I can’t imagine how it was on the 11th.

Yep.

Oh my god.

It was pretty bad, I can remember it well.

I don’t think anybody’s going to forget it.

Nope.

Speaking of unforgettable, there’s this scene in Instrument that’s one of my favorite scenes, the scene where you’re in Philadelphia at St. Joe’s Gym [in 1988] and Guy’s hopping on the basketball hoop right above your head during “Glue Man”. What were you thinking when he did that?

I was thinking, “God, it’s just like Rites of Spring [a pre-Fugazi band both Brendan and Guy were in in the mid-80's, their only album and EP are still in print on Dischord], which basically when we were in Rites Of Spring, he would… actually, he did that kind of shit a lot! But in Rites Of Spring, it was constantly, there was shit flying everywhere, we would smash all our shit [instruments] all the time, [laughter] and it was jumping off, just, you know. You have to understand, I’ve played with Guy since we were sixteen, so we were always just going as crazy as we possibly could. In our first band Insurrection, definitely that shit came first and music came second. [laughter]. It was like juggling or something – try to play the song while going as crazy as possible. [laughter] That was just… we had so much footage of Guy doing stuff like that, too.

That could have been a bonus section of the DVD in itself! [laughter]

Yeah, I know! Well, we put a lot of shit in there anyway. Nothing Guy does – not that it doesn’t surprise me, but I know that when I’m playing, the most important thing is to keep the atmosphere consistent. When he’s up there in the hoop, you don’t stop and watch him. [laughter]

Even though you’re like, “Oh, shit! I hope he doesn’t fall on the snare drum or something!” [still laughing, even while Brendan continues below]

Yeah, it’s the last thing you think about… actually, what you’re thinking of is, “I hope he falls on the snare drum, that would be kinda cool.” [several more seconds of laughter]. Definitely. But you’ve gotta keep going, you’ve gotta push it.

You do whatever [it takes].

If you’re really gonna attempt to reach a climactic moment in a song, to push it, then you really have to push it. It’s kind of an unconscious thing, and it only works if everybody in your band is shooting for the same thing, which you never know exactly when you get there, but you try to arrive at the same time. And you’re just pushing and pushing and pushing, so behind the drum set, that’s all I’m thinking about, elevating the environment. There’s not much thinking going on, it’s basically pretty primal, I think, what we’re going for. It’s the dance of death, man, you know? [laughter]

I knew about Rites Of Spring and some of the back history of you guys from reading the book Michael Azerrad did [Our Band Could Be Your Life].

Oh yeah. I haven’t read that yet.

I’d gotten the book two days before I talked to Mike Watt on the phone, and he telling me, “There’s this book out that’s got stories on the Minutemen and Black Flag…” and I said, “I know which book you’re talking about, I just got it the other day!” And coincidentally, by the time I was talking to him on the phone – I got the book on a Sunday and I was talking to him on a Tuesday – I was already up to the chapter on you guys.

Oh yeah? Just whippin’ through it, huh?

Yeah. I re-read books all the time.

Do you like that book?

Oh yeah.

Is it one of the better books about the stuff?

I think it’s one of the only books I’ve actually seen about the stuff, ’cause Mike was telling me, people, when they compile rock history, they gloss over punk rock and say, “Oh yeah, punk rock… Sex Pistols and Nirvana. Let’s move on to the next thing.” And you want to grab whoever’s putting this history together and say, “Hello?! You missed about fifteen years of stuff!”

Yeah, that’s really true, but they’re thinking about mass culture, and this was never about mass culture. This was about communities, small groups of people, all playing for people very esoteric music that other people will appreciate, that people cultivated and fed on the same wellspring and aesthetic will understand. That’s the most interesting music.

This year would have been [John] Coltrane’s 75th birthday.

Yeah, that’s right. Herbie Hancock’s going to be downtown doing a big concert on [Coltrane's] birthday. When is his birthday?

September 20th, I think.

Oh, so it’s just a few days away then… [oops!] Oh, no, we’re in October now. I missed the show. Son of a bitch.

I know. I missed Mike Watt last night in Philadelphia.

Oh, is he on tour?

Yeah.

Is he playing in D.C.?

