We Jam Econo with Mike Watt’s Lifetime Car History

Mike Watt is one of the most influential American musicians alive today, and he doesn’t need much of an introduction for anyone who listens to punk, funk, or any flavor of dangerous rock ‘n’ roll recorded since the early 1980s.

He’s best-known for being a founding member of the Minutemen and fIREHOSE, not to mention playing bass for Iggy Pop and a too-long-to-name-here list of bands. The Red Hot Chili Peppers’ 1991 album Blood Sugar Sex Magik is dedicated to him, and rightfully so. What you might not know, however, is that Watt is a serious car guy who learned how to wrench by pasting together hooptie air-cooled VWs and various gig-rigs in the streets and junkyards of Southern California. He was kind enough to sit down for an interview about his automotive history, which I now share with you here.

Before we get to the interview proper, a bit of background. The seminal Minutemen album, Double Nickels on the Dime, was released in the summer of 1984, and its front cover artwork features a Dirk Vandenberg photo of Watt driving his 1964 Beetle at exactly 55 mph on the Harbor Freeway in Los Angeles.

I moved to Southern California in the fall of 1984, at age 18, and Double Nickels on the Dime became my favorite driving music right away. For more than four decades, I’ve obsessed over the radio in the dash of Watt’s Beetle. I could tell it was a cheap aftermarket 8-track player of some kind, but what, exactly? Last year, I posed the question to my readers and learned that this radio is almost certainly an Oakland-made AFCO Electronics unit from the late 1970s. It turned out that one of those readers lives next door to one of Mike Watt’s sisters; through her, I got the lead photograph of teenage Mike with their dad’s sunroof Beetle and was able to deliver an interview request to her brother. Here we go!

Note: Both Mike and I are wordy men who grew up in profanity-heavy Navy towns, so this transcript is edited for clarity and safe-for-workness. Also, keep in mind that the only photos of actual Watt vehicles are the two of teenage Mike with his dad’s Beetle and the one from the “Piss Bottle Man” video.

Murilee Martin: I really wanted to write an article about the cars, in sound and in photographs, on Double Nickels on the Dime.

Mike Watt: Right there [on the album cover], that’s number three! That red Volkswagen Bug is number three. Now, I never owned these things at the same time. I had five Volkswagens, but one at a time.

MM: Well, let’s hear about your very first car.

Mike: Okay, let’s talk about it. It’s a ’68 silver VW my pop got me. He has shore duty in Monterey. He’s teaching, this is near the end of his 20 years in the Navy. He was a—you know what a chief is? It’s like a sergeant in the Army.

MM: Oh yeah, I grew up in a Navy town. Alameda, up north.

Mike: Sure! So he has shore duty in Monterey, which is on the Pacific Ocean. Lot of hills, right? (laughs) Manual, right?

Okay, so I’m coming of age, and he’s, ‘I’ll getcha a car. I’ll getcha a Volkswagen.’ He had just gotten an old ragtop, early ’60s, right? He restored it, did everything, ’cause my pop, you know, he was a Machinist’s Mate. He liked the way things worked, and that’s … why he got into this Bug and he thought, me too. You know, in those days, really simple.

He got me this hippie book by a guy named John Muir—not the naturalist guy. This guy wrote the Compleat VW Guide for the Idiot, before the idiot books, right? This is 1975 or 1976. And I go up there to San Pedro, we’re in the west side of the Port of Los Angeles, so I fly up there, because I ain’t got a car yet! (laughs) He’s procuring it, right. He gets this used thing, he gets an Earl Scheib. You remember Earl Scheib? $39.95?

MM: Oh yeah. When I first moved to Southern California in ’84, I had a girlfriend with a Corolla who got it painted at Earl Scheib. I think it was $49.95 by that point. Earl painted the seat belts, the tires, the mirrors …

Mike: They didn’t mask this s**t off, you were getting everything painted. (laughs). It was just silver, but the stuff chipped off. You know, no primer, whatever. I guess you paint ’em up to go sell ’em, put sawdust in the tranny or some s**t. Right? When you buy a used car—I find this out later—always bring a magnet, because of the Bondo.

MM: Beetles will rust, even in California.

Mike: They were made for Northern Europe. They only had three quarts of oil, no radiator.

