There aren't a lot of guys in
punk rock
(or
rock & roll
, period) who appear to have their feet more squarely on the ground than
Mike Watt
, who in his own regular-guy way has been the heart, soul and conscience of the music ever since his days playing bass in
the Minutemen
. A musical team player who lives by the notion of "jamming econo" (living and touring frugally, with an eye on the music rather than the trappings),
Watt
is as likely to talk about fixing his van or recording on used tape in his interviews as he is about "stardom" or "career," so when he had a regular guy's sort of life-changing experience -- a close brush with death brought on by a massive abscess in his perineum that eventually burst -- it makes sense that he would chose to write a song cycle about it.
Secondman's Middle Stand
is a "
rock opera"
of sorts in which
presents a first-person account of his illness and recovery (names of the participants included) which occasionally betrays the influence of
Dante
's
The Divine Comedy
, with sickness representing the Inferno, treatment standing in for Purgatory, and the return to health as the ascent to Paradise. If this all sounds a bit grand, it doesn't play that way;
's craggy voice (sounding like a deeper, West Coast variation on
David Thomas
' vocal style) keeps this material firmly grounded at all times, as do the messy realities of tunes like
"Puked to High Heaven"
and
"Pissbags and Tubing"
and the everyday joy of
"The Angels Gate"
"Pluckin', Pedalin' and Paddlin'."
recorded these songs with
Pete Mazich
on organ,
Jerry Trebotic
on drums, and
himself on "thudstaff" (that's bass guitar in Pedro-speak), and while the arrangements are typically efficient,
and his crew are able to conjure up a genuinely epochal sound out of this power trio, with
Mazich
's organ offering a broad range of tonal colors and
's thick bass tone sometimes doubling as a fuzzed-out guitar.
is a wildly idiosyncratic examination of life, death, and the bridge in between, with its sense of joy in the possibilities of second chances outweighing its very real terrors, and no one but
could have made it -- it's harrowing, funny, and genuinely moving stuff from a true American original. ~ Mark Deming