Let me see. My computer’s on. He should be there soon ’cause he’s in New York tonight… [On the tape, you can hear the keys clicking on my computer keyboard. I end up misspelling the URL to Watt's homepage.] I just spelled it wrong – and I’ve been touch-typing since I was seven.

[Overhearing the keys clicking] Yeah, you’re fast, huh?

Yeah, I’ll be at my day gig and my boss’ll see me and he’ll be like, “How do you type so fast?” [laughter] [Brendan inquires as to where I work, initiating a little more small talk. Meanwhile, I'm looking up Watt's tour dates.] Oh, he’s gonna be in Baltimore on the 15th and in D.C. on the 16th at the Black Cat.

Great! That’ll be awesome. The Black Cat just moved three doors down, but [now] they’ve got this great huge space that’s really nice. Very pleasant place to play, very pleasant place to see a band. Not that your readers will be there checking it out – but I don’t know, you know? Actually, I don’t know who your readers are, but…

[page 8 missing] [CJ's Note: At this point, I was asking Brendan about the ship's bell that was part of his drum kit. He mentioned that Guy had found that bell for him after years of trying to use other things as percussion during their days in the improvisational band Happy Go Licky.]

… I don’t, … no. Not really. To me it’s more like going back to the Wire live record, you know? Or some of the more super-experimental shit that was going on – Einsturzende Neubauten and stuff, all the more experimental noisy stuff…

Yeah, like Einsturzende Neubauten banging on a bridge tunnel and stuff. [An early Einsturzende Neubauten single, "Stahlversion" ("Steel Version"), was a recording of the band members drumming on the hollow underpass of a steel bridge in Berlin. Check out the CD 80-83 Strategies Against Architecture.]

Or Sink Manhattan – ever hear of them?

I might have heard of them.

Yeah, they were sort of like that, they were brilliant. It’s sort of a reference to that sort of thing, and it’s also atmospheric, trying to bust the genre a little bit.

You push everything so that it doesn’t sound like the last record or whatever else is going on.

Yeah, that’s the idea. And it’s also a feeble attempt to try not to get bored playing drums. [laughter]

Well, how bored could you be when Guy’s usually in danger of toppling the drums over? [laughter]

I know, don’t worry, I’m just… [several seconds of laughter] … being facetious. [laughter] I wouldn’t say it’s boring to play drums. What I mean is, you’re limited to the four or five different things you have to play, so it’s kind of cool to break it out a little bit and bring some trash in there. Just bring some reality back to it. Perk your ears up.

While I’ve been inconsistent in my buying of Dave Grohl’s efforts since his first Foo Fighters album dropped in 1995, to be honest, listening to this album made me regret it immensely to the point where I turned around and filled in the considerable holes in my collection. And Pat Smear’s back in the band while Bob Mould and Krist Novaselic join in on the fun? Yes, please.

The Osaka Four are still unstoppable. This album is just more proof of why that is so. And the whole SCANDAL album catalog is on US iTunes now? No more excuses, folks – pay your $9.99 apiece and see what I’ve been raving about for the past four years!

For whatever reason, there’s a serious air of mystery – intended or not – surrounding what is apparently the current flagship act on Jack White’s Third Man label. So be it. But the attention he’s giving their collective career is justified and the album is a solid debut release. The only complaint? At 29 minutes and six seconds, you’re left wanting more.

I welcomed the return of the Meat Puppets ever since Curt Kirkwood polled fans as to whether they wanted to see a reunion of the original lineup through his MySpace page. The first result of that question’s aftermath, 2007’s Rise To Your Knees, was the indie-rock equivalent of Star Trek: The Motion Picture: It was great to see/hear from some old friends again, even if the end results didn’t fully live up to the anticipation built up from years worth of passing time even before a return to action became reality.

With that seemingly odd comparison having been made, it’s not a stretch to suggest that the follow-up, 2009’s Sewn Together (which made TGML’s Top 10 Album list that year) is the Meat Puppets’s Wrath of Khan. Fully recharged after the test run that was Rise To Your Knees, Curt and Cris Kirkwood and then-drummer Ted Marcus had delivered in Sewn Together a long-playing effort that was (and is) fully worthy of standing up with the best albums (II, Up On The Sun, Mirage, Huevos, Too High To Die) of their classic back catalog.

