We Jam Econo: The Story of the Minutemen

Although a lot of the footage is of poor quality, the way the movie is edited taps into the enthusiasm the band garnered during it's live performances. After a screening at the Rice University Media Center in Houston, several attendees mentioned the urge they felt to get up and applaud 20yr old concert footage. The filmmakers did an excellent job of breaking up current interviews with footage they shoot throughout the band's early years. Surviving members of the band and other music contemporaries reminisce about why the Minutemen stood out and were so important. These ideas are then highlighted by concert footage or an archived interview with the band shortly before the death of D. Boon. For example, seeing Mike Watt today talk about growing up in San Pedro and the aggravations of trying to start a band in a small town is accentuated with comments he makes twenty years prior as the band is starting to taste national exposure. Whether you are a fan of the Minuteman, or alternative rock in general, shouldn't matter in choosing this film. The story resonates around the childhood friendship between D. Boon and Mike Watt and how it produced a sound that was one of the most creative in the history of rock n' roll. Imagine a twenty-year class reunion but only the people you liked are going to attend. That's the feeling I walked away with.

I'm a sixty something life-long fan of rock (well at least since the mid 1950s), and lived in California and never heard of the Minutemen that I can remember. Maybe I did hear of them but thought they had something to do with Paul Revere. I'm not sure why I rented the DVD but I'm happy I did.

The interviews, the live shows are raw like the music The Minutemen made. I think their lyrics and what they sing about to be inspired. They aren't afraid to speak the truth (whatever that is!) and do it in an unique and insistent fashion. In the interview of the three band mates they come across as grounded, thoughtful, humble, and connected to one another. D. Boone, Mike Watt, George Hurley rock. I wish I'd have seen them live.

I love The Minuteman, so it would be very hard for me to dislike this documentary. Still, I thought it had some pretty serious structural problems. The backbone of the film is Mike Watt telling the story of the band in chronological order, using primarily clips from two lengthy interviews. This part of the film tells a compelling story. It is inter cut with performance footage and snippets of interviews with dozens of other major and minor figures in the band's story. This talking head footage has a tendency to undermine the film at time. The director obviously collected so much interview footage that he seems compelled to use it, but what's being said is often repetitive and not pertinent to the point that Watt's story has reached. It gives the film a disorganized, scatter shot feel that really undermines its effectiveness at times.

It's difficult to know what to say about this well-made, honest, and truly documentary film.

On the one hand, as a fan of the band I'm grateful to have such a nice retelling of their story, crisply paced, and full of details I'd never heard.

On the other hand, I found myself at the end of it rather sad and swimming in nostalgia, and there's something so creepily unpunkrock about that, I'm not sure the basic message of keep-on-moving, do-it-yourself came out in the end.

I suspect that's a distinction between the perspective of the filmmakers, who came upon their subject matter after D. Boon's death and the split-up of the group, versus my own perspective, as a contemporary fan of the group (the number of familiar faces appearing on screen was astonishing.) As such, I also suspect the reaction of the viewer will be quite different depending on whether you were there or whether this is increasingly ancient history.

Here's what stands out:

-- this is an extremely honest and true-to-the-spirit-of-the-group film in its DVD release format (the one most of us will see, given the lack of major theatrical distribution). The filmmakers have crammed two disks with tons of extras: the documentary film itself and another 20 or so outtakes that didn't really fit into the narrative structure, but virtually all of which are amusing or edifying by themselves; three music videos the band and its friends put together, each with their own amusing moments ("This Ain't No Picnic" had me laughing aloud); an unedited interview with the band from 1984; and on disc 2, three more or less complete performances by the band, one from 1980 that shows the band at its coalescent moment and fresh on the scene, one from a college gig in 1984 that shows the band at it mature and bouncy best, and a sort of Minutemen-unplugged all-acoustic set performed for a cable access channel late in the band's existence. It's a great bargain for fans, and while I'd point newcomers to the still-in-print recordings first, this is a fantastic way of completing the band's catalog.

As a standalone documentary, it certainly tells the story well enough in a conventional narrative that it stands as history.

