1983: Minutemen, Buzz Or Howl Under The Influence Of Heat

By Jeremy Michael Clark

Barely seventeen, I spent much of my free time in the summer of 2007 listening to music, sprawled out on the dingy white carpet of an unfurnished two-bedroom apartment I rented with two guys a year or two older than myself. We weren’t exactly friends yet, but we’d hung out whenever our bands played shows together, and that counted for something back then. That May, we had lied our way into a lease and here I was, on the cusp of my senior year, not legally emancipated, with keys to a place I could sort of call my own. What did my mother think, you ask? Good question. She’d once told me that as long as I didn’t end up dead or in jail, she didn’t really worry about what I was doing. As the oldest of her boys, I guess she thought I didn’t need much guidance. Regardless of how I see it now, back then I felt free. My friends could say they had cars or late curfews, but I had my own address, far from a home where I never felt safe, closer to school and the nearby record shops, bookstores and music venues where, as a teenager, I cobbled together some sense of self.

My friends and I couldn’t afford cable, so to fill the idle hours between work and parties we listened to music and endlessly watched the same five or six DVDs. Our neighbors must have gotten so annoyed when all I watched for weeks was We Jam Econo, the 2005 documentary chronicling the brief career of Minutemen, an 80s punk band out of San Pedro, California. Probably like many teenagers in the 2000s, I discovered Minutemen because of Michael Azerrad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life, a book that was the closest thing I had to a bible. Any band, record label or person Azerrad mentioned was an excuse to spend hours scouring AllMusic, the online database I used to discover new things to listen to. From there, I made mental lists for my next trip to the record store, where I’d pester everyone for recommendations on an almost-daily basis.

I was no stranger to “weird” music when I discovered Minutemen, and still I wasn’t prepared for what I heard. Most of what I listened to I could slot into some type of “genre,” however arbitrary and narrow. Minutemen changed all that. To me, they are a “both/and” type of band. They never felt the need to limit themselves to any one idea, any one way of writing a song. Everything about them seemed a contradiction, but they never stopped to smooth it all out. They would write short songs, and cram them full of so many parts, it felt impossible to keep up. They could play fast enough to make you launch yourself into a swarm of other bodies and funky enough to make you dance alone in your room. They could whiplash from worry about heartbreak to worry about nuclear war, then go off on a rant about a shitty boss and how capitalism is bullshit, all in the span of two minutes. There were no topical or musical limits – if they could imagine it, think it or feel it, it was worth saying.

And though each member of Minutemen was an incredible musician, it wasn’t just the music that felt revelatory. There was a sense of pride and sincerity about them that just felt like nothing I’d ever seen. They made no attempt to obscure their working-class roots or even their lack of musical expertise. As a budding bass player who couldn’t afford his own instrument, I loved knowing that Mike Watt and D. Boon didn’t even know the bass was different from the guitar before starting a band. I felt insecure talking to people at shows about gear and screenprinting and record pressing because it seemed like everyone already knew so much more than me. So when Mike and D admitted that, in the beginning, they didn’t even know the importance of tuning their guitars to each other, I thought, Oh wait, I don’t have to pretend to know what the fuck is going on. This, to me, was the clearest example of the DIY ethos: even these guys who were clueless could teach themselves enough to make records that, decades later, would resonate with someone like me.

The phrase “do it yourself” conjures up, for some, memories of hand-sewn patches on clothes, xeroxed zines and concerts in whatever space available: living rooms, VFW outposts, bowling alley basements. I found that scene at thirteen, when a kid I recognized from school handed me a wallet-sized flyer as I walked down Bardstown Road one day. The flyer listed a bunch of bands I’d never heard of and the address of a church. Considering the person who handed me the flyer looked as if they’d never stepped foot in a church before, it confounded me, but it was also enticing. People were playing music without record labels and contracts and agents and all that other bullshit? Up until then, music for me pretty much consisted of what was on the radio, or what was shared amongst friends who downloaded entire discographies off of Kazaa or Mediafire: accessible enough to hear, and maybe even cover, but not to emulate. I felt like I had been let in on some sort of secret, and I wanted to know more.

While I too recognize this type of DIY, I also know a different kind of “do it yourself.” It has a different tone, one I heard so often as a kid. My mother sometimes worked late, and sometimes my stepfather was nowhere to be found, so if I got hungry? Make yourself something to eat, my mother said over the phone. If I missed the school bus because stray dogs chased me down the block at six in the morning? You better find a branch and learn to fight them off, my stepfather said, locking the door behind me. I can’t count the number of times I went to others for advice or help, only to be told that if I were going to be a real man, if I were going to grow up, I needed to take care of myself. Nevermind that I was so obviously still a child, or had tried every option before asking for help. Doing things myself wasn’t the exception, it was the rule. Here, “do it yourself” was about survival.

In this new world, “do it yourself” seemed to be more about possibility. You might do something yourself, but you didn’t have to do it alone. Doing it yourself meant recording songs in the living room of your own home instead of paying for a studio or a practice space. It meant selling t-shirts you screenprinted to fuel the van you borrowed so you could drive to the next city to play a show you booked in front of other people your age who sang along to the songs you wrote. It meant rejecting the expectations and ideas other people foisted upon you, and making space to say what you needed to say.

