Old punkers do not seem to mellow with age; if anything, the music made by The Unknown Instructors, an all-star line-up of ex-somebodies from the eighties underground, is even more aggressively strange than any of the hardcore assaults they mounted on complacency in their heyday.
There’s always been a paradox built into their notoriety; the movement that took these men to fame was about being ordinary people. Our band could be your life, said The Minutemen. Anyone can do this, and that’s what made it revolutionary.
They were punks who truly did it themselves with a thoroughness that would never have occurred to the Sex Pistols or the Clash. Rock ‘n’ roll was never the easy life for them. They worked hard and eked out a living on squalid tours, and to a certain set of agitated fans they became revered, precisely because they refused to pose as gods.
Partly that, anyway. Partly that, and partly because they made music that was impossible to ignore. Not beautiful music – that was for Dire Straits and U2. These guys were in bands that were among the best at doing what indie/punk/hardcore music was supposed to do: wake you up.
The Minutemen excelled at crafting little daggers of songs, designed to slice through the hazy sameness of everything else on the radio. Joe Baiza’s band Saccharine Trust moved far beyond hardcore, both enthralling and utterly confusing punk audiences with jazz guitar and high-risk experimentation.
And here they are, twenty or twenty-five years on, re-coalesced into The Unknown Instructors, grizzled veterans of American Punk. The core of the group: George Hurley and Mike Watt (founding members of both the Minutemen and fIREHOSE), injury-prone improvisational guitar man Joe Baiza, and Dan McGuire. Also making appearances: Raymond Pettibon – famous for the unnerving artwork that he contributed to many SST releases, including the iconic ‘Four Bars’ logo of Black Flag – and David Thomas of legendary art-rock outfit Pere Ubu.
The Master’s Voice, released in March, is their second album on Smog Veil. A third is expected from the same sessions that produced The Master’s Voice.
All these years later, they hold true to their ethic of accessibility – The Unknown Instructors was actually the brainchild of Dan McGuire, a poet, teacher, and ordinary fan from Ohio. (Teaming up with a regular joe is nothing new to Watt & Hurley; they formed fIREHOSE with Minutemen fan Ed Crawford.)
“First time I heard jazz – I was hearing Coltrane, Ornette Coleman – I thought these people were playing punk too.” – Mike Watt
“He was outside of us, as just a gig-goer and a listener, but he was inside The Unknown Instructors,” explains Mike Watt. “He knew what it was going to be more than any of us.”
So The Unknown Instructors are both a fan’s dream realized and a gang of old friends getting back to what they do best.
“Punk was about friends,” says Watt. “Black Flag put out our first record; we put out Husker Du’s first record. Not copying each other but being inspired. UI is an extension of those days.”
But they’re not exactly The Unknown Instructors, to hear Watt tell it.
“The Unknown Instructors – that’s not so much us,” he explains. “That’s what we’re trying to channel.”
The cover art by Pettibon, a drawing of a Doberman awaiting a command, fits neatly with their idea of listening, taking instruction. Watt sees UI as a chance to pay homage to some unexpected heroes of the punk scene: the jazz greats.
“First time I heard jazz – I was hearing Coltrane, Ornette Coleman – I thought these people were playing punk too,” Watt says.
He’s partly laughing at his youthful ignorance, but he’s partly making a point about the similarities that punk shared with jazz.
“Their scene actually was very tiny and there’s some parallels to our thing. Maybe not so much on the musicianship, because those motherfuckers could play, man! God damn! But being in the moment and on their own self-reliance.”
To date, there’s only been one show for UI, a gig sponsored by the recently defunct counterculture magazine Arthur. As for future tours, Watt says he’d love to embark upon them, but he’s not sure it will happen.
And as for their old scene, the days of the Minutemen, Black Flag, Saccharine Trust, and the celebrated era of underground punk, I wondered if Watt thought it was all over.
“You can’t remake those days – you have to be in these days,” he says. “But there’s ethics and values that keep going; they don’t get obsolete. There are bands now – they won’t even play clubs. They’ll do a whole U.S. tour and play people’s houses. Portland bands, Boston bands, Tucson bands, out-of-town bands touring houses, living rooms. So it’s still strong and alive.
“There’s a label here run by a skater guy, Todd, Recess Records. They remind me a lot of the old SST days. There’s Merge in Chapel Hill. Nowadays I think it’s easier to start a band than ever. Things are more econo. Young people are more open-minded; they’ll listen to way more things than when I was younger. Those weren’t the good old days. Like my pop said when that show was on, ‘Those were not Happy Days.’”
Watt has kept busy since fIREHOSE, touring with the Stooges, hosting his own internet radio show, releasing albums with the Secondmen, and even planning a rock ‘n’ roll film adaptation of Richard II with Raymond Pettibon. He’ll still lay his distinctive slang on an interviewer – “proj,” “prac,” and, most famously, “econo,” the Minutemen term for a thrifty, common sense, working man approach to making music.
Hurley is the one who’s been most noticeably absent from the music scene in recent years – he has a construction company and has largely retired from drumming – and to hear Watt tell it, the chance to play with Hurley again was one of the main attractions of this project. Hurley had to literally brush the dust off.
“There were dust clouds in the studio,” Mike Watt laughs. “We were all saying, ‘whoa, what’s this about?’ Georgie hadn’t been playing in a while; it was coming off of his fucking heads!”
Dusty or not, listening to His Master’s Voice, I had the feeling Hurley drove a good amount of this record, and that without him the whole thing would fall apart.
Which brings us, finally, to the music. The tragedy here would be if the resulting product were safe. With all these names and expectations, what if the results were…ordinary? Well, not to worry. The record feels clearly jazz-inspired, improvisational and borderless. There’s a nervousness and a funk that holds over from the old days, driven by that probably unconscious rhythm section.
Baiza’s guitar is like a dentist’s drill, something you feel creeping up your spine. The vocals are matter-of-fact, more like beat poetry than singing, and a less pretentious version of Jim Morrison’s “Indians scattered on dawn’s highway bleeding…”
ITunes calls the album “Unclassifiable,” and indeed classifying it would be tough. Jazz-groove spoken word with some punk freak-out guitar? It sounds like something from deep within some dark, destined-for-scandal psychiatric ward. Horrible noise in some places – no two ways around it. But never safe and never stagnant.
Too often a reunion-style album sounds like a pale imitation of the old days. Of all the musicians of the recent past, though, none are better insulated against this fate than those of the eighties underground. Their entire scene was built not on hit songs but on originality and hard work. They broke out of the stagnant cover band scene of the seventies by playing what they wanted; they stayed original within the world of punk by never letting punk define them.
So it shouldn’t surprise us that, even with a little dust on the drums and a few more grey hairs, these men are still exploring.
– Tom Vale