Now, two years later, comes Lollipop; While they’ve had a major personnel change – Shandom Sahm, son of the late Sir Douglas Quintet/Texas Tornados leader Doug Sahm and also a former Meat Puppet back in the short-lived Golden Lies period, replaces Marcus behind the trap set – they not only haven’t lost a step, they’ve progressed nicely without losing an ounce of what makes the Meat Puppets who they quintessentially are, be it Curt Kirkwood’s lead lines or his and Cris’s brotherly harmonies. Much of the material could have fit nicely on Up On The Sun or Mirage, but there are also a few welcome twists and turns, like the reggae/ska rhythms that propel the verses “Shave It”, or the almost Coldplay-esque piano chords that open “Orange” only to get near-obliterated by “My Sharona” drums and some nasty fuzz bass from Cris Kirkwood. All of it works.

So, if we’re going to fool around with Meat Puppets/Star Trek comparisons, does that make Lollipop their Search for Spock? Well, put it this way: Search was a must-see flick back in the day. Lollipop is a must-hear album. Enough said.

(Hot tip: Advance order customers who ordered Lollipop from the band’s website – your humble reviewer included – initially received a high-quality digital download of the album with the songs in their original, pre-manufacture sequence [but accidentally labeled with the final sequence’s song titles] – an error long since corrected and rectified by the band’s management. To emulate the original sequence, program your CD player or iPod playlist in the following order: 2, 3, 11, 10, 9, 5, 6, 7, 8, 4, 1, 12.)

Stream: Meat Puppets “Damn Thing”

Last night I saw Mike Watt for the third time in four solo tours of his (a bit of waffling on my part led to my not making arrangements to see him when he did his “Prac’n the Third Opera Tour 2009”). It has never been not worth the wait and the two-hour drive from Hazleton to Philadelphia to get to wherever he was booked to play. There were a few differences, though:

For one, Watt was back to playing in a standard guitar/bass/drums outfit, The Missingmen (with guitarist Tom Watson and drummer Raul Morales) – the first two times I had seen Watt play, he was working with his organ trip The Secondmen. Two, Watt was playing a different venue, the North Star Bar (the prior location for Watt’s Philly shows until then, the Khyber, has apparently stopped hosting live music – a shame). Third, the release Watt was touring behind, hyphenated-man, was the first solo album he’d released since he parted amicably with Columbia Records in 2005 (as well as being the first album to be released on his newly minted clenchedwrench label). And last but not least, I got married last June – which meant I brought my newlywed wife Tara, who taste in music is quite radically different than mine, this time around.

(Coincidentally, the second time I’d seen him in October of 2004, I’d only recently started to get acquainted with Tara through LiveJournal and wouldn’t meet her face-to-face until a month after that gig – which also means I hadn’t seen Watt in a solo capacity since before I met the woman who is now my wife. Knowing Watt as well as I do, he would probably call that “trippy”. )

Also different and somewhat related to at least two of the above reasons was the operating procedure regarding getting to the gig. All of the previous times I’ve gone to see Watt, it was on a solo journey, which meant I could leave earlier in the day and hang out with Watt and his crew. I would also get a hotel room (konk pad in Watt-speak) near the venue so that I could get a good rest before hoisting anchor and sailing back to Hazleton. This time around, we left a little later in the day and didn’t bother with a hotel this time around. I still got to talk with Watt a little before the show – we had parked in the lot behind the North Star and Tara wasn’t sure if it was the correct lot, so she had me get out and ask somebody. I saw three figures standing near Watt’s van – it was getting dark by this point – and approached them – and one of them was Watt, who recognized me immediately with a “Hey, Ceej.”

Watt was still hobbling around a little due to his knee being in a flexible brace; Watt suffers from Osgood-Schlatter Syndrome in his knees, and had to have surgery on them in his early twenties to correct it. Last summer during one of the Stooges’ European festival dates, his knee gave out onstage. It was a bit sad to see Watt hobble around, but the man is no quitter. We proceeded to have a nice conversation for about ten minutes before Watt had to go back inside his van to take his pre-show “konk”.

