Mike Watt


Michael David Watt is an American bassist, vocalist and songwriter. He co-founded and played bass guitar for the rock bands Minutemen, Dos, and Firehose. He began a solo career with the 1995 album Ball-Hog or Tugboat? and has since released three additional solo albums, most recently in 2010 with Hyphenated-man. He is also the frontman for the supergroup Big Walnuts Yonder, a member of the art rock group Banyan and is involved with several other musical projects. From 2003 until 2013, he was the bass guitarist for The Stooges.
Watt has been called "one of the greatest bassists on the planet". CMJ New Music called Watt a "seminal post-punk bass player". Readers of NME voted Mike Watt one of the "40 Greatest Bassists of All Time" and LA Weekly awarded him the number six spot in "The 20 Best Bassists of All Time". In November 2008, Watt received the Bass Player Magazine lifetime achievement award, presented by Flea. The Red Hot Chili Peppers dedicated their best-selling album, 1991's Blood Sugar Sex Magik, to Watt.

Biography

Early career

Watt was born in Portsmouth, Virginia. His father was a machinist's mate in the Navy and when he was young, Watt's family moved to San Pedro, California, where he became good friends with D. Boon. Watt and Boon picked up bass and guitar, respectively. Watt was a fan of T. Rex and Blue Öyster Cult, while Boon's exposure to rock music was limited to Creedence Clearwater Revival, another Watt favorite.

The Minutemen

In 1978, Watt and Boon formed a band called The Reactionaries with drummer George Hurley and vocalist Martin Tamburovich. The band later became Minutemen with another drummer named Frank Tonche, who only lasted two shows with the group; Hurley, who had been in the short-lived new wave group Hey Taxi! at the time Minutemen first formed, rejoined Watt and Boon. After signing with SST Records in 1980, Minutemen began touring constantly, releasing a number of albums along the way. Their music was based on the speed, brevity, and intensity of punk, but included elements of jazz, folk, and funk.
Born with Osgood–Schlatter disease, Watt had surgeries on both knees in the early 1980s which limited touring in 1981. Watt wrote all of the music for What Makes a Man Start Fires? as he was laid up after one of his knee surgeries, living with his mother at the time and needed to keep himself occupied.
In 1984, Watt met Black Flag bassist Kira Roessler during a Black Flag/Minutemen tour. They soon became romantically involved, and subsequently began collaborating on songs, including material on Minutemen's final album 3-Way Tie . They also formed a two-bass duo, Dos, and have since recorded and released three records.
Minutemen ended tragically on December 22, 1985, when Boon was killed in an automobile crash at the age of 27 while driving to Arizona with his girlfriend. Their fifth full-length album, 3-Way Tie , had already been scheduled for release at the time of the accident. In the documentary film We Jam Econo, Watt mentioned that the last time he saw Boon, he had received lyrics for 10 songs from critic and songwriter Richard Meltzer for a planned collaboration with Minutemen. Minutemen were also planning to record a triple album with the working title 3 Dudes, 6 Sides, 3 Studio, 3 Live as way to counteract bootleggers.

Firehose

After Boon's death, Watt was profoundly depressed; he and Hurley initially intended to quit music altogether. Sonic Youth invited Watt to hang out with them in New York City in 1986; they recorded a cover of Madonna's "Burnin' Up" on the first Ciccone Youth EP, and Watt played bass for two songs on the Sonic Youth album Evol. Watt cites this period as critical in inspiring his post-Minutemen career saying, "The first thing I did was Thurston asked me to play bass on Evol. That was a big highlight, man. Like, 'What, you want me to play without D. Boon?'"
Subsequently, Ed Crawford, a Minutemen fan who drove to San Pedro from Ohio, persuaded the Watt/Hurley rhythm section to continue playing music. Firehose was formed soon after. Following three releases on SST, Firehose was signed to Columbia Records by A&R man Jim Dunbar. Shortly after the release of 1993's Mr. Machinery Operator, the band decided to call it quits.
Watt and Kira married in 1987, but their marriage ended not long after Firehose's break-up. However, both their friendship and Dos have remained intact; they even recorded their third album, Justamente Tres, not long after their divorce.

