Jam Session

The spiky hair. The skinny tie and Converse tennis shoes. You don’t have to know one lyric to one punk rock tune to conjure up an image of a punk rocker. Yes, punk rock has always had a look, be it Johnny Rotten’s safety-pin couture, or the modern Green Day/Good Charlotte tattoo-and-eyeliner chic. But San Pedro, California’s Minutemen, who put out records from ’80 until ’85, never really fit that mold.

“I mean, one guy was this fat guy, and the other two guys were these, kinda, bozos,” reminisces Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore in the new documentary We Jam Econo: The Story of the Minutemen, which debuts at Rice Cinema on Friday. “The Minutemen were really intriguing to me.”

“We were fucking corn-dogs,” goes the lyric to the band’s autobiographical song “History Lesson Part II.” As the late-’70s L.A. punk movement coalesced, the Minutemen found themselves both behind and ahead of the curve. First, they were slightly older and had no fashion sense to speak of. More important, unlike a lot of punks who were still learning musical rudiments long after forming bands, bass player Mike Watt, guitarist D. Boon and drummer George Hurley already had serious instrumental chops. Best friends since early adolescence, Watt and Boon had been playing Creedence and Blue Öyster Cult covers for years, until, as the song says, “punk rock changed our lives.”

Rather than as a chance to jump on a musical bandwagon, Watt and Boon saw early punk as a challenge to their creativity as well as a stab at true musical freedom. They created short bursts of songs with no solos and no choruses. “We had to purge all our arena rock; that’s all the short songs were about,” says Watt today.

“I agreed to do this movie on the condition that it not be a Ken Burns blurry-photograph thing,” continues Watt, who serves as the documentary’s de facto narrator, driving the film crew around the band’s hometown to point out significant locations and going through a stack of discs chronologically. “There were really two objectives for me. No. 1, I wanted people to see what we did so they might gain the confidence to do something artistic and personal themselves. And No. 2, I want people to know about D. Boon.”

The Minutemen came to an abrupt end in late ’85 when Boon, their portly political powder keg of a guitarist/front man, was killed in a van accident. Watt and Boon were more like brothers than bandmates, and it’s clear 20 years after the tragedy that Watt will never get over the loss. “The thing that made the music unique was that personal connection,” he says quietly. “That’s what was taken away from me when we lost D. Boon. I can never have that again. There just can’t be the Minutemen anymore.”

We Jam Econo touchingly brings that lost connection to life for 90 minutes, featuring live footage from all stages of the band’s brief career along with a staggering array of musicians, friends and family testifying to the vitality, courage and nerdiness of one of the world’s most eccentric and electrifying bands, “punk” or otherwise.