To suggest that the spirit of Watt’s original band The Minutemen was in the building would be making a very obvious understatement. Many of the two-hundred-plus attendees in the audience were sporting Minutemen shirts, of course, but the spirit was also present within Watt’s set list, the first portion of which was the performing of hyphenated-man in its entirely. Watt had been inspired to compose the music for hyphenated- man after listening back to the Minutemen’s discography during the period when the We Jam Econo documentary was being filmed, and used one of his late bandmate and best friend D. Boon’s Fender Telecasters to compose it. Watt and his crew were particularly on fire tonight – they proceeded to play all thirty of hyphenated-man’s short songs in about 35 minutes – a good 12 minutes faster than the original recording.

For the encores, Watt and the Missingmen peformed – after two covers of The Pop Group’s “Conspirator’s Oath” and “Amnesty Report” – a selection of Minutemen songs to round out the evening, centered mainly around selections from Double Nickels on the Dime although “Black Sheep” from the Joy 7” (the Minutemen’s second-ever record) was also played. His bum knee didn’t stop him from being as animated as he usually is during performance – for novices to Watt’s live work, I don’t mean to imply that the man hops around like crazy onstage, but he still gestured, shook his head, smack one of Raul’s cymbals on cue, and even do a mock-pirouette during the quiet part of “Toadies”.

During the set Watt mentioned that he had paid a visit to the house John Coltrane had grown up in on 33rd Street (the neighborhood isn’t far from where the North Star is on Poplar Street) and was bummed out about the fact that the sign identifying the property as a National Landmark had been stolen. Coltrane is one of Watt’s heroes, and Watt traditionally plays Coltrane’s music before and after sets (This time around, the Coltrane album du-jour was The Complete Village Vanguard Sessions; last time it was Interstellar Space and Sun Ship).

Part of the thrill for me with seeing Watt live is the opening acts preceding him. With exceptions during the last two tours when the Japanese band LITE joined him for part of the itinerary. Watt usually has the promoters for each date book local acts to open for him – thus turning his fans onto local talent they might not have seen otherwise. First opening act Split Red – named after a Minutemen song from What Makes A Man Start Fires? – played a set of original music that showed a distinct influence from some of Watt’s former SST labelmates (and gave away demo CD-R’s at the merch table!), and their lead guitarist Travis Woodson saw fit to slip “Cohesion”, D. Boon’s guitar solo piece from Double Nickels, into his solo spot, while second act Caterpillar – whose music referenced everything from Velvet Underground-esque jangle to fuzz bass a-la Flipper to Sonic Youth-ish guitar noises – pulled a Mike Watt and played a concept album called Jonestown (about the town that was flooded during the 1800′s, and due out the end of next month) of their own for their own set. Both bands are definitely worth checking out – as is Watt himself every time. Next time he’s in your area, run, don’t walk.

After listening to the advance single from this album, “Fool For Your Baby”, I had a severe amount of trepidation as the release date for the New York Dolls’ third studio album approached. “Fool For You Baby” and its Phil Spector-gone-lo-fi production really underwhelmed me, and in my track review I openly stated that I hoped that this song was the exception rather than the rule as far as the full album was concerned.

Two of the major tenants of the Dolls’ operating manual – the strong songwriting and the mining of 50’s and 60’s rock and pop influences – are still abound on Dancing Backwards in High Heels. That’s the good news. David Johansen is in the best voice he’s ever been in his entire career. That’s more good news. For the first time on a studio album since Too Much Too Soon the group throws in a Dollsified cover of an oldie, this time taking on “I Sold My Heart to the Junk Man” (an early Patti LaBelle hit), while DavidJo and Syl Sylvain reclaim “Funky But Chic” from David’s first solo album and insert it into the Dolls canon that it belonged into in the first place.

Knocking down the star rating on this album is the production. The electric guitars on the album take a pretty much permanent back seat to the rest of the instruments, including the same cheesy organ sound that dominates “Fool For Your Baby”, and the drum sound is quite wimpy, almost cardboard-box like. These are two developments that simply run counter to the usual Dolls esthetic. Blame for this should be placed squarely on new producer and bassist Jason Hill, rather on the absence of Steve Conte and Sami Yaffa who had been filling the voids left behind by Johnny Thunders and Arthur Killer Kane quite nicely.

