"The Minutemen's classic double album is unlike any punk record, or double album, before or since. It is a compact explosion of ideas and a prism for the energies coursing through the 80s underground." (Marc Masters writing in Pitchfork)
Double Nickels On The Dime is the one of the seminal US post-punk albums, released by Minutemen forty years ago, on 3 July 1984 - put out locally on California's independent SST Records.
The double album consists of 45 songs covering a range of subjects, from the Vietnam War to working class struggles and racism. The three band members took one side each, with each side including at least one of their solo compositions, along with other tracks they chose (which was inspired by Pink Floyd's late 60s album, Ummagumma); the fourth side was called Chaff, which basically consisted of the leftover songs which didn't fit in on the other three sides. Additionally, some of the songwriting was outsourced to their contemporaries, like Henry Rollins and Chuck Dukowski (Black Flag) and Jack Brewer (Saccharine Trust).
Background:
In 1980, in San Pedro, California, childhood buddies D. Boon and Mike Watt disbanded their previous band, The Reactionaries, and formed Minutemen, bringing in Frank Tonche on drums. But after just two gigs they canned him and went back to their old Reactionaries drummer, George Hurley. They produced a string of songs that were minimalist, hard hitting, staccato bursts, mostly coming in at under two minutes. It was classic hardcore punk in many ways, but yet also nothing like that. Watt's bass was too melodic for starters, while Hurley's eclectic drumming pushed them into the realms of jazz and funk.
They had been working with local producer Ethan James in 1983, contributing a song to his Radio Tokyo Tapes compilation (named after the studio where he worked), but they ended up doing three tracks, all recorded by James for free. They liked his work enough, that they brought him along for their next full album.
Double Nickels On The Dime:
By November 1983, the band had recorded enough for an album in one session, but on hearing that their SST labelmates Hüsker Dü were working on a double album (which would become the equally legendary Zen Arcade), they decided to go back into the studio and record more songs. The second session, in April 1984, yielded 24 more songs. James then mixed the whole record on one eight-track machine in just one night, with the whole thing costing $1,100 and had taken only six days to complete in total.
Viet Nam (Audio only)
The title was a bit of a tongue in cheek reaction to Sammy Hagar's I Can't Drive 55, a tune apparently whining about the federal speed limit of 55mph on US highways. Minutemen said driving fast "wasn't terribly defiant", and that a bigger rebellion would be to make their own "crazy music." The double nickels being the two fives that make up the 55 miles per hour, in trucker slang - and the dime (10) being a reference to the main I-10 interstate near their home of San Pedro.
Nature Without Man (Audio - co-written by Chuck Dukowski of Black Flag)
The record managed to sell 15,000 copies in 1984, which is considered reasonable for an indie release at that time. There were no official singles released from the album, but a nine-track sampler EP, Wheels Of Fortune, was sent to radio stations. They also produced two videos; for This Ain't No Picnic - made for $440 by UCLA graduate, Anthony Johnson - and was also nominated for an MTV award; and one for Ain't Talkin' `Bout Love, a Van Halen cover.
The Songs:
Dennes D. Boon wrote the anthems, and often quite broadly about politics; Michael Little in Vinyl District, notes that he "was both an idealist and a realist: he wanted to change the world but he was far too world weary to cry out for some bogus revolution that was never going to happen."
This Ain't No Picnic (Original music video)
This Ain't No Picnic discusses racism and working class, after a supervisor (he was working in an auto parts store) wouldn't let him listen to jazz and soul on the radio while he worked - also using a racist slur in reference to the music choice. Corona was a protest song about the downtrodden parts of Mexico they had visited, framed against the destructive greed of the US, using a neo-norteño / polka riff, and also managing to name-check the popular Mexican beer brand. It's biggest legacy (for better or worse) is its subsequent use as the theme for popular MTV show, Jackass.
