Tyler’s Favorite Albums (1984): Minutemen – ‘Double Nickels on the Dime’

Posted on October 19, 2021 by Tyler

I once devoted an entire episode of my first radio show to playing this record in its entirety, and I would do it again. Despite it’s prodigious length for a punk record, it still takes infinitely less time to listen to than Ulysses takes to read.

Not to be too hyperbolic, but this is the best album of the 1980s by the best band of the 1980s, and deserves to be considered one of the great works of Western Civilization. If you haven’t listened to Double Nickels on the Dime, just do so now and begin the next chapter of your life.

June 16

Posted on June 16, 2016 by Tyler

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Sometimes with people, I fake I’ve seen movies, to round off the edges.
Subset of history, I lose my identity, start bummin’ at parties…
(“Life as a Rehearsal,” 1982)

Happy Bloomsday, aka International Minutemen Day. The former’s a tribute to the 20th century’s greatest epic hero, and the latter is an unofficial tribute to the 20th century’s greatest band.

Here is a spiel I wrote about the Minutemen around this time a couple years ago.

Here is San Pedro, their hometown (and one of my favorite places in the world), in the news very recently.

Here is a book that my friend Mike Fournier wrote about the Minutemen some years back.

Here is an (unsuccessful) attempt my friends and I made to recreate the “Double Nickels on the Dime” cover during a visit to Pedro in April.

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And last, here is some validation for you all, in the spirit of the unofficial holiday. Be good to each other, and just as importantly, let yourselves be heard.

Drove Up from Pedro

Posted on June 16, 2014 by Tyler

It’s June 16th, known to some as Bloomsday, the day in which James Joyce’s epic Ulysses takes place. Because the Minutemen used that date to name an instrumental track on their masterpiece double-album Double Nickels on the Dime in 1984 (listen to the whole thing here), the date has earned an additional meaning to many of their fans, including yours truly.

(via Watt’s hoot page)

If I could write a book about why the Minutemen encapsulated everything that was essential about punk rock and great and rock n’ roll, I would. Maybe I still will some day. A spate of literature does exist about the band, including a 33 1/3 Book about Double Nickels by my friend Mike Fournier as well as a particularly landmark section of Michael Azerrad’s volume Our Band Could Be Your Life (aptly enough, named after a line in the Minutemen song “History Lesson (Part II)”).

The trio were at once irreverent and smarter than any of their contemporaries, at once shambolic musicians yet still a tighter unit than any of their counterparts that played by the rules. The Minutemen made it very clear that no song, no story, no band could be as important as the one that you create, and while D. Boon died almost three decades ago, Mike Watt still tours relentlessly and lives his message every day. Their politics were no joke and neither were their working-class backgrounds (the term “double-nickels on the dime” came from trucker lingo).

(via laexeclimo.com)

The trio’s working-class legend are what brings me to their sonic geography. There are few places on Earth, if any, where the Minutemen could have come from other than San Pedro, CA. For anyone who hasn’t been there, it is a beautiful slice of land suspended over the Pacific Ocean, a hinterland of Los Angeles without feeling at all like the city proper. Like the city to it’s north, it elicits passionate reactions one way or the other: a heavenly village draped over a hill, or a boring burnt-out former-Navy town. My perspective on Pedro (pronounced Pee-Droh) is overwhelmingly the latter. When I lived in Long Beach, I would regularly escape across the Bay to relax and do some writing, and I told anyone visiting the West Coast that it was my favorite place in California and impressed upon them how important it was to visit at some point. The Korean Friendship Bell, the Sunken City, William’s Book Store (R.I.P.), and so many more wonderful landmarks tie the beautiful town together. That the greatest band to ever record and tour came from Pedro is not a big surprise, considering how unique and staunchly working-class the city was, and in many ways, remains.