MM: Oh, I know, I’ve owned a bunch of old Beetles. One of my first cars was a ’58 Beetle.

Mike: Well, that was the thing about it. He knew that you didn’t even need a f****n’ cherry picker. You could use a floor jack, work on it yourself. And they were econo. They had solid lifters, they actually timed better not with the strobe gun. And like I said, pop got me the John Muir hippie book. This guy’s so econo that he had this thing where you took one of the light bulbs from the turn signal, with an alligator clip and a wire, line up the pulley with the crack on the crankcase, and then you turn the distributor when the light, you know?

He wanted me to get my hands on it, you know? He didn’t want me just driving it. Because he wanted to impart this kinda curious thing he had about how things worked. I remember him telling me how points actually work, that the spark plug goes off when the points open, not when they close. You’re not gonna pass f****n’ 10,000 volts through the points. It’d burn up in a week! That’s with the 6-volt, well, 12-volt–converted over. All this kinda stuff. And this is a guy who doesn’t even graduate high school, right? Joins the Navy at 17.

That Monterey shore duty he had, he was teaching. First refrigeration, then they put him in nuclear engineering. Anyway, I go up there. He’s got it sitting there. And of course I’ve never driven a manual before, you know? The school teaches you how to drive in Driver Ed. It’s automatic, put it in D, step on the pedal, and point it. So I’m 10th, 11th grade. I graduated in ’76,—all three of us Minutemen graduated in ’76, from San Pedro High.

So I’m up there, and pop gets a pencil out. He’s got it in his left hand here, and with his right hand he’s showing me the H-pattern of the gearbox. Here’s first, here’s second, here’s third, here’s fourth, and you kick it out for the reverse, right? You push down. ‘You got that?’ he said. I said, ‘Is that it? There ain’t just that!’ He says, ‘That’s right! There’s a clutch and a brake.’ So then he uses two hands for this, for the pedals. ’OK, that motor has to keep spinning, so when you come to a stop the clutch goes in, right? And then you pull it out and let go of the brake.’ You know, he’s showing me the thing. And then he hands me the keys! That’s it! I mean, we are not in a car, he just verbally gives me some instructions.

So, okay, I’m gonna man up and grow a pair. Like I said, the f****n’ grades of these hills in Monterey, you know? I’m sweatin’ bullets at every stop sign (laughs), you know, breakin’ my neck with whiplash trying to drive. Must have been eight, nine hours, and of course I don’t even roll down the windows. I’m just sweatin’ to death. And I didn’t want to let him down. I stalled millions of times, but I finally got the hang of it, and without him there.

After this, I get back to Pedro and teach four women how to drive manuals. And I did that because they were trying to learn from their pops and their brothers and s**t, and the males would have nervous breakdowns ’cause you got no f****n’ patience. Also, I thought ‘f**k these big hills,’ because Pedro’s got ’em too, so let’s find the empty church parking lot that’s flat, early in the morning, with no cars. We’ll practice there. (laughs) But that experience, that life experience—I never yelled at these ladies, no problem. No cardiac, no f****n’ freakout, and I think it’s because of that thing he put me through, that he encouraged me to partake. I think this is why he did what he did. (laughs)

MM: That’s how you learn!

Mike: So get this! The next drive is back to Pedro, like 250 miles. But interstates—there ain’t a lot of stops, there ain’t a lot of grades. I mean, there’s the Grapevine and s**t … A little Volkswagen, when I first started, oh man, that was a pants-s****er of a thing.

That’s my first vehicle. And, man, ’68 ain’t a good year, I learned. So after a couple years, I’m like, ‘let’s look for one.’ Because if you know about Volkswagens, you know the big changes. The 1300 comes in ’66, the long stroke with smaller cylinders, and there’s the 1500 in ’67. ‘Let’s get one before ’66. Let’s get a ’65, the 40-horse.’

So I get a ’63. Now, there was something—I don’t know if you had it up there—did you have something called the Recycler? It came out on Thursdays. This is where I bought all my s**t. All my basses, all my equipment and my cars. Okay, so, that ’68 was 300 bucks. But pop put some money in it, at least the Earl Scheib paint job. So I find another one for $300, a ’63, and it’s a light blue one. And, man, it didn’t look bad. It wasn’t all f****d up, body-wise. But it was not maintained, and it lasted me about a year and a half. Then I sell it for parts.