As a poor black kid who sometimes had to literally fistfight his own stepfather just to leave the house, who was punished again and again by this man who hated that I had the nerve to just be myself, this scene was nothing less than a sign of hope. Of course, I couldn’t have been alone in that; I’m sure some of the people I met were managing their own crises in much the same way I was: privately, as best they could. But the fact that I didn’t know, that we could connect without having to admit what we were running from was itself a kind of grace. Even though I had to borrow other people’s instruments, even though after the show some of these white kids would get picked up by parents with nice cars who would drive them to homes much larger than mine in neighborhoods I had never heard of, at those shows, in those few hours between the opening band and the headliner, I could convince myself that my dirty secondhand clothes weren’t just all I had – they were all I needed.

By the time I was seventeen, shame lived at the very core of who I was. Being vulnerable, being open, being genuine? Fuck that. In my experience, vulnerability got you mocked, or worse. Given that, imagine how blown away I was listening to “Self-Referenced,” the first track off of Minutemen’s 1983 record Buzz or Howl Under the Influence of Heat. Hearing D. Boon shout, “How can I believe in books / when my heart lies to me? / I’m full of shit,”  I was floored at the audacity of writing such a thing, much less saying it to anyone else. In my home, it wasn’t okay to talk about your heart, or books, or self-doubt. Even in the music scene, it sometimes felt like anger and sarcasm and being “cool” were the languages that were safest to speak. Don’t get me wrong – D. Boon and Mike Watt could be angry and sarcastic, but more than other bands I was listening to at the time, they also showed what lived underneath that: not just sadness, paranoia, and alienation (thought plenty of that), but also joy, love, humor, and pride. If nothing else, you could hear how happy they were just to play together. It was so fucking uncool I couldn’t bear it. I also couldn’t get enough.

Even in We Jam Econo, Buzz or Howl gets only a brief mention. Released in between What Makes A Man Start Fires? and Double Nickels on the Dime, two absolutely classic albums, I understand why it gets overshadowed. Hell, the entire record is only sixteen minutes long. But if I were going to introduce someone to their discography, Buzz or Howl is where I’d start. The record kicks off and you’re immediately off-kilter. Sometimes I feel like it starts mid-song, as though the band had been playing the intro riff again and again, with growing intensity, until Spot, who recorded the album’s first side, finally started the tape. Were it not for the song lyrics printed on the album sleeve, I wouldn’t know what the fuck D. Boon was shouting, given his voice barely rises over everything else. And even when reading the lyrics, I can’t say I totally understand what he’s talking about. But if I don’t “get it” in a logical way, it makes emotional sense: I feel it. Of course, the band themselves don’t do you any favors, since the lyrics themselves are unexplained, as brief and fleeting as the songs themselves. By the time you’ve gotten a handle on a song, it’s gone.

The brevity of the album is, to me, even more impressive than the epic nature of Double Nickels. While maintaining momentum over the span of 46 songs is incredible in its own right, I’m more impressed by the way Buzz or Howl covers so much ground in so little time. It feels like a record made by people who know how little time we have, and don’t want to waste it. Listening to this record is like sitting at the top of the stairs that lead to a basement of a house. The house is where you and three or four others have lived for only six months, and today’s the last day you’ll call it home. If you’re not gone by tomorrow, all your shit will be out on the lawn, and down in the basement, three guys are hurling themselves through song after song in an attempt to get everything recorded before the power goes out. Once that happens, it’s over – there’ll be no way to capture that moment again, and there’ll be no evidence you were ever there. They don’t care that one song doesn’t sound like the other. Each one feels necessary, and they coexist off the strength of that urgency. The band trusts that everything will make sense in the end, if not to everyone else, then at least to themselves.

I think I love most about this album how even years later every song feels both surprising and familiar. “Dreams Are Free Motherfucker!” sounds like Velvet Underground covering Ornette Coleman; “The Toe Jam” feels like an outtake from Trout Mask Replica. Alongside this abstract cacophony, there’s also “I Felt Like A Gringo” or “Little Man With A Gun In His Hand,” songs that are about as “conventional” as any you’ll find in their discography (“Little Man” is still on my running list of songs I hope to cover one day, even though I haven’t played live music in a decade). And whether because of or in spite of all these contradictions, the center holds. There’s a feeling that the whole album is held together by sheer momentum, that it would all fall apart if even one person were to stop playing (I’m pretty sure the whole thing was recorded live in one or two takes). Listen to “Cut” or “The Product” and tell me it doesn’t feel like watching three dogs yoked to one leash try to run in different directions. Today, listening to these songs, to the way the bass, guitar and drums all lean on and push against each other, I am reminded of the fragile and intense nature of teenage friendships, of forging community out of a shared need to push forward relentlessly, even if we were pushing for different reasons, even if that momentum meant the moment itself might not last much longer. Despite all the reasons I eventually drifted away from the DIY scene, the principles I learned still inform how I live today, and I am grateful for how it gave me a kind of home at a time when there was little else I trusted or believed in.

More than any other record, Buzz or Howl Under the Influence of Heat, and Minutemen in general, feel like a synthesis of all the music I loved at that time. I listen to this album and I hear Captain Beefheart and Funkadelic and Creedence and Ornette and The Stooges but above all else, I hear Minutemen. When I got to play music with my bandmates in Mountain Asleep, it was such a joy how alike yet disparate our interests were, how we managed to meld our different ideas of what we wanted to sound like, and though I can’t speak for them, I know Minutemen were the model I was trying to emulate, if not musically, then spiritually. After all, to be influenced by Minutemen meant not sounding like them at all – it meant sounding like yourself, no matter what.

 Jeremy Michael Clark’s poems have been published both online and in print. In a past life, he played bass in the band Mountain Asleep. Born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky, he is currently a graduate student at Penn's School of Social Policy and Practice. You can find his work at jeremymichaelclark.com.