Double Nickels on the Dime

Double Nickels on the Dime, The Minutemen, Rolling Stone Magazine's #411

exile staff consensus: Top 400 album

the breakdown:
3.5 cannons - venerableseed
3.0 cannons - lenbarker
2.0 cannons - polchic and eurowags
1.0 cannon - angryyoungman

the essays:
10/22 - And our last post about these two albums is Dave's tale of glue ear, hippies, erotic sandwiches, John Goodman, and laundromat theft. (I bet you've clicked (or scrolled down) already.

10/19 - First time poster Audrey has a terrific zinger about the essence of Double Nickels: driving around, youth, and, er, other bodily essences.

10/16 - Then comes my personal Double Nickels lament.

10/12 - First up is Mr. Barker's terrific look at Double Nickels and its '80's emo punk brother-in-arms Zen Arcade.

the introduction (done with the Funkadelic's Maggot Brain):
After a week of OK Computer's numbing familiarity (a/k/a no alarms and no surprises) the next two albums, Funkadelic's Maggot Brain and the Minutemen's Double Nickels on the Dime are sure to jolt us back to their disparate realities. Just how disparate? Lets just look at the raw facts:

Origin:
DNotD: San Pedro, California
MB: Parts unknown

Band Members:
DNotD: Three permanent members. Drums, Guitar, Bass
MB: Too many to count

Album Length:
DNotD: 81 minutes
MB: 37 minutes

Number of Songs:
DNotD: 45
MB: 7

Average Song Length (Longest Song):
DNotD: 1:46 (3:05)
MB: 5:15 (10:20)

And that's before we get into the sound, the politics, the album covers, the spirit, the time, the genres, the dance-ability, the audience, the attitude, and the legacy.

Despite all their surface differences, these albums both rock, are both underappreciated, and have both become wonderful treasures for legions of devoted fans. They both also carry on the message of the forthcoming apocalypse that OK Computer began so well.

Why else did we connect the two? Believe or or not Minutemen bassist Mike Watt covered Maggot Brain's title track on his own debut solo album, with J Mascis on guitar and Funkadelic's own Bernie Worrell on keyboards. (We'd be a lot prouder of our combo if we'd have known that fact before the choice was made.)

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It's All In How You Get There

Yes, Double Nickels rocks, you dumbass. You'd have to be afflicted with glue ear to not recognize that. It wasn't easy for me to figure it out myself, though, since I came to Double Nickels by way of fifteen years and a friend's gift card.

I ran with a pretty strange crowd during my freshman year in college. I met a number of folks at the new student orientation, none of whom seemed to have anything in common, and many of us ended up on the same floor in the dorms. There was the hippie transfer student, the football player who hoped to transfer to Emporia State to play after he failed at walk-on tryouts, the big-toothed virgin and his hiphop-obsessed midget roommate, and the deadhead. It was a motley group that somehow figured out how to get along by drinking and destroying property. But I digress.

Through the hippie, Chris, I met another hippie, Shana. Cute girl who self-identified as being a Jew despite being raised Baha'i. I'm not sure that it is even remotely relevant to this tale, but I always found it interesting. I don't remember the introduction much or what we did that night, but the evening came to a close with Shana looking for a place to stay. I thought she was cool and I was kinda interested in her, but another guy seemed a bit more into her and so she left with him. More specifically, she told me she needed a place to stay and I wasn't too aggressive in making my pitch.

Later on, she told me that she knew that she was going to sleep with one of us, which might have been her way of flirting with me, except it just made me think that she might have been the village bicycle. In any case, fast forward a week or two and they were an item. I quickly became the third wheel who had to listen to the guy talk about how her butt was so nice that he wanted to eat a sandwich off it. Just think of what I missed out on.

Shana's beau, whose name totally escapes me, introduced me to some really amazing music: Muddy Waters, Suicidal Tendencies, Infectious Grooves, and a few other funky things. Then he dropped Mike Watt on me and fIREHOSE and The Minutemen. And here I was listening to the Singles soundtrack and putting "Would?" on repeat. We got along well, despite my earnest comment to him that the celebrity he most resembled was John Goodman. He didn't appreciate that much. I made tape copies of all the stuff he shared with me and I perfected my ability to redraw album covers and band logos on cassette inserts.

Over time, I stopped listening to tapes and lost touch with Shana and her man. I heard that they got married, so I bet they've enjoyed dozens of sandwiches together. And, I never forgot about some of the music that I heard back then. The Minutemen were always on the list of bands I wanted in my collection, but they never hit the top of my list and I never found any of their stuff when I checked out used CD stores. Then, recently, a friend of mine who happens to know a great deal more about music than I, came into a gift card. And, as luck would have it, he too was interested in the Minutemen, so he got himself a copy of Double Nickels. Yes, that means I soon had my copy too. And from there, well, I was finally able to say that I learned something during freshman year - The Minutemen rock. I did also learn how to rip off coin-operated laundromats, but I don't think my parents would consider that to be knowledge.

A chance encounter, fifteen years of waiting, and a bit of electronic piracy all came to aid me in my journey to one of the greatest rock albums of all time. I wouldn't have it any other way.