Now I get a ’64, and that’s the red one on the cover of Double Nickels on the Dime. And that baby … by that time, I’m f****n’ rebuildin’ motors and brakes. (laughs)

MM: So you have rebuilt VW engines, then?

Mike: Oh, big time, big time, big time! But I got a shameful story. In fact, I didn’t tell anybody for 20 years, I was so ashamed. But we’ll get to that …

So this is the car you’re thinking of, the red one, the ’64. It gets hit while it’s parked. And this guy, you know, he’s borracho—drunk. He’s culpable and he has to pay, and I’m not out for blood or anything. But this m**********r, he’s like some vengeful weirdo. I come back from a tour—it’s the first big tour the Minutemen do; Black Flag takes us on a U.S.–Europe tour, the first time we go to Europe. So I come back, and he had cut out the flat windshield, the rubber gasket thing, and rain came in and all this s**t. He also sawed the m**********n’ linkage on the master cylinder of the brakes. Man, what a f****n’ dick! I can’t even remember who it was now, but I wouldn’t want your karma, buddy.

The windshield—this is funny, because in the Recycler: Oh, look at this, $8.95, what a deal, right? Oh, it’s in Azusa (laughs), 50 miles from Pedro. I don’t know if you’ve ever driven in a car without a windshield …

MM: Oh, I have!

Mike: Man, there’s a pressure differential. It’s way worse than a motorcycle! It was sucking at me and my buddy Dirk—the guy who took the cover picture on Double Nickels on the Dime. I mean, rocks are gettin’ in our faces. (laughs) I put the windshield on, and you know the trick to putting ’em on, right? Kite string and dish soap.

MM: Yeah, you put your feet up against it …

Mike: In the parkin’ lot! We m**********n’ drive home that way!

MM: I learned a lot about working on cars from Beetles, just because they’re just such simple cars.

Mike: Right, right! So I find a Squareback after that. The thing about the Bug is, it’s hard to get amplifiers in it. You can take the seat out and then get it in, but then you gotta put the seat somewhere in the meantime. Anyway, in the Recycler I find a ’67 Squareback, the first year with the disc brakes. It’s got a 1500, called the pancake motor, because they put the fan housing and stuff behind. So you got a little station wagon thing, right, and I put curtains in there.

We had a bakery in Pedro then, DiCarlo, and I bought it from them for 750 bucks. Wow, that’s two Bugs’ worth! All of those first three Bugs were $300 each. Same with basses—my first two Fenders, one was a Precision and then, a few years later, a Telecaster. They were $300! (laughs) For some reason then, things were kinda stable like that. So this Squareback was 750 bucks, but man, it’s got little curtains, I can put my amp in there, and I don’t have to take the seats out.

And then (crash noise) again! I mean, I’m not complaining, ’cause I could have been in the m**********r when it was hit, right? But I wake up in the morning and somebody had bashed it.

Now, my sister’s got a ’65 Bus, which has got room. You don’t have to take out the seat. In fact, you could put in a couple speaker boxes … But! It had a bungee cord to hold it in third gear. So I’m thinking—and here’s the story I never told anybody for 20 years. I’ve already rebuilt a couple motors, a 40-horse and the Squareback 1500. So, the Bus had Solex dualies, but I had to put Webers in.

But before that, there’s this thing I’m thinkin’: You know what? The Squareback is bashed, but I can repurpose that tranny! Now, this is before the independent rear suspension, so it’s got the f*****n’ struts with the splines—these big tubes, right? I get this thing up on jack stands, I get ’em off, and I see on the Bus there’s these reduction boxes, so they could use the same trannies but geared down. One gear and another gear—two gears, right?

MM: Yeah, they’re different.

Mike: Think about it. There’s two gears, right?

MM: So it goes backwards!

Mike: (laughs heartily) I mean, you gotta pull the f****n’ splines. The IRS motor’s just so much easier, just to connect it up there to the tranny. You know how the VW motors hang off the transmission with four bolts.

MM: Yeah, the engine does, I never messed with VW transmissions.

Mike: So I get it all on there and everything, and I put it all back together and you got it: I had f****n’ four gears in reverse and one gear forward. What a f****n’ a**hole! So I have to do the whole f****n’ thing again! (laughs uproariously) So, yeah, the bungee cord on the shifter. This m**********r catches fire!

