I'd Love to Turn You On #171 - Minutemen – Double Nickels on the Dime

I chose to write about this album because I wish someone had turned me on to it when I first began exploring punk music. I was a freshman in high school in the fall of 1991 when Nirvana’s Nevermind busted open my expectations about music and set me on the course of discovering what else was out there. If I had found Double Nickels on the Dime by The Minutemen when I was fourteen, it would probably be one of my top five all-time favorite records. Instead, I came across this album the year I turned thirty and it prompted me to reassess what great music I had missed up until that point. When the Minutemen released Double Nickels on the Dime in 1984, they created a classic album in American independent music, a testament to a beautiful friendship, and a blueprint for how a few regular people can come together and make something extraordinary.

When I first went looking for punk music, I gravitated toward the two American punk bands that people around me talked about the most: Black Flag and Minor Threat. In each band’s music, I found elements that I liked, but neither one felt like something that really included someone like me. When I eventually heard Double Nickels on the Dime, I found myself in this album in a way I had never experienced with a punk band. When I listened to his album, I recognized core elements of myself that didn’t always seem at home in punk music like goofiness, thoughtfulness, weirdness, and idealism. Guitarist and singer D. Boon, bassist Mike Watt, and drummer George Hurley grew up in working class San Pedro, California and formed the Minutemen as an alternative to the bleak prospects of their hometown. All three band members were close and shared chemistry as musicians, but D. Boon and Mike Watt were lifelong friends whose bond informed nearly every meaningful aspect of the Minutemen’s existence. On “History Lesson, Pt. 2,” one of the best songs on Double Nickels on the Dime, D. Boon simply tells the story of two friends discovering punk music and learning how to do it for and by themselves. This album of more than forty songs documents a fiercely unique, independent band at the height of their powers taking on as much as they possibly could. Double Nickels on the Dime remains the Minutemen’s greatest achievement and its influence can be traced throughout a prominent branch of indie rock including one of 2016’s best albums, Human Performance by Parquet Courts.

When D. Boon died in 1985, the Minutemen ended, but the band’s legacy grew consistently over the following decades. In 2001, Minutemen figured prominently in Michael Azerrad’s indispensable book, Our Band Could Be Your Life. Azerrad featured Minutemen as the second profile in the book, derived the title from a lyric in “History Lesson, Pt. 2,” and dedicated the book, in part, to D. Boon. In 2005, Tim Irwin’s great documentary, We Jam Econo: The Story of The Minutemen, brought the band’s story to an even larger audience. The band’s music, especially Double Nickels on the Dime, became a touchstone for the expanding world of indie rock. Eclectic indie rock band Calexico established a rousing cover of “Corona” as part of their live shows before recording it for their 2004 EP, Convict Pool. In 2006, indie folk singer Bonnie “Prince” Billy and post-rock instrumentalists Tortoise released a covers album, The Brave and the Bold, and offered up a monolithic, but faithful rendition of “It’s Expected I’m Gone.” As I’ve learned, it’s never too late to get started with an album as essential as Double Nickels on the Dime, but for your sake I recommend that you start soon.

-         John Parsell

I'd Love to Turn You On #42 - Minutemen – Double Nickels on the Dime

I was watching a documentary about the Minutemen on Netflix the other night (We Jam Econo: The Story of the Minutemen) and toward the end of it a guy said Double Nickels on the Dime is “the greatest record of all time,” and I was kind of taken aback because that’s a bold, borderline ridiculous statement for any album, much less a double LP that was recorded for next to nothing over the span of a few weeks during the height of the Reagan years. But the comment stuck with me like a challenge. So I played it a few dozen times, listening closely and giving the matter a lot of thought, and I have to say I think he’s right.

My case for the greatness of the Minutemen’s third LP is based on a simple logical conclusion: If rock and roll is the art of the young, and the greatest rock records tend to be made early in artists’ careers, then the greatest example of youthful rock and roll brilliance must be, in turn, the greatest album of all time. And I can’t think of a better example of youthful rock and roll brilliance than Double Nickels. It came about as a kind of a dare. The band was in the middle of making an album when they learned that their label mates Hüsker Dü were about to release a double record. Not to be outdone, the three-man band from San Pedro, California, knuckled down and wrote 20+ new songs in a matter of days, ordered up a second disk, and wrote in the liner notes, “Take that, Hüskers!” And the songs are all fantastic. They’re short and catchy, full of energy, but weird, too -- off-kilter arrangements, and pithy, naïve and idealistic lyrics about everything from Bob Dylan and Michael Jackson to Central American politics and control-freak roommates. They’re songs that give the finger to the notion that the song is a limited art form, that you can’t really do anything new with it, because here are 40 or so numbers that are completely unlike any song that’s been written before or since. Yet they’re very much songs, not just noise or a bunch of strange sounds -- they have choruses and bridges and guitar solos, and you can dance to them and sing along.  

If I were forced to name a “sounds like,” I’d have to say Creedence Clearwater Revival, a la “Up Around the Bend.” Most of the tunes on Double Nickels are built like that: a unique, punchy riff broken up with a pounding bridge and a shoutable chorus. Indeed, the band idolized Creedence; side one even has a cover of “Don’t Look Now (It Ain’t You Or Me).” And D. Boon’s guitar work is reminiscent of Fogerty’s at times – bright and sassy. But from there the comparisons drop off. The Minutemen were a punk band, not major-label hitmakers, so they’re a lot rougher around the edges. (“We jam econo!” Boon declares in “The Politics of Time.”) But they don’t exactly sound punk, either; they’re not your prototypical one-chord, spastic-drum slam-dance band. At any given point, Double Nickels sounds funky, jazzy, folksy, bluesy, metalish, chaotic, Martian, you name it. This eclecticness is due largely to the fact that these guys could really play; bassist Mike Watt is all over the fretboard and George Hurley could hold his own with the best jazz ensembles. But even more so, it’s about attitude. In 1984, this band was utterly ignorant and/or defiant of constraint – like youth and the best of what it means to be young. 

In the documentary, Hurley says of Double Nickels, “You do things when you’re young that sometimes you look back and it’s kind of amazing. I don’t think I‘ve gotten any better.” 

I don’t think rock and roll has either. 

- Joe Miller