Record (Re)Collection: Costa On The Minutemen’s “Double Nickels On The Dime”

I was reading Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991 by Michael Azerrad and I came to The Minutemen chapter. They’re a fantastic band and the title of the book even comes from one of their songs of all things. You’d be surprised at how big an influence the band have had on indie music, probably just as much, if not more so, than other “big” independent underground bands.

The death of D Boon of the Minutemen is probably one of the greater tragedies of music, to be honest. Formed in 1980, The Minutemen are ranked with Black Flag and The Descendents as one of the legendary California punk bands. I got into them a little after I got into college and I started to delve more and more into obscure and old punk and hardcore bands besides the modern guys and gals running around out there.

Reading Our Band Could Be Your Life this past summer when I was in Greece for 10 days and reading about the death of Boon in a tragic car crash that, in a perfect world, shouldn’t have fucking happened. He shouldn’t have had a terrible fever, his girlfriend wouldn’t have fallen asleep at the wheel, and he wouldn’t have flipped over as the van drove off the road and broken his neck instantly that night in 1985.

I was, as I’d sat there reading it, maybe a mile or so from where my grandmother was buried. My first profound experience with death was watching her die from lung cancer and my mother sitting me down as a little kid to explain to me that she wasn’t coming back, that she was gone forever. I just re-read that chapter of Our Band Could Be Your Life, and re-reading about Minutemen bassist Mike Watt talking about the death of Boon; it’s heartbreaking. Having seen bits and pieces of We Jam Econo – The Story Of The Minutemen, a documentary film on the band, and seeing Watt there talking and telling stories, you can tell that it still kills him inside. It’s obvious that he carries that death with him in some form every single day.

I listened to Double Nickels On The Dime after that, humming the bass lines and singing along because it’s an utterly fantastic and underrated record from an underrated band, and the first thing that came to mind? My grandmother, my mom’s mom, who I remember as always smiling, a balance to my very quiet and stoic grandfather from that side of the family (that these days family members say I most act like). It’s sort of cheesy to make this comparison and to say that in a way listening to this record maybe makes me think I know what Watt feels like because I didn’t know Boon, so I don’t. But at the same time, it’s a feeling that almost everyone has; those defining moments in their lives that are so utterly profound that they’re milestones in life, for better or worse.