MM: They did that, yeah.

Mike: It catches fire. I’m workin’ on a car up in Hollywood, and I smell gas. The breather tube had got plugged, and when I go over there to lift up the engine lid, the fuel flashed on the thing and caught me. This is the day before a tour, this is in ’87, and my head caught fire! Here’s a tip I can pass onto you for when your head catches fire: I hate T-shirts, but I was wearing a Lakers shirt. So I was working on this Mustang II, two sets of tools, right? Metric and standard at the same time, because Ford was starting to do cars both ways then.

Anyway, I pull the shirt off and it puts the fire out and I scream so the fire didn’t go down my lungs. It was like I was under a giant magnifying glass. I remember sittin’ on the curb and I’m hearin’ the tires blow up one at a time. BOOM! BOOM! So the next day I gotta do a tour, you know, all bandaged up. People think I’m dressin’ like Rambo and s**t. Every night after the gig, the hydrogen peroxide on me looked like shaving cream, all the f****n’ bacteria. But I got this is scar tissue, so I gotta wear a hat. You’ll see me in a hat these days, it’s not a fashion statement. To this day, you know? I’m 67 now.

So, that’s the end of my Volkswagens. All five of them. I took that as a sign. I moved on to Toyota trucks. The first one had a 20R motor, the 22R next.

MM: I love the Toyota R.

Mike: Good motor! Good motor! Overhead cam, runs like a champ. But the metal on the Toyota, everything else is pretty f****n’ thin. But man, what a reliable car. You won’t have to rebuild them motors.

MM: No, they go 500,000 miles. They all come from 1950s Japanese forklift motors, the whole R family. Tell me about your Toyota trucks.

Mike: Well, I had two of them, but (long, sad pause) another bash-and-dash! The second one got destroyed. The first one, it wasn’t the motor or the drivetrain so much, it was that the body wasn’t so much together. It rattled, rattled real loud. The other problem was especially with the bed—to use it for gigs and to bring your speaker boxes you needed a camper shell. That’s why I got the second one …

Mike: So it’s 1992, the time of the riots here. I was on tour and got back, and there was this Datsun pickup on cinder blocks. It had been bashed-and-dashed, too! It was pushed up on the sidewalk, broke the wheels off. I bought it for 100 bucks. I had to buy rims and tires and a new windshield.

You can see it in the video for ‘Piss Bottle Man,’ by the way. I’m drivin’ it. It ran good. I can’t remember the motor, but very much similar to the Toyota. Very reliable. But like the VW bus, there’s no protection there. (laughs)

Mike: I never toured in these vehicles. Now, the Minutemen, the first gigs we did out of town, we would borrow the Black Flag vans. They were old Econolines. There were two versions of them and we nicknamed them ‘The Prayer.’ Oh my God, I can’t believe we drove in these m***********s! I mean, the first one, you didn’t have to worry about fallin’ asleep at the wheel, because a trash truck had hit it and the port hatch wouldn’t close all the way, so it had a gap about that high (holds fingers about 5 inches apart). So the driver’d have to wear sunglasses and a scarf and s**t. None of the gauges worked, no lights or anything, you’d have to guess on what speed you was going. Three-on-the-tree manual, and, you know, them old Econolines are actually Falcons.

MM: Yes, they are.

Mike: They just put another body on them. So the motor’s ridin’ right next to you. They just moved the seat, you know? They were stealin’ the idea from the Volkswagen, because the Bus was actually a Bug. The same wheelbase. It was a parts cart at the factory and they got this idea, but it was the mother of all vans. Before that, my pop told me, panel delivery trucks. That was the old days. Nobody had vans until VW did that Microbus.

So finally, when the Minutemen are doin’ our own tours, we gotta get our own van. [Guitarist and lead vocalist] D. Boon gets a Ram. I remember it had a four-barrel, the manifold was plastic and it warped, so you had leaks. It had a 318. The rear hatch was this big giant thing with the spare tire that got bent all f****n’ up. I mean, a lot of the ’70s U.S. designs were like, whoa!

MM: They weren’t very well made.