-- the band's uniqueness among punk bands stands out with the distance of time, and at the heart of what the Minutemen were is this strangely undying question of what it meant (or means) to be 'punk'. The band challenged authority constantly in the sense they had no training but what they provided to themselves, didn't care about popular notions of success, and had a sound that defied even the conventions of punk: jazzy, funky, explosive, melodic and abrupt all at the same time. But it's important to note, as the film makes evident, the Minutemen defied most of the emerging genre conventions of stereotyped punk. They didn't look like "punks", they didn't sound like the Ramones, they had an awareness of the world around them that went beyond the self-indulgent bemoaning of the here and now. Just when you were up and thrashing this song was over. The Minutemen stood out because they were constructive; nihilists neither in spirit nor deed.

-- what I did find frustrating about the film, though, was it never quite closed on the question of how the Minutemen truly got from playing "Smoke on the Water" to penning "Double Nickels on a Dime". We get a sort of catalog answer, in that D. and Mike Watt grew up together and were very simpatico, but is that all there is to the story? There are hints everywhere, but ultimately the interviewees seemed a bit too close to the band to add enough perspective on this question. Of course, this is often the big mystery in music, from Jimi Hendrix to Mozart, where does that extra touch of genius come from? It may be unfair of me to expect an answer in 'We Jam Econo'.

-- Context or lack thereof: the film is a bit of a hagiography - there's not a lot of discussion about the band's warts or occasional lack of selectivity in its recorded output, and the negativisms of the scene are dealt with somewhat obliquely (mainly focussing on the gobbing second-wave punk wannabes and thrashers). It's probably that there just wasn't enough time to come out with a fast-paced informative film and deal with more of the complexities of context that shaped the band. It's one thing to note three relatively untutored guys in a working class / military town railing against the creative and political repression of Reagan's America, but with twenty years between the film and the demise of the band, we might be able to start explaining to future generations just what it was like to live under the cloud of nuclear annihilation while living on government cheese. As such, this ended up playing more like a fan's document than broader history. Nothing wrong with that, mind you; it's just there's another movie to be made sometime.

-- I also wish there had been a little more attention paid in a way to George Hurley's role in the band. He co-wrote a lot of the songs, and while due credit is given to his incredibly technical, creative drumming, there's little about George's background relative to the details about the relationship between D. and Mike. The drummer makes the band.

I do warmly and highly recommend this movie to anybody with an interest not just in the Minutemen per se but pop music history in general. They were paradoxically sui generis while epitomizing the way bands lived, worked, and died back in the day. This is a primary document in that sense.

I just attended the premier for this last night at San Pedro's historic Warner Grand Theatre, and man - what a beautiful film. I know that "time sensitive references" are not smiled upon by our IMDb benefactors, but I believe that in this case it is entirely appropriate to put the film in context in this way. A documentary is, by definition, a time sensitive thing - and this one intentionally so as it's release marks the twenty year anniversary of D. Boon's passing. What I experienced last night at the premier is, I think, an integral part of what this film is all about: celebrating the life, and mourning the loss of this tremendous artist.

I first heard the Minutemen in 1985, just months before D. Boon's tragic and untimely death, and so for me, as well as for so many others younger than myself, my love affair with this band has been one of grieving from the very beginning - a grieving which, for Angelenos like myself, is a deeply personal and palpable thing, and one from which it seems we have never fully recovered. ---Until last night. The opening of this movie was like the memorial service for D. Boon that most of us never had. All of LA's punk rock luminaries were in attendance (and in the film!), along with as many of her fans and enthusiasts as the theater could hold, and the feeling was one of - at last - a proper, collective acknowledgment of the contribution made by the Minutemen to punk rock, to DIY, to music period, to each of us; an exhale, if you will, followed by a whoot and a raised fist. The audience cheered and hollered as each of their friends and idols graced the screen to share the myriad ways in which this band touched and transformed their lives, booed at the villains, wept openly at the final goodbye's to D... and this is, I think, what this movie ultimately is: finally, after twenty years, a "time sensitive reference" of the greatness and importance of this band - something which everyone over here knows down in their soul, but which now can be shared with the rest of world with the same level of intimacy - in Mike Watt's own words as he drive's his van around Pedro, in the amazing and extensive live footage of the band, in the very spirit of celebration with which the film was made.

So, see this movie, buy a copy, share it with your friends - then go form a band, make a record, make a movie, start your own label or production company or zine ---or just go drink and pogo!

RIP, D. We love and miss you.