Happy 50th Birthday, Mike Watt!

Hope you live as long to be as productive as Mike Watt, legendary punk bassist for The Minutemen, the reincarnated Stooges, fIREHOSE, Banyan, The Missingmen, The Black Gang...just tell me when to stop, OK? The short version is that San Pedro's unassuming, hardworking rocker has made it to 50 years and left us so far with a stunning backlog of work. The long version? I wrote that one a few days ago for my pals at LA Weekly:

Mike Watt: Mr. Engine Driver
[Scott Thill, LA Weekly]

"I’m freaking out, but it’s okay to get into the middle ground, into autumn," he adds. "Black Gang and Missingmen are middle-age records, but that’s natural because I’m there. I can’t make The Punch Line," the Minutemen’s blistering 1981 debut full-length. "I’m in a different place in my life. I wrote all those songs for D. Boon. Now I write for Watt."

Writing for Watt, however, does not mean that there is life without D. Boon and the Minutemen as much as that there is life after them. As the years pass and memories fade, the Pedro art-punk trio only grows in stature, marked for life as influences on those moving units and those making movements. When the music lifers are assembled and counted in the year 3000, the "corndog" Pedro clan that wrote the jagged classic "Cut" will have indeed made the cut. That’s the juice that just keeps on giving.

"To be honest, it is the biggest reason I’m still doing music," Watt confesses. "At the time, it was the movement: We didn’t think it was music, but expression. We had a weird style, but it was empowering. And we met some daring people, like Bad Brains, Hüsker Dü, Sonic Youth. They weren’t afraid, we figured, so why should we be? And I want others to think that if I can do it, they can too. That’s why I helped those kids put out We Jam Econo."

And from the Fountain of Youth to snapshot sunsets, Mike Watt is stacking his future with expressions to be dissected and discussed by open-minded come-ups in love with everything from Daydream Nation to Ulysses. It’s a remarkably dense body of work, like all of the greats, which starts unassumingly in San Pedro with talented friends trading riffs and ends who knows where. Who knows? All that matters is that he’s working. Hard...

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