Mike: Yeah, this was terrible. And then he gets killed in it, you know, and so no more Dodges for me. What happens is, Georgie [drummer George Hurley] gets an Econoline E250, and then I buy it from him. So that’s my first Econoline, for fIREHOSE.

MM: That was the later kind with the engine in the front?

Mike: E250’s got a 351 Windsor. It’s a ’74. You’re actually separated from the motor in these things a lot more. It’s kinda next to your starboard leg, but it’s nothin’ like the engine sittin’ next to you like a passenger, like the baloney seat on a f****n’ airplane. But it’s got mags on it, it’s been done up with carpet and s**t.

Get this, the mags break on the Pennsylvania Turnpike! Literally, one of them breaks off the hub. You know, mags are for drag races—why are you puttin’ this f****n’ s**t on? Anyway, they’re made for less weight, for the quarter-mile. I was big into drag racing when I was a boy. I never did it, but I built the things and I’d read the magazines.

MM: Did you go to—

Mike: Lions! And Irwindale. And then we had Ascot, for the speedway, that s**t with the motorcycles, no brakes with the steel shoe on the port foot. (laughs)

And sprints! A.J. Foyt would beat you in little sprints, with sawed-off Offys and s**t. No banks on the turns, so you’d just lock up the front end and the rear end would come around. For my paper route, for subscriptions, they’d let us go. That was in Gardena. The ad on the radio was like, ‘Where the 405 and the 91 freeways COLLIDE!’ They’d have figure-eight racing, designed for crashes.

They had demolition, and you could only spend $400 on the car! You had to have a sealed tank and a roll bar. Georgie did that s**t.

MM: Did you go to the junkyards in Wilmington? That’s right by Pedro. I used to go there all the time in the mid-80s.

Mike: Pick Your Part!

MM: We might have been at the same junkyard at the same time.

Mike: They’d have the octopus with all the tools.

MM: ¡That’s El Pulpo! I used to do a lot of parts shopping in those junkyards, so I figure you must have, too.

Mike: Man, we were econo! The Minutemen say, ‘We jam econo.’ When I wrote that in ‘The Politics of Time,’ it was not just a slogan. (laughs) This is just the lyric to a song.

So I get this one van from Georgie. He never took it on tours or s**t. But we’re on a fIREHOSE tour, we’re in Franklin, Ohio, and it throws a rod. Right through the case. And this guy, he’s gotta pull the motor through the front end, which means take everything apart. Then we get this brilliant idea: We’re gonna record an album in the middle of the tour, in Painesvile, just east of Cleveland. So I and Georgie and Edward [Crawford, guitarist and vocalist] go off to there, while the dude puts in another motor.

But as soon as I get it back, I off that one, I wreck it. Edward had this guy, a helper man named Dave-O. One of the leaf springs was goin’ bad, and he gets this idea [to fix it], but he only gets one side! You get those in twos, or you have no balance! Well, we hit black ice. I kept it on all the wheels—you turn into the spins, right? This was between Utah and Wyoming, and a Neil Young song, ‘Too Lonely,’ was playing. I can’t listen to it again. Georgie’s screamin’ at the top of his lungs. We’re doin’ maybe a 270-degree slide into the infield. We come around, oh f**k!

Anyway, I off this one, and I get my first brand-new car. It’s a 1990 Econoline E250. And that lasted me 13, 14 years. What I did was, I put on the hatch, ‘Brangus,’ half Brahman bull, half Angus. Because, you know, a lot of the Latin guys, they’d put on ‘Norteña’ and stuff. Put on rock ‘n’ roll stickers, or a big sign that says, ‘There’s Expensive S**t Inside, Do Not Steal.’ You make it look incognito, so I put that on there.

It actually had a bullet hole. I took a bullet. I wasn’t in there—it was like all the bash-and-dashes. It didn’t ruin it, just had a hole in the back starboard hatch, a .22 thing, because it didn’t go through the second layer. The Missingmen drummer, Raul Morales, I was 20 years older than him, I sold it to him. That’s his first vehicle, ‘cause he was riding bicycles.

My next one was a 2005 E350. I found out the 250 was runnin‘ too much on the margins. You know, half-ton, the 250 motor—you gotta run ’em too hard and you wear ’em out. You want things that are more bonus, then you won’t wear ’em out. This m**********r had a V-10 Triton, 6.8-liter. I mean, I never went to the floor, it had so much power. And then huge suspension. You overdo it, and then things last longer. Plus maintenance. And that baby lasted me 18 years.