Solo career

After working with Firehose, Watt began a solo career. His first album, Ball-Hog or Tugboat?, featured appearances from dozens of musicians, including Henry Rollins, Eddie Vedder, J Mascis, Carla Bozulich, Evan Dando, members of Sonic Youth, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Frank Black, Nirvana, Soul Asylum, Jane's Addiction, the Beastie Boys and the Screaming Trees. The album and its supporting tour were Watt's first taste of mainstream fame, when Vedder and Dave Grohl of Nirvana were part of his touring group. After Vedder returned to his Pearl Jam commitments and Grohl began working with his new band Foo Fighters, Watt formed his only four-piece touring group to date, The Crew Of The Flying Saucer, featuring guitarist Nels Cline and two drummers.
In 1996, Watt contributed bass guitar on two songs for Porno for Pyros' second album, Good God's Urge, filling in for Martyn LeNoble who quit the band during recording sessions. Watt subsequently ended up being the bassist for the band's tour that followed the release of the album.
He made an appearance in an episode of Cartoon Network's Space Ghost Coast to Coast.
In 1997, Watt released Contemplating the Engine Room, a punk rock song cycle using naval life as an extended metaphor for both Watt's family history and the Minutemen. The album, which was critically well received, features the trio of musicians Nels Cline on guitar, Stephen Hodges on drums, and Watt as the only singer.
Watt went on to play in such groups as Banyan and Hellride, a sometime live outfit that plays cover versions of Stooges songs. He also played in Wylde Ratttz with Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore and The Stooges' Ron Asheton, recording a song for the film Velvet Goldmine. Watt also recorded a bass line to send to the Pennsylvania space-folk band The Clubber Lang Gang for their record Now Here This, on the track "For the Broken People". Starting in mid-2011, Watt began playing bass for a psychedelic/progressive rock band called Anywhere with the Mars Volta's Cedric Bixler-Zavala and Christian Eric Beaulieu of Triclops! In 2015 Mike Watt joined the Waywords and Meansigns project, a collaborative project setting James Joyce's Finnegans Wake to music.

Illness, recovery and The Stooges

In January 2000, Watt fell ill with an infection of his perineum, forcing him into emergency surgery and nine weeks of bedrest in his San Pedro apartment. Initially unable to play his bass, he rebuilt his strength with intense practice as well as live club gigs where he performed sets of Stooges covers with Hellride in California and with J Mascis and Dinosaur Jr. drummer Murph in New York City under the name Hellride East.
In 2000, Mascis asked Watt to participate in a world tour behind Mascis' first post-Dinosaur Jr. release, J Mascis and the Fog's More Light. At several of the shows, Ron Asheton formerly of The Stooges joined Mascis and Watt onstage, wherein the group would play entire sets of Stooges songs. Watt and Mascis later joined Asheton and his brother, Stooges drummer Scott Asheton, for a one-time-only performance at a Belgian festival under the name Asheton, Asheton, Mascis & Watt. In 2001, Watt was one of several bassists invited to participate in the sessions for Gov't Mule's The Deep End, partly on the recommendation of Primus' Les Claypool. Watt and Gov't Mule recorded a cover version of Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Effigy" for the album. The sessions were immortalized in the documentary feature film Rising Low.
In 2002, Watt, along with Pete Yorn and members of The Hives, backed Iggy Pop for a short set of Stooges songs at that year's Shortlist Music Prize ceremony, after which Watt was asked to play bass in the reunited Stooges lineup in 2003. The reunited Stooges played their first show in almost 20 years at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in May 2003.

''The Secondman's Middle Stand''

Watt's third solo album The Secondman's Middle Stand, inspired by both his 2000 illness and one of his favorite books, Dante's The Divine Comedy, was released in 2004; one reviewer writes that the album is a "harrowing, funny, and genuinely moving stuff from a true American original". For the first time since the Minutemen, Watt recorded the album with an "all-Pedro band", Mike Watt and the Secondmen, consisting of organist Pete Mazich and drummer Jerry Trebotic, along with former that dog. vocalist Petra Haden.
While promoting and touring behind The Secondman's Middle Stand, Watt announced plans for future recordings, stating that he intended to record as frequently as he did in the Minutemen days for as long as he could.
Watt would part amicably with Columbia/Sony BMG in 2005, after 14 years as both a solo artist and as one-third of Firehose.

Unknown Instructors

In 2005, another side project featuring Watt came to light with the announced September 20 release of The Way Things Work, an album of improvised music under the group name, Unknown Instructors with George Hurley, Saccharine Trust's Joe Baiza and Jack Brewer, and poet/saxophonist Dan McGuire. A month after the album's release, the Unknown Instructors recorded a second album, The Master's Voice, with Pere Ubu frontman David Thomas and artist Raymond Pettibon joining the core quartet of Watt, Hurley, McGuire and Baiza. A third album with the same lineup, Funland, was released in 2009 and features a semi-cover version of Captain Beefheart's "Frownland". Basic tracks have already been laid down for the fourth Unknown Instructors album at Secondmen organist Pete Mazich's Casa Hanzo studio in San Pedro.
Watt would further his interest in improvised music by forming a trio, Los Pumpkinheads, with former Beastie Boys keyboardist Money Mark and Caroline Bermudez.
On December 14, 2005, the McNally-Smith College of Music in Saint Paul, Minnesota announced the formation of the Mike Watt Bass Guitar Scholarship, which is to be awarded annually to a bass major starting in the Fall of 2006.
In March 2006, Watt took part in the performance at Disney Hall, Los Angeles, of Glenn Branca's "Hallucination City" Symphony #13.