Corona (Live in San Pedro, 1985)
Viet Nam contains some seemingly random maths; "That number's 50,000. That's 10% of 500,000", which actually relates to the number of Americans killed in the Vietnam War, compared to the number of North Vietnamese soldiers. Theater Is The Life Of You comes from a drive Boon made from Pedro to Oceanside, writing impressions of what he saw along the way. Themselves is a bit of a waltz, a slightly dirge-like, sad song that Watt later said reminded him of a whaling song. Little singled out Cohesion, as being a "truly pretty acoustic guitar turn on Cohesion which wins my award for Unlikeliest Song by a Hardcore Band Ever."
The Glory Of Man (Audio only)
Mike Watt gained a reputation for writing abstract lyrics, often drifting into the philosophical - with a particular preponderance for James Joyce on this album. He said that The Glory Of Man was "the most overt of the Joyceans, except for June 16th." It says that despite lameness on our part, there is still goodness in us. It includes a heavy kick drum disco beat by Hurley, with an econo one note guitar part from Boon.
My Heart And The Real World contains more Joyce themes, in this case where he was paralleling Homer. He told Hurley to play the drums like The Jam's first album (In The City). Take 5, D, after some critiquing of his lyrics by Boon, was based on a note from a friend's landlady about a leaking shower.
One Reporter's Opinion (Live in San Francisco, 1985)
History Lesson Part II is perhaps unsurprisingly a follow up to History Lesson from 1981s The Punch Line. It includes references to Richard Hell (Television), E. Bloom (Blue Öyster Cult), Joe Strummer and Bob Dylan. It offered up something of an appeal for acceptance amongst their hardcore peers (who just weren't all that used to seeing or hearing music played so proficiently). The song was, according to Little, "Their own will and testament as a band". On World According To Nouns, Watt had stumbled onto Wittgenstein and Pettibon and semantics, asking, "are there any thoughts left in the head that don't have a word assigned to it?"
Shit From An Old Notebook is a song with lyrics pieced together from scraps from an old notebook he found in Boon's van. Do You Want New Wave Or Do You Want The Truth? is all about the manipulation of words and was inspired by the semiotics theories of Umberto Eco.
Then there is Toadies, inspired by Soviet composer, Shostakovic's memoirs, referencing Stalin liking to surround himself with such toadies. Retreat is about sensory stuff and perception. It is quiet and then freaks out - Watt says it is "about insecurity. Things people go through. About me being a little too sensitive, not just being aware."
Toadies (Audio only)
George Hurley seems to have been, according to Watt, well influenced in his songwriting by having a job that required to be at work very early in the morning (a mill). Watt said that Mr Robot's Holy Orders is a good example of that. You Need The Glory is a scat song (it seems to have been Hurley that brought many of the jazz influences to the band), where he is beating on old oil cans. Nothing Indeed was a blues shuffle with a riff kind of borrowed from the Birthday Party (Nick Cave's first band).
Mr Robot's Holy Orders (Audio only)
What they said:
The record is as much about art as it is about punk, full of experimentation and boundary pushing. It was somewhat parochial, like much independent music of the time, never making much of a splash here in the UK.
Watt explained to Flipside in 1985 why they weren't getting any radio time: "I think one of our problems with radio is that we don't write songs, we write rivers. We play against each other, guitar and bass; we don't set up a background for our narrative."
Mark Deming (AllMusic) in his 5 star review said that Double Nickels is "one of the very best American rock albums of the 1980s.... A quantum leap into greatness... Full of striking moments that cohere into a truly remarkable whole."
Legendary music critic, Robert Christgau, writing in Village Voice, was a bit more mixed initially, saying that Boon was a "somewhat limited singer", but that the record "is poetry-with-jazz as it always should have been." He later admitted he underrated the album with his first review.
Although with a very lo-fi feeling overall (remember the thousand dollar budget it was recorded on), what you will hear clicking on any of the above song links, is just how phenomenal the trio were as players - unlike most of their contemporaries - and the deep, earnestness of many of the lyrics.
We'll finish as we started, with another apt quote from Pitchfork - "But the legacy of Double Nickels On The Dime isn't just that the Minutemen did things themselves, It's also that they tried everything, ignoring artificial barriers between forms of art, classes of culture, and kinds of influence."