And then, two years ago … My neighbor across the street, he’s got a camera in his doorbell. It captured the whole thing: It took these guys like two minutes. About 10 days later, the LAPD says ‘boneyard in Watts, impound.’ They had sawed everything out. The insurance company gave me almost $10,000 and called it totaled.

Now I’ve got a Transit 150, 2023. So that’s what I’m driving now.

MM: Here’s what got me really into wanting to know more about your Beetles: I was looking at the famous cover photo on Double Nickels, and I know you guys must have driven that stretch of the Harbor Freeway 50 times to get everything lined up. The road signs, the speedometer, your face in the mirror …

Mike: No, no. Four times. It’s downtown LA, and I’m glad you asked about this, because people think they know what the f**k’s up. Total wrong urban myth, lie, b******t. Where the 110 is now and meets at the 10, me and my buddy Dirk Vandenburg, we made four rounds, downtown there, off and on where the sign said San Pedro. And I had to do three things: I needed my eyes in the mirror, I needed the speedometer at 55, and I needed the San Pedro sign. Now, there’s no digital cameras, so we’re rollin’ the dice.

Now, we’re makin’ fun of Sammy Hagar. I think he’s a Bay Area guy.

MM: Yeah, he is a Bay Area guy.

Mike: Said he couldn’t drive 55. So we’re makin’ fun of him, ’cause D. Boon says to me, ‘You know, this guy, he drives crazy and he makes safe-ass rock ‘n’ roll. Why don’t we drive safe and make crazy rock ‘n’ roll?’ The record’s a big joke, and we even put ‘55 miles an hour’ on the label. But everybody thinks it has somethin’ to do with the numberin’ system of the roads, and it has nothin’ to do with that! It means goin’ exactly the speed limit.

MM: Getting that shot would have been really tough.

Mike: Here’s where it gets f****d up. We got everything in there, just rolled the dice, developed the pictures. We got four shots, one of them’s got everything we need. But in those days, when you made album covers, I just got posterboard from Sav-on for 37 cents and pasted it on with white glue. Well, when SST [Records] gets it, they crop the photo! The should’ve cut part of my head, ’cause they cut the ‘O’ off of Pedro! So all that s**t to try to get Pedro—most of the word is in there, but they should’ve cut off more of the back of my f****n’ head. But we got exactly 55 miles per hour and my eyes in the mirror. That was the plan, and it came off.

And then he took a picture of Georgie in his 1969 VW Bus. It’s got independent rear suspension, so he could have swapped out his motor a lot easier. Never had to, but that’s what it is. One-piece windshield, right?

And then D. Boon had that Impala with the big wrecked … (laughs) That thing was runnin’ on like f****n’ five cylinders. It sounded like a sewing machine.

MM: You can hear that on the album.

Mike: Here was the problem with the album, the double album. The whole concept of the record never existed until Hüsker Dü came to town. Hüsker Dü’s good friends of ours. We put out their first album in 1981, Land Speed Record. They’re our buddies, they’re a three-piece from Minneapolis. The other three-piece from SST, our buddies, was Meat Puppets from Phoenix. A trio of trios. But we don’t sound the same. See what you can do with rock ‘n’ roll?

MM: I love those bands.

Mike: We get this album done in November ’83. They come to town in ’84. At Cabrillo Beach here in Pedro we give ’em a cookout, and they tell about they’re gonna record this double album, called Zen Arcade, this concept thing. And we’re like, ‘F**k! We should do a double album!’ So we write all these f****n’ songs up, but we don’t have any concept, and we record in March. So they’re like five months apart, the two sessions. So we have to come up with a concept.

One of the concepts is D. Boon’s ‘Let’s make fun of Sammy Hagar,’ and I’m totally on board. The other concept is this double album by Pink Floyd called Ummagumma. If you remember, it was one live record but the other one, each guy had a quarter of the record for his solo s**t. Now, we ain’t gonna do a whole f****n’ thing, so we each do a solo song. And then [producer] Joe Carducci says, ‘Hey, since you’re makin’ fun of Hagar with the drivin’, why don’t you have your cars on there, too?’