I'm not going to bother commenting on the other album outside of saying that I think it is bloated masterpiece of boredom. It can't keep me awake on my evening commute, which is the measuring stick I use for these albums. Can it make me feel something other than feeling like a beaten down working stiff? In the case of Maggot Brain, the answer is no. click here to
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Easy Erections and Body Funk

I have a lot to learn from this little music appreciation experiment and it was never so evident to me before today. I listened to part of Double Nickels on the Dime for the first time this morning and was transported from toolin' around the suburbs in the family Prius (going well under 55 in our area traffic) to places more varied. I can't play this music around the young'uns (the 3 1/2 year old can already wield "Goddammit!" like a spear, he doesn't need these guys adding to his vocabulary) and so there was a special indulgence to sitting at an interminable red light, behind a blue VW Beatler, hearing these songs that sounded like the essence of young men, all easy erections and body funk. Sometimes they want to impress a girl, so they pull their act together, as in Cohesion. Sometimes they don't much care.
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Double Nickels Killed My mp3 Player

Double Nickels on the Dime broke my mp3 player. That's my theory. All I know is that the LCD screen is now all white and it doesn't play the songs I want.

It was working fine before I uploaded Double Nickels and its endless litany of songs. But I uploaded anyway. Then I put the little machine on shuffle and guess what. Every other song was by the Minutemen. I guess the odds were good.

This wasn't a match made in heaven. It didn't matter how much I liked or disliked the album it was going to take over the shuffle. Bust my grove, change my mood, seep into my mind, and then, right when I might just be getting into a song, it would end. Just like that. End. And I would be back to something more, um, familiar.

Double Nickels was never meant to be listened in mp3 format. Heck, the CD release came in 1987 three years after the vinyl had been released and two years after the band's tragic end. The music was never supposed to be shuffled or disposable. It was Important and Defiant and Urgent and Necessary. To this day the album still hasn't received a proper CD release (one that includes all the vinyl's songs) and the prospects don't look great.

No, Double Nickels seems fixed in the past and fixed in its Reagan-era, cassette listening, 55 miles-per-hour speed limit milieu. Music doesn't sound like this anymore, it doesn't feel like this anymore, and it doesn't act like this anymore. The low budget, badge-of-honor-just-to-get-it-to-run first-generation Volkwagen Beetle Mike Watt drives on the cover is now dead replaced by the $17,000 girl-car New Beetle. mp3 player standard. click here to
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Double Nickels for the Zen Arcade

I like Double Nickels on the Dime. Heard it for the first time last week, and it's still growing on me as I'm listening to it again while writing this post. I definitely admire the hell out of what those three dudes pulled off on it, and it sucks that D. wasn't around much longer afterwards. Mike Watt's playing is amazing here, too, as is drummer George Hurley's. I probably would have gotten really into this band, if I had heard them when I was younger, say, around the age of 13, the age that I was when I heard Husker Du's Zen Arcade for the first time.

The story goes that hearing about Zen Arcade inspired the Minutemen, who were labelmates of Husker Du, to expand a single album that they had been planning on releasing into the 40+ track behemoth that became Double Nickels on the Dime, and I am glad that it did, because I am really digging this album now that I'm finally checking it out. However, I am not so glad that Zen Arcade was left off of the Rolling Stone list that inspired this blog. Sure, they voted Husker Du's New Day Rising onto the list, and it's a pretty good album, just not as great as the neglected Zen Arcade.

I had grown up enjoying poseur band like Kiss and Twisted Sister, but seeing and hearing Motley Crue's video for "Smoking in the Boys Room" drove me away from all of it. Thanks to that lameass cover, I went from "Metal rules!" to "Metal sucks!" in a short span of time. Then, a few years later, one sunny summer afternoon in 1988, after I had embraced '60s and '70s "classic rock" and almost completely abandoned '80s music, a then-four-year-old Zen Arcade came into my life and showed me that there was still some great hard rock being released well into the '80s. I popped a dubbed cassette of the album into my cheap walkman in my tent at camp and had my mind blown. In addition to being floored by their diversity, I was shocked by the evident honesty and passion, which the cold dance pop and pop metal dominating the airwaves at the time sorely lacked. "Something I Learned Today", "Broken Home, Broken Heart", "Never Talking to You Again", "Dreams Reoccurring", "I'll Never Forget You", "Turn on the News", "Reoccurring Dream"; yeah, Mould and his band sure as hell did it for me.

After hearing Zen Arcade, I was more receptive to the idea that post-Zep hard rock bands didn't have to suck, which sounds ridiculous, but, listen man, the suckiness of the Crue, Bon Jovi, Poison, and their ilk had scarred me bad. It took something as great as Zen Arcade to knock some sense into me, so I can't help but be disappointed that it didn't make the list along with its sister album.

And, yes, I'm cool with Double Nickels on the Dime being on the list. It features that same diversity, passion, and honesty that won me over on Zen Arcade, and, had I heard Double Nickels on the Dime that summer afternoon instead, it probably would have left a similar impression on me. I'm just grateful that somebody lent me one of 'em, at least.

Unfortunately, around that time, somebody also played an S.O.D.: Stormtroopers of Death album for me, which I didn't understand was a gag and despised. Due to the brevity of their tunes, I labored under the misconception that they had been the Minutemen for a long time afterwards and, as a result, never checked out the real deal. Oh well, better late than never! click here to
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