While Dancing Backwards is a decent effort from the band, it’s not definitive Dolls and is basically a fans-only album, if that. It definitely wouldn’t be the album I would recommend to be a first New York Dolls purchase. Unfortunately, this album is what David, Syl, and company will be touring behind this summer when they open (what?) for Motley Crue and Poison (what the fuck?), which means this well-intentioned misstep will probably be the first – and last – purchase for Dolls newcomers unless someone in their immediate vicinity steers them to their earlier albums first.

I’m quite the fan of these guys, and my sole disappointment at the only time I’ve seen them live to date (at WMMR’s MMRBQ in 2007) stemmed from their only getting a half-hour or so to play (despite their already stellar back catalog track record at the time) while has-beens Collective Soul were getting twice that time to play. When I first heard of the song’s title (the first advance single from Holding On To Strings Better Left To Fray, out May 17th), I had fears of these guys pulling a Bon Jovi – or worse yet an Aaron Lewis (and playing to the teabagger contingent in the process as the ex-Staind singer is) until I listened to the song itself, the music of which is actually composed and arranged in a vein similar to their hit “Fake It”. Definitely something that makes me look forward to the new album. Steam below, pick out your favorite lyric at the band’s own site, then pay your 99 cents at iTunes.

Stream: Seether “Country Song”

From his second solo album Contemplating the Engine Room onward, Watt’s solo album output to date has been centered around concept albums that he affectionately calls “punk operas”. …Engine Room’s 1997 release saw Watt mix parallel storylines about the Minutemen, his father (a career Navy man), and the novel/movie The Sand Pebbles with musical influences as varied as Creedence and Coltrane. The long-in-the-planning followup, 2004’s The Secondmen’s Middle Stand, had Watt going in a different direction musically without straying from his punk roots, performing in an aggressive organ trio to deliver a story that combined the chronology of a near-fatal illness with that of Dante’s Divine Comedy. It took me a little while to get fully into Engine Room upon its release, admittedly, but with Middle Stand this listener was able to plunge in from day one.

Hyphenated-man – which has already been out in Japan since October of last year – is also a concept album/”punk opera”, only without a fixed storyline. Instead, the album is a suite of thirty short songs, each inspired by a character in a Hieronymus Bosch painting. None of the songs are longer than two minutes – most average a minute and a half, actually – and the lyrics are somewhat abstract, slipping in bits of Japanese language here and there. What may be surprising to some listeners is that the whole thing comes off rather accessible. The idea of short songs harks back to the Minutemen, of course – Watt’s self-re-immersion into his first major band’s back catalog was spurred by his participation in the documentary We Jam Econo – but, even though Watt composed all thirty songs on one of his late Minutemen bandmate and best friend D. Boon’s Fender Telecasters, none of the songs are retro recreations of almost thirty years ago. This particular effort was helped during the basic track recording of the album by Watt not recording his vocals and bass parts until much later on – guitarist Tom Watson and drummer Raul Morales recorded their parts, mostly in tandem with few guitar overdubs, without knowing what Watt’s parts even sounded like, by design. (Coincidentally, a few of the guitar parts on the songs – “Belly-Stabbed-Man” is one example in particular – actually come off in the same style as those on the first two fIREHOSE albums.)

One of the most pleasant surprises on Hyphenated-man is Watt’s vocal work, which seems to be at its most comfortable and is definitely at its most varied here: singing sweetly on some tracks, hollering like someone less than half his age on others, reciting in a whisper here, doing multi-tracked harmonies there – whatever each song and each lyric calls for. As it should be.

Is Hyphenated-man the best thing Watt has done in his solo career yet? That’s hard to say, but only because Watt has not really done the same thing twice in the past decade and a half since fIREHOSE split, and he’s not about to start repeating himself, ever. And now that he’s got his own label deal going down, the wait between Watt projects will not be as ridiculous as it was since 1997. Hyphenated-man, is, however, a highly-recommended listen – and the tip of the iceberg as far as Watt’s future musical output is concerned.

Preview: “Hollowed-Out Man”