Okay, okay. So everybody has a solo song. Georgie’s is ‘You Need the Glory,’ he’s whistlin’ and hittin’ oil cans. D. Boon just played a Spanish nylon-string. It’s called ‘Cohesion.’

MM: I used to make cassette mixtapes with just instrumentals, to listen to on long drives, and that song was on all of them.

Mike: Mine, D. Boon would tell me my lyrics were too spacey. So Dirk, the guy who took the picture for the album, he’s got a landlady. She leaves him this f****n’ note about the f****n’ shower leakin’. I go, ‘D. Boon, is this real-enough lyrics?’

So that’s the solo songs, but it’s also the car noises. We don’t know how to put 48 songs in order! So in those days, that’s vinyl, we’ll probably put the best ones on the outside and the s****y ones huggin’ the label, right? Four sides. So we pick straws and Georgie wins. He gets first pick. D. Boon got second pick, I got third pick. And then songs nobody picked, those went on the fourth side. That’s why it’s called ‘Side Chaff.’

MM: To me, this album was real car-centric. It’s got the pictures of the cars, the sound of their engines.

Mike: Yeah, but none of my words have to do with cars. ‘Political Song for Michael Jackson to Sing,’ I actually wrote Mike Jackson. I thought, if Michael Jackson sang a Minutemen song, we’d never have to explain ourselves again.

MM: Yeah!

Mike: I never got word back. All the other songs I wrote, I had just finished reading Ulysses, by Jim Joyce, so they’re all about that. That’s why ‘June 16th,’ that’s Bloomsday. It’s also Raymond Pettibon’s B-day.

Here’s how D. Boon’s worked: If they rhymed, there was no way I was gonna get ’em. See, I would write a lot of music, but it would be like Navy housing, tract housing, you know? Garage on this side. It’s the same f****n’ thing. So I’d use their words to give me variety. But he had stream-of-consciousness, like ‘f**k advertising/psychological means.’ That’s the ones he’d give me. And so that’s how I got his words. So their words were really critical to my songwriting. He wrote one with Joe Carducci, one with Henry Rollins.

Georgie, he always let me title. He never wrote a title. He’d just give me these things he’d write at work. They were beautiful.

MM: The radio in the ’64 Beetle on the album cover. That’s an AFCO 8-track player. I obsessively researched what that was. Did it work? Did you listen to 8-tracks in that car?

Mike: No. Only radio. The 8-track didn’t work. We got econo, pulled it out of a car in a Pick-a-Part. But I did have 8-tracks at home. Try to learn bass on that s**t, you couldn’t pick up the needle!

MM: I really wanted to write about that radio.

Mike: In Los Angeles, if you didn’t have a radio, you wouldn’t know the traffic conditions. My pop always wanted me to have a bravo, you know, a Plan B. Like, ‘That truck has a blowout, you goin’ port or starboard?’ He wanted me to have bravos in back of bravos!

MM: I also would go to the junkyard to get radios, and if you wanted a working cassette deck in the ’80s, forget it! Everyone stole ’em.

Mike: I’ll tell you, I don’t know if you remember, in the old days cars came from Detroit without mirrors and radios. Dealers would put ’em in. So D. Boon’s pop, that’s what his job was, at a Pontiac dealership here. He was a radioman in the Navy.

MM: I had the idea D. Boon’s dad worked at the South Gate GM plant.

Mike: No, no, no! He worked at a dealership. He got D. Boon a job there too, at the parts counter. And that’s the origin of the song ‘This Ain’t No Picnic. That’s got a car-origin thing to it, way more than the motor sounds.

MM: In the circles I move in, we use the word ‘econo’ all the time, the way you coined it.

Mike: You know where it comes from. It comes from Econoline.

Anyway, I gotta get to my show now, my Watt From Pedro Show. Big love.

To learn more about Mike Watt and his music, I suggest you start by watching the excellent 2005 documentary, We Jam Econo—The Story of the Minutemen. Then head over to Watt’s website, which has a great wealth of fascinating stuff. Be sure to catch the Watt From Pedro Show, which gets regular play in my garage. You can get some of his latest work on vinyl from BIG EGO Records, too.

If you’re fortunate enough to live within Econoline-driving range one of the venues for the current tour of Watt’s band, Mssv (Main Steam Stop Valve), go listen